Shotgun Honeymoon

Behind her, almost hidden in the shadows, was one of the young waitresses from the diner he frequented almost every evening before he went on duty. Janina. Young, pretty, everyday made astounding by a pair of huge heavily fringed mahogany eyes and a thick, roughly halved mane of hair the midnight side of brown. His heart and libido did the same damn telltale hop-skip-and-pucker it’d done any time he’d wound up in her vicinity lately. Damn because at maybe sixteen and still in high school Janina was jailbait. Still she was a cute little thing. He hoped her future would be more attractive than her present appeared to be.

“I don’t get involved,” Janina’s mother recalled his attention by saying, “but this time it’s bad, worse’n I ever heard. Hadda call, y’know? Lotta bangin’ around—someone gettin’ hit, like. Body hittin’ walls, furniture bustin’ ’n all. Then I hear her scream and she runs out the house all bloody. Her brother runs out after, drags her back in. Their old man’s waitin’ for ’em in the door, hits her good in the stomach ’afore he and the boy throw her inside an’ it sounds like they start goin’ on her again.”

Russ flicked a glance at the teenager who nodded slightly in frightened confirmation. Russ’s mouth thinned. Nobody’s kid should have to live in a place like this.

No woman of any age should have to live here, either.

Once again his attention stuttered. His libido loosed its hold on him, turned over to his youthful heart. One regulation-clad foot slid him protectively nearer to the screened door and the young woman inside the trailer. Her eyes flared at the movement, lit with something akin to…

Welcome, worship, recognition…

Skittishness.

And more insight than he wanted her to possess.

Russ felt his Adam’s apple bob, his sliding foot stammer and slip back where it belonged: under his control, no longer betraying him.

Or his seditious heart.

Deliberately he returned his attention to the mother. She put the cigarette between her lips and dragged hard. “Little while later I hear this sound, pop-pop, like that. Then it comes again, pop-pop, an’ I see the old man run out the door lookin’ like he don’t believe what happened. I see he’s been shot, ’cuz he’s bleedin’ down the side of his head somethin’ fierce. Don’t slow ’im down none, though. He just gets in that old car ’a theirs an’ takes off. All the while I hear this pop-pop-pop-pop goin’ off over there. Then it went all quiet. That’s when I called you.”

The demon of Russ’s temper battered his temples, demanding release from the cage in which he kept it. He short-chained it to the floor. “You waited until after to call?”

The woman nodded. “Seemed safest.” She cast a suddenly wise glance over Russ that seemed to take in his youth and his lack of backup. “Fer ever’body.”

Except the woman in that trailer, he wanted to snap at her. But didn’t. Instead he asked, “There was only the three of them in there?”

She nodded again. “Far as I can tell. Three of ’em’s all there ever is—’cept when they bring in paid company t’bang on that girl. Wasn’t none of that today though.”

“And you haven’t heard anything more from inside?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know their names?”

The woman shrugged. “Ever’body knows ’em ’roun’ here. Girl’s kinda the local hooker. Her daddy an’ her brother bring guys to her. Don’t think she likes it none, but she ain’t got much choice. Name’s Maddie Thorn, her brother’s Harold, daddy’s Charlie—”

“Damn.” At Maddie’s name, Russ yanked his handie-talkie off his shoulder and radioed for help, crossed the street and unholstered his gun before crashing through his former high-school classmate’s—his best friend’s, his prom date’s—front door.

And damn her to hell for not asking him for help.

As Russ crossed the narrow street, Janina Gálvez flew across the room to lift her absent father’s ever-loaded Winchester down from its rack on the wall. Weapon in hand, oblivious to her mother’s weak protests, she fled out the far door to carefully work her way around the edge of the trailer.

She wasn’t stupid. She kept to the shadows behind the propane tank and beneath the awnings as much as possible. She knew how to handle herself and her daddy’s gun and she really couldn’t let that boy-cop go out there alone. She just couldn’t. If anything happened to him, she wasn’t sure she could bear it. Not when she’d only just made up her mind three weeks ago that the instant she could, she intended to marry one rookie police officer named Russ Levoie, the most wonderfully gorgeous hero she’d ever laid eyes on. And if he got himself killed trying to save Maddie Thorn again, why she’d…

Janina swallowed. She didn’t know what she’d do. The only thing she was certain of was that she intended to save the taciturn hero from himself for herself.

Period.

Chapter 1

Winslow, Arizona

July 17. 7:00 p.m. Present

He lived like a freaking monk.

Frustrated and furious with himself because of it, Russ Levoie slammed through the door of his trailer, causing it to bounce on its hinges. For the first time in his thirty-two years he was really sitting up and taking notice of all the things he’d never done, didn’t have in his life.

What he noticed most was that he was damn-it-to-hell lonely in a way he’d never felt before.

All because of his brothers and their wives.

