Busting Out (Busted Series Book 2)

  Busting Out

  Vanessa M. Knight

  Busting Out

  Copyright © 2018 by Vanessa M Knight

  Published by Inked Publishing

  Cover Design by Najla Qamber Designs

  Edited by Nancy Canu

  Busting Out… is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations for use in critical articles or reviews.

  ISBN: 978-0-9971838-5-6

  To Julie, my BFF partner in crime, for being there for me in every crazy thing I've done over the years. You are more than friend. You’re family.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Extras

  About the Author

  Other Books by Vanessa

  One

  “West on Fullerton at Austin.” The instructions crackled over the police radio as Chase Montgomery ran around the corner onto Fullerton. Between the restaurants and the lavanderia, civilians lined the noontime sidewalk, creating an impenetrable wall.

  “There they are,” his partner Perry Flores huffed beside him.

  Two teens crossed the road. Why? To get on Chase’s bad side. City buses with advertising for everything from Weight Watchers to Oreos squeaked and sputtered as cars whooshed by.

  Chase and Perry followed the teens through an extreme version of Frogger. Horns honked, tires screeched, and a car swerved—thankfully dodging right before Chase became a Chevy’s hood ornament. More tires screeched. But somehow, they made it across.

  Chase craned his neck to get a better look. The drug-dealing little shits were getting away with, if his intel was correct, a backpack full of heroin. Any heroin was bad, and letting it loose on the Chicago streets was worse.

  The epidemic was real, and Chase and his partner were in the middle of it. Deep in the middle of it, chasing low-level runners on the west side of the city.

  “Excuse me.” He dodged a woman and her stroller, holding her shoulders so she wouldn’t fall over. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  This whole running thing was getting old. It would be so much easier to shoot the drug mules in the leg. Slow them down. But with the people on the streets, it was too risky. Anyway, he couldn’t pull his weapon on two unarmed kids. He wouldn’t.

  So instead, his shoes slapped against the pavement. His muscles ached. The air sliced down his dry throat. Why the hell did he need the gym membership with all this cardio? Or a personal trainer? His PT needed to amp up the miles next visit, or Chase needed to find slower perps.

  “They’re splitting up.” Perry pointed at the shorter of the perps turning east on Wrightwood.

  “Follow him. I got this one.”

  Perry went after the little twerp with the mustache straight out of a seventies porn flick, and Chase turned right on Wrightwood, following the second thug, otherwise known as John Lacik. Chase’s shoes pounded against the cracked one-way street. The civilians thinned as he moved from the busy intersection to the residential blocks.

  Lacik stopped and turned around. Chase reached for his gun. Don’t do it, kid. His hand hovered at his holster. “Stop. Police. We need to talk.”

  The kid’s blue eyes widened as Chase stalked closer. The kid looked terrified. Blond spiky hair. Baby face. How the hell had this kid ended up shilling for the Vipers?

  “I’m not going to jail.”

  “No one said anything about jail.” But really, if the kid had as much heroin as Chase’s snitch thought, there was no way there wouldn’t be jail time. He inched closer. “Let’s sit down and talk about this.” Emphasis on the sit.

  “Screw you.” Lacik turned his back on Chase. And ran. Naturally.

  Chase had really hoped the whole sit thing would pan out. But that wasn’t how this worked. It never worked that way. He followed, running through the gangway between the two houses where the kid just disappeared.

  Something banged. Dammit. He needed to move faster or he was going to lose this kid. Bursting through the wooden gate at the front of the tiny backyard, he sprinted toward the back of the patch of grass and the open metal gate for the alley.

  Chase spun around, listening, searching. Garbage and exhaust lingered in the air. Small garages intersected with smaller fences lined the length of the unpaved alley. Overflowing metal and plastic trash bins clustered behind each postage-stamp yard. Spurts of grass peeked through small cracks, the gray corridor’s only splash of life.

  And the kids blond head bounced along, halfway down the block.

  Fuck. Chase took off again. When he signed up to be a cop, he never thought “pursuit of justice” meant literally running up and down the Chicago streets.

  Yet here he was, crossing Schubert Avenue and making chase down another back alley. Halfway down, a truck was wedged between two facing garages, maybe a foot of space on each side. Moving men sat on lawn chairs in one garage, eating their lunch. Boxes and appliances were piled next to the metal ramp sticking out of the truck bed.

  The kid dodged a refrigerator and angled his body to slide past the truck. But it slowed him down.

  Chase just had to use that to his advantage. As he slid his way past the truck, his shoulder holster snagged on a piece of metal.

  Dammit. He’s getting away.

  Maggie Lane drove her car past the alley entrance and parked on the side of the street. She wanted to drive down the alley, but there was a damn moving truck in the way. “How many garbage bags did you bring?”

