Chapter One
The windows were open. Night slithered into the room, along with the distant rhythm of jazz from the main venue, and the thick scent of gardenias.
The open windows were a good sign.
The distance between the golf course and the venue was not.
River Scott—Riff, to everyone but his mother—was a big man. He stood six feet four, and weighed in at two hundred and thirty-five pounds, his MMA fighting weight. The fact that his overweight, unhealthy, geriatric benefactor wasn’t afraid of being alone in the same room with him while reaming him out was another bad sign.
Riff’s hearing was good. Someone hovered in the sitting area outside Barron Fox’s nineteenth hole office door. Hopefully, whoever it was, they were unarmed. Rumor claimed the bodies were buried somewhere between this hole and the sixth.
The older man slouched forward, his white-sleeved, pasty-white folded arms splayed on his solid mahogany executive desk, his sagging face dripping with sweat but not one drop of interest. His suit jacket swallowed the back of his chair.
“Explain to me what went wrong,” Barron Fox said.
It all started in second grade, if Riff remembered correctly. Back then, he had been small for his age. The growth spurt wouldn’t hit until he was seventeen. Johnny Something-or-other had cornered him on the playground and demanded he hand over his lunch money.
That was the day Riff discovered how much he loved to fight. Win or lose—because he’d most definitely lost that first match—didn’t matter. The rush of adrenaline was what counted with him. He’d made bad life choices from that moment on.
His worst choice to date, however, was landing tonight.
On the surface, Florida was much like the brochures. Towering palm trees, sandy beaches, timeless mansions … Underneath, however, it had the sort of seedy underbelly that proved even the best fruit rotted from the inside.
The whole arrangement had smelled bad from the start. Riff was a free agent. He was used to deals that smelled off. A guy who knew a guy who knew a guy approached him, and even though he’d known better, his interest was piqued. He’d been offered a lot of money to throw a fight with an unnamed opponent he had no way to research. Since Riff couldn’t assess the other guy’s skills, he’d decided to go for the guaranteed money in a fight that was rigged.
He’d landed in Palm Springs by way of Wyoming two days ago, been driven from the airport to the resort where the fight was to take place, then given free use of the gym.
Earlier tonight, he was escorted from his hotel suite to the weirdest venue he’d ever fought in. Since he’d once fought in a barnyard where cockfights were the main feature, that should have been a steep hill to climb. But no.
A golden ballroom crusted with crystal chandeliers, and tall, floor-level windows sporting tacky gold curtains, and bas-relief walls overlaid with gold that looked straight out of a Roman orgy, proved taste couldn’t be bought.
The cage was as gaudy and ridiculous as the ballroom. Layers of gold silk swayed like a Southern debutante’s puffy skirt around the twenty-foot octagon. White, gold-speckled canvas flooring prepared to display body fluids with garish delight, because nine times out of ten, blood wasn’t all that got spilled.
Although right now, in Barron Fox’s office on the secluded end of his golf course, spilled blood had shot to the top of Riff’s list of concerns.
Fox was waiting for an explanation. Riff tried to explain.
“He left himself wide open.”
The idiot had celebrated too early, and the competitor in Riff couldn’t have it. Again, while he didn’t mind losing, he had his pride. That knee to the head he’d delivered should smarten the kid up for his next fight.
He shifted in his chair, which was not designed to hold someone his size. It creaked in indignation.
“If I hadn’t taken him down, everyone would have known the fight was rigged. They’d want their money back.”
Fox toyed with a pewter letter opener, balancing it upright on the tip of the blade. “We can’t have that.” Reptilian eyes pinned Riff. “Neither can we have someone renege on a contract.”
Riff saw his bank account dwindle to a few hundred dollars. “I’ll pay it back.”
Fox waved a hand. “No need.” A ray of hope brightened the room before it was routed by Fox’s next words. “However, you caused me to lose a significant amount of money.” He named a figure that made Riff’s testicles curl up and withdraw into his body. “I do expect reparation for that.”
Riff’s Southern mee-maw had predicted he’d end up as an enforcer for the mob because he was too big to be a male model, even though he was pretty, and he was too big for bull riding. Fox wasn’t exactly the mob boss his mee-maw envisioned. No Italian in him. He was a kleptocrat, though, which in Riff’s eyes, was worse. Much, much worse. At least mobsters had some sense of honor.
