Outside the Law

He held up one hand to stop the tirade. “I’ve got this under control, okay? I know how the local cops operate in Coot’s Bayou. I worked for them for a few years. They’re just shaking the bushes, hoping something will fall out.

“I’m not falling out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned his back on them, daring them to try and stop him from exiting his own office. If he didn’t find a punching bag soon, he was going to lose it. But he heard no steps behind him, no clatter of high heels on the polished wood floor.

It was a fine spring day, cool and crisp in a way perpetually muggy Houston seldom saw. He’d ridden the Harley to work, and as he settled into his eight-mile commute home, he hoped the wind in his face would clear his mind. But when he pulled into his driveway, he was every bit as tense and angry as when he’d left work.

He didn’t bother putting his bike in the garage. He stepped inside his small ranch house long enough to shed his jeans and golf shirt and throw on shorts and a T-shirt with the arms ripped out. Barefoot, he headed outside again, straight through the backyard to the gate that led to the adjacent property.

Mitch lived next to a played-out oil field. He’d bought the little house out near Hobby Airport for a song because most people didn’t care for the sound of pumps and the occasional smell of raw petroleum. That was three years ago, and now the pumps were silent and still. The oil reserves were empty.

The quiet wouldn’t last forever. Even now, the oil company that owned the mineral rights to this two-hundred-acre chunk of land was in the process of acquiring more sophisticated drills and pumps that could go deeper into the ground. But for now the field was still and peaceful except for the breeze rustling through weeds that had reclaimed the ground and the occasional bird chirp.

Most of the old machinery had been removed, but one rusted grasshopper pump was left, abandoned, and Mitch had turned it into his private gym. It had just the ambiance he needed to train for a cage fight.

Mitch normally started his workout with some general fitness training—push-ups, jumping rope or agility drills with resistance bands wrapped around his thighs. But today he skipped all that. He tugged on a pair of four-ounce gloves, which offered minimal protection for his hand but left his fingers free, then went to work on the heavy punching bag he’d suspended from the pump.

Jab. Jab. Left hook. Right uppercut. Knee to the solar plexus. Head shot. Body shot. Like always, he imagined an opponent. Usually, he visualized the guy he was scheduled to fight. He would study any videos he could find of the guy, imprint his fighting style into his brain, then picture all the various ways he could beat him.

Today, his opponent was not Ricky “Quick Death” Marquita. Today, the face he saw was his brother’s.

Dwayne was the one who’d motivated him to learn to fight—not by encouraging him, but by beating him up a few times when they were kids. Bigger, older, Dwayne had had no trouble besting his little brother.

Mitch continued to rain punches and kicks onto the hapless bag filled with sand and gel, pausing only long enough to whip off his T-shirt after he’d gotten good and warmed up. Roundhouse kick to the head. Elbow to the chin. Inside crescent kick to the knee. He kept going long past exhaustion. Sometimes, the winner of a cage fight was simply the one who could stay upright the longest. Fighting through exhaustion was a key skill.

If he and Dwayne fought today, things would be different. Dwayne still outweighed Mitch by a good thirty pounds. But Mitch was sure that if they ever met in a chain-link cage—or in a back alley—he could smear the mat with his brother.

CHAPTER TWO

BETHTRIEDTOTELLHERSELF she’d done what she could. If Mitch was determined to be an idiot about this situation, how could she talk him out of it? Arguing wasn’t her best skill; she left that for the lawyers.

Turned out Daniel didn’t agree. He shared Raleigh’s concern about a scandal being detrimental to Project Justice, and he didn’t allow anything to get in the way of the foundation’s efforts to free wrongly convicted men and women from prison. But he also cared about Mitch, who had been one of the first people Daniel had hired when he and his father had started the foundation.

After Mitch had stormed down the hall toward the elevator, Beth had returned to her little laboratory, the place where she felt most comfortable. Fingerprints, fibers and blood didn’t argue. They spoke only the truth. They weren’t all that complicated.

Men—Mitch, in particular—were.

But she hadn’t been in the lab ten minutes before Daniel called her.

“You want me to try again to convince Mitch to cooperate?” Beth asked, almost before Daniel had said two words.

“You’re the one who knows him the best, Beth,” Daniel said. “I’m in the middle of a Logan Oil board meeting, or I would track him down myself and talk some sense into him.”

Those were pretty strong words, coming from Daniel, who seldom left his estate unless it was for something really important. His new wife, Jamie, was in the process of pulling him out of his shell, but old habits died hard.