  “Three.” Jessica Xu unhooked her seatbelt and leaned into the back seat. “Is that enough?” This was Jessi’s first ride-along. She’d been working the front desk at Busted Detective Agency for the past year, hinting at her desire to be a PI the whole time. She’d proved her reliability—and her tenacity—dropping hint after hint about hitting the streets and leaving the horrible phone system that liked to hang up on customers behind. Maggie really needed to send that thing to the antique graveyard.

  “Should be.” Maggie poked her head out the window. It was a beautiful day. Sunny. Warm. Not exactly what you expected in April, but she’d take it. Sifting through someone’s trash after an April shower wasn’t exactly high on her “fun things” list. Although, what part of sifting through trash was high on anyone’s list?

  Three men carried boxes into the truck blocking the alley. Of course there’d be a truck in back of the house across the way on the day that Maggie and Jessi had to get in and out undetected. That had been the whole point of coming here at eleven AM on a Saturday, when Jillian Hendricks would be out scouring the antique universe for Hummel and Precious Moment figurines. Apparently, there was a whole club that did this every month. Go figure.

  “So what are we going to do?” Jessi asked. “Can we make the exchange with the movers around?”
>
  Could they? Yes. Should they? Probably not.

  “Quieres almorzar?” a deep voice asked from near the truck. Lunch. Was he asking about lunch? Please let him be asking about lunch.

  Another deep voice said, “Por que no? Esto tomará un rato.” She understood the first part—why not? The rest, she had no clue.

  Maggie really needed them to stop for lunch. If she and Jessi didn’t exchange the bags now, they’d have to wait until sometime next week—or worse, next month, when Jillian went off to find porcelain children again. A whole month. Maggie had already put off this client one week due to Jillian’s hectic hospital schedule, and finding a day when Jillian would have a full can and wasn’t working had turned into a challenge. Even the boyfriend, Maggie’s client, didn’t know Jillian’s schedule—probably why he hired Busted in the first place.

  The moving men removed lunch bags from the front of the truck and disappeared into the garage. Music immediately floated from inside, and Maggie figured this was as good as it was going to get.

  “Grab the bags and come on.” She waited for a car to pass, and then opened her car door and slipped out, slamming it shut. Noise didn’t matter, not on the busy Chicago streets. The mission was speed.

  Maggie walked along the right side of the alley, sticking close to the fences and garages. Jillian Hendricks lived on this side—across and over from the open garage with the mariachi music spilling out. The idea was to not let the moving men see them. Not to let anyone see them, actually.

  Pausing at the corner of the garage next to Jillian’s, Maggie dragged Jessi closer. “Okay,” Maggie said under her breath, “give me those.” She took the stuffed garbage bags from Jessi and nodded at their target—Jillian Hendricks’ trash cans. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You open the garbage can and pick out the first three bags. I’ll dump these in to replace them.”

  “Why? It’s not like she’ll notice.”

  “The garbage men don’t come for a few hours or so. What if she brings out another bag? The goal is to catch her before she gets suspicious.” Maggie looked toward the open garage. Music. Male voices. Paper and plastic crinkling. It was time. “Let’s go.”

  Jessi popped out and headed straight for the garbage can. Lifting the plastic lid, she heaved out three full bags, flattening against the wooden fence to give Maggie room to dump the proxy-bags without being seen.

  Success!

  The world shifted. Something or someone shoved Maggie forward, into Jessi. She righted herself with the help of two male hands covered in familiar crude fanged snakehead tattoos above the thumbs. Gang tattoos. The Vipers.

  Once she was firmly on her feet, the blond teen turned and ran down the alley, yelling, “Sorry” over his shoulder.

  “Hey!” Jessi yelled, as he disappeared around the corner, and picked up a dirty red backpack.

  Maggie glared at her, raising her index finger to her lips in the universal shut-the-heck-up sign. They still had to get out of here without anyone seeing them—anyone else seeing them, anyway. She shook her head and leaned over to pick up the scattered garbage bags. The kid had been like a mini-tornado. It was time to get out of this alley.

  Collision. Something or someone slammed into her.

  Again.

  This time, the air ripped from her lungs when instead of soft Jessi, she hit hard wood. Her feet tangled in the damn garbage bags. Her knees buckled. Nothing stopped her downward momentum. The ground flew up to meet her cheek. Yay, physics.

  Someone—not Jessi—rested on top of her, making a very pissed-off Maggie and gravel sandwich. She tried to push up, but the body squashing her was large and male. The hand on her ass? Also not Jessi. Maggie bucked like she was doing the worm, and the five-finger encroacher disappeared.

  “Shit,” a deep voice rumbled above her as the weight vanished.

  Air hit her skin without the human blanket. Breathe. It was so much easier to breathe without the weight. She pushed onto her knees. Gravel dug into her palms. What the hell was wrong with everyone, running around knocking people over?

