Brock (2 page)

“What time is he supposed to meet her?
I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on, and a lot more….” Her mom looked at the doorway, and Rayne closed her eyes. “He’s here now.”

Her mom nodded.
“He wanted to talk to you first. He knows about Em being deaf. She can use sign language, but I’m not sure if he can read it or not. I forgot to ask him when I talked to him. I was really upset at that man, the one that hurt her. She was so upset that I had to have someone take her home. I just hope she doesn’t quit. She works really hard.”

Rayne got up and went to the sink.
She was washing up when her mom spoke again. When she turned, her mom looked like she was on the verge of crying again.

“You can’t fire her
, honey. I don’t think she has any place else to go. And even Peter doesn’t want you to do that. We both really like her.” She stood up and hugged her. “She’s a good, hard worker, but this one man…she carries a notepad around and uses it to talk to other people. I’ve never had any other issues but with that ugly man who thinks she should be locked away.” Rayne wondered what the man would do if Neal shifted in front of him or she zapped him. Probably piss himself.

“Let me talk to Alistair.
After that, we’ll move on from there. But don’t worry about the prick. If he gives me too much trouble, I’ll have one of the men eat him for dinner. It might be better than what I want to do to him. And do me a favor, please have her come here for today. I want to get to know her and see if we can work something out with her. Can you have…well not Peter, I guess, but someone bring her here?”

“Yes, I can have
Jeff bring her. I think he’s sort of sweet on her anyway.” Rayne nodded, and her mom left. Alistair came in just as she was pulling out three more orders to fill. She was so glad that she had Ally around to keep her straight and busy. The woman was a miracle in organizing her.

“You have to make sure your employees don’t go around knocking the shit out of customers. It could be bad for your business.”
She glared at him, and he laughed. “Is the girl all right? I hadn’t heard that she’d been injured, just that some asshole had jerked her around when she didn’t do what he wanted.”

“
Mom didn’t say, so I’m not sure. Jeff is going to bring her over here so that you can talk to her after we talk. You want what I have now, or do you want to wait? Mom gave me some.” He nodded and sat at her desk. “The girl’s name is Em Cole, and she’s a deaf mute. I’m not sure if that’s the PC way of saying it, but I’m not in the mood right now to pretty things up. Want to tell me why you didn’t tell me yesterday?”

“You sounded tired
, and I figured your mom would give you the information. Besides, what could you have done last night at ten o’clock?” She huffed at him, and he smiled. “Neal said your sales were through the roof. How was it really? Is the Pretty Flower going to be the next big thing in floral arrangements?” She flushed and ignored his question about the next big thing. She’d be happy if she was the next little thing.

“We never stopped.
I’m so glad he talked me into taking that extra inventory or we would have been standing around with our thumbs up our ass at around noon. Saul brought us lunch, and we had him go back and grab up anything else that wasn’t nailed down from all three shops, and still only came home with empty containers. We sold it all.” She smiled when she thought of the success of their first outdoor show. “I think we might be able to hang on for another year if this keeps up.”

She still couldn’t believe she had two shops and a warehouse.
Every time one of the huge greenhouses she dealt with had extra inventory or a back haul, she and her crew scrambled to make room for whatever inventory they had. And just the day before yesterday, one of them had approached her and Neal about taking their end of year things for next to nothing. They were going to be overflowing with merchandise in a few days.

She sat down.
“The man grabbed her because she couldn’t hear him. Mom said she carries around a pad of paper to communicate, and she’s never had any issues before this. Why would someone grab another person they don’t know?”

“
I took a call from him this morning before I left the office. That man is a shit. He said he thought you shouldn’t have people like her working if she couldn’t do her job. He said that she’d embarrassed him by not listening to him. I explained to him that she was handicapped, but that just set him off more.” He handed her some notes. “He wants to sue you and your company. But I have a plan.”

“Of course you do. How much is this going to cost me?
Or do you think we can just kidnap him and bring him somewhere remote so you all can have a nice snack? I’ll provide the beer.” He laughed and acted like she’d wounded him. “Seriously, I can’t fire her, and I wouldn’t even if that were part of the plan. She doesn’t deserve what he did to her.”

