Dangerous Flirt (4 page)

Beth handed over her mug and blew on her hands, chilled from the crisp late October air, then pulled out the emergency twenty dollar bill she kept
in her gym bag. “Caramel mocha with a double shot of espresso please.”

“One regular it is.” The woman scribbled her order on the mug with a dry-erase marker and handed it to a teenager manning the espresso machine.

Beth moseyed down to the pickup end of the counter, her attention fixated on the newest bunch of bee-themed coffee mugs for sale. Fat bumblebees circled flowers with coffee bean centers
on a bright yellow ceramic cup. Two worker bees clinked coffee mugs on a blue to-go cup. She picked up one with tiny bees spelling out, “Get Buzzed in Dry Creek, Nebraska”, for closer inspection.

“Caramel mocha double espresso ready.” A boy with boredom-glazed eyes handed over her drink.

“Thank you.” The coffee's warmth seeped into her palm. Heaven. The chocolate scent jolted her system into
working order. Everything would be better now.

She blew away the steam and screwed on the lid, then slung her gym bag over her shoulder. As she swerved through the maze of tiny tables crowding the floor between the counter and the door, her cell vibrated against her butt. Shrugging her stuffed gym bag higher up on her shoulder, she grabbed her phone out of her back pocket.

“Hello?”

“Um…Ms.
Martin…”

Beth sighed and pushed open the heavy glass door with her hip. “Martinez.” The cold wind blasted her, sending a chill down her spine.

“Yeah, Ms. Martinez. I'm Deputy Schnell with the Council County Sheriff's Office. Can you meet me at your grandparents' home? Seems it's been broken into.”

Fifteen minutes and twenty miles later,
Beth stalked out of the tiny living room in her dead grandparents' vacant home. Technically it was her house now, but she couldn’t think of it that way.

She traced the curse words spray painted in red on the foyer walls. Most were in English, but centered on the oak front door in large, block capital letters and underlined with a bold swoosh was the word
puta
.

Nice try, but she’d been called
a lot worse. Whoever had done this had crossed a line they shouldn't have.

Looked like the nasty calls and threatening texts had been only the beginning. The assholes had upped the ante. Her tormentor had promised she’d regret her decision not to sell. He’d sorely misjudged her reaction to this because it wasn’t regret making her blood boil.

Something crunched under her favorite cherry-red cowboy
boots as she marched across the hall. She stepped sideways and glanced down at the remains of a broken window pane under her sole before taking stock of the damage in the dining room. Where once photos of her grandfather's retirement party, her parents’ wedding pictures and her own Quinceañera portrait had hung, fist-sized holes dotted the pale-yellow walls like Swiss cheese. Stomach clenching,
her hand reflexively went to her abdomen as if she and not the wall had been punched.

“Uh, Ms. Martin.”

She took a steadying sip of coffee, then said, “Martinez.”

“No ma'am, my name is Schnell.”

She spun around and eyeballed the rail-thin deputy standing in the living room. Is this what law enforcement had come to in rural Western Nebraska? My God, they hadn't just scraped the bottom of the
barrel with this guy. No. They'd broken through it, dug around in the muck underneath, pulled up this fine specimen and slapped a uniform on him.

“My
name
is Martinez,” she rolled the R and emphasized the Z.

His pale-green eyes bulged and his Adam's apple bobbed convulsively. “Apologies, ma'am, but this was just kids who did this. Sheriff Wilcox said he was sure of it as soon as I told him about
the damage.” He nodded as if that settled everything.

He continued to chatter, but she listened with half an ear and walked back into the living room. Broken beer bottles and fast-food wrappers littered the thick carpet. If her beloved abuelita had lived long enough to see her pin-neat living room with its daisy wallpaper turned into a trash dump, she would have rained down misery on the litterbug.

Schnell shifted his slight weight from side to side and clutched his hat. “Drunk people…uh…kids…uh…teenagers,” he mumbled. His gaze turned toward the large yellow stain on the living room carpet that reeked of ammonia. “It's the only, uh, explanation.”

