Jacked (9 page)

The hot sheet was long and I was still slightly distracted by an alluring blonde, so I went over the list twice. Most of the vehicles reported were typical; they were older makes and models, easy to steal with a brick and a screwdriver. But the ones I’d highlighted were anything but. Son of a… While we were screwing around and getting innocent people killed, four new cars vanished off of a dealership’s lot.

“Trent, it’s time,” Cap said from the doorway, jerking his head. “Suits from the network are here.”

Fuck.
I dropped my pen on the table and followed him out into the hallway. With all that had gone on in the last twenty-four hours I had refrained from thinking about this meeting. This was the television network’s answer to me refusing their repeated requests to take another private meeting at their office in Manhattan. This time the mountain came to me at my convenient hour.

A new throb immediately started in my skull. No way was I going into Cap’s office unprepared. “And?”

“They want to talk to you.”

“I gathered that. Christ, Cap.”

“I know.”

“Do you? I just had three girls camped out on my goddamned lawn take cell pictures of me when I left my house. I mean, how the hell do they find out where I live? Fans have even started calling up my mom. My
mother
, Cap. She doesn’t need this shit and I sure as hell don’t either. She’s got her hands full taking care of my pop; she doesn’t need to add nonsense on top of it.” I took a deep breath. “I didn’t sign on for all of this.”

Cap sighed hard. “Yeah, well, unfortunately you did. We all did.”

I glared at the ominous office door down the hall. “If I would have known it would turn out like this I would have said no.”

“Just hear them out. A few more months and our contract will be up and we can all get out of this clusterfuck.”

I wanted to punch the wall. “We fucked up—
majorly
—last night. This lack of focus is stacking the shit pile higher. I need to know that every one of them has their head in the game and has my back and I gotta tell ya, Cap, I’m not feeling it.”

My captain’s eyes slid back and forth down the hallway, obviously worried that we might be overheard. I knew we had to be careful; so much was on the line.

When he glared at me in silence, I felt like he needed a wake-up call. Insubordination be damned. “Three bodies on the highway, Cap. Three. And one hanging on by a thread. Bad intel on the Taurus SHO, pulling over that doc last night, then that multi-car wreck. Jesus… We’re lucky no one else died.”

“Hey, you know damn well that every man on this team takes their job very seriously. You making this personal?” Cap questioned.

He’s lucky I didn’t turn around and take a walk after that remark. “Yeah, I am. I got blood on my hands and I’m not liking that one bit. We should have stopped that Nissan before it got out on the Schuylkill. But instead of figuring out where we all went wrong tonight, our
team
is going to be distracted by fucking fan mail. We need to sort this shit before someone else gets hurt, or worse—one of
us
gets killed.”

Cap growled at me but I didn’t give a shit. It was the truth and he knew it.

“Listen to me, son. I get your anger. I do. But like I told you before, sometimes it’s out of our power to prevent bad things from happening. We can only do our best, that’s it. I’ll put foot to ass for the fuck ups. Mark my words.”

I tried to take another calming breath. “The call on the doc’s car was a complete diversion. I just reviewed the reports.
Four
high-end vehicles were boosted at the same time we were chasing bogies. That’s no coincidence.”

The entire thing made my skin itch, and that was not a good sign. I had a gut feeling why it played out like it did, and that made me feel even more uneasy. More often than not my gut instincts turned out to be accurate and if they were on the mark now, the criminals just played us at our own game. “We were set up like chumps and we fell for it.”

Cap heaved a heavy sigh and nodded. “That’s not lost on me either, Adam. I got a report back on the driver on the stolen Nissan. They ID’d him as one Harrell Manley.”

My brain seized. “
Manley?
”

I instantly recognized the name since I’d busted him a few years ago. He was young but a seasoned car thief, repeat offender, gang member, and I knew for a fact that he had connections with chop shops, using their illegal activities to support their other illegal habits. I also knew who he’d been working for these days.

“Yep. Had his younger brother Dwight in the car with him, too. Both DOA at the scene.”

