Slow Heat by Lorie O'Clare Page A

and crossed his arms over his chest. “I have no intention of screwing up my probation. My lawyer says everything could be expunged from my record in the next month. Then I won’t be a felon anymore. This is the job all men dream of and I am not going to do anything to mess it up.”
    “Don’t blame you.” Greg handed one of the beers to Micah and snapped the cap off the other. “Here’s what happened.”
    Greg King was a giant of a man, at least several inches taller than Micah, who stood six foot one. King was muscular as hell, and for a man close to fifty years old, he never moved stiffly or took his time sitting or standing, like Micah’s dad and uncle had started doing.
    “It was over a year ago and we were having a hell of a time with an insane woman and a drug she was using to control people.”
    “Slave juice,” Ben offered.
    Greg shivered intentionally as he nodded. “Nastiest shit I’ve ever run up against.”
    Micah forced himself to quit thinking about his father and uncle. They were fine. There were never two tougher old men, and no matter how the heat might have come down, they would all get through it. He also shoved thoughts of Maggie from his head. That hot little number could get him in to more trouble than she realized if Micah didn’t stay focused.
    “Slave juice?” he asked. This was a new one for him.
    “Yup.” Greg led the way back to the cement room and paused next to the door in the middle of the room. “It was a drug that robbed you of your ability to control your own actions.” He paused, took a drink of his beer. “Depending on how much was injected, you might have thoughts in your head, but you were helpless when it came to following orders. If someone told you to pick up this gun, point it to your head, and pull the trigger, you’d do it.”
    “Crap,” Micah hissed.
    “It took over a year to take down the bitch who invented the shit,” Greg growled.
    “He was telling me the story last week and mentioned that Marc’s wife rescued everyone from an underground prison and shot four guards single-handed, with all of them on the other side of the door.”
    Ben Mercy was a good kid. He had done time for grand theft auto but didn’t fit the profile. Apparently he’d been wrongly convicted, but—not having much money—he’d done time before getting out and finally finding a lawyer willing to help him wipe his record clean. King had hired Mercy, seeing something in him, despite the kid not being able to do everything the rest of them could do. Until the felony was off his record, Mercy couldn’t get his P.I. license and be an official bounty hunter.
    Ben pointed to the door in the middle of the room when they returned to the basement. “Greg surprised me with this. What I get for questioning his story, I guess.”
    Micah shifted his attention back to the door. That’s when he noticed four mannequins stacked against the far wall.
    “Never hurts to take on a little exercise,” King said, walking across the room. His giant size made the room appear a lot smaller than it was. “Figured I would set up a mock reenactment. Jones, this will be good for you, too.” He grinned at Micah and winked. “Will show me just how finely tuned your skills are.”
    “Oh yeah?” Micah asked. Only when you got paranoid was there anything to be paranoid about. “What are we doing?”
    Greg pointed to the ceiling, then lifted the first mannequin. “I’ve got these life-sized dolls rigged to come at the door. I took the liberty of drawing a bull’s-eye on each one of them. It will be sort of like target practice. You can each take a turn trying to take all four of them out before they can make it through the door.” He grinned at Micah. “Want to play?”
    Micah shrugged. There was no harm in having a bit of fun. And it wouldn’t prove a thing if King saw firsthand how well Micah could shoot. “Sure, I’m in.”
    “When it happened for real, four men were coming down a flight of