Chapter One

Hayes Brodie was so not in the mood for this shitshow. Then again, he was never in the mood to deal with a tanked-up asshole who’d just tried to kill him.

Shortly after said attempted murder, Hayes had managed to restrain the asshole—AKA Petey McGrath. He’d done that by putting him in a headlock and then slapping plastic cuffs on both his hands and his ankles.

That hadn’t stopped Petey though.

Nope.

Despite not having full use of his hands or feet, Petey had still tried to punch and kick Hayes. And, of course, the restraints hadn’t stopped the idiot either from spewing a string of uncreative, f-word-laced profanity.

That cursing had continued nonstop as Hayes had loaded him into his SUV and belted him into the backseat so they could begin the ten-minute drive to the Outlaw Ridge Sheriff’s Office.

Hayes had a mountain of gratitude that he hadn’t had to drive Petey all the way into San Antonio, a good hour away. It was late, going on midnight, and he was over and done dealing with this clown. He could stash him in the Outlaw Ridge jail and have someone from San Antonio PD come and collect him. Then, Hayes’ mission would be done, and Petey would become someone else’s problem.

With Petey still cursing a blue streak and doing his best to inflict harm to anyone or anything in his limited reach, Hayes turned into the parking lot of the sheriff’s office. There was a cruiser and a red truck in the reserved spaces, so he figured there’d be at least one unlucky deputy on duty. Unlucky because he or she would soon get a dose of Petey.

Hayes pulled to a stop in the visitor’s space behind the cruiser just as another vehicle, a Jeep, turned into the parking lot. He instantly went on alert. Petey had almost certainly pissed off a whole bunch of the wrong people with his antics, and Hayes thought this might be one of them coming to settle a score.

But that wasn’t the case.

He sighed though when the tall woman with the short, choppy brown hair stepped from the Jeep. She was wearing a dark blue Outlaw Ridge PD uniform.

Deputy Jemma Salvetti.

Someone he did his best to avoid. Even when certain parts of his body, especially the brainless part of him in his boxers, wanted no such avoiding. They’d been on a “blind” date, a setup at one of those stupid escape room deals where he’d first interacted with Jemma and felt the stirrings of heat.

Stirrings that he’d immediately shut down.

Or rather, Hayes had tried to do that anyway.

But no matter what the brainless part of him wanted, Jemma was hands-off for a whole lot of damn good reasons. Too bad those damn good reasons hadn’t stopped his so-called friends from making sure Jemma was at any and all social events that Hayes attended.

“Hayes?” Jemma greeted, and, yeah, it was a question.

Even though he lived just a few miles outside of the small ranching town of Outlaw Ridge, and there were those matchmaking attempts, he didn’t make it to the sheriff’s office that often. That was in part because of his wanting to avoid Jemma but mainly since he didn’t have a lot of business with them.

As an operative for the elite private security company Strike Force, he had missions all over the country. Missions involving rescues, hostage situations, missing persons, and other assorted felonious activities. But in his seven and a half years of working for Strike Force, this was a first for him to have apprehended a fugitive so close to Outlaw Ridge.

“Jemma,” he greeted back.

In hindsight, he should have realized that she could be on duty. After all, despite being in her early thirties, she was pretty much a rookie. She’d had less than a year on the force after giving up her lucrative and successful law practice. Rookies usually got stuck on the night shift.

“What brings you here?” she asked. Even though she had that rookie label, it was an all-cop glance that she made to his backseat, where Petey was now thrashing his shoulder against the window.

“That’s Petey McGrath,” he said, tipping his head to the guy. “He assaulted his eighty-two-year-old grandmother, robbed her, and fled with money that he probably needed to pay off some loan sharks. His eighty-three-year-old grandfather took extreme objection to that and asked Strike Force to work with SAPD to track him down fast. I was lucky enough to locate him first, and I was hoping the sheriff’s office could hold him until morning.”

Jemma eyed Petey, sighed, and nodded. “What was he doing in Outlaw Ridge?”

“His grandparents have a fishing cabin about five miles away, and Petey set off a silent security alarm when he broke in. The granddad called to let me know that, so I drove straight to the cabin and found him.”

“The sonofabitch punched me in the stomach,” Petey complained.

Hayes huffed. “Only after he tried to stab me with a kitchen knife. I knocked that out of his hand, and he tried to kick me in the balls and pull my hair. Before he resorted to biting or some other insulting attack generally reserved for eight-year-old kids, I punched him in the gut to knock the wind out of him and then restrained him.”

“You sonofabitch,” Petey repeated.

Hayes had been called much worse, but as former Delta Force special ops, he’d never pulled the enemy’s hair. Hard not to feel anything but contempt and loathing for someone who’d fight like that.

“Are you okay?” Jemma asked, and it took Hayes a moment to realize that the question was meant for him.

“Fine,” he said.

“I’m not fine,” Petey howled. “I wanta file a complaint. I wanta talk to both your bosses.”

Jemma rolled her eyes. “That’s a lot of demands and whining for someone who assaulted a granny. Is his grandmother all right?” she tacked onto that.

“Not especially. She’s in the hospital with a broken cheekbone and two cracked ribs,” Hayes explained.

Jemma’s mouth tightened. Her amber eyes narrowed. And she cursed Petey under her breath. That, and the strong urge to beat the crap out of Petey, had been Hayes’s reaction as well.

Jemma gave Petey a look of undiluted disgust, and she was good at it, too. Then she tipped her head toward the police station. “I’m just about to start my shift. Let’s get him inside so I can do the paperwork to process him in.”