Riff managed to swallow the golf ball lodged in his throat. The room stopped spinning. Common sense dug in its heels. Barron Fox didn’t hustle everyday people for petty cash. He went after the ones with secrets to hide and billions to move from country to country.
Maybe Riff couldn’t shake down someone’s sweet little mee-maw. But a Russian oligarch hiding his wealth in the good old US of A?
Riff could do that.
Except Fox didn’t want something as mundane as an enforcer. He reached into a drawer, then slid a photograph across the desk’s shiny surface toward Riff.
Riff picked it up. Blue eyes blazed from the closeup. Short, curly blond hair framed the type of face that belonged on a child’s doll—smooth lines, full red lips, pink, rosy cheeks. The eyes didn’t belong to that angelic, child-woman face. They held shrewd defiance. Anyone who looked into those eyes knew she was smart. And jaded. Angry, too.
If she were a man, and they stepped into an octagon together, Riff would be second-guessing his chances, because intelligence, determination, and nothing to lose were a deadly combination.
He slid the photo back. “I don’t fight women.”
Fox laughed. He sounded genuinely amused. “I don’t want you to fight her.” He leaned forward. The amusement didn’t touch his eyes, which remained dark and soulless. “Her name’s Tilly Wynn. I want you to find her.”
He wasn’t going to find this woman for a man like Barron Fox either, because while he didn’t know for sure what Fox wanted her for, if she didn’t want to be found, it wasn’t for anything good.
“I’m not a private investigator,” Riff said.
“You misunderstand. I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Here’s how this works. You owe me money, and I owe a good friend a favor. Grand, Montana, was the last place this woman was seen. That was a few years ago. Five, maybe six. The trail went cold after that. You’re from Grand, Montana. Dig around a little. Use your connections.
“I don’t expect results right away. She’s been missing for a long time already. Maybe she’s dead. If so, bring me proof. If she’s alive, go ahead and bring me proof that she’s dead. It keeps things simple.” Fox’s thin smile chilled Riff. “You do that and we’re even.”
Riff got the message. He wasn’t an enforcer. Fox wanted a hit man. One who was dispensable.
Riff had walked into the role—likely as intended. He’d left himself wide open. Anyone who’d done their research on him would have known that he’d never be able to ignore such a rookie mistake.
His brain got busy, working on damage control. First, he had to get out of Florida alive. After that, he could figure out his next move. It wasn’t going to be murdering a woman, that was for damn sure. He didn’t care what she’d done, or to whom, or how angry and jaded she was.
He stood and picked up the photo. The chair sighed with relief. He tried not to look at the face glaring up at him from the photo in his hand. Those angry eyes made him feel guilty, even though he’d done nothing wrong. He added revisiting how he made his life choices to the list of things that needed doing.
“That’s it?” he said. “A name, a photo, and the location where she was last seen? That’s all I’ve got to go on?”
“That’s it. Be sure to leave a clear trail. I’d hate to have to send someone looking for you, too.”
He tucked the photo into the hip pocket of his Bermuda shorts.
A woman waited in the small sitting area outside of Fox’s office. Her name was Shanda. She was very beautiful, although despite the effort she put into preserving her looks, and the obvious invitations she’d sent while watching him work out in the gym, she was a little too old to entice him. He’d been warned that she was Fox’s mistress, and while Fox was indifferent to a lot of the things that she did, he didn’t like sharing.
She wore a slinky gold ball gown. The spectators had dressed up for the fight. She didn’t appear to be armed. The dress was so low-cut and tight, and the fabric so sheer, he’d have seen it if she were.
She held a fat white envelope in her hand.
“You’re probably wondering what you’ve gotten yourself into, right about now,” she said, tapping the envelope against the palm of her other hand.
Yeah. Kind of. But he wasn’t about to admit it.
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“That’s good. However, it’s always best to be prepared for the worst.”
Her blue eyes were cold, unlike the blazing eyes of the blond in the photo, but equally jaded. She tucked the envelope into the front of his shorts, then slid the envelope lower, nestling it inside his briefs. Her fingertips brushed his junk, which woke with a start, proving when it came to so much as a hint of sex, it wasn’t as picky as he was.
She tracked one finger up and down before withdrawing her hand.
“You don’t strike me as being cut out for whatever task Barron just gave you,” she said, shifting from smoking-hot temptation to motherly concern, which confused the crap out of his junk.
