Chapter 4 #2
Dixon’s gut knotted. “Text me the info on the other phone, and don’t ever use this number again.”
As soon as he got to the office, he got his burner phone out of the safe and frowned when he read the name. It was the same damn detective who’d brought Yankee Dan in for questioning. He cursed beneath his breath and made one more call, then worked until it was time to go to the grand opening.
By night, ten hired hit men were vying for the fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on the head of a homicide detective named Gunner Kingston.
* * *
The morning after the hit went live, Gunner was merging into the traffic on the Loop, carefully working his way into the fifth lane of a six-lane highway as he headed to work.
His entire focus was on telling Lieutenant Samuels about his lottery win, and he had left home earlier than usual, hoping to talk to him before the workday began.
As always, he had an eye on the traffic around him—from the guy in the Mercedes riding his bumper, to the woman in the Ford Focus in the fourth lane beside him who was putting on her makeup as she drove, to the guy in front of him pulling a metal trailer with landscape equipment who kept hitting his brakes.
While the traffic in lanes one, two, and three kept moving and exiting from the Loop onto feeder roads to get to their destinations, the sixth lane was left for switching highways.
It was nothing short of a miracle that any of these people lived long enough to grow old.
A couple of minutes later, he saw a flash of something purple in his side-view mirror.
It was a rider on a Yamaha motorcycle coming up fast behind him on the outside lane nearest the concrete barrier.
He expected the rider to go flying past, except he didn’t.
Instead, the rider braked slightly and began matching his speed to Gunner’s car.
It was a bright flash of light coming through the driver’s side window of his car that caught Gunner’s eye.
The light was bouncing on his arm and then on his shirt, and he chanced a glance away from the traffic in front of him to see what it was.
The rider on the Yamaha was aiming a handgun straight at his face.
Gunner stomped the brakes instinctively, knowing the biker would sail straight past him as he fired, and it worked. The first shot went over the hood of Gunner’s car and into the back window of the little Ford Focus belonging to the woman putting on makeup.
With only seconds to react, Gunner made a hard swerve to the left and ran the bike straight into the concrete barrier, knocking the biker into the air like he’d been ejected from the cockpit of a fighter jet.
He came down hard on the hood of Gunner’s car as Gunner was already stomping the brakes to keep from running over him.
Gunner spun the car sideways, which slung the shooter off onto the pavement to his right, then jammed his car in Park to block the lane from the traffic behind them.
Cars were already swerving into other lanes to get out of the way.
The woman in the Ford Focus had swerved and spun out, and was now stopped sideways across lanes four and five, screaming bloody murder inside the car without being heard.
Gunner’s mind was spinning in a hundred different directions as he hit the lights and sirens on his car, then he jumped out and began waving off traffic into the three open lanes to the right.
Traffic was slowing down to a crawl as he made an urgent call for backup and an ambulance, then he ran to the biker to see if he was alive. To his surprise, the biker was not only alive, but beginning to regain consciousness.
At the same time, the driver of a concrete truck and the driver of a semi both stopped, purposefully parking in a way that completely blocked off all traffic around the wreck to protect Gunner and the victim and to protect the little blue Ford Focus from being T-boned by oncoming traffic.
Gunner was looking around for the gun when he saw it lying against the barrier, beneath the wrecked Yamaha. He grabbed an evidence bag to recover the gun, then went back to the shooter.
The man had a serious case of road rash along with some obvious areas of missing skin.
His helmet was in two pieces and lying on either side of his head like a hamburger bun, open and waiting for mustard.
Two of the fingers on his shooting hand were broken and dangling like wet noodles, and he was moaning something about his leg and reaching for his head and chest.
“What’s your name?” Gunner asked.
“Kevin Warren. Sorry… Sorry,” he kept saying.
“Why did you pull a gun on me?”
“Needed the money,” he muttered.
Gunner frowned. “What does that even mean? You expected money if you shot someone?”
Warren moaned. “Hurts… Bounty on your head.”
“Bounty? On me? Do you even know who I am?”
“Kingston. Cop. Black Mustang GT.” Then he quoted Gunner’s tag number.
The skin crawled on the back of Gunner’s neck. “Who the hell put out the bounty?”
“Don’t know.… Tying up loose ends… Am I gonna die?”
Rage followed shock. In that moment, Gunner knew.
Damn Burgess Dixon and his loose ends.
Four dead FBI agents.
Freddie Welsh—dead.
Yankee Dan—dead.
Gunner Kingston.
All of them dead…but him.
Gunner rocked back on his heels as the biker took a slow, rattling breath and closed his eyes. He checked for a pulse. The biker was still alive, and now he could hear sirens.