Bullshit.

Beth took another fortifying gulp of coffee. Its heat flowed over her tongue and down her throat, distracting her from her initial
impulse to rip the deputy a new one. Not the best plan of action. She was an estate attorney, for God's sake; you couldn’t get any more staid than that. She needed to calm down and think logically. Unable to hazard a guess about whether the freckle-faced deputy, who looked all of twelve, was dim or corrupt, she counted to twenty.

“And what about the threatening phone calls telling me my life
would go to hell if I didn't sell? Were those from bored kids too, Deputy Schnell?”

His eyes went wide, but he didn't utter a word. Pulling at his loose shirt collar, he gulped hard, as if he'd swallowed one of the slimy frogs from the pond out back.

Heavy footsteps thunked up the front steps, followed by a quick rapping on the open door.

“Heard there was some trouble in the neighborhood and
I figured I'd poke my head in to see if I could help.” Council County Sheriff Roger Wilcox stood in the doorway, his soft belly protruding over the belt of his uniform pants. A smile curled his lips, barely visible under his gray handlebar mustache.

Just perfect.

For the past two months he'd disregarded her complaints about her neighbors feeling forced to sell and the escalating threats against
her. Sure, he'd promised to look into it, but never took any action. Low priority, he’d claimed. So she’d stewed and tried to dig up any information she could find on the mystery buyer. She’d been tempted to tell Hank, see if he would talk to Wilcox sheriff to sheriff, but her grandparents’ house was outside of Hank’s Dry Creek County jurisdiction and the last thing she wanted to do was drag him
into a turf battle with a neighboring sheriff.

Sweeping her hands across the air to encompass the vandalism, she nodded at the sheriff. “Yep. Seems like someone is trying to send me a message.”

He sauntered into the living room and all but ignored his inept deputy fidgeting in the middle of the room. Hands clasped behind his back, the sheriff strolled around the perimeter, stopping here and
there to kick at a bottle or brush his fingertips across the red paint.

“Message, eh?” Wilcox faced her. Rubbing his chin, he eyed her for a moment. “I don't know about that. Looks like the handiwork of teenagers to me.”

“That's what I told her, sir,” the deputy piped in, sending an I-told-you-so look Beth's way.

Wilcox rocked back and forth on his feet. “Good, Schnell.” He flashed her an ingratiating
smile. “A bright light within our ranks, this one is, which is why I'm assigning him as the lead investigator on your case. If anyone can find the hooligans who did this, it'll be Schnell.”

The tips of the deputy's ears reddened and he straightened to his full height of about five feet, seven inches. “Thank you, sir. I'll make you proud.”

“And do you have much investigative experience, Deputy
Schnell?”

“Everyone has to start somewhere.” He scowled.

“And are you going to start with the person snatching up everybody's land? The bully who pushed, prodded and harassed the families living between the county line and the Lakota Reservation?”

“Now, now, young lady, you've expressed your concerns to me before.” Wilcox's eyes hardened but the plastic smile remained. “There is nothing to
that but rumors and innuendo. The calls and texts you’ve reported don’t say anything about an orchestrated plot to buy up land. As a law enforcement officer, I'm obligated to stick to the facts.”

Crossing her arms, she faced off against the sheriff. “And what facts are those?”

He nudged a burger wrapper with the tip of his brown shoe, shined to a high polish. “Why, that the person who did this
likes greasy food and cheap beer. That doesn't sound like some high-flying, big-money developer, does it?”

The heat in Beth's flush of indignation would have made dry brush burst into flame, but she kept her mouth shut. She'd played this game with Wilcox several times already. It always turned out the same. He patronized her. She antagonized him. They both stalked off unsatisfied and steaming.