The muggy heat didn’t help his brain keep up, either. It took a few seconds to process that he’d be going to bed with a hard-on he’d have to take care of alone, because he wasn’t tagging Fox’s mistress, even though he strongly suspected she could teach him a few memorable things.
Making better life choices started right now.
“There’s fifty thousand dollars in that envelope,” she said. “Along with a map and instructions. You can get yourself to Montana. That map will get you to a little place called Burning Scrub. It’s off the grid. No one knows it exists. If you deliver that money to a woman named Mavis Jenkins for me, she’ll let you stay in Burning Scrub until you come up with a plan to get yourself out of whatever job Barron gave you that you think you can handle, because I assure you, you can’t. It will buy you some time.”
Her offer was too good to be true. And too opportune. She wasn’t sleeping with Fox because she was selfless and kind. She was enjoying herself and whatever game she was playing, or she’d be long gone. Maybe she was into big men.
Except Fox was more Jabba the Hutt than a side of prime beef.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Helping you is a byproduct of helping myself.” The slope to her smile made it clear she thought he wasn’t too bright. “Sleep on it. If you decide you like the lifestyle Barron is offering—don’t fool yourself, this won’t be the last task he gives you—then leave the envelope next to the bed and the maid will return it to me. If you decide a trip to Burning Scrub, Montana, is more appealing to you, be sure and tell Mavis her daughter sends her love.” Her smile turned slightly brittle. “The money should buy me back hers.”
Riff understood mommy issues. He had a few of his own.
“I’ll think on it,” he said.
He jogged the few miles to the resort hotel and the safety of his suite, illusional as that safety was. The corner of the fat envelope scratched at his junk, but it was safest right where it was.
Back in his suite, he rinsed the night’s events off his skin in the shower. Then he took the fat envelope of money and a cold bottle of water onto the balcony that overlooked the ocean and let the salt air seep into his lungs while he pondered his options. He had two.
One was unacceptable. The other wasn’t much better, but at least it didn’t involve cold-blooded murder.
He’d check to see exactly how secluded this Burning Scrub really was. He’d never heard of it, and he was Montanan.
But Montana in general was a great place to hide.
* * *
Two days with his father, and his father’s second family in Grand, Montana, were all Riff could take. The old man was reliving his youth with a wife nearly twenty years younger, and three kids under five, and it was a tough show to watch.
Riff liked his two half-brothers and tiny half-sister. They were great kids, and their dad was making up for the crap job he’d done during his first go at the title.
But Riff’s relationship with his old man remained uneasy, made more so by the fact that physically, Riff was a younger version of him, and the hot young wife was continually pointing it out.
Other than looks, the two men had nothing in common. Riff’s dad was a rancher. Riff had no interest in ranching. His dad blamed his mom for the distance between father and son, saying she’d turned Riff against him, which was rich, considering he’d walked out on them when Riff was three. And Riff quickly grew tired of hearing how his dad married his mom because the sex was fantastic, but everything else about their marriage was crap.
Riff had lost touch with his mom when he left home at eighteen, eleven years ago, now. She’d moved on, too, since then, and left no forwarding address. Just as well. Riff loved her, but on a crazy scale out of ten, she ranked a thirteen. She’d give anything “new age” a whirl. He’d had to be the parent, and he’d sucked at it almost as bad as his dad. He hoped she’d found someone who finally understood her.
He hung around Grand long enough to pick up some outdoor winter camping gear and warm clothes. It was October in Montana, and snow could fly any day. He didn’t trust Shanda, who had no reason to help him—beyond wanting to get in his pants—and he’d escaped the resort before that could happen. He’d deliver her money, but if he got a bad feeling about Burning Scrub, he’d head somewhere else for the winter. He was big and strong. A Hutterite community might take him in.
He changed his rental car several times, and headed in the wrong direction, before grabbing a bus to get to Butte so he could pay cash. It wasn’t easy for a man his size to disappear. Everywhere he went, he attracted attention.
He finally made it, however. Shanda’s map took him to the Ride No More Ranch, a massive tract of land that stretched into the West Pioneer Mountains, and which was easy enough to pass through unseen.
