Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 69511 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69511 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“You’re late.”
I winced anyway. “I, uh, had some matters to attend to before coming to work. And to be honest, you sprung this on me last night after I already had these plans.”
He took his glasses off his face, the same glasses style that I used when the contacts decided to irritate my eyes, and placed them on the desk.
“Have a seat,” he gestured toward the chair. “Close the door.”
I really wasn’t going to like what he was about to say, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me to close the door.
He expected a fight.
And when he said what he said next, I realized why he expected a fight.
“I’m sorry, but you want me to what?” I asked, hoping I hadn’t heard my father right.
My father was the newest chief of police for Dallas Police Department.
Technically, in this moment, he wasn’t my father, but my boss.
“The neighborhood watches,” he repeated himself. “I want you to work with the leaders of twelve neighborhood watches.”
I blinked.
And blinked some more.
But nope, the expression on my father’s face didn’t change.
“Why me?” I asked carefully, hoping not to piss him off when I was about to ask for a few days off.
“Because you need to lay low, and this is a good way to do it,” he answered. “You pissed on a hornet’s nest, Gable. I really need you to stay alive.”
He was right about that.
Every last member of the Aided Aimers was out for blood, and they had their sights set on me.
They hadn’t known that Tyrone and I were behind the arrests until Madman was brought in and let them know that a cop had been in their ranks.
They might be locked up right now, but they wouldn’t be locked up forever.
Right now, they were up for bond, and the only thing saving us from having them all back out on the street was that their bail was so high.
High enough that it’d take some serious cake for even one of them to be bonded out, let alone all of them.
Our new DA, the one who’d taken over after our old DA had let out a couple of criminals who’d then hit my sister-in-law with a car, was much better and stricter. He wasn’t going to be caught dead letting out known violent criminals.
Though Pepper, my sister-in-law, was doing much better than she had been a few months ago, she still spent every day in pain.
“Okay, kid?” Dad asked, seeing the change overcome my face, I was sure.
We all adopted that look when we thought about how badly hurt Pepper had been.
I still remembered when that car had hit her. When she’d flown through the air. The sound of her body hitting the ground. The sickening thud of the car making contact with her body.
How my nephew, Forest, had cried out, and how my heart had physically ached at the sound.
I felt like I could still hear it in my nightmares.
I scratched my head. “Okay.”
“Good,” he stood up and handed me a stack of papers. “There’s a meeting in an hour in the conference room.”
Before I could ask him about the time off—something I was technically due—he was out the door and into another meeting in the conference room.
I went to follow, but then saw the mayor of Dallas sitting in the chair that Dad had just walked to.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I got up, sat in my dad’s chair, and wrote him a note.
I want a week off.
—Gable
I probably wouldn’t have put up such a fight had I known I would be working directly with a certain female I couldn’t get out of my head.
A female I hadn’t realized was home.
I narrowed my eyes at her as I walked into the room.
She glanced at me, then quickly glanced away, a pinched look crossing her face.
“Ladies,” I said to the room full of women. “How can I help?”
The meeting took three hours.
Dealing with twelve—though technically only eleven truly participated—women who all had differing opinions was tough at any time.
But when it came to their homes and their families, they all wanted to be heard.
I wondered how Athena had gotten herself roped into this.
Her neighborhood—at least the one she was living at last I knew—wasn’t in an area that was on the neighborhood watch list Dad and a few others had created in order to help higher crime areas.
The one she was representing was one that I’d never known she had any connection to.
“All right,” I said as I gathered up the papers with notes I’d taken. “Our first order of business is to plan those National Night Out parties. Any and all police representation you want at these parties is granted by DPD.”
They all stood, some filtering out of the room, while others hung back and chatted.
Meanwhile, the one who was doing her best to escape without talking to me was one of the first out of the room.