Undercover Refuge. Melinda Di Lorenzo

       Chapter 1

      Detective Rush Atkinson was sure of two things. One. Someone was following him. And two. They were going to be sorry.

      Gritting his teeth, he stepped a little harder on the gas. The Lada protested immediately. The lumbering old vehicle—built in 1972 and seemingly held together by sheer willpower alone—had a strong preference for moving at a slow and steady pace. It was good on the back roads and got the job done, and it usually suited Rush just fine. Of course, he wasn’t usually being stalked up a mountain road. If he’d thought that was even the vaguest possibility, he would’ve grabbed his second-favorite vehicle. A monster of a motorcycle that he’d pieced together with his own two hands. A source of pride.

      “A source of speed, too,” he muttered as he took another quick glance in the rearview mirror.

      He knew his look wouldn’t yield anything. Not on the straight patch of road. So far, he’d only caught glimpses of the car on the wider bends. It was a silver hatchback. One of those hybrid electric vehicles, Rush thought.

       Strange choice for a stalker.

      He didn’t really have time to muse on it. Or the desire to, as a matter of fact. He was supposed to be meeting with his “boss,” Jesse Garibaldi—aka the man he was trying his damnedest to put behind bars—in just under five minutes. He should’ve been early. Would have been early, if some fool wasn’t tailing him. No way was he going to make it on time now. He’d been trying to give the silver hatchback the slip since the second he realized it was following him.

      “For your own good,” he grumbled at the unseen driver.

      Really, he was doing them a favor. Garibaldi wasn’t the kind of man who welcomed uninvited guests. Not on this side of things, anyway. Inside the small town of Whispering Woods, he might be thought of as a businessman and philanthropist and an enthusiastic lover of tourists, but Rush knew better. The man was a murderer.

      Fifteen years earlier, when they were both barely more than kids, the other man had killed Rush’s father and Rush’s friends’ fathers. Garibaldi had set off a pipe bomb at the Freemont City police station in order to destroy some kind of evidence. He’d been successful, and the three men who died were nothing more than collateral damage to him. A good lawyer had seen to it that he got off. Now, a decade and a half later, Garibaldi was entrenched in the small tourist-driven economy of the mountainside town. A pillar. But all of the goodwill and investment were a front for something more sinister. Using the truly good people of Whispering Woods, Garibaldi had set himself up with a tidy little drug empire. In came the heroin. Out went a series of doctored paintings, laced with the deadly mixture of opiates and paint, and no one was the wiser.

      Except us, Rush thought grimly as he swung the wheel and veered off the concrete road and headed onto a small dirt-packed one.

      Just a couple of months earlier, he and his partners had discovered Garibaldi’s out-in-the-open hiding place. They’d pieced together his method. Now, with two of his three partners holed up in Mexico, and the third on hiatus in Europe, it was Rush’s job to put the final nail in the coffin. Something he was eager to do. It was going to happen any day now, too. Garibaldi was organizing something big. A meeting with a buyer, Rush believed.

      It was the perfect moment to make the bust. All he had to do was to get his pseudo-boss to trust him enough to disclose the details and include him in the exchange. He was well on the way there. In the short time since Rush had used his connections to secure a position on Garibaldi’s crew, he’d already risen from grunt man to enforcer to errand-runner.

       Gonna be hard to get any higher than that if you’ve got a stalker tagging along.