CHAPTER SEVEN

Hank Costabile nearly sideswiped a car.

He knew he should probably slow down, and maybe not take right turns so sharply either, but he was so pissed that it was hard to force his foot to ease back off the accelerator.

It was difficult to maintain his cool when he, a decorated former police sergeant, was being tailed by a pair of cops in an unmarked vehicle. The whole thing was insulting. Did they think he didn't know? That he was okay with it?

He understood why they were tailing him, even if it disgusted him. They'd almost certainly been assigned the gig by the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department himself, Roy Decker. The old man was once captain of Central Station, where Jessie Hunt's Homicide Special Section unit operated. He had a soft spot for the profiler and apparently worried that Hank might want to do her harm now that he was out of prison. He wasn't far off base.

After all, Hunt was the reason that Hank had been imprisoned in the first place. Her self-righteous busybody mentality had cost him eighteen months of his life. And if not for a technicality that got his conviction overturned on appeal, it would have cost him decades more. He wasn't sure he would have made it that long.

Cops don't tend to do well in prison. For some reason, the people they put away hold grudges. The only reasons he'd survived this long was because he was a badass who wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty the first few times that someone came at him, and because the guards had been paid a little extra by his law enforcement friends to keep an eye on him.

There was also the small fact that he"d hooked up with a white power gang. He wasn"t totally in alignment with all their views, but when it came to survival behind bars, a guy sometimes had to make compromises.

That wasn't something he needed to lose sleep over right now. His bigger priority was getting these undercover cops off his ass. Looking in his rearview mirror, he saw that they were three cars behind. He was tempted to blow through the red light and leave them in the dust but knew that the short-term satisfaction of the maneuver would be outweighed by the consequences down the line. No, he needed to lose them without breaking any laws.

Studying himself in the mirror, he noticed the deep crevices in his furrowed brow. Even his normally smooth bald head had the start of little wrinkles. He knew that it was due to stress and perpetual anger, but there wasn"t much he could do about that. Anger was his fuel these days.

They shouldn't be treating him like a perp. Truth be told, they should be throwing him a parade. In his two decades on the force, he'd nailed hundreds, if not thousands of criminals. He'd gotten thieves, rapists, and murderers off the streets. Sure, maybe he'd cut a few corners here and there. Maybe he'd taken a little something on the side now and then. Maybe he looked the other way when his higher-ups engaged in legally questionable behavior, but who didn't?

Admittedly, maybe not everybody went as far as he did in covering for his former boss, Commander Mike Butters. The man was paying an underage porn actress for sexual favors, and Hank tried to shut down the investigation of her murder because Butters"s bad choices might come to light. And maybe not everyone would have tried to have the profiler investigating the porn actress"s murder killed before she got to the bottom of the case.

But the truth was: she deserved everything she got. He thought back to how she just kept coming at him relentlessly back then, questioning his professionalism and his sense of duty. It was an insult to everything he'd worked for two decades. She was this fresh-scrubbed profiling savant, ignoring how things had always been done, threatening the life he'd built. She was a fly constantly buzzing around his head, and he'd resolved to swat her down.

Some might suggest he went overboard. Maybe he could have just planted drugs at her house or had a suspect in one of her cases falsely allege that she coerced him into a confession.

But in the heat of the moment, when his boss was on the verge of being charged and his own career was in jeopardy, he didn"t have time to plot out some elaborate plan to undermine Jessie Hunt. He just needs her out of the way. In retrospect, he"d made mistakes. But those mistakes should have been viewed in light of his years of meritorious service. Instead, he was thrown to the wolves.

He knew there were still some folks on his side, more than the goody-two-shoes crowd realized. Jessie Hunt might be the heroine of the city, but there was a whole contingent of people who"d had enough of her antics. Powerful interests in the world of media, business, and law enforcement had suffered at her hands and wanted her to get her comeuppance. And to the extent that Hank could make that happen, they wanted to help him.

But for now, those interests had to had to lie low. Hunt was Decker's prized pet and the public's best girl. They were biding their time, waiting for the perfect moment to take her down. But he wasn't inclined to be so patient.

The light turned green, and he shot forward, honking at the car in front of him to either pick up the pace or move to the side. The driver steered over to the shoulder, and Hank sped by, glancing over. It was a mother with two kids in the back. She gave him a sour look, and he flicked her off.

He punched the accelerator and weaved in and out of the cars that served as obstacles. He needed to get away from the jerks behind him, to get a little freedom of movement. What he really felt like doing was pulling over, letting them do the same, then yanking them out of their car and pummeling them bloody. But that would be counterproductive. Best just to lose them.

Besides, he needed to save that fury for the person who truly deserved it—Jessie Hunt. And when the time was right, he would unleash all the pent-up rage he been bottling up.

He'd been waiting a long time for payback. He could wait a little longer.