“You’re right.
You don’t want to fire her. But I really do have a plan. I have this friend who is going to run an article on your hiring people to work that are having a rough time. She’s going to point out that you have several handicapped people working…why are you shaking your head? I’ve already spoken to several of your staff, and they are all for it. They seem to think you’re this goddess that others need to know about.”

“You did not speak to any of them.”
He nodded. “Damn it, Alistair, I do this because they need a helping hand, not to get more sales.”

“I know that
, and they do as well. Jeff? You said he’s coming here. How much did it cost you to renovate the van so he could drive it for you?” She flushed. “And that woman Debra, the one that is paralyzed from the waist down. When you hired her, you also bought her a wheelchair that she could move around in. What do you suppose other places would have done?”

“I’m not other places.”
He laughed at her. “I’m not saying I agree with it or even if I want you to run it, but what is this article going to prove? What’s it supposed to do other than make me out to be some sort of idiot?”

“No one thinks you’re an idiot
, love. And this article is to show others what we all already know. You’re a kind and loving woman who will do this for me so that I can tell my wife that you’re going to stay in business. She’s afraid if you close up she won’t have a job anymore.”

Rayne snorted.
“She won’t let me pay her, so technically she doesn’t have a job working for me. And whatever I should be paying her, she and your family spends twice that on flowers. I can’t imagine where on earth they’re putting them all. Every time I get something new in, they all rush here to be the first to get it. They’ve even taken to showing up on truck days to see what comes off it.” She got up to pace, embarrassed and pleased that they liked her shop so much. “This article is going to bring in every crackpot in the whole town to see the freak show they think I have working here. That might be good for what’s going on now, but I don’t need a fucking circus around here when I’m trying to work.”

“Some will
come out to see, yes, but not most of them. You might even get an influx of applicants, too, but that wouldn’t be so bad, would it? I know you’re planning to expand next summer, so that could help you as well.” She nodded at him. “Not to mention that if you and Neal ever take a honeymoon, you won’t have to worry about the shops so much if you have enough people working here.”

A woman knocked on the door jamb
, and both she and Alistair stood up. Christ, her mom wasn’t kidding about her being lovely. She looked like what Rayne had thought an Emma would look like. She was blonde with blue eyes, delicate and soft looking. She moved into the room without taking Alistair’s hand, pulled out her notepad, and handed her the top sheet. Rayne looked at it, then at the girl, and handed it back to her.

“No, I
won’t accept your resignation. And I have no intentions of firing you.” She started to write again, and Rayne touched her arm. The connection was immediate.
“You can speak to me this way if you’d like and I’ll tell him. His name is Alistair Golden, and he’s my attorney, so you can say whatever you want to say around him and it won’t go any further. But you won’t quit working for me. That bastard wins if you do, and I so don’t want that to happen.”

“He will take everything from
you. Men like him only do things like this because they are cheaters and liars. That man will leave you alone if he doesn’t see me anymore. I won’t let that happen just because I’m deformed.”
She looked at Alistair.
“He will agree with you despite the fact that he’s an attorney. Ask him.”

“She thinks that if she quits that everything will just go away.
She wants me to accept her resignation so that the man who grabbed her will give up.” Alistair was shaking his head before she finished. For now Rayne was going to ignore the deformed remark and have a talk with her later about it. “Em and I can speak using a link. You ask her and I’ll relay the questions and what she says. But I won’t allow her to quit.”

“Neither will I.” She told
Em what he had said. “Ask her if I may ask her a few questions about yesterday. Tell her that I need as much information as she can remember, as well as what she thought the man said to her. Did he hurt her? And if so, does she need medical attention? I would also like to talk to her about the article and see if she would mind being interviewed.”

She relayed the questions to
Em and told her about the newspaper article. Em stared at Alistair, then at her before answering. She could already see that she wasn’t going to do it. She could almost feel the girl’s fear.