Gunner stood, looked at the wrecked Yamaha the biker had been riding and then at his own car, not as pretty as it had been ten minutes ago but still in one piece. And so was he.
But not for long if this was only the beginning. He had to take some drastic action fast, but right now, it was all about getting the wreck off the highway and traffic moving back at normal speed.
He stood aside as the ambulance rolled in, followed by two units from the Highway Patrol who began redirecting traffic.
He gave the gun he’d recovered to two cops in a patrol car while the EMTs made short work of stabilizing Kevin enough to transport, then loaded him up and headed to a hospital with the police car behind them.
Warren was already under arrest for attempted murder, and Gunner was anxious to get back in his car and off this freeway.
Where there was one fool, there could be a hundred others.
As soon as the tow truck loaded up what was left of the Yamaha and the officers cleared the highway, Gunner turned his battered car around and headed to work.
By the time he got to Homicide, he was in a most shitty frame of mind. He entered the department disheveled and bloody, moving like a soldier going to war.
Cliff stood abruptly. “Gunner, what the hell happened?”
“Hell just froze over,” he muttered and kept walking—straight into Lieutenant Samuels’s office without knocking, closing the door behind him.
Samuels was on the phone when Gunner entered, but when he saw his detective, he ended his call and stood.
“What happened?”
“There’s a fucking fifty-thousand-dollar-bounty on my head.
I know that because a biker on a purple Yamaha tried to take me out on the Loop this morning.
His first shot missed me and hit the car in the lane beside me.
I ran his ass into the concrete wall. The impact threw his body a good ten feet in the air before it landed on the hood of my car and slid off.
He’s on the way to the hospital. He’s already under arrest for attempted murder… if he lives.”
Samuels paled. “What’s going on that I don’t know about?”
“I believe I asked him the same question. All the biker said was that there was a bounty on my head, and someone was tying up loose ends. Federal agents dead. A federal witness dead. Yankee Dan dead after finding the body, and because I brought Dan in, clearly, I am the last. I don’t know what Dixon thinks I know, but he’s not taking any chances.
And I’m going to say this again. This is happening because some dirty cop in this division is feeding Dixon privileged information. ”
“I want you to go home and stay there until we can get this figured out,” Samuels said.
“Like hell…sir. I’m about to have a Come to Jesus meeting with the bastard at his office, and if I don’t come back, then you’ll know it’s on him.
And there’s one other thing I was going to tell you this morning for legal purposes.
I am the unidentified man who won the Mega Millions lottery.
My lawyer and I have already been to the Dallas Claim Department, signed the paperwork, and set up the payout.
It won’t show up for a few weeks, but I’m telling you now so that no one thinks it’s dirty money when that shows up in my bank account. ”
Samuels’s eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, sir, and I don’t intend spreading the news around. It will eventually leak after the money shows up, but I don’t want to face all that until I have to, so I’d appreciate you keeping that info to yourself.”
Samuels shook his head in disbelief. “You win the lottery, and someone puts a hit out on you. That’s the craziest dichotomy of personal issues I’ve ever heard, but my lips are sealed, and you have my support. I’ll order escorts to get you home and get a patrol at your house.”
“No, sir. Keep everyone else out of this, or they’ll just become another name on Dixon’s hit list. Just know that I’m about to yank a knot in Dixon’s ass and tie up some loose ends of my own.
And for God’s sake, don’t say anything to the detectives out front.
I don’t need someone giving Dixon a heads-up that I’m coming for lunch. ”
Samuels was still arguing, shouting, “Wait, Gunner, wait!” as Gunner left his office.
Cliff knew something serious had happened and grabbed Gunner by the shoulders, stopping his exit. “Bro, what’s going on?”
Gunner paused. “I had a wreck on the Loop. I’m going home to change clothes, drop my car off at a body shop, and rent a car until it’s fixed. Are you still going through security footage from the area of our hanging victim?”
“Uh… Yeah, I am,” Cliff said.
“I have some notes I’ll forward to you regarding the victim’s personal life.
Barry Caldwell has no ex and no children.
He and his twin brother, Perry, are co-owners in his business.
Perry has a significant other named Ron Ames.
Ames has a staggering amount of debt. Check both of them out.
Barry Caldwell had a two-million-dollar life insurance policy with his twin as the beneficiary. ”
“When did you figure all of this out?” Cliff said.
“When I took my laptop to the dealership yesterday to get my tires rotated and the oil changed,” Gunner said.
“Oh, right. Good work,” Cliff said.
Gunner nodded and let the door slam shut as he exited the department.