Free Last Call by Sarah Ballance

coming
back?"
    "I started digging," he said. "And I must have
dug too far. I got a message indicating if I didn't back off, you'd
be next."
    "And coming back here is your version of
backing off?"
    "I don't back off."
    "No, you just turn tail and run."
    The look he gave her then made her desperately
want to recoil — ideally, into the back seat. But outwardly she
didn't flinch.
    He turned away first, his grip on the steering
wheel lethal.
    "Since we're putting it all out
there," he said through his teeth, "why don't you tell me how
you're involved with this case, Detective ."
    She glanced from his hands to his face, but he
wasn't looking at her. "I'm not," she said firmly.
    He shot a dark glimpse her way. "Fair
assumption, considering your untimely demise. Technicalities aside
. . ."
    Rhys wanted to keep her cards
close, but somehow they'd been set up. She didn't yet know how her
being shot tied into Nick's arrival in town, but the timing was
suspect, at best. Someone forced her hand, and with any luck, together she
and Nick could figure out who and why.
    She didn't have to like it.
    "Years ago," she said, "a drug deal went bad
in my neighborhood. A few… kids were killed. After I was sidelined
the last time, I had a lot of time to catch up on the gossip, and
an old name resurfaced. I had enough connections here and there to
put some of the pieces together, but I needed to stay on the wire
so I went back in."
    "Who the hell cleared that?"
    "No one. This is personal."
    Nick glowered with such ferocity she began to
think she really had lost her mind. Dangerous work, yes. But she
had very little to lose.
    "You went back into that neighborhood without
backup? What about your cover?"
    "Like I said, it wasn't blown. You and I were
reportedly arrested on drug charges. I got out. You didn't. There
were no headlines. You know how it is — those small arrests don't
even make the news these days, and I was admitted to the hospital
under my street name to protect the investigation. It's all
covered."
    A spot at Nick's temple pulsed. "You are not
this naïve," he said fiercely. "Or this stupid."
    "I'm not involved with the big players. I'm
mainly just keeping up with Judy, very much on the sidelines." Judy
Ross had become one of Rhys's closest friends over the course of
the investigation. Rhys hated lying to her about who she was. She
despised that she used her, in spite of a genuine
friendship.
    "You're not involved at all now. You know
this, right?"
    She glared. Of course she couldn't go back.
Her cover had been blown sky high and he was a jerk for stating the
obvious. "You can forget the machismo. In case you've
forgotten—"
    Welcome to
Woodson .
    The sign flashed by at sixty miles an hour,
but the impact was head-on.
    "Elliot Woodson." The words came in a whisper,
if they made noise at all. Elliot was the frontrunner in a special
election for a new assistant district attorney — the previous one
had been murdered after a high profile drug dealer went down hard.
Apparently, the prosecution couldn't be bought.
    Rumor had it Elliot Woodson couldn't be,
either.
    "What?"
    "He was the man… killed in front of me. The
night I was shot."
    "Elliot Woodson? The Elliot Woodson? Are
you sure?"
    "I saw him. I know ." Rhys fumbled for the
computer. "Tell me your phone has a mobile hotspot."
    "You can't read while you're riding. You'll
get—"
    "I know I get car sick. I don't care."
She glared at him until he gave up his password, then entered it
and impatiently tapped her fingers on either side of the touch pad
while the computer found the network.
    Nick frowned. "You won't find the real story
in the news."
    Again with the obvious. Quickly, she found a
preliminary blurb on his death. "Heart attack."
    "Wouldn't expect that out of him. Young, and
he was always in those charity marathons. You're sure you saw
him?"
    "It gets worse. It was a hit."
    "How do you know that?"
    "Right after I was shot, one of them said
something about not being paid to