Surrender A Section 8 Novel - By Stephanie Tyler Page 0,6
if she should just surrender. Explain. But those men she’d searched out were the ones who’d hurt the one person who’d kept her safe all her life, and she’d hurt them.
She’d felt indestructible. Lethal. An angel of death no one saw coming.
Afterward, she’d felt angrier, not better. She had to make things right, had to balance out the bad deeds with some good ones.
“Why’d you do it?”
She glanced at Dare and wondered if he knew what it was like to live with a heavy burden of guilt. “I hunted down and killed the men who tortured, raped and killed my mother. Think a jury of my peers would understand that?”
“I have no goddamned idea what drives most people,” he muttered. “You’re going to have to fill in the story.”
“My mom did bail bonds.”
“She was a bounty hunter?”
“Yes—she owned the company and had men working for her. She wouldn’t go out alone—but she was the one who usually talked the fugitives into surrendering.” Both tough and tender, her mom could bring out the best in anyone. Avery had worked in the office for as long as she could remember, typing up files and helping to keep things running as she got old enough to get her own bounty license. Learning things both legal and illegal from the men and women her mother employed as she helped them try to turn their lives around. “One night, she got a call from a woman she’d helped in the past. It was late and she wanted me to go with her, but I’d been up all night doing paperwork—I’d fallen asleep on the couch and she’d left me a note.”
It had been four hours later when she’d woken. Avery had tried to call and got voice mail, so she’d driven to the address her mother had hastily written on a pad of paper by the phone. Luckily, it was on carbon copy paper used for messages.
The fast, smooth motion of this truck was nothing like the way her drive had been that night, her arms jerking the wheel, fear knotting her limbs.
“I found her in the alley. She’d tried to fight—that was obvious. But they just . . .” She put a hand up to her eyes like that could stop the tears. Didn’t want to show the kind of emotion she felt to a relative stranger, but revisiting the image was something she did daily. When she got control back, she continued. “They’d cut her. Raped her. Then they stabbed her and let her bleed out. And I had no idea why. Before the police got there, I took fingerprints and samples from under her nails and went to a friend who worked in a lab to run them later that day. I was thinking about meting out my own brand of justice—it was the only thing that got me through.”
“You were supposed to be with her,” Dare said simply.
Why that was so hard for her to admit to herself, never mind out loud, she didn’t know. She nodded, knew now there was no turning back from all this.
“That same woman called again—tried to lure me back to that spot later that night,” she said. “I didn’t tell the police anything about that. I already knew how to shoot criminals. To track them. To think like them. It took me three weeks to find them—twenty-one days of following that woman around until I got a lead.”
“Did they say anything?”
“I didn’t give them the chance. I thought they went after her because of a jumped bounty or something. There was paperwork, but I found out later that was all stolen from another bounty hunter. I never suspected . . .” She brought a hand to her throat, and there was silence in the truck for a long time, even as darkness fell and they put more distance between her and the men who’d come after her. She assumed he was bringing them to a safe place for the night. If there was such a thing. “I think her murder was part of something bigger.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because you and I both know that those men back at the apartment were hired hits, not cops or feds.” And now it was her turn for questions. “Where’s our father?”
“There’s a CD he made for you in the glove compartment.”
“I have a laptop in my bag,” she said after she pulled the CD out.
“Crank the volume.”
She found the CD and then took the small computer from