I rubbed my hand down my face as the news sunk in. I’d also busted Dwight back when he was only thirteen. He was a good kid at heart but fell victim to his shitty environment. Mom was on welfare with a heroin habit; dad was unknown and definitely not in the picture. He followed his brother right into the gang life.

I tried to scare him straight when I had him, even put Dwight in contact with free counseling services that worked with at-risk kids. His brother was too far embedded in his ways to turn away and make something out of himself, but I really tried to make a difference with the younger Manley kid. Tried, but obviously failed. Now he was dead and gone and there would be no future for him. No redemption. Just another kid I couldn’t save. Before I could stop it, my disappointment turned into physical burn. What a waste of a life.

“That confirms it was a diversion. Both calls were.”

Cap sort of agreed, though not as confident as I was. The Manley brothers were in it for the money and had been stripping and selling cars parts for years, but lately word on the street said they were boosting cars for one specific client. “Both were armed but there were no drugs on the bodies or in the vehicle.”

We’d called off the chase when things got too dangerous. “The Nissan is the only piece that doesn’t quite fit. Maybe he was off the clock and working his own deal.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But he’s too dead to ask now.”

That he was.

“I just briefed Commissioner Quinlan and he agrees that we want you to lead the investigation since you’re already working the Mancuso case. See what you can dig up. Hopefully you can tie something back to them.”

A guy in a dark suit popped his head out of Cap’s office at the end of the hall and waved, demanding our attention.

Cap’s exasperated sigh reflected my own. “We’ll discuss this later. Let’s go get this shit over with.”

I reluctantly followed him into his office, noting the small space was already occupied by three bodies, one of who instantly set me on guard. It was an automatic reaction to being sized up as if I were her next meal.

Long chestnut hair, expensive stilettos, a killer body clad in a dress meant for anything other than talking business—her motives for making this trip couldn’t have been any more obvious. Fuck, I hated surprises. Last time I saw her, she was trailing behind her father’s shadow, pouting and bored.

Apparently she was taking her father’s recent death in good stride.

“There’s our star! Mr. Trent! So good to see you,” the one suit gushed.

Harry, Herby something
.

He was the one who originally lured us into this mess, promising all sorts of things along the way. I sure as hell didn’t want to shake the asshole’s hand but to avoid so would be rude. Instead, I gave the outstretched hand a squeeze until the condescending smile turned into a slight register of pain.

“Yes, of course,” his voice rose in pitch. I enjoyed watching him shake out his fingers at his side. “You remember Melissa Werner,” he said. “Please, sit.” He nudged the other suit I didn’t recognize to vacate the chair.

That would put me right next to a pair of long legs attached to nothing but high maintenance trouble.

I avoided looking at her.

“No, thanks. Say what you came to say and then I need to get back to work.” I crossed my arms over my chest. There was no way I’d let them talk me into something again this time. Didn’t matter how much money they wanted to throw at me. They had turned my life into a small circus and our unit into a joke amongst the rest of the force. That was enough damage as far as I was concerned.

Asshole was smirking like a shady used-car salesman, thinking he already had a chump on the hook. “We’d like to discuss opportunity and your future.”

And there it was. This was the same bullshit they spieled before, only this time I wasn’t buying it. “That’s nice. Not interested.”

That answer got the queen up out of her chair.

She stepped over the other suit as if he were nothing more than a pawn. “It’s good to see you again, Adam.”

Normally I would view a gorgeous, self-assured woman as a challenge—see if I could get her to give up all the power and heed to my commands, but this one was nothing more than a spoiled socialite looking for a play toy. Melissa Werner was the kind of pleasure I did not want to mix with business.

I gave her a nod. “Ms. Werner.”

“So formal,” she chided. “I’m here to make you an offer, Officer Trent. I hope you hear me out before making any hasty decisions.”

An offer?
Before I could give her my firm “no” she handed a bunch of spreadsheets to me. They might as well have been written in Greek. “What’s all this?”