He’d forgotten how much he hated camping. And also winter. By now he’d heard that the first major winter storm was headed this way, and forecasters predicted it to be the snowfall of the century with a cold front to match. He didn’t want to be caught in the mountains in the storm, because he didn’t have enough winter camping experience to survive it, but there was no backtracking now. He’d worked too hard to cover his trail. He had to move fast.
He reached the outskirts of Burning Scrub in the early afternoon on the second day of his uphill hike. He was cold and hungry, and he needed a shower, and overall, his mood was not good. His life choices remained consistently poor. The gray, heavy sky smelled of snow, and the wind had picked up.
High-pitched squeals ripped through the cold air, scaring the crap out of him before he identified what the sound was.
A pig. One that was deeply unhappy.
Its squeals ended abruptly. Didn’t that warm his heart.
His first glimpse of the town wasn’t promising, either. He approached it with even more caution. Shanda’s route brought him along a narrow footpath that saw little traffic, and between two buildings, into what appeared to be the town square. It looked like the setting of an old western movie, complete with false-fronted buildings, a boardwalk, and a main street of dirt.
Worse were the troughs set up in the middle of what passed for a street. A large kettle, perched on a tripod over a fire, chugged steam into the cold air. Two men, dressed in baggy wool clothes covered in heavy-duty leather butcher’s aprons, lifted the kettle and poured it over the contents in one of the troughs. He knew what the trough held.
The whole set-up reeked of a cult.
He crouched between the two buildings and reconsidered his options. The first snowflakes swirled in the air. The two men looked up. The bigger man frowned, said something, and the two men got busy. A wooden smokehouse had been erected nearby. Riff had seen these in people’s backyards growing up. The inside was lined with nails for hanging thin strips of meat. The wind shifted direction, and Riff smelled smoked pork. This one was already in use. His stomach rumbled. He’d eaten earlier in the day, but he was a big man, and he’d done a lot of walking.
Something nudged his backpack from behind. He dropped one hand to the ground to keep from falling over. He half turned, still in a crouch, and glanced up into the barrel of a lever-action Winchester repeating rifle. He’d have whistled in admiration, because the weapon was sweet, except the woman training the rifle on him didn’t appear to be in the mood to have her weapon admired.
“On your feet. Slowly, with your hands in the air,” she said. “Make any sudden moves and I’ll shoot.”
She would, too. She had a no-nonsense sort of voice that brimmed with impatience. She was bundled for warmth in a thick wool coat; long, woolen skirt; and leather boots with hooks rather than eyelets for laces. The hood of her coat covered her hair, and a red knitted scarf concealed most of her face.
Her eyes tracked his movements as he attained his full height, then widened slightly as she took in his size. He had a good twelve inches on her, possibly more. He could have that rifle out of her hands in less than a second, except taking it from her wouldn’t serve any purpose other than making her mad. He didn’t want to do that. Not with the storm front approaching.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Riff Scott.” No need for an alias. His name would mean nothing to her. He wasn’t famous.
Fingerless gloves repositioned the butt of the rifle so that it huddled firmly into her shoulder. “You expect me to believe a grown man’s real name is Riff?”
“You think I’d rather go through life being called River?” His mom was a big fan of River Phoenix, the actor. Three guesses as to what his middle name was.
Her steady eyes sharpened, and he got the uneasy sense that he knew her. Some girl he’d tapped? If so, he hoped she wouldn’t hold it against him. He hadn’t lived in Montana for years, but he’d been a bit of a ho in his youth.
“I see your point,” she conceded. “What are you doing here, Riff River Scott? How did you find us?”
“I have a delivery for Mavis from a woman named Shanda.”
His captor took a step back, cocked the rifle so that a round loaded into its chamber, and he was no longer as confident that he could disarm her. He wasn’t surprised by the reaction when he said Shanda’s name, considering where he’d met her and who she was with.
This was where things got ticklish.
He raised his hands higher. “Don’t shoot me. I’m just the messenger. I’ll give Mavis the package, then I’ll be gone.”
Hopefully Mavis wouldn’t turn him out in the storm, although if she was as kind-hearted as her daughter, his fate wouldn’t trouble her in the least.
And he still hadn’t made it past the first line of defense. Would he get to speak with Mavis or not?
His captor made up her mind.
“Walk,” she commanded.
She gestured with the barrel of her rifle for him to precede her. Her scarf slipped, exposing more of her face, and uncertainty as to how he might know her morphed into dread.
Tilly Wynn.
He’d been played.