Blood and Roses (Holly Jennings Thriller) by A.K. Alexander Page A

relationship. This was no partnership. Let the guy believe they were equal. Let the guybelieve whatever he wanted, as long as he carried out Quentin’s orders.
    Quentin sat down behind his desk at Bradley Security Systems. He had turned his bad fortune from being “let go” by the US government into something good, something profitable, and into something that would work to not only his benefit, but to the benefit of mankind.
    And, his boy, Joque, was going to carry out the perfect plan.

CHAPTER
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    14
    O’Leary scribbled on his legal pad, then squinted at the computer screen. Things were a little blurry. He probably shouldn’t have had that last rum and Coke. The first couple got his mind going, the last couple turned his brain to mush, and he didn’t want that. His career as a jockey was on the downhill slope, but he was doing something now that maybe he should have done a decade ago.
    He got up and turned down the radio on his kitchen counter inside his small apartment. O’Leary knew he’d had a fall from grace. He’d once owned a sweet condo at the beach in Santa Monica and a nice house out in Lexington. He’d driven some great cars, worn some expensive clothes, lived the rock-star lifestyle there for a bit. Then a few years ago, after the horse Nobody’s Business had a bad accident on the track and one of the jocks in the race wound up living out his days in a wheelchair, trainers lost faith in O’Leary. Owners lost faith in him.
    Worst of all…he lost faith in himself.
    He glanced at the bottle of rum next to the radio and thought about it.
    No.
    He wasn’t going there again. There was something pushing him toward something better, toward a course of action he’d long delayed. Maybe it was his crash from fame, maybe it was Elena accepting his invite for coffee.
    Or, maybe, it was time to do the right thing and expose what he figured were certain to be lies.
    He knew that if he had looked into the lies of the past when he was riding high, he would have never enjoyed the career he’d had in racing. It would have been over a lot sooner than it had been. He would have been ostracized.
    Had it been the right choice?
    He didn’t know, and he also didn’t know if what he was chasing now was the truth, but he had positive suspicions.
    Twelve years ago.
    Twelve years ago, O’Leary was at the peak of his game. Elena was his girl. He was in the winner’s circle more often than not.
    His home base was in Lexington, but he was all over the country on horses. And he’d ridden a horse trained by Geremiah Laugherty, who was starting to make a name for himself, but there was word that Laugherty liked women and gambling as much as he enjoyed training horses. And at times, O’Leary questioned the man’s training practices. But he was training winners, and O’Leary had won some races on this horse named Dirty Games. How ironic, that colt’s name.
    The horse was owned by Marvin Tieg, who had just barely gotten on the map in Hollywood. Back then, Tieg was putting as much cash as he could into producing whatever he could. He started out with a money-making slasher film and things went on from there.
    The problem was that Tieg had a habit of spending money faster than he could recoup it. He and Laugherty seemed to go hand in hand in that department. Tieg had bought himself a string of horses and a decent estate in Versailles, Kentucky.
    Tieg also liked to buy people, and when Hollywood (which is what O’Leary called him) came to town and started spreading the cash around wining and dining folks, no one complained. O’Leary certainly didn’t.
    This horse, Dirty Games, was a real nice horse that was winning and had a real nice future in front of him. Tieg had some great animals at his place that were insured to the hilt. Millions of dollars in insurance money.
    Even drunk, O’Leary remembered it all like yesterday because of what happened. And news of Tieg’s murder had dragged all his memories to the surface. He