“I
can’t help you with that. If you make me, I’ll have to leave here.”
Em looked around the room, and Rayne would bet that she took everything in and knew where everything was, including the windows and exits.
“I can’t let anyone from my family find me. They would drag me home again to be their servant. I’m not going back.”
There was a great deal of hatred in her voice, and she wasn’t surprised to feel her fear double. Whoever her family was, they hadn’t left a warm and fuzzy feeling in their daughter. Rayne would bet that her handicap as well as the scarring had something to do with them. But she’d never pry beyond talking to her unless it became an issue later.

“
As long as you work for me no one will force you into doing anything you don’t want to. And if anyone tries, you come to me. We protect those that work for us.”
The woman nodded, but Rayne had a feeling that she didn’t believe her. She didn’t blame her; she wasn’t one to trust quickly either.

Em and Alistair
sat at her work table, and Rayne sat at her workstation. She could fill pots while helping Alistair relay questions and answers. A couple of times she wanted to find the man who had hurt Em and knock the shit out of him, but she knew that she’d just make it harder on Alistair and Neal if they had to bail her out of jail.

Alistair took pictures of the bruising on her arm as well as the scratches she had.
Her hand was also bruised, and he took pictures of that as well. Before he left, Alistair told her that he wanted to find the slimy bastard and hurt him a few times. She offered to bring the beer again, and he told her he’d let her know. The man was going to find himself in a world of hurt now, she figured.

Chapter 2

Brock
read the article in the paper three times and laughed harder each time. The women he’d been kidnapped by had actually told the police that a giant tiger had tried to rape them. He laughed out loud when he got to the part where the person who had written the article had put his own slant on the story. He thought that the women were known to be drug addicts and that most of their police records were for robbery and solicitation. He had gone on to say that while he had covered the story, there were no other sightings of a tiger in the area, and none had escaped from any zoos or wildlife preserves within the five-state area. He had made it sound as if he hadn’t really expected to, either.

“Did you see this?” Ryland tossed the same paper on his desk in front of him
as soon as he entered his office. “I don’t suppose if I were to check with any of the rest of the family they’d know anything about it either.”

“It was me.”
His brother sat down and glared. “Don’t get your underpants in a twist, Ryland. Even though I was the tiger, I wasn’t the bad guy. What the article doesn’t tell you and I will is that they drugged me with a date rape drug and took me to their lair—for lack of a better term—and decided to have sex with me, hoping I would get one of them pregnant. And before you ask, no, they didn’t know who I was. They said I have a nice truck that looked expensive.”

“But you shifted in front of them.”
He nodded. “What the fuck for? What if they’d had a camera or, Christ, if they were videotaping the whole thing?”

“I would have heard it and
, to be honest with you, I think together they couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag even if it were wet. Not to mention since they were both naked, it would have been really hard for me not to see a camera they might have had pointed at me. Their names are Millie and Margaret Caldwell. I believe if you think about it, their names will ring a bell. If not, then do a search on them. You’ll be amazed at what the two of them have tried since they learned to swindle people. I think they’ve both been to jail more times than I’ve been wasted.”

His brother leaned back in the chair.
“I don’t like this, but the article makes them sound like a couple of crack heads, so I’m willing to let it go. But this thing with the building downtown, what have you been able to find out? Other than, of course, that the blood was pigs.”

“The prints on the cans matched the DNA on the rim
, so I’ve run them and figured out who they are. They have a record for vandalism but little else, other than the father has a great deal of drunken and disorderly. I’m running some things now, and I think maybe the father worked for us a few years back and caused us some problems until we had to get rid of him before someone got hurt. He might be our scumbag in this case, or so they think. But I want to look deeper before I give you that. It sounds to me like a case of kids thinking they might be helping out poor old dad.” Ryland asked their names. “Owens, Harvey Owens that worked for the construction company that we bought up and sold out in chunks. Harvey has two sons, Harvey Jr. and Donny. The older goes by Junior. He and Donny are nineteen and seventeen respectively, but the older has been a great deal of trouble since their dad was fired. Mostly more of the shit they did to us, but with overpasses and trains. Junior is going to be facing some hard times if he’s arrested again. Donny, I don’t know. I think he might be bullied into what happened. