Bonaparte's Belle: A SEALs of Honor World Novel (Heroes for Hire Book 24), Dale Mayer [read an ebook week .TXT] 📗

“Good,” he said, “I’ll have even more fun pulling them in then.”

“If you think it’s safe,” she murmured.

“I ought to be safe enough,” he said. “Believe me. At this point in time, I’m really hoping they do something stupid.”

“But you’re alone, and you have no backup.”

“Nope, I don’t. You just get that jail cell ready. I’ll have two bodies ready to warm those seats back up in no time.”

She hung up, looked over Lana and Isabel, and said, “Where’s your mother?”

“She’s at home. Why?”

“Because I’m not sure I can let you two go home.”

“She has—you have to,” Lana said, jumping to her feet, staring at her in shock. “Mama has no one else.”

“And now Mama will have to go to the seniors’ home for care by somebody who can look after her.”

Both women stared at her in horror.

“Did either of you even think about Mama,” Angela said, “when you started your life of crime and then buckled under the brothers’ blackmail? Did you even consider what would happen to Mama?”

Both women just looked at each other, tears welling up, and they shook their heads.

“Jesus,” Angela said, staring ahead. “I’ll go call the prosecutor.”

“Please, please, please,” Lana said, “you have to let me go home.”

“Why? I can’t trust you to actually go home, even to take care of your mother. When I left dear Isabel here on her own, she had already packed up her car and was leaving town.”

Lana turned to stare at Isabel. “What!”

Isabel flushed. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “I was terrified. I knew those men would come back. I knew they’d get out of jail one way or another, though it didn’t occur to me that my own sister would help them escape, but I knew they’d be coming back after me.”

“And what about me?” Lana asked, staring at her sister in shock. “Were you just leaving me with Mama and Granddad to worry about?”

“Only until I could figure out what to do,” she said. “I had to get away. You weren’t the one being held hostage in your house,” she said.

“And it was Henry and Johnny,” Angela said, looking at Lana. “Who did you deal with?”

Lana’s face turned red and then white and then red again. Finally she admitted, “It was Ronnie.”

“No surprise there,” Angela said. She walked over, grabbed another pad of paper and a pen, and dropped them in front of Lana and said, “Start writing down everything that happened.” The woman looked up at her and said, “Can’t I use a laptop or something?”

“No,” Angela said, rolling her eyes. “You can’t. I’m sure you remember how to print at least, if you don’t remember how to write.” And, with that, Angela stepped through to the back, where the women couldn’t hear her, and yet Angela could still keep an eye on everything and called the prosecutor.

When he answered the phone, his voice was hard and fed up. “I’m enjoying a Saturday afternoon with my family,” he said. “Why are you disturbing me?”

“Because I’ve got a problem, sir,” she said quietly, and she quickly laid out the problems.

“Good Lord,” he said, “is this all related to your deputies quitting?”

“Yes,” she said, “we’ve got a group forcibly trying to buy up property in town. I’m not yet exactly sure why, but I’m certain there is a compelling reason. Now I have two sisters who got caught doing something they shouldn’t have, who’ve been blackmailed and threatened, and one of them actually released my prisoners from my jail.”

He groaned, and then he laughed, and afterward he cried out, “Good God. That’s just too ridiculous to believe.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ve got them both writing up statements, while I’m sitting here, keeping an eye on them.”

“And you have no deputies left?”

“None of my original crew, but I have one on loan,” she said. “It is my belief that my former deputies may have been subject to threats as well, but I have no proof of that. At the moment, what I need to nail down is what charges I can bring up on these two women, though it’s complicated by the fact that their mother is undergoing cancer treatment at home, and their grandfather is in a care facility with Alzheimer’s.”

He coughed into the phone. “And they didn’t think about that first?”

“It doesn’t seem that they thought about very much,” she said quietly.

He sighed heavily. “I’ll call you back. If you can, … if you need to detain them,” he said, “lock them up, and we can send somebody out to look after the mother.”

“That might be what has to happen,” she said. “What I don’t know is what kind of charges we’re looking at, how severe the charges will be, whether the sisters will be eligible for community service to resolve this.”

“And you know that’s not for me to call,” he said in a warning voice.

“I know that,” she said quietly, “but I also know that a lot of the charges are up to you, depending on what we’re actually looking at.”

“Do you really think they’re innocent in all of this?”

“No,” she said, “absolutely not. Do I think that they did this out of greed or out of malice? No.” She added, “Their initial misstep was to help their grandfather sign a property sales contract, when he wasn’t of sound mind to do so. I do believe they were trying to fulfill his wishes, to care for the mother and the grandfather, but they should have gone through a legal process. They were also getting pressured to wrap up the sale by these same men, who were the ultimate buyers, and who went on to blackmail and to threaten them.”

“Good God, what a nightmare,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m calling you. This one is above my pay grade.”

He snorted at that. “We’ve always had pretty easy dealings around here up until now,” he said. “I just didn’t really expect something like this.”

“Neither