If the stakes had been any lower, Beth would have walked away from the frustration of dealing with an asshole like Wilcox. But the truth was she couldn't. Someone was strong-arming people to sell. Poor Sarah Jane Hunihan finally sold after panic attacks sent her to the emergency room over in Dry Creek. As the last holdout, Beth would be damned if she'd give up the house her grandfather had built
with his bare hands for a fistful of cash.

Despite the wreckage around her, she could still see the home where she'd come to live as a newly orphaned eight-year-old girl. Now her grandparents had passed on, leaving her this house. It was the last link to her family, her history, her heritage.

There were no diamonds hanging from her family tree. No Bible handed down from generation to generation.
When her grandparents had come here, they'd left Mexico with only what they’d carried in a little suitcase as they followed the crops north. They'd eked out an existence, scrimped and saved to make a better life for their son, José, and later for her. Now there would be no future Martinez generations. How could she sell when this house was all she had left for family?

“I take your silence to
mean that you are finally seeing the light.” Wilcox swiped away an invisible piece of lint from his brown shirt.

“I wouldn't say that, sheriff.” Beth kept her voice low and steady. “So what do you recommend I do to discourage these vandals?” She made air quotes with her fingers.

The smile on Wilcox’s face transformed to a mere baring of his wide-spread teeth, and he slapped his brown hat onto
his bald head. “My recommendation, Señorita Martinez?” He drew out her last name as he sneered. “Why, I'd recommend selling.”

Angry heat spiraled through her body. “I'm sure you would, sheriff, but I'll be damned before I take your advice. Now, since there's nothing you two are really going to do to find who's behind this, I guess I'll have to do it on my own.”

“So you're going to do his job?”
Wilcox shook his head and twisted his lips into a cruel snarl. “See, Schnell, this is the problem with our immigration laws. These people come in and start taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.” He paused, rubbed a fleshy hand across his large belly before shrugging his shoulders. “But on the other hand, at least this one isn't lazy.”

“You piece of shit.” The words shot out of her mouth.

Any semblance of civility evaporated from Wilcox's face. His eyes narrowed and he stomped over until his breath fogged up her glasses. “Watch your mouth. You’re not under the Dry Creek County sheriff’s protection out here.”

Beth whipped off her narrow glasses and cleaned them on her black sweater. “I can take care of myself.”

He settled his hat back on his head. “You'd better hope so, señorita.
You'd better hope so.”

“Is that a warning?”

The big man strolled toward the front door, his deputy trailing behind like a puppy. “Nope. I already told you, I deal in facts.”

The men hustled out of the house without looking back. Schnell slid easily into his cruiser. Wilcox's car dipped low when he settled his bulk behind the wheel. A second later, dust filled the air as their vehicles spit
out gravel and dirt on their way down the driveway and onto Highway 28.

Out of habit, Beth locked the front door. No amount of begging and pleading had convinced the alarm company to come any earlier than next Friday to install a security system. The broken windowpanes and mess inside proved the flimsy door-handle lock wouldn't keep anyone out, but she had to do something to combat her lack of
control over her life, her own body and basically everything else in the world.

Head down, she trudged over to her green Mini Cooper, racking her brain for a reason why this was happening.

Why would someone be so desperate for her to sell? The house wasn't big. The land surrounding it wasn't particularly scenic or valuable and it was practically in the middle of nowhere, even by Nebraska standards.
The Lakota Reservation was just up the road, but the only thing on this end was prairie. Tribal leaders announced last week that they were going to build the new casino on the eastern end of the reservation.

Unable to come up with a reasonable explanation, Beth slid behind the wheel. The car's engine purred to life and she steered it toward Dry Creek. She hadn't had any luck in her in-person
search at the county clerk’s office beyond finding a corporation name, but maybe she could find a clue to the buyer's identity in the online records.

Too late, she spotted the crater-sized pothole.

A tire dipped into the chasm. The car veered to the right.

Desperate to stay on the highway, she jerked the steering wheel left, overcorrecting and nearly shooting off the other side. As she pulled
back into the correct lane, coffee sloshed out of the small opening on the top of her travel mug, soaking her hand and thigh.