Broken. Rebecca Zanetti

Mal looked dangerous in his dark hoodie with unnecessary sunglasses hiding his eyes, but he’d fit right in as they jogged back to the house.

      Wolfe took off at a fast pace. “You didn’t have to come—I can handle this.”

      “Right. These solo missions you’ve been doing are stupid.” Mal kept pace, his tone more thoughtful than sharp.

      “Yeah, I know.” Wolfe had been trained well, and backup was always a necessary precaution. It felt good to have Mal along.

      Mal hunched his shoulders and slid his hands into his pockets. “The other day you mentioned a job dealing with sex clubs.”

      “No, the job is tracking down a guy who went to sex clubs. Now that he’s dead, I have to figure out who he was, who killed him, and why.” The club was just coincidental, and he certainly didn’t want to see Mal in leather pants, backing him up at a club party.

      Malcolm’s gait slowed. “Did you really go to a sex club?”

      Wolfe grinned. “Yeah. A BDSM one.”

      “Huh.” They moved silently for a while as the rain increased in force.

      “You ever been to one?” Wolfe asked, keeping the conversation going.

      “Nope. I make no judgments, but I’m more of a private type of guy when it comes to romance.” Mal’s boots splashed water up from holes in the sidewalk.

      Wolfe stepped over a pile of fast food wrappers. “Ditto.”

      “Was Dana really there?” Mal chuckled.

      “Yeah, and she was barely dressed. I stopped breathing for almost two seconds.” Which was a long time for Wolfe to forget to watch his six.

      “So the two of you—”

      “No.” Wolfe increased his pace. “Just friends.” Why was it when a guy found love, he assumed everyone else would, too? Some guys, like Mal, found that happiness. Guys like Wolfe did not.

      Mal stiffened as the sound of yelling came from one of the homes. A woman screaming at a lazy, no-good bum. “Sometimes romance sneaks up on you.”

      “Nothing sneaks up on me.” Wolfe slowed his pace near the correct house, keeping out of sight of the narrow front window that was caked with mud and bird poop. He moved to the side of the garage, barely squeezing in between the worn siding and a rough chain-link fence, and then cautiously approaching an oval-shaped window. Weeds made his boots and jeans wet. After wiping grime off the glass, a lot of it, he peered inside. Satisfaction ran through him faster than a good latte. “It’s the truck,” he whispered.

      Mal slid his sunglasses up on his thick hair, his intelligent eyes piercing the haze. “You want front or back?”

      “Front.” Wolfe slid out of the way to the front of the garage. “On ten?”

      “Ten.” Mal sucked in air and inched by the fence to the backyard, his chest barely making it through the narrow path.

      The neighborhood was quiet, and if anybody was watching through a window, they probably wouldn’t call the cops. Wolfe started counting in his head, keeping his back to the garage door and pulling his gun free of his jeans. He arrived at eight, ducked his head, and ran full bore at the front door, breaking it wide open with his right shoulder.

      A half-dressed man jumped up from a torn sofa and Wolfe shoved him back down with one hand, his gun sweeping the room.

      From the kitchen, Mal prodded another man in front of him toward the sofa. “Sit.” He then turned back and made quick work of the rest of the small house. “Clear,” he called out.

      Wolfe smiled at the two staring defiantly up at him. The first guy was around thirty with dirty blond hair, bloodshot eyes, and open sores along his neck. The second was maybe around twenty-five years old, and was a tall guy with darker skin and a bruise on his cheekbone who had the shakes. Definitely needed a fix. “I’m going to ask this once. Why did you shoot at me?” Wolfe kept his gun pointed low, not wanting to freak them out too badly. Yet.

      The blond sniffed and then shrugged. “No clue who you are.”

      The other guy shook harder, his dreadlocks moving over his bony shoulders.

      Mal returned to the room. “Drugs and guns in the back room. I put everything in this duffel.” He tossed a dirty duffel on the floor and decided to point his gun at the guys.

      The shaky guy sat up, his gaze planted on the duffel. “You can’t take that.”

      Wolfe sighed. “We can do pretty much anything we want.” These guys were pathetic. “Just tell me who hired you and who you meant to follow or shoot, and we’ll leave you and your drugs alone.” He was taking their guns, though. Anybody who shot at him deserved to lose their weapons. That seemed fair.

      The blond guy looked over at his buddy.

      Mal stepped forward, his expression pissed. “Listen. I have no patience for this shit. Talk now, or I’m going to start hitting people.”

      Okay. Wolfe didn’t usually play good cop, but what the hell. “You guys want out of this? Believe me—talk and we’ll leave.”

      Mal growled. “Let’s just kill them. They don’t know anything, and I’m hungry.”

      “I saw an IHOP a couple of blocks over,” Wolfe offered. “I guess we could just shoot them and go, but that’d probably make a bunch of noise.”

      Mal pursed his lips. “We could go for blunt-force trauma. There’s probably a baseball bat around here somewhere.”

      “Knives would be better,” Wolfe said thoughtfully. “Did you see any when you came in through the kitchen?”

      Mal winced. “That’s so messy, and this is a new sweatshirt. Strangulation?”

      The blond drooled and sucked in air. “Wait a minute. Just wait a minute.”

      “One chance,” Wolfe said, letting the predator in him show.

      “There isn’t much to tell.” The shaky guy exhaled, his thin body shuddering with the movement. “Some guy hired us to follow the pretty blond chick. Gave us her address. We’ve been watching her for about a week. Got the text to take her out after the party in the mansion.”

      Heat rolled through Wolfe. It had been Dana in danger? He’d known it was a possibility, but he’d truly thought the guys were after him. The tweakers pressed back on the sofa as if somehow sensing his mood had changed.

      “You’ve been watching her for a week?” Wolfe asked.

      The shaky guy nodded, the movement a painful-looking jerk. “Yeah, kind of. We’ve staked out her apartment building and followed her a few times, but we’ve lost her a lot.”

      Probably when they stopped to shoot up drugs.

      “But you caught her scent when she went to the party last night?” Malcolm prodded him.

      The blond guy’s face brightened. “Yeah. We followed her cab to the car rental place and then to the mansion, and man, that outfit she was wearing was something else. Thought about—” He caught himself and made a strangled noise, heeding too late his sense of self-preservation.

      “Thought about what?” Wolfe asked, his tone dropping to deadly and his hands starting to twitch with the need to punch through the asshole’s face to the sofa.

      The blond gulped and shook his head, his breath turning shallow. If he passed out, he’d stop talking, darn it.

      “Somebody texted you to kill her?” Wolfe asked, enunciating each word and trying to keep his calm in place.

      The blond winced. “Yeah.”

      “When did you get the text?” Wolfe snapped.

      “Right before she