Broken Read Online Free PDF Page A

smarter than he looked. Of course, lice were probably smarter than Blanford looked. The jeans he wore were slung so low, they’d fallen down when he tried to run from Quinn. He’d tripped and ended up landing facedown in the dirt with his skinny, naked ass hanging out. The sweatshirt he wore was so grimy and stained with sweat, no amount of Clorox was going to clean it. He stank to high heaven, and Quinn wondered if the man had any idea soap and deodorant existed.
    As Blanford climbed into the back of the car, Quinn decided he was damn glad he hadn’t ever gotten around to getting his own car to use for work. He’d just keep using company cars—there was no way in hell he’d let something that dirty in a car he owned. And even though he could do pretty much whatever was needed to bring in the people who went and skipped bail, he figured tying somebody to the top of a car to transport him might just be pushing it.
    Bail-jumping. Bounty hunting.
    How in the hell had he gotten into this?
    “Because you’re good at finding scum,” he muttered.
    Not a rancher like his dad. Not the doctor-type like his twin brother. Hunting down trash seemed to be his calling.
    Probably because that’s where you came from . . .
    You ain’t nothing but trash.
    It was a sly, insidious whisper, the echo of his dead mother’s voice. Long dead—more than twenty years had passed since she’d overdosed.
    If it hadn’t been for the guy who’d been shooting up with his mom, Quinn didn’t know where he’d be right now. It turned out the police were looking for the man, though, and very enthusiastically. They’d busted the door down early that morning, discovered their suspect, lying on the floor in a drugged daze next to a corpse . . . and Quinn, in the closet.
    If the police hadn’t found him that morning, if Quinn had woken up and found his mother dead, he would have hit the streets and never looked back. Which meant he wouldn’t have landed with his dad and Luke on the ranch in Wyoming. That one little twist of fate had probably saved his life. If it hadn’t been for Dad and Luke, he might have ended up a bottom-feeder like Blanford.
    “Now that’s a depressing thought,” he muttered, slanting a look at Blanford. He rolled his shoulders and shoved a hand through his hair. Then, blowing out a sigh, he climbed into the car.
    It already reeked, a sickening mixture of body odor and fried food. As he started the car, he hit the button for the window. A blast of hot air came through, and in the back, Blanford swore.
    “Shit, man. It’s hot out. Ain’t this thing got AC?”
    Quinn ignored him.

    “LITTLE cunt.”
    Ugly words, spoken in an ugly tone, with ugly anger flashing through a pair of pale blue eyes.
    “Little cunt, one of these days, I’m going to teach you a lesson.”

    A new voice . . . soft, shaking, unsteady.
    “ He wants you dead.”
    Sara Davis came awake with that voice echoing in her ears. After two years, she still heard that voice, all too often. She still had the dreams, all too often. And she was still on the run. As soon as she felt like she might actually remember what it was like not to run, she would have to pack up and start all over again.
    She took a deep breath—through her mouth. In the little apartment where she lived, it wasn’t ever safe to breathe too deeply through one’s nose. Not when the aromas consisted of a nasty mix of stale food, marijuana, various bodily wastes when the plumbing screwed up, and sweat.
    Holding her breath, she counted to ten and then let it back out. Sitting up, she kicked her legs over the side of the plain twin mattress. She hadn’t spent money getting a frame for it—the moment she’d looked inside this place, she’d known she’d stay only as long as it took to find someplace else.
    That had been six weeks ago, and it was taking a lot longer to find a decent place than she’d hoped. Of course, decent was relative. She’d be happy with someplace where she could