Rip laughed. “Doesn’t matter when you’re seventeen and eighteen.”
Cam slapped my shoulder. “Remember when we did that at Rafferty’s?”
“We were smart enough to leave money on the bar.” I grinned. Even if I did yak into his front bushes. “I’ve never drank tequila and whiskey on the same night since.”
Cam suddenly hopped off the truck. “Shit.”
“What?” I craned my neck and stumbled because that last swig of Tennessee whisky had been ill advised.
Then Rip gave me a quick salute and melted into the trees before I heard his boots pounding along the path behind the fountain.
Cam glanced at me, then the duck and grinned. “Sorry.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Cam took off like the former track star he was, in the opposite direction from Rip.
Kai didn’t even bother with a half assed apology. He sprinted for the trees after Ripley.
The wide beam of bright white light washed over Daisy’s head as I dropped down.
Shit, shit, shit.
I rolled out of the bed of my truck to the ground.
“Freeze where you are! This is the police,” came a modulated voice.
I snuck around the tire of my truck as the light bounced around the fountain. Maybe I could sneak through the—hell. A familiar cruiser was kissing the grill of my Chevy.
I sighed and held my hands up as the white light from the top of the cruiser blinded me. “It’s not what it looks like, Chief.”
“Funny, looks a lot like you’re stealing a monument from a park.”
I blinked and tried to step out of the powerful stream of light.
“I said freeze.”
I frowned at the husky and very female voice, but did as I was told. “Can you turn that away from my eyes?”
“Not in this lifetime, Cash Murdock.”
I winced and couldn’t make out the face of the cop, but it sure as hell wasn’t the bulky shape of Chief Pope.
I was screwed.
Chapter 2
Parker
I’d beenout on my patrol. I’d drawn the short straw on the overnights this week. Jonas Tanaka, one of our late shift officers, was out on leave thanks to a torn rotator cuff.
It was going to be a long six months unless I could convince the mayor to give me a little more budget to hire a temporary replacement. Or, a long shot, two permanent people.
Even longer with this kind of bullshit.
The park shenanigans wasn’t even my first drunken idiocy of the evening. Hell, not even my second.
“Stay there.”
