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He did as ordered, sliding the bolt on the shop’s front door in place. Locking himself in with a man holding a loaded gun and apparently zero qualms about using it, and a possible dead body. Scotty had wanted money. Because Don had gotten him fired from his latest job of course. Working as a cashier at a general store wouldn’t make him wealthy, but that didn’t matter to his uncle. Don had ensured that Scotty couldn’t feed himself, let alone buy the stuff that made the memories go away. The stuff that quieted the screams. He didn’t use coke all the time, only when everything got to be too much. He’d wanted a reprieve, one night where he didn’t walk the streets to outrun the memories of things everyone told him hadn’t happened. He’d thought the mechanic shop was empty. Figured he’d sneak in and grab a few items to sell. Quick cash. How was he to know the owner would be in the back? How could he have anticipated a customer coming in when the shop should have been closed in the first place?
Fuck.
He could almost hear Don cackling in his ear, feel his breath on his neck. Don had wanted to kill him that first time he gave Scotty coke, but he’d been incompetent. The shop owner looked like he was nothing if not competent. If he wanted Scotty dead, he would be.
The thought was almost a relief.
“Check him.” The man motioned to the body on the floor.
Scotty blanched. “I-I can’t.”
The man cocked his head slowly to the right and tapped the trigger. “Repeat that?”
Heart in his throat, Scotty got the message. He didn’t want to die, despite everything, so he dropped to his knees beside the body on the floor and lifted a trembling hand to the guy’s neck. He waited, eyes closed, breath halted…exhaling with a choked sob when he felt a steady pulse under his fingertips. He hadn’t killed anyone. Yet. The relief was just as powerful as the fear had been. “He’s alive.” The words trembled something awful, but he didn’t think he’d ever been so relieved. The only time he could recall coming close to this feeling was the rush of finally moving out of Don’s place when he’d turned eighteen.
He just about jumped out of his skin when the owner knelt beside him, tapping Scotty’s temple with the gun. “Sit over there.” He motioned to a spot on the floor within his line of vision. “I’m only gonna give you one warning: you move and I shoot.” His gaze was unnervingly serious when he said, “And I only ever shoot to kill.”
Scotty scurried over to do as ordered, hugging his knees to his chest, rocking back and forth. He watched as the owner put the gun down and rolled the man onto his back.
The mechanic’s hands stilled when he gazed down at the unconscious man. “Son of a bitch.” Recognition came and went over his face before his features blanked. He tore open the man’s shirt, jostling him.
A moan left the wounded guy, and Scotty covered his mouth with a trembling hand. Fuck. He hadn’t ever hurt anyone. Never. Not even when things got really bad. Yeah, he would steal from Don because that fucker deserved it, but this was something different.
He’d shot someone.
“What’s your name?”
He blinked at the shop owner, but the guy wasn’t even looking at Scotty. “Um.” He licked his lips. “Scotty. Scotty Fallon.” Shit. Should he have used a false name or something? Fuck, he wasn’t even a good criminal. But it was too late.
The guy looked up from frowning at Scotty’s victim’s bleeding wound. “Any relation to Mayor Fallon?”
The question was innocent enough, but the hair on Scotty’s nape still stood in a warning he didn’t quite understand. “He’s my uncle.” Don didn’t like when Scotty told people that. He would prefer no one knew they were related. Scotty was the one piece of baggage his uncle could never rid himself of.
“Uncle,” the shop owner muttered with a shake of his head. “Of course.” He finished stripping the unconscious man’s shirt off, leaving his chest bare, the bullet wound in his right shoulder exposed.
Scotty swallowed and glanced away, shaking, fighting the urge to throw up. He couldn’t look at what he’d done.
“Well, Scotty Fallon, you fucked up.” The shop owner held up a wallet, flipping it open with one hand, showing off the ID and badge inside. “You fucked up good.”
Scotty’s body went ice cold as he read the identification.
Vince Hardin. U.S. Federal Marshal.
4
It was always weird to Zander that his hands could just as easily heal as destroy. He hadn’t had much use for healing, but he possessed the knowledge all the same. There’d been a time when he would’ve walked away from a downed man, leaving him to bleed out without a second thought.
His old boss used to brag about Zander’s coldness, his cruelty. And while Zander had never embraced it, he’d done nothing to change that perception of him. In his past line of work, it normally didn’t matter who you were or your job description. If you’d been marked for death then you died. But there’d been a special cruelty reserved for law enforcement, for the cops that hunted his former boss. The old man liked showing off just how untouchable he was, and Zander had been the weapon he’d used.
He remembered all the faces of the men who’d been on his former boss’s hit list.
The one Zander was now bandaging up? At the very fucking top.
So, how did a federal marshal based out of New Jersey end up here, on the floor of Zander’s garage, bleeding from the graze of a bullet? Oh, he knew how the bullet thing happened—a jittery motherfucker with no clue as to who he’d decided to rob. But how was the marshal in the same place as Zander?
He glanced over to the side where the guy—Scotty—sat with his knees hugged to his chest, rocking back and forth. Ever since the gun went off, Scotty had gone deathly pale—not that he hadn’t been pale to begin with—and had yet to regain any semblance of color.
The mayor’s fucking nephew. Wasn’t that some shit? He had a bleeding federal marshal and a wanna-be thug with blood ties to the town’s mayor under his roof. For a man who’d made it his duty to skirt the law, he was now elbow-deep in it. He could laugh at the irony if he wasn’t too busy thinking of ways to get rid of two bodies.
