Don't Mess With Texas Read Online Free

alone would make the image go away.
    It didn’t.
    There, stuffed in the back of her car, was a body.
    She recognized the Armani suit first. Then she saw his face. His eyes were wide open, but something was missing.
    Life
.
    Jack was dead.
    Jack was dead in the trunk of her car.
    Her vision started to swirl.
    She tried to scream. Nausea hit harder. Unable to stop herself, she lost the rest of her two-hundred-dollar meal all over her dead ex-husband’s three-thousand-dollar suit.

 
    “B UT HERE’S THE best part.” Dallas picked up his coffee and eyed his brother over the rim of the cup. “The wife came out of the bathroom and started beating him with a toilet brush. A toilet brush!”
    Tony smiled, something he seldom did lately. Then his humor faded. “And this is what you want to do for the rest of your life?”
    “We only take on a few of those. We’re working real cases, too.”
    “Like the Mallard case?”
    “Mallard?” Dallas feigned innocence, hoping to avoid lying, and looked out the window as a patrol car, lights glaring, pulled into the parking lot next to the restaurant.
    “Okay, let’s talk about the case you’re not even getting paid for,” Tony said.
    “What case?” Then Dallas remembered telling his brother about the Nance case last week over beers. He probably should be less forthcoming—especially since it was a Miller PD case. Not that robbery was his brother’s division.
    Tony stirred sugar into his coffee. “Detective Shane called me.”
    “So you’ve been sent to tell me to back off.” Dallas congratulated himself for knowing something was up.
    “He’s a good cop. He’s certain he has the right guy.”
    “He’s wrong.”
    “You’re not even getting paid for this case, so I don’t—”
    “You think this is about money?” Dallas, Tyler, and Austin had all gotten a fat check from the state of Texas—as if the state could ever buy back their mistake. Not that they wanted to blow through the cash, but they’d all agreed that stopping another innocent man from going to prison came before getting paid. And Eddie Nance was innocent. Dallas would bet his right testicle on the fact.
    Dallas leaned in. “The only thing Nance is guilty of is being black and wearing gray sweats like the guy who robbed who convenience store.”
    Tony dropped his spoon on the table. “The clerk pointed him out in the lineup. And the kid was picked up less than two miles from the store an hour later. He has priors.”
    “One eyewitness doesn’t make a case. I’ll bet there were fifty black men wearing gray sweats in that two-mile radius. And his one prior is for a fight with his buddy over a girl. He’s not a criminal. The kid had a scholarship to go to college. Had!”
    Tony shook his head, but didn’t argue. Dallas wanted to believe it was because his brother knew he was right.
    “I can’t believe you really want to do this kind of work when you could be doing the real thing,” Tony grumbled and pulled his coffee closer.
    “It’s real. We’ve even managed to get about six of DeLuna’s drug runners off the street.”
    Tony’s frown deepened. “That’s why you’re doing this whole PI shit, isn’t it? To get DeLuna?”
    Was his brother just now figuring that out? The way he, Tyler, and Austin saw it, if they kept poking at DeLuna’s dirty little operation, sooner or later the drug lord would get mad enough to crawl out from the rock he’d hidden under and face them. When he did, they’d be ready.
    “It’s not the only reason.” That was true, too. Dallas leaned back in the booth. Making sure others didn’t get screwed by the system—the same system that had let him, Tyler, and Austin down—mattered as well. And as Austin mentioned earlier, if they managed to piss off the guys in blue, the men who had stood there and watched three of their own get sold down the river, well, that was okay, too.
    “You’re gonna get yourself killed. And when you do, I’m going to be fucking