Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 66580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 333(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 333(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
“This isn’t drama, Shade. This is serious shit.”
He caught and held my gaze. “Serious shit is what I do, Mandy. We can handle it.”
There was something in his face, something strong and dangerous that almost had me believing he meant it. God, if only… I dialed Hannah’s number and she picked up almost instantly.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did they find you?”
“No,” I told her. “But Shade’s here. He’s bringing me home and then we’re going to talk.”
“You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“Not all of it, but enough… He says we need to talk about it. Maybe he can help.”
She fell silent for a moment. “He can’t help, can he?”
“Honestly? I don’t know,” I whispered. “We’ll be there in a few minutes. Try not to freak out too much. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Hanging up, I turned to Shade. The sun was behind him, turning him into a dark, looming profile of a man. Threatening. Intimidating. Implacable. I should’ve stayed away from him. I thought I’d met fun, sexy Shade, but that’d only been a front. He’d been scary Shade all along. I’d just been in denial.
“Leave the bicycle over there,” he said, nodding toward a fence. “We’ll come pick it up later. Then get your ass on the back of my bike.”
Shade
I listened as Mandy and Hannah told me the whole story, wishing I could feel surprised. I’d seen a lot of ugly in the world, though. Far too much ugly to doubt for a second that they were in real danger. The situation didn’t set right. Wasn’t a big fan of pedophiles. Also wasn’t a big fan of men who’d sell out their own kids for drugs.
I’d have been willing to step in on this one even if I wasn’t fuckin’ Mandy, and that was the truth.
As for her and her sister, they were like two kicked puppies. Mandy looked defeated. Hannah, too. All the while, her little girls were running around, playing some sort of elaborate game with sticks and leaves in the dust. I supposed they were cute enough. You know, if you liked children. I never had. Even so, the thought of some asshole touching them… Nope.
Wasn’t gonna happen.
Dopey stood at the far end of the yard, smoking and giving us privacy. I’d fill him in later.
“Did he lay hands on you?” I asked Hannah, considering the situation. She looked away, one hand coming up to rub her arm self-consciously.
“He grabbed me,” she admitted. “Twisted my arm. I’m more worried about Callie. The way he looked at her… This is bad. Really bad. We need to leave town right now.”
“What about your boyfriend—the deputy?”
“If I call him and they find the drugs, Mandy could go to jail,” she said. “It’s better to leave.”
“I’d rather go to jail than let them get the girls,” Mandy chimed in.
“If there are drugs in the house, you’re both in possession,” I said flatly. “Doesn’t matter who put them there. You both get arrested, those kids will go into foster care, and that sicko might come for them.”
Hannah nodded, her face determined. “So we’ll leave.”
“Do you want to leave Violetta?” I asked her, considering the situation. She shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter. We can’t stay.”
“And you?” I asked Mandy. “What about probation? You’re only four weeks out from total freedom. This could destroy that.”
“Hannah and the girls are all I care about,” she told me, her voice resolute. “That’s what counts here. If they leave, I can go crash on Sara’s couch.”
I nodded, already making my plans. We could handle this, of course. Randy and his little friends were like gnats to a guy in my position. I could run them off without hardly noticing. That would be too easy, though. If one of those bastards was into kids, he’d had other victims. Men like that needed to be put down. That part was straightforward enough.
More complicated was doing it in a way that let Hannah stay in Violetta. That deputy of hers was the kind of man who married a woman, took care of her. For reasons I didn’t care to examine too closely, I liked the idea of Mandy’s sister being happy.
That meant we had to solve the problem of the trailer—God only knew what other kinds of shit Randy had lying around.
We’d need to interrogate him, I decided. Find out exactly what he’d left there, figure out if it could be cleaned up. If he got seriously hurt during the questioning, all the better. It’d still end the same, but I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if he bled a bit first.
“You got a place the kids can go for the afternoon?” I asked.
Mandy narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “Why?”
“Because later today we’re going to have Hannah call Randy and tell him to come over. Then we’re going to talk to him and you probably don’t want the kids around while we do it. Might be a little traumatic.”