Page 21 of Daybreak

* * *

Burgess Dixon was at the breakfast table when he got a call that Garza and Letourneau’s bodies were in the morgue, and the detectives were ruling it a fight gone wrong. The gunshot residue on Garza’s arm and hand, and Letourneau’s fingerprints on the hasp of the knife, plus the money all over their bodies and the floor, was all the proof the cops needed to prove they’d killed each other. Case closed.

As soon as the call ended, Dixon reached for his fork to finish his waffle and bacon. The federal witness against him was gone and the men guarding him—collateral damage. The homeless man who found him was gone. And the two losers who’d screwed up the body dump had been dealt with without a single finger pointing at him. That’s why he kept Whistler on the payroll. It wasn’t the first time Beau Whistler had gotten away with murder.

He finished eating, gathered up his briefcase, and buzzed Whistler to bring the car around. It was business as usual at the office downtown, and while he made good money running a commercial cleaning business called Dixon Down and Dirty, it was basically a front for his side businesses, the ones that had made him rich. But that much money coming into a cleaning service was also what had alerted the Feds.

Whistler was outside in the limo, waiting when Dixon emerged. He nodded a good morning as Whistler opened the door to the back seat. He was inside and buckling up as Whistler drove away from the estate on their way downtown.

It was going to be a busy day today with the grand opening of his eleventh Dixon Down and Dirty cleaning services in a new location. He had his iPad in his lap, going through the checklist for the opening, when his phone rang. He set the iPad aside to answer, glanced at the number, and then answered in quiet disapproval. “Why are you calling me on this phone?”

“Because you still have a loose end.”

Dixon’s gut knotted. “Text me the info on the other phone, and don’t ever use this number again.”

As soon as he got to the office, he got his burner phone out of the safe and frowned when he read the name. It was the same damn detective who’d brought Yankee Dan in for questioning. He cursed beneath his breath and made one more call, then worked until it was time to go to the grand opening.

By night, ten hired hit men were vying for the fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on the head of a homicide detective named Gunner Kingston.

* * *

The morning after the hit went live, Gunner was merging into the traffic on the Loop, carefully working his way into the fifth lane of a six-lane highway as he headed to work. His entire focus was on telling Lieutenant Samuels about his lottery win, and he had left home earlier than usual, hoping to talk to him before the workday began.

As always, he had an eye on the traffic around him—from the guy in the Mercedes riding his bumper, to the woman in the Ford Focus in the fourth lane beside him who was putting on her makeup as she drove, to the guy in front of him pulling a metal trailer with landscape equipment who kept hitting his brakes. While the traffic in lanes one, two, and three kept moving and exiting from the Loop onto feeder roads to get to their destinations, the sixth lane was left for switching highways. It was nothing short of a miracle that any of these people lived long enough to grow old.

A couple of minutes later, he saw a flash of something purple in his side-view mirror. It was a rider on a Yamaha motorcycle coming up fast behind him on the outside lane nearest the concrete barrier. He expected the rider to go flying past, except he didn’t. Instead, the rider braked slightly and began matching his speed to Gunner’s car.

It was a bright flash of light coming through the driver’s side window of his car that caught Gunner’s eye. The light was bouncing on his arm and then on his shirt, and he chanced a glance away from the traffic in front of him to see what it was. The rider on the Yamaha was aiming a handgun straight at his face.

Gunner stomped the brakes instinctively, knowing the biker would sail straight past him as he fired, and it worked. The first shot went over the hood of Gunner’s car and into the back window of the little Ford Focus belonging to the woman putting on makeup.

With only seconds to react, Gunner made a hard swerve to the left and ran the bike straight into the concrete barrier, knocking the biker into the air like he’d been ejected from the cockpit of a fighter jet. He came down hard on the hood of Gunner’s car as Gunner was already stomping the brakes to keep from running over him.

Gunner spun the car sideways, which slung the shooter off onto the pavement to his right, then jammed his car in Park to block the lane from the traffic behind them. Cars were already swerving into other lanes to get out of the way. The woman in the Ford Focus had swerved and spun out, and was now stopped sideways across lanes four and five, screaming bloody murder inside the car without being heard.

Gunner’s mind was spinning in a hundred different directions as he hit the lights and sirens on his car, then he jumped out and began waving off traffic into the three open lanes to the right.

Traffic was slowing down to a crawl as he made an urgent call for backup and an ambulance, then he ran to the biker to see if he was alive. To his surprise, the biker was not only alive, but beginning to regain consciousness.

At the same time, the driver of a concrete truck and the driver of a semi both stopped, purposefully parking in a way that completely blocked off all traffic around the wreck to protect Gunner and the victim and to protect the little blue Ford Focus from being T-boned by oncoming traffic.

Gunner was looking around for the gun when he saw it lying against the barrier, beneath the wrecked Yamaha. He grabbed an evidence bag to recover the gun, then went back to the shooter.

The man had a serious case of road rash along with some obvious areas of missing skin. His helmet was in two pieces and lying on either side of his head like a hamburger bun, open and waiting for mustard. Two of the fingers on his shooting hand were broken and dangling like wet noodles, and he was moaning something about his leg and reaching for his head and chest.

“What’s your name?” Gunner asked.

“Kevin Warren. Sorry… Sorry,” he kept saying.

“Why did you pull a gun on me?”

“Needed the money,” he muttered.

Gunner frowned. “What does that even mean? You expected money if you shot someone?”

Warren moaned. “Hurts… Bounty on your head.”

“Bounty? On me? Do you even know who I am?”