All Kinds of Tied Down (Marshals 1)

“Damn right I did,” she huffed, and I saw her eyes glint with anger. “Give me a hard time—fuck them!”

“Aruna—”

“As if dealing with her isn’t preferable to dealing with me,” Catherine scoffed. “Please.”

I shook my head. “You guys can’t come in here and push—”

“Do they want to be audited?” Janet asked pointedly. “I think not.”

My nice and unassuming friend, one of the chief auditors in the Tax Exempt & Government Entities (TE/GE) division of the IRS, was actually the scariest person in the room. People thought she was cute and fluffy with her short curly red bob, freckles, and big blue eyes—until she pounced on you and you realized she was terrifying.

“I—”

“Mr. Jones?” a nurse said as she came into the room. “What do you—I’m sorry, but you’re not supposed to have this many vis—”

“He can have as many people in here as he likes,” Min instructed. “And if you call security, I’ll have your job.”

“Stop,” I begged. “This woman puts needles in me.”

“I need to speak to Mr. Jones’s physician,” Catherine snapped at the nurse before she even had a chance to respond to Min. “Please advise him that Dr. Catherine Benton is here.”

“I don’t—”

“Dr.… Catherine… Benton,” she said slowly, frostily. “Do it now.”

The nurse glanced around the room and left quickly.

“He won’t know who you are,” I said to my conceited friend. “You’re very full of yourself right now.”

She grunted, walked over to me, and flicked me in the middle of my forehead.

“Witch,” I grumbled, but I couldn’t help laughing.

“I have concerns,” she replied. “And I need to know what your doctor did, because it’s not in his notes and that’s troubling. If he didn’t do what I think, I’m going to have to wheel you into surgery in about an hour.”

Min gasped.

“I really don’t want you cutting me open,” I said emphatically.

“You should be so lucky,” said my doctor, Dr. Sean Cooper, who looked like he belonged on a magazine cover instead of walking the halls of a hospital, as he strolled into the room. “Dr. Benton is one of the top neurosurgeons in the country.”

“Yes,” she seconded, arching an eyebrow for me. “I saw that Miro suffered hypoxia associated with the gunshot wound to his clavicle, and my concern is—”

“Erb-Duchenne palsy,” he finished. “Yes.”

“And,” she snapped. “How long was he—”

“I haven’t updated the file, but walk with me and I’ll show you the MRI we performed.”

“Excellent,” she said crisply, turning to follow him. “Sit tight, I’ll be back,” she said over her shoulder.

When she was gone, Aruna waggled her eyebrows at me.

“You guys are all bullies.”

I was fairly certain the hospital staff would be really glad when I left.

I HAD been, by all accounts, well on my way to a life of crime, growing up in Pacoima, California. There was shoplifting—always food because I was always hungry—truancy, and doing the courier thing. Guys said, hey kid, I’ll give you twenty bucks to take this there, and I did. I never asked what was inside; I didn’t care. But I got a reputation for being reliable, and that led to getting invited along to business transactions at cockfights, gambling in back rooms, and watching as guys drank, smoked, and did lines. Soon enough, I was the one being offered a bump of coke or a drag or a drink.

I was in and out of more than two dozen foster homes by the time I turned fifteen. Enough that, with the trouble I dabbled in, I’d been caught in situations when the police came charging through the front door. What inevitably happened was the biggest, strongest men in the room ended up taking me outside and staying with me until Child Protective Services showed up.

These were the only men in my life who ever really saw me, talked to me, or seemed to care whether I was alive or dead. The savior thing, the white hat thing, the hero thing: all that imprinted on my brain. So instead of hating law enforcement, I went the other way. In fact, I decided I never wanted to be the guy getting busted; I wanted to be the guy doing the busting.

Policemen were kind, solid, powerful, and—as I aged—damn hot. I was lucky. I had it better than a lot of foster kids I knew. I wasn’t raped, pimped out, or molested. My foster parents just didn’t give a shit at all. I had to scavenge my own meals and clothes. It was like I was invisible. The last time I was removed from a home—because the people I was living with had a meth lab in their basement—the detective who ushered me out of the house stopped in front of my guardian and punched him in the face. As the man stared up at him from the floor, the detective tugged at the clothes that hung off my too-lean frame. I was severely malnourished, and that time, I went to the hospital. It was then I was assigned a new caseworker—my angel, as it turned out—Mrs. Perez.