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“You’re sure it’s just a habit?”
She barked out a laugh. “Don’t you have enough to worry over? For example, this story Destiny claims she was bribed to tell, saying that you’d confessed to the shooting of your father.”
Ace scowled, quick to anger at the thought of all the damage the bank teller had done. “Why should anyone believe anything she says now—an admitted liar who launders money for drug dealers?”
“Maybe they wouldn’t, except her story checks out from her phone records, though the caller couldn’t be traced, to the timing of an anonymous initial payment to her bank account. And her prints were found inside your condo, underneath the flooring she lifted up to plant the gun.”
“The real question is who paid her? Who was willing to buy her off to do it?” As Ace’s overheated brain formed an image of his father’s second wife, the same woman who’d coughed up an even larger chunk of money to bring him in, his shaking hands clenched and twisted the cheap fabric of his baggy jail garb. “Was it—was Selina involved in this? She seems to have a penchant for using her money to cause trouble for me.”
“Or to return you to the safety of your family,” Sierra quoted, sounding as dubious as ever about the line the woman had initially fed her over the phone the day she’d first called to hire her to find Ace. “But be that as it may, Destiny swears she doesn’t know who it was. She claims the caller blocked the number and the first half of the payment posted anonymously to her account. But the voice—”
“Was it a woman’s?” he asked impatiently.
Sierra shook her head. “Male, she insisted, though she said it was rather high-pitched and younger-sounding. And now, get this. Destiny’s furious that she went to so much trouble, brought all that scrutiny down on herself, and this dude stiffed her for the second payment.”
“She knows more. She has to. Who would take a risk like that, sell those kind of lies for some strange young guy?”
“She might’ve looked and talked the part of the reliable witness, but Destiny Jones has got an expensive drug habit of her own that convinced her to take the risk in the first place,” Sierra said as the final train car crossed before them. “But the longer things went on, the more nervous the whole deal made her.”
“No wonder she took off, then, especially with her being involved in other crimes, too,” Ace said. “So what’s going to happen to her now?”
The railroad arms rose slowly, allowing Sierra to finally cross the tracks.
“They’re holding her for the time being for possession, filing a false police report and whatever else they can come up with,” she said. “There’ll be additional charges, too, based on her breaking and entering your condo and planting the weapon.”
“After everything she put me through, I ought to sue her, too,” Ace said. “But it doesn’t sound like she’d be worth the effort.”
“I suspect you’re right about that,” Sierra said, “though at this point, no one could blame you for wanting to rain down some righteous retribution. Honestly, just thinking about the whole mess is enough to make me wish I’d slugged her harder.”
“You punched her?”
“Yeah,” Sierra said. “Right in front of Spencer, too, it turned out, who wasn’t amused in the least, but I seriously thought the lying little hustler might’ve been reaching for a gun.”
“I take it she wasn’t.”
“Oops. My bad,” Sierra said, a smile in her voice.
In no mood for levity, Ace said, “When I find out who’s really responsible for what she did, who gave her that gun to leave inside my condo, they’ll have damned more than a little retribution coming their way, I can tell you.”
Nodding, Sierra glanced his way. “Not to change the subject, but I need to make a quick stop.” She nodded in the direction of a small Mexican cantina, a humble hole-in-the-wall strip center where Ace hadn’t gone in years.
“Ah, I’m not really in the mood to eat,” he said, unable to imagine facing the stares of other people who’d been reading about him in the paper or hearing about him on the evening news.
“I figured as much,” she said, “which is why I phoned in an order for us right before you c
ame out. Just hang tight. I’ll be right back. Then I’ll get you over to the lodge where I’m staying, where you can shave and shower and change into the clothes your brother Grayson brought over for me.”
“You had—” Ace shook his head, surprised, since the two hadn’t been especially close through the years. “Grayson knew you were planning to shanghai me, too?”
Pulling into the parking lot, Sierra nodded. “Actually, it was his idea in the first place. He understood how overwhelmed you might feel, and that you might need to prepare yourself before Ainsley and the others sprung your pregnant daughter on you. So he asked if maybe I could stick around a little while and help out. He seems like a good guy, and I could spare an extra day, so—”
“I’ll be sure to thank him for that,” Ace said, touched by his brother’s thoughtfulness. “And thank you, too, for delaying your trip back to Vegas. I know you must be eager to get back to your life.”
“I—ah—I’ll be right out,” said the bounty hunter, her green eyes avoiding his at the mention of her home city.
But not before he spotted the unease in them, the tell, as he’d learned to think of such things in the world of high-stakes business negotiations. It was yet another hint that Sierra Madden remained nervous. Though he imagined that anyone might suffer some level of fallout—or even PTSD—considering the brutality she’d suffered at the hands of her father’s loan shark and his henchman, he hoped like hell it wasn’t more than that.
Chapter 8