“Those are our ratings for the last nine weeks. As you know, the pilot for the show was highly successful. We had guaranteed a six-month season, renegotiating that for a year. Landing the new air time has had very surprising results. We need to reevaluate how we spend it.”

I tried to hand the paperwork back to her. “Honestly, Ms. Werner—”

“Melissa,” she corrected.

Yeah, whatever.
“Honestly I can give a rat’s ass how you decide to spend your time. My job is to catch car thieves and criminals. If you want to film me while I do that, then you get what I signed on for.”

She slipped the papers out of my hand. “Do you see this number?”

I had to squint. Fucking printed numbers were small. Thirty-two years old and I probably needed glasses.

She pointed to another set of numbers. “The first number represents our ratings prior to October eleventh. This number, the
bigger
number, is our ratings after we aired the episode where you engaged in the hand-to-hand combat with Mr. Ortiz.”

Mr. Ortiz
. Yeah, I remembered that night vividly, ending with a trip to the hospital to patch up a two-inch slice in my gut. Asshole caught me with a knife right under my Kevlar when I tagged the back of his jacket.

I was pumped on adrenaline and he was wasted on crack. Ortiz had ditched the Pontiac he boosted on Basin Street but I had him on the ground before he got to the end of the block. Cap made me strip off my vest and bloodied T-shirt while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. Ritchie never took the camera off me. I was surprised that he was able to catch up to me. Kid was fucking fast with that camera.

It was also after that particular episode aired—where they showed me reuniting the baby girl that had been in the back seat of the stolen car with her hysterical mother—when all the ridiculous
fandamonium
started. I didn’t know what the big deal was. I was just doing my job, for Christ’s sake.

“So?” I still didn’t know what she was getting at.

“We rebroadcasted the episode after we garnered the new nine p.m. time slot. In the last few weeks our viewership has jumped
significantly.
The excerpt of you jumping over the hood of the car has been viewed over four million times. You were a global trending topic, Adam. Needless to say, I’m very pleased. Not only have we locked in with a major network, as of last week we currently rank tenth on the overall ratings with an increase of over seven million new viewers.”

She beamed at me, and for a moment I was captivated by her excited enthusiasm. Add that to the fact she was a young, gorgeous woman who smelled fantastic, it was almost a lethal combination.

It would be very easy to hike up her short skirt and fuck her over the desk. She’d probably get off on it.

“Seven,” she mouthed.

My visions evaporated. “Seven million people watched the show?”

She took the papers from my hand again. “No. Twelve million eight hundred and seventy-five thousand did. The seven million is
new
viewers.” She gave me a patronizing smile. “I don’t expect you to understand the complexities of ranks and ratings, so don’t worry that handsome face of yours trying to comprehend it all.”

And right then her presence enraged me. Her tone was brimming with condescension, masked by the seductive way she accentuated certain words. Did she really think I was that oblivious and simpleminded?

“Fox has now given us a new mandate to maintain viewership, so what we need to discuss is how we leverage our assets to make that happen.”

I felt her heated gaze singe my cock; her double meaning so blatant even the two other suits in the room squirmed.

“I’ve decided that we’re going to rebrand the show,” Melissa continued, lifting her attention back to my face. “Our new marketing goals are to feature you as the primary focus of each episode. It would mean an increase of your on-air time, which we need to amend in your contract.”

She snapped her fingers, barely casting a glance back at her underlings. “Harry…”

He fumbled, passing papers in a hurry.

“You’ll see we’ve amended paragraphs seven and nine.” She flipped a page. “You’ll also be requested to do a few new photoshoots as we will be doing extensive promotion, both in print ads and on social media. Fox will also run promotions on their website. That’s all noted here.”

The quiet suit cleared his throat. “PR…”

“Oh yes,” Melissa continued. “We’ll provide you with a public relations manager to assist you with your own social media as well as give you media training for when you conduct interviews.” She flicked her fingers at Harry again. “Do you have the preliminary agenda for his personal appearances?”

This shit was hurting my brain. “My what?”

Harry fumbled through his briefcase while she sneered at him with the patience of a demanding child.