to Angel, Vince was a saint. Angel was a hothead. Short, wiry, all energy with little brains.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why I put up with you?” Vince asked in his usual soft tone. Right now he was definitely wondering that very thing himself.
Angel snorted. “I’m the best getaway-car driver in the business and you know it.”
Vince couldn’t argue that. Angel had lightning-fast reflexes. But since that life was behind them, Vince didn’t need a getaway driver anymore.
“You also love me,” Angel said without looking at him.
Vince stared over at him, realizing that was the only reason he didn’t take Angel out into the desert and put a bullet through his brain. Angel was his half brother. Blood was everything, even if your mother had no taste when it came to men.
“Damn, it’s like a refrigerator in here,” Angel complained, reaching over to turn off the air-conditioning. “You tryin’ to kill me?”
All those years of being locked up in the same cell block had made Vince even more aware of his brother’s shortcomings. Not that it had ever taken much to set Angel off, but now, once angry, Angel was nearly impossible to control. That had proved to be a problem. On top of that, now that Angel was out of prison, he had unlimited access to sharp instruments and a fifteen-year fixation on getting what he had coming.
“We need to talk,” Vince said.
“What is there to talk about?” Angel demanded, glaring over at him. “We find the bitch. We get what’s coming to us. This ain’t brain surgery.”
“My fear is that when we find her, you will go berserk like you did with Lanny and kill her before she tells us what we want to know,” Vince pointed out calmly. “If I hadn’t gotten you out of there when I did last night, we would be on death row right now. We almost got caught because you can’t control your temper.”
“You were going too easy on Lanny. I had him talking. He was just about to tell us. If he had lived just another few seconds…”
Vince groaned. “When we find Molly, you have to refrain from that kind of…persuasion, or we will never get the diamonds.”
“If she hasn’t already fenced them,” Angel snapped.
“She hasn’t,” Vince said for at least the thousandth time. These particular diamonds couldn’t be easily fenced—they were too recognizable. And Vince had his sources on the outside watching for them. There was no way Molly could have tried to fence the uncut stones without him knowing about it.
Angel shifted in the seat, his left cheek twitching from a nervous tic. “Okay, okay. So why are we still sitting here? Let’s find the bitch.”
“I found her before I found Lanny. She’s working at a greasy spoon off the Strip,” Vince said.
“You’ve seen her?” Angel asked, his voice high with excitement and suspicion. “Why didn’t you take me with you?”
Vince raised a brow as if to say, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“You wouldn’t try to cut me out of my share, would you?” Angel asked, going mean on him. Angel didn’t trust anyone, but still Vince took it as an insult.
“You’re my brother.” As if that meant anything to Angel. Vince reached into the back seat and picked up the latest in laptop computers. Opening it, he booted it up.
“What? You going to check your e-mail?” Angel snapped.
“Patience. She isn’t going to get away,” Vince told him calmly. “I put a global positioning device on her car.”
“What?” Angel swore. “You were close enough to her to put some damned gadget on her car but you didn’t grab her? Are you crazy?”
“Like a fox,” Vince said.
“So where is she, Mr. Smart Guy?”
Vince studied the screen and smiled. “She’s running for her life.”
Chapter Three
Antelope Flats, Montana
When Cash got back to his office, he found his sister Dusty sitting behind his desk. She leaped to her feet like the teenager she was and ran to him, throwing her arms around his neck.
“Did they find her?” she asked stepping back from the quick hug, a mixture of hope and fear in her expression.
He shook his head and stepped around behind his desk.
Dusty was dressed in her usual jeans, western shirt, boots and a straw cowboy hat pulled low. A single blond braid trailed down her slim back. She was a beauty, although she seemed to do everything possible to hide the fact that she was female. Cash wasn’t sure if it was because Dusty was raised pretty much in an all male household or because she actually loved working on the ranch more than doing girl stuff.
“You’re going to keep looking though, aren’t you?” She sounded surprised he was here rather than out with the other officers searching the Trayton place.
“I’m off the case, Dusty,” he said dropping into his chair. His sister had been only eleven when Jasmine disappeared. He doubted she understood the implications of Jasmine’s car being found so close to town, but she would soon enough, once the Antelope Flats rumor mill kicked in. He wanted to be the one to tell her, but still the words came hard.
“I was her—” he paused, the word coming hard “—fiancée and with her car found near here, I’m a suspect in her homicide.” He waved a hand through the air, knowing there was more that would come out but no reason to open that can of worms until he had to.
“Homicide?”
“A sufficient amount of her blood type was found in the car to change her disappearance to a probable homicide,” he said.
“How could anyone think you would hurt her?” Dusty cried. “She was the love of your life—is the love of your life. She can’t be dead. She’s probably in Europe just like you thought. She’ll come back once she hears about her car being found and, when she sees you again, she’ll remember what you shared and she’ll be sorry she stayed away and she won’t ever leave again.”
He smiled up at her, surprised that his tomboy sister was such a romantic and touched that she cared so much. He didn’t have the heart to tell her how wrong she was. “What are you doing in town? I thought you were helping with branding?”
“Shelby sent me in to check on you and tell you that you’re expected at dinner tomorrow night.” Dusty rolled her eyes. “Who knows what big bombshell she’s planning to drop now.”
Shelby was their mother, but it was complicated as all hell. Just a few months ago, out of the blue, Shelby Ward McCall had shown up at the ranch. What made that unusual was that Cash thought his mother had died when he was just over a year old.
Shelby had not only announced that she was alive, but that she and their father Asa had cooked up her demise. It seemed they had thought it would be better for