  She glared at the man trying to dislodge his foot from one of the garbage bags. Serves you right. “What the hell?”

  He only grunted. Why she was surprised by his less-than-stellar manners, she wasn’t sure.

  Maggie stood up on wobbly legs. Her clothes were a mess—jeans covered in a thin layer of dust, black T-shirt now a hazy shade of gray. A few swipes of her hands down her body did nothing; she still looked like Pigpen. “What’s with you?”

  The guy hopped from one foot to the other, and the garbage bag tore as he yanked his shoe through the neck of the bag. Apparently, it was too hard to answer her questions while being attacked by garbage bags.

  “Why are you playing with garbage?” He kicked free and stood to his full height—a few inches taller than her, at least six feet—giving her the perfect view of his face.

  That face.

  She knew that face. That rugged face. His large nose and the scar curving along the left side toward his lip were the only indication that there might be flaws hiding behind those perfectly sculpted cheekbones. And there were flaws—smoldering brown eyes aside.

  They’d fooled her once. Never again.

  “Magpie?”

  “Maggie.” Why was it so hard to remember to call her Maggie? She tried to beat the dust off her jeans. Anything to keep her hands busy, and her eyes from raking over that body of his.

  “I’m sorry. Are you okay? Do you want a ride to the hospital?” He stared down the alley, probably hoping to see the teen he’d been chasing. But that kid was long gone.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine.” She felt her eyes roll—of their own accord. It wasn’t her fault he was asking dumb questions and her body was responding. Too bad her body seemed to respond to everything he did.

  “What are you doing here?” Chase’s eyes roamed over the scattered garbage bags and the backpack in Jessi’s hand.

  “Working.”

  “In garbage?” Judgement was all over his face. Bad enough she got that from her family.

  “Why are you running through the alley like a bat out of hell?” she countered.

  “Working.” The corner of his lip curled as he stepped away from her. That little curl of his mouth was so darn sexy. A tingle shot straight through her mutinous heart.

  “I’m getting the bad guys, Magpie.” He leaned in, putting those lips inches from hers.

  Gorgeous lips that looked delicious. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he smelled. Like man. God, she missed the smell of a man. Spicy. Dark. With a rich woody base. Or maybe that was just him.

  He smirked. “Has it been so long since you’ve taken down the bad guys that you’ve forgotten what it looks like?” Jackass.

  Maggie was still catching bad guys, just in the private sector. Not that any of the cops understood. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  He ran a hand down the back of his neck—had she mentioned what nice hands they were? “I think he got away.” The great Chase Montgomery didn’t get his man. Must be why he looked mad—no, not mad—maybe upset. The crinkle in his brow couldn’t be worry. Chase didn’t get worried. He was way too arrogant for that.

  Unless this bad guy had done something extra bad—and now he’d gotten away. The urge to make him feel better was both foreign…and unwanted.

  He didn’t deserve to feel better after what he’d done to her. So why did she grab the backpack from Jessi and shove it into his chest? “Your bad guy dropped this.”

  “Thanks.” Chase took the backpack, and those hands brushed hers.

  “And, uh, isn’t he a Viper?” Maggie stepped away, wiping her fingers on her filthy jeans.

  “Yeah.” He stared at her for a long second. “How do you know that?”

  “The tattoo on his hand. Don’t they have a safe house a few blocks over, on Meade? Ten bucks says he’s heading over there.”

  “Ten buck
s, huh?”

  She tried to help and all he heard was ten bucks. Jackass. She was so done playing his little game, but if she didn’t play nice it might get back to her father. So she forced a smile on her face and yanked one of the intact garbage bags off the ground. “Shouldn’t you go after him?”

  He met her smile with one of his own and slung the backpack over one shoulder. The glare off his perfect white teeth gave off enough wattage to power a small country. “Are you sure you don’t need a ride to the hospital? I’m told I give great mouth to mouth.”

  Maggie didn’t bother responding. Jerk. She took the garbage bags and walked toward her car.

  “Should you be driving?” Those little lines of worry were back around his eyes again. And for a change, he sounded serious. He smiled at Jessi. “Can you drive?”

  “I’m fine,” Maggie cut in. “Shouldn’t you be running?” She turned to him and deliberately rubbed her cheek, where she was sure a bruise was starting to form. He stared at her cheek for half a second before sighing and shaking his head. She was not going to read anything into that. She wasn’t.

  “Good point.” He followed her down the alley toward the end of the block, where he hung a left toward Meade. “See you around, Magpie.”

  She literally could not take her eyes off him as he made his way down the block and out of sight. Not that she cared. And she most certainly did not watch him walk away because the sight of his round ass in those jeans was an aphrodisiac.

  There were an awful lot of not’s swirling around her head. And not one of them was good. Chase was no good. He’d led her on, and tried to destroy her career. He wasn’t the type of guy she should be caring about. Or watching. Perfect ass or not.