Free Ransom (Dead Man's Ink Series Book 3) by Callie Hart

a time when I’d do the occasional shift at Dead Man’s Ink, purely for the enjoyment of tattooing and meeting new people, but not anymore. Hector and his boys make a point of walking down Main Street every morning and every night just before dusk. They come to see if I’m around; they come to show their faces, to show they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, and I have a pretty fucking short fuse these days. I want to hurt him. I want to do unspeakable things to him, so I stay away, keep my wits about me, and I bide my time, waiting for the day I go rolling up on his place of business.  
    “Why there?” Cade stabs a finger at the buttons on the Humvee’s radio until static crackles out of the speakers. For a second I’m transported back to the desert, and I’m straining to hear snatches of distorted sound from my hip radio as bullets whip and sing overhead. Cade frowns. “Why the library?”
    I block out the chatter of the radio, staring straight ahead out of the windshield in front of me. “Because she’s back. Because she’s brought a team, and it looks like she’s staying.”
    Cade knows precisely who she is. Denise Lowell, agent for the DEA. Lowell was pursuing Ramirez last year, and arrested both him and myself after we had a bust up at Dead Man’s Ink. She tried to lay the pressure on me back then to talk, to say something that might incriminate Ramirez (and potentially myself) in illegal activity. I got the feeling, as I sat there in that interview room being interrogated by her and her little DEA friends, that she wouldn’t have really cared where I slipped up or what I inadvertently confessed to. She would have taken a misdemeanor crime and somehow twisted and turned it, moulding it like clay, until it was suddenly murder one. She’s the type of woman who can perform magic tricks like that.  
    “Is she here for him?” Cade holds onto the steering wheel tight, glaring at the straight road ahead of him. Any moment now he’ll have to turn right, pull off into the sleepy, lazy town of Freemantle, but until then he looks intent on gunning the engine as hard as he possibly can.  
    “I don’t know. I fucking hope so, man. I really fucking hope so.”

CHAPTER SIX  

    CADE

    Rebel’s looking twitchy as we get out of the Humvee and walk across the street. There are some kids playing on the patch of grass outside the library; they have some kind of electric skateboard and three of them are watching as the tallest, gangliest pre-teen zips up and down the sidewalk, wobbling, looking like he’s about to fall off and crack his head open any second. To be honest, I’m surprised that there even are four kids in Freemantle. I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed any before. I don’t even think there’s a school here.  
    Rebel puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out a roll of twenty-dollar bills. “Hey.” He beckons to the kid on the skateboard. “Wanna make some money?”
    The tall kid cocks his head to one side, coming to a stop. “How much?”
    “Forty bucks. But you gotta split it between you. Ten each.”
    “Pssshh. Ten bucks is nothing. What do you want us to do?” Four sets of owlish eyes blink up at my friend like he’s a god.  
    “Are you any good at math?” he says. All four of them shake their heads. “Okay, well how about I make it simple for you. Who’s got a pen and some paper?”
    The smallest kid takes off his backpack and produces both articles. Rebel scribbles something down on the paper and hands it over to the tiny kid. He can’t be any more than six or seven. The kid squints at the scrawl on the paper, frowning, and then spins it upside down, trying to make sense of it that way. Rebel turns it back.  
    “Take that into the library and find the answer for me. It’ll be in a mathematics book, I promise.”
    “Which one?” Tall kid’s looking suspicious.  
    “I don’t know. But I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’ll find the answer in there. You just have to