Hayes hadn’t exactly been holding his breath, but it had occurred to him that the small sheriff’s office might not have an available cell to hold someone.

“Thanks,” Hayes muttered, and he went to his SUV door to open it.

The moment Hayes unclicked the seatbelt, Petey immediately barreled out toward him. Or rather, the asshole tried to do that anyway. Hayes just stepped back and let the idiot trip on his own bound feet and tumble out of the SUV. Hayes did catch him, right before Petey would have face-planted on the pavement.

Petey didn’t show any appreciation for that.

He tried to slam his elbow into Hayes’ chest, but Hayes was able to dodge that. Jemma wasn’t. She had stepped up to help him, and her right breast caught the impact of Petey’s assault.

Hayes cursed. Jemma did, too, and she made a sharp gasp of pain, but she didn’t back away. She grabbed Petey by the back of his collar, and with Hayes’ muscle behind the idiot, they began to perp walk Petey toward the station.

They stopped though when there was a squeal of brakes out on Main Street.

A black truck screeched to a stop. It was the only vehicle on the road, so at first Hayes thought it was just a lookie-loo who wanted to know what was going on.

But no.

The driver’s side window came down, and thanks to the streetlight, he caught sight of something that he sure as hell didn’t want to see.

The barrel of an assault rifle.

“Get down,” Hayes managed to say, and he shoved Petey to the ground. In the same motion, he took hold of Jemma’s arm, hauling her down at well.

And the bullets came flying.

A spray of gunfire peppered across the parking lot, slamming into the ground and Hayes’ SUV. Keeping hold of both Petey and Jemma, Hayes scrambled back, using his vehicle for cover. It was bullet resistant, but if the shooter got out of that truck, Jemma, Petey, and he would still be easy targets.

Hayes did something to prevent that.

He drew his Glock, one of the three guns he carried, and he scrambled to his feet, moving to the front end of the SUV so he could try to return fire. He cursed though when he realized he didn’t have a clean shot at their attacker. There were shops and buildings on the other side of the truck, and if someone was in one of them, he could hit them with friendly fire.

Jemma went to his side, shoulder to shoulder with him, and she was about to peer out where she might have gotten her head shot off, so Hayes used his elbow to shove her back. Apparently, she didn’t approve of that because she muttered some profanity.

“I’m going to shoot at the tires to hopefully get the gunman to stop firing,” Hayes let her know, and he glanced at the police station. Any deputy inside would have almost certainly heard the shots and would be responding soon, and the shooter might just gun them down the moment they stepped outside.

Hayes rolled out from the SUV, came up and fired at the tires. He hit one, and while the plan worked to get the gunman to stop shooting, it was a little too effective. The driver not only stopped firing, he slammed on the accelerator and sped away.

Normally, that would have pissed Hayes off, and he would have gone after the asshole, but he looked back at Petey, who had somehow managed to get to his feet and was trying to waddle-run away.

“Damn it,” Hayes muttered.

Hayes shifted directions and tackled Petey. While he was restraining this pain in his ass, again, Jemma took out her phone, and he realized she was calling dispatch so an APB could be put out on the truck.

“Dispatch isn’t answering,” she muttered after a couple of seconds. Frowning, she glanced in the direction where the truck had fled. “Let me get the prisoner inside, and I’ll go after it. You think the shooter was gunning for Petey?”

Hayes considered that a moment. “Maybe. Obviously, he’s a class A dirtbag and no doubt has plenty of enemies.”

But that suddenly didn’t feel right.

And Hayes didn’t like that tightness that began to form in his gut. That tightness had a way of letting him know that something more than just the obvious was wrong here, and since that sensation had saved his hide a time or two, he didn’t ignore it.

Still keeping watch in case the shooter returned, Jemma took hold of one of Petey’s arms, and Hayes took the other. This time, it was a perp-run, and despite the man’s hampered movements, he was clearly ready to get inside and away from anyone who possibly wanted him dead.

Jemma threw open the door to the police station and muttered more profanity when she stepped into a spray of water. The overhead sprinkler system was spewing, and Hayes quickly realized why. There was smoke coming from the back of the building.

“What the heck,” Jemma muttered. “Trace? Clayton?” she called out, the urgency in her tone and on all over her face.

Those were no doubt the names of the deputies who were supposed to be on duty. But no one was at any of the desks in the bullpen that was in the center of the large open space.

“Trace?” Jemma tried again, and this time there was even more alarm in her voice.

No answer.

With the water continuing to shower them, Jemma let go of her grip on Petey, and taking out her phone again, she called the fire department while hurrying past the sheriff’s office. Hayes kept Petey in tow and was right behind her, but he could see that it, too, was empty.

That knot in his stomach got a whole lot tighter.

She raced to the back of the building toward the source of that smoke. “Clayton?” she tried again, making another call, and he saw that she pressed Sheriff Marty Bonetti’s number.

It rang. And rang and rang. Before it went to voicemail.

Jemma’s breath was gusting now, but she kept searching. Kept calling out the names of the two deputies. Kept getting no response from them.

She threw open a door at the end of a narrow hall, and she switched on a light to what appeared to be a breakroom with a counter, microwave, and leather sofa well past its prime. There were some traces of smoke here coming from a trash can in the center of the room, and the water from the sprinklers had pooled on the floor.

But it wasn’t just water.

There were red streaks snaking through it.

Hayes followed the source of those streaks to the far left corner of the room. And he saw them.

Two men in deputy uniforms identical to the one Jemma was wearing. The pair were on the floor, both lying in a pool of blood.

And both men were very much dead.