And there was no way in hell that I was dipping into my trust fund. The moment that I did that, my father would know. He would also give me hell for it, seeing as I’d told him he could take that trust fund and shove it up his ass.
I decided a few years ago that the only reason he’d given it to me in the first place was so he could control me.
Granted, a lot of the money in my trust fund had been given to me thanks to my mother’s death—she had a sizeable life insurance as well as money of her own when she’d passed thanks to a rich grandparent—but that wasn’t the point. In the end, my father was the one to make the trust fund for me, and using it would be bad.
At least, in the long run, anyway.
A little more pissed than I’d meant to be, I ripped off the wrapper of the Pop-Tart.
Then started to laugh.
Justice came up to where I was standing and looked over my shoulder at what I was looking at and grunted.
“I get half of that,” he said.
I handed him one half of the cinnamon Pop-Tart, then started eating the other half.
He took it and took a rather large bite of it before saying, “It’ll be okay.”
And, for some reason, I believed him.Chapter 11
No one tells you that you’re getting old and wise. You have to come to that realization on your own when you’re reading Amazon reviews for dildos.
-Royal’s secret thoughts
Royal
It took me three days to understand how to do the job.
Tanika, the preceptor who taught me the ropes of being an emergency dispatcher, leaned back in her chair and grinned.
“I think you’re good,” she said. “You know everything that I can teach you for now. The rest will come in time.”
I grinned at her and pointed at the screen.
“If you hadn’t told me how to do all of this,” I said. “I’d still be fumbling around half-blind. Thank you for taking the time to show me the ropes.”
Tanika smiled. “Pamela just threw me in there and made me figure it out. At times, I agree with her approach, but there is a learning curve here. Granted, like she said, Kilgore is a small town—well, smaller than where she used to work—which was Dallas. But I feel like that wasn’t fair. And despite their suggestion that you could figure it out, the idea of letting you bumble around and do it yourself made me remember my first week on the job.”
I grinned at Tanika.
I liked her.
She was a married mother of three, and her husband was on the police force. Her husband being Yao—the steely-eyed Asian man that’d been among the men that Justice had talked to when he’d told them he was asked to kill me.
“I can’t imagine having to learn all of this on my own,” I admitted.
“Granted,” Tanika said, “I also came from a dispatcher background. But I came from a town with four thousand people to this place. And granted, thirty thousand isn’t that much compared to other surrounding cities, but it more than tripled my usual call load.”
I couldn’t even imagine.
“What’s the worst call you’ve ever gotten?” I asked, then immediately regretted it when I saw the look on her face.
“Yao was on shift.” She shivered. “He wasn’t in the new unit—the undercover unit—yet. He was still working as a beat cop. He was working Eleventh Street, running a call on a suspected drug dealer called in by a passing motorist who’d gotten lost. When Yao showed, the drug dealer had immediately opened fire on my husband’s car. I had to listen to his panicked cries over the radio.”
God, I couldn’t even imagine.
“That’s why he wants to clean up Eleventh Street, isn’t it?” I asked.
She nodded. “That day shaped who he became. He wants nothing more than to tear that place down brick by brick and build it back up again so it’s a safe place for people to drive down once again.”
But before we could do any more talking, chatter came over the airwaves.
It didn’t take me long to place the voice.
Justice.
“Dispatch, this is Unit M4. I have a report from a citizen of a suspicious vehicle parked across her street. We’re at 733 Shady Grove Lane. License plate for the van is M34-9999. Texas plates.”
Tanika had explained to me that when Justice wasn’t putting himself in harm’s way while undercover at his garage, he was working regular shifts with the new motorcycle unit for Kilgore Police Department.
“10-4,” Tanika said. “Let me run those plates.”
I sat back and let her work, watching and learning.
Tanika tapped away on her keyboard for a few minutes before saying, “Plates are registered to the address across the street. A Johnson Brown.”
“10-4,” Justice rumbled.
Then he was gone.
I knew it was coming before Tanika said a word.