Free A Bad Day for Scandal by Sophie Littlefield

episodes from the last few years would be dug up and reviewed by Sheriff Dimmit Stanislas as he sat on his wide and lazy ass up in the county seat, and Stanislas had shown how eager he was to find scapegoats for any blight on the department. He’d be pleased as punch to go after Stella—especially if a conviction could boost his dismal reputation.
    And even if Goat wanted to help her then—which was very doubtful, since he’d probably be fit to be tied when he realized the extent of Stella’s lawbreaking—he’d be forced to join the efforts against her if he wanted to hold on to his job. Stella figured it was only the crazy red-hot pheromone-drenched electricity between them that had allowed him to overlook her escapades this long. But all the sexual chemistry in the world couldn’t help her if he ever found out just how far she’d gone to deliver her brand of renegade justice, a brand that flew in the face of everything Goat stood for.
    At least the envelope of pictures and the flash drive seemed to be blessedly missing, along with Priss and Liman.
    But Stella had a sinking feeling that she wouldn’t be able to track down the former without getting tangled up further with the latter.

Chapter Nine
    “That’s quite a striking outfit you got on,” Stella observed that night as she and Chrissy hiked through a frost-dead field toward the Porter place, eyeing her assistant’s stretch fleece yoga pants tucked into a pair of pink fake-suede Ugg knockoffs, and the camo-print sherpa-lined flak jacket she’d borrowed from one of her brothers, the hood cinched tight around her pretty face. “You could take that anywhere from a dinner cruise in the Arctic sea, to a hoedown in a hunting camp.”
    “Well, you might as well get your mileage out of me now, seeing as I got to mind the shop tomorrow,” Chrissy said, ignoring Stella’s teasing.
    Since the farm was a suspected crime scene and all, they were taking the precaution of approaching it overland in the dark. Stella’s Jeep was parked off-road on Monroe land, hidden by a grove of scrubby staghorn sumacs.
    “I don’t know about these here flashlights you got,” Chrissy added dubiously. The Blue Dot police models had been a splurge that, on reflection, didn’t merit the price; the white light could blind a person but didn’t do the best job of illuminating the path in front of them.
    Stella sighed. “Yeah, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.”
    She gave her backpack a reassuring heft. It was a BlackHawk R.A.P.T.O.R., designed for special ops use, which she bought herself for Christmas after an earlier model was lost in the summer’s deadly outing to the lake. She might never use all the features—she doubted that the built-in jump harness would come in handy any time soon, for instance—but she loved how slick and lightweight and intimidating looking it was.
    Inside the pack was her Tupperware spaghetti box full of lock tools. Some were professional models Chrissy had helped her find in dark and illicit corners of the Internet, but her favorites were the homemade jobs she’d crafted out of beer cans. That, and a vibrating Oral-B flossing wand that had its uses in certain situations.
    The Porter house was dark. The winds from earlier in the day had died down and now another storm threatened, illuminated by a silver moon that drifted in and out of the clouds. Their footsteps on the porch sounded much too loud, and an answering skittering sound from the bushes gave Stella a momentary start, but the inky form that went flying across the scrubby yard was nothing but a large rat or a small raccoon.
    Stella unzipped her pack and got out two pairs of latex gloves that she’d rubber-banded together. She handed one pair to Chrissy and slipped on the other.
    “Going uptown, I see,” Chrissy said, tugging the gloves over her hands. For everyday breaking and entering, Stella economized by using Ziploc sandwich bags, which were just fine when a person didn’t