“Apparently I don’t know him as well as I thought,” Beth huffed. “Coot’s Bayou? He’s never said a word to me about his hometown. Or his half brother. Or his arrest record.”

“He had good reasons for wanting to put that part of his life behind him, Beth. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. He grew up under pretty harsh conditions and it’s not something he wants to think about.”

“He’s sure trying to run from it now.”

“He can be convinced to do the right thing, I know he can. He’s smart, just bullheaded sometimes. Mitch cares about you and respects you. He’ll listen to you if you try one more time.”

Beth wasn’t so sure. But despite his reclusive ways, her billionaire boss understood human nature better than most anyone Beth knew.

“If you really think it will help, I’ll try.” She would simply have to put her disastrous attempt at dating Mitch out of her mind. He was, first and foremost, her friend. He needed her, even if he didn’t know it.

“Do it now. Because frankly, if you don’t convince him, I’m going to have to tell him to take a leave of absence from work.”

Beth stifled a gasp. “Daniel, he didn’t—”

“I know he didn’t kill anyone,” Daniel said impatiently. “But we have lots of innocent people depending on us. Having one of our key employees accused of murder, no matter how ridiculous the charge, could damage us beyond repair. I will stand behind Mitch a hundred percent. But I won’t have him dragged off in cuffs from our offices, in front of TV cameras. Which is exactly what could happen if Mitch doesn’t cooperate.”

Beth swallowed, her mouth going dry. She’d known things could get bad for Mitch, and for everyone who worked at Project Justice as well as their clients. Why didn’t Mitch see it?

“I’ll go right now, Daniel. I’ll find him. I’ll convince him.”

She tried calling Mitch’s cell, then his home, but got voice mail both times. He was very good at ignoring a ringing phone when he didn’t want to talk. “You can run, but you can’t hide,” Beth murmured as she grabbed her purse and headed out the door, putting her assistant, Cassie, in charge for the rest of the afternoon.

Mitch’s house was less than ten miles from downtown and close to the I-610 loop, but it had kind of a rural feel, with a cow pasture across the street and an oil field next door.

Rush hour hadn’t gotten a good grip on the city at three in the afternoon, so the trip to his home only took a few minutes. She pulled into the driveway and saw that his Harley was there. Good. But she didn’t get out right away. She sat in the car, composing in her mind exactly what she would say to him.

By following him home, she was pushing the bounds of their friendship. But she couldn’t sit back and allow him to be railroaded right into prison. Her job had presented her with too many examples of innocent men and women, accused of crimes, who had made their situations so much worse by going into denial.

Mitch’s house was cute, Beth had to admit, even if the locale wasn’t ideal. The white brick house had red shutters and a trellis shading the front porch, on which grew trumpet vine and morning glories poised to burst into bloom. Mitch kept everything in good repair, but Beth couldn’t help thinking, as she mounted the front steps, that the place could use a woman’s touch.

She rang the bell. When he didn’t answer after a few moments, she rang again and knocked. “Mitch? I know you’re in there. You better just come to the door, because I’m not leaving. We have to talk.”

Still nothing. No sound.

Determined, she walked around the house and let herself into the backyard through the gate in the honeysuckle-choked chain-link fence. The patio and yard were empty, but she found the sliding glass door unlocked.

Nervous sweat broke out on her upper lip as she opened it. “Mitch?”

She was about to go inside when she heard something, a strange noise punctuating the silence.

Smack, smack, smack. And the unmistakable sound of a human male exerting himself. The noise was not coming from inside the house, but behind her. From the yard…no, beyond the yard. Beyond the fence, into the otherwise still oil field.

What the hell?

Curiosity killed the cat, she reminded herself as she abandoned the sliding glass door and went in search of the source of the sound.

The back gate had been left ajar. As a trained crime scene investigator, she should have noticed that before. Mindful of her heels on the uneven ground, she crept through the gate and followed the strange sounds to another fence, a beat-up chain-link enclosure surrounding an old grasshopper pump.

She could see no way in, so she cleared away some of the tall weeds and peered through the gap she’d created.

Her breath caught in her throat. Finally she’d found Mitch, and he appeared to be beating the crap out of a punching bag, pounding it with his fists, bare feet, elbows and knees.

She was at once fascinated and horrified. Here was a male in the prime of his health and vitality, shirtless, muscles rippling and sheened with sweat. He was beautiful…and terrifying.