sighed and smiled. “Okay. I just got back from testifying in a court case. I’ve got half a dozen cases to work and now I have to decide on priorities,” he confessed. He flicked a long finger at the file stack. “I thought I might flip a coin…”
“No need. The captain has something urgent for you to do.”
“Saved by new orders!” he joked. He jerked forward and his booted feet slammed to the floor. He got up and stretched enormously, pulling his white shirt with the silver Ranger badge on the pocket tight over hair-roughened, hard chest muscles. “What’s the assignment?”
She tossed a sheet on his desk. “A homicide, in an alley off Castillo Boulevard,” she told him. “White guy, mid-to-late-twenties. Two detectives from CID and a medical examiner investigator are already on scene, along with a couple of EMTs and patrol officers. The captain said you should go right now, before they call a contract ambulance to transport the dead body.”
He scowled. “Hey, that’s in the city limits. San Antonio PD has jurisdiction…” he began.
“I know. But this one’s tricky. They found a young white guy with a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, execution-style. Remember what’s on Castillo Boulevard?”
“No.”
She gave him a smug look. “Jake Marsh’s nightclub. And the body was found in an alley two doors down from it.”
He broke into a smile. “Well, well! What a nice surprise to drop in my lap, and just when I was feeling sorry for myself.” He hesitated. “Wait a minute. Why’s the captain giving it to me?” he asked suspiciously, glaring toward the head Ranger’s closed door nearby. “The last assignment he gave me was looking into the mysterious death of a mutilated cow.” He leaned down, because he was a head taller than she was. “They thought it was aliens,” he whispered fervently.
She made a face. “You never know. Maybe it was!”
He glared at her.
She grinned. “He’s just ticked because you got to work with the FBI for two years, and they turned down two applications from him. But he said you could have this murder case because you haven’t embarrassed him this month. Yet.”
“It won’t be uncomplicated. In fact, I’ll bet a week’s pay that by dark it’s going to turn into a media feeding frenzy,” he said.
“I won’t take that bet. And, by the way, he said you should stop getting gas at that new all-female gas station downtown, because it’s giving the department a bad name.”
He lifted both eyebrows. “What’s he got against women pumping gas?” he asked innocently.
“Gas isn’t all they’re pumping.” She flushed when she realized what she’d said, gestured impotently at the assignment sheet and exited in a flaming rush.
Brannon grinned wickedly as she retreated. He picked up the sheet and went out of the office, grabbing up his off-white Stetson on the way.
In Austin, a slender woman with her long blond hair in a bun, wearing big gold-rimmed glasses over her twinkling dark brown eyes, was trying to console one of the state attorney general’s computer experts.
“He really likes you, Phil,” Josette Langley told the young man, who was in the first month of his first job out of college. He looked devastated. “Honest he does.”
Phil, redheaded and blue-eyed, glanced toward the door of Simon Hart, Texas Attorney General, and flushed even redder. “He said it was my fault his computer locked down while he was talking to the vice president on-line about an upcoming governors’ conference. He got knocked off the network and couldn’t get back on. He threw the mouse at me.”
“Lucky you, that it wasn’t attached to the CPU at the time,” she said with a wicked grin. “Anyway, he only throws things when Tira’s mad at him. It doesn’t last long. Besides, the vice president is his third cousin,” she pointed out. “And mine, too, come to think of it,” she added thoughtfully. “Never mind, Phil, you have to learn to just let it wash over you, like water on a duck’s back. Simon’s quick-tempered, but he gets over it just as fast.”
He gave her a baleful look. “He never yells at you.”
“I’m a woman,” she pointed out. “He’s very old-fashioned about yelling at women. He and his brothers were raised strictly. They don’t move with the times.”
“He’s got four brothers and he says they’re all just like him. Imagine that!” he said.
She remembered that Phil was an only child, like herself. “They’re not just like him. Anyway, they live in Jacobsville, Texas. The married ones are a lot calmer now.” She didn’t dare allow herself to think about the two remaining Hart bachelors, Leo and Rey. The stories about their homemade biscuit-craving and the things they did to satisfy it was becoming legendary.
“The bachelor ones aren’t calm. One of them carried a cook out of a Victoria restaurant kicking and screaming last week, and they sent the Texas Rangers after him!”
“They sent Judd Dunn,” she replied. “He’s our cousin, too. But it was a joke, sort of. And she wasn’t exactly screaming…Well, never mind. It’s not important.” She was talking too fast. She felt her face go hot at the mention of the Texas Rangers.
She had painful memories of one particular Texas Ranger, whom she’d loved passionately. Gretchen, Marc Brannon’s sister, had told her that Marc Brannon had gone on a drunken rampage two years ago, just after they broke up and ended up on opposite sides of the courtroom in a high-profile murder trial. Marc had left the Rangers shortly afterward and enlisted with the FBI. He was back in San Antonio now, back with the Rangers again. Gretchen also said that Marc had almost driven himself crazy with guilt over an even older incident when Josette was fifteen and he was a policeman in Jacobsville. Odd, she thought, remembering the painful things he’d said to her when they broke up.
Josette had told Gretchen that she didn’t blame Marc for his lack of belief in her innocence. Part of her didn’t. Another, darker part wanted to hang him by his spurs from a live oak tree for the misery of the past two years. He’d never really believed her story until their last disastrous date, and he’d walked out on her without another word, after making her feel like a prostitute. She’d loved him. But he couldn’t have loved her. If he had, he’d never have left Texas, not even if the murder trial had set them at odds.
She cleared her throat at the erotic images that flashed through her mind of her last date with Marc and turned her attention back to poor, downcast Phil Douglas.
“I’ll square things with Simon for you,” she promised him.
“I really like working here,” he said eagerly. “You might mention that. And I promise I’ll fix the computer next time so that his e-mail won’t ever lock down again. I’ll put it in writing, even!”
“I’ll tell him, Phil. Right now, in fact. I have to see him on a question one of the district attorneys faxed in this morning. Chin up, now. The world hasn’t ended. Everything passes with time—even things you think will kill your soul.”
And she should know, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.
When she walked
