“Yeah, I told him I was recording so it wasn’t really... Anyway, he gave me some shit about an elderly parent wanting to reconcile with his only child as death approached, as to why Dead Milt would leave everything to a son who’d threatened him. Which was pretty much bullshit since we know about Harper’s extremely recentDon’t let Milt Junior in the House or You’ll Be Fired on the Spotrule.”
“What’d he say when you brought that up?”
“He started getting cagey and hung up before I could ask about any of the house rules,” Jules told him. “He’s hiding something—although maybe I’m just imagining it.”
“I dunno, you’ve kinda earned the right to trust your instincts,” Sam said as they stowed the groceries in the back of the car.
“And yet,” Jules pointed out. “When my instincts tell me to believe Milt Junior, you laugh in my face.”
Sam laughed. In his face. “Yeah, nope, I draw the line there. You’re absolutely wrong about that one. He flat-out lied to us.”
“Well, he certainly lied by omission about his manslaughter conviction, but that doesn’t mean he’s lying about not wanting the money. FYI, he got a five million dollargiftfrom his father when he got out of prison.”
“Shit,” Sam said. “Gee, thanks, Dad.”
“Harper implied that there was some kind of fraud or embezzlement involved.”
“Harper’s a dick, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about that.” Sam checked for oncoming traffic before stepping outto access the driver’s side door. The stream in the far left lane was moving at quite a clip—the light ahead at the intersection was green.
But a vehicle had stopped just a few dozen yards behind them in the right lane, signaling to pull into a driveway, leaving him both time and space to get behind the wheel without getting his feet run over or the door ripped from the car.
“I think it was likely more from the pressures of guilt from failed fatherhood,” Jules said across the top of the car. But then... Jesus Christ! “Sam!”
Someone in the left lane—black SUV, heavily tinted windows, circling block guy?—suddenly stood on their brakes and the driver behind them in a silver Toyota swerved hard into the right lane—directly toward Sam.
Who reacted exactly like the Navy SEAL that he was as he dove up and over the hood of their rental car.
Jules reached for him, to pull him farther out of the way or to catch him—which, he wasn’t quite sure. Whatever he was attempting, he did little more than get in Sam’s way as the bigger man somersaulted into him. They landed together in a heap on the sidewalk as the Toyota slammed into the rental car with an ear-jarring screech of metal-on-metal.
And then it was Sam who was pullinghimback even further, skittering them across the concrete on their asses as their rental car bumped up and over the curb toward them—holy shit!—before finally settling into a steaming, broken, window-shattered, never-gonna-move-again place.
No, the steam was from the Toyota that had hit them—the driver was a young woman who was horrified and out of her car, pushing aside her already deflated airbag. “Oh my God, oh my God, are you hurt?”
“I’m okay,” Sam called back to her. He turned to Jules. “You okay?”
He was going to have quite the collection of bruises—Sam probably was too—and his hands were shaking from adrenaline, but... “Yeah.”
“Areyou?” Sam asked the Toyota’s driver.
“I think so. I’m so,sosorry,” she called.
It was pretty freaking miraculous, and the look on Sam’s face echoed Jules’s own bone-deep relief. “Thanks for that heads up,” he said as he helped Jules back up to his feet, as they brushed themselves off. “That could’ve been bad.”
“You think?”Badwas an understatement—it could’ve been deadly. Jules had to lean over, hands on his knees, until his lightheadedness finally started to clear.
The Toyota’s driver joined them there on the sidewalk. She was young and Black and extremely upset. And more than a little frightened—oh, shit, ofthem. The two white men whose car she hit—one of them, Sam, whom she’d nearly killed, being both extra-large and extra-Texan. “The car in front of me stopped short so suddenly,” she said, “and?—”
“Hey, it’s all right,” Sam said soothingly, like he was talking to Haley or Ash. “We’re all okay. That’s really all that matters.”
Jules chimed in as he straightened up. “I saw exactly what happened—you had nowhere to go.” He willed his hands to stop shaking as he opened his phone and dialed Troubleshooters operative Lindsey Jenkins who was former LAPD and still had plenty of contacts here. It would be nice to have a friendly face on the scene when filing this accident report.
“Nothing here that can’t be fixed,” Sam said as Jules stepped away slightly to give Lindsey a quick overview of the situation. “I’m Sam and this is Jules, and neither of us aremad at you, all right? You did some good driving there—no one got hurt.”
“I’m on it,” Lindsey told Jules over the phone. “I’ll see if Andre’s around—he’s a detective—last name Lennox. It’s actually good that you’re gonna meet.”
“Maybe not this way,” Jules said.
“No, you’re gonna love him. Really. Oh, I hope he’s available. I’ll text you with his contact info, and give him yours. He probably won’t get there before the patrol car does, but you can tell them—the uniforms—that you know him. Or you’re about to know him. No, just say that you know him. He’ll be good with that.”