Damn them and bless them.

Jamming a fist through what there was of his neatly trimmed hair, Russ made his way to the refrigerator, yanked it open and grabbed a beer. For an instant he studied the unopened can, then loosed a virulent oath and threw the brew the length of the neat-as-a-pin trailer. The can burst against the far wall, spewing beer floor to ceiling, and spraying the sofa he spent most nights sleeping on—alone, always alone—as well as the table and chair beside it.

“Damn.”

He viewed the mess tiredly. He rarely lost his temper, and certainly not like this. Not that he didn’t have one. No, he had a decided temper. He’d simply learned young that allowing it to have its way with him tended to frighten people and got him nowhere.

Of course, holding it in check all the time wasn’t necessarily the best alternative, either.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness. His elderly sixth-grade teacher, Sister Ann Henry, niggled across his memory. Turning, Russ grabbed a couple of rags and a bottle of spray cleaner from under the kitchen sink, strode across the trailer and began to mop the beer off the industrial-grade tile flooring he’d put down a year ago.

Judas-stinking-Billy-goats, he was envious of his brothers. Shoving air between his teeth in disgust, Russ caught up the exploded beer can, drained what remained of the beer in a long swallow then angled his body to pitch the can the length of the trailer. The can bull’s-eyed the kitchen sink, clattered briefly about the stainless-steel sides and settled. He grimaced. He hadn’t been a three-letter jock in high school for nothin’.

Tiredly he turned back to the job at hand. He’d never before envied his brothers anything. Guy, Jeth and Jonah were all younger than him and there’d never been anything they’d had that he’d wanted. Sure, he’d occasionally wished he could be as laid-back about life as Guy, and once, he’d wished for a little of Jeth’s recklessness, but he didn’t remember ever wishing for a bite of Jonah’s loose-cannon hotheadedness. He had enough of that commodity of his own to worry about.

Not that he let anybody see it. Hell, you couldn’t be a hothead and maintain your cool as one of only two local police lieutenants.

But his lack of sibling envy had been before Jeth and Guy had gone off and found themselves wives.

Russ moved up to scrub the wall paneling. He’d known before he’d gone out tonight that he should never have agreed to have dinner with the lot of them. He’d needed tonight’s guys-only annual blowout, dammit, but not the way Guy and Jeth had set up this particular so-called remembrance day.

He never liked remembering what had happened thirteen years ago today, what he’d walked into the middle of in that trailer. So much blood, the terrible disfigurement Maddie had suffered—the nightmares that hadn’t ended there but begun. But this year was worse than most. This year he’d had to go tell his best friend that her psychopathically abusive, pedophile of a father had been released from prison and was looking for her. She’d spent the past twelve years learning to feel safe for the first time in her life, learning to have a life at all, because Russ had assured her Charlie would be permanently incarcerated for the things he’d done to her. And now he wasn’t. Because Russ had missed one parole hearing in twelve years and the psychologists and psychiatrists had gotten their way.

But of course, he couldn’t back out on his family. They’d expected him. They’d done the bar thing for him tonight. Instead of it just being Guy, Jeth, him and a rip-roaring drunk to the destruction they too often saw on the job, they’d all been there, including Jonah and their brilliant oldest sister, Mabel, who hated boredom, dabbled in herbs and did investigative work for the state’s forensics crime lab when she wasn’t needed elsewhere. Including Jeth’s glowing-with-new-pregnancy wife, Allyn—now teaching marine paleontology for the University of Arizona in the field at her grant-approved study site not far from Havasu Falls—and Guy’s nearing-delivery pregnant wife, Hazel. Even his youngest brother, Jonah, the newest addition to the Levoie law enforcement legacy, was present. The only one of his siblings who was missing was the youngest, Marcy, killed on this date several years ago during a kidnapping gone wrong on Jeth’s watch. It had taken them all a long time to get over that one, Jeth especially, and then only with Allyn’s help.

Russ knew Marcy’s murder at age ten was part and parcel of what ruled him now where his life on the job was concerned, this annual drunk he and his peace officer brothers went on “in memory” of both their baby sister and the piece of his soul Russ had lost on this same date thirteen years ago when he’d burst into Maddie’s trailer and seen for the first time what her father and brother had been doing to her for years.

Life was not always as easy as it seemed in a small town, especially for a cop whose best friend was both abuse victim and whore. Suspicion followed one like gossip, and these annual nights out with his brothers were a lifeline he needed to keep him sane, grounded—and also, sometimes, to keep him from thinking too much.

Thank God they’d left Guy and Hazel’s adolescent daughter, Emily, and Jeth and Allyn’s almost-four-year-old son, Sasha, at home. If they’d brought the kids, too…

It would be one thing if he envied his brothers the love they’d found or their subsequent happiness, but he didn’t. No, his envy was far more complicated than that.

What he envied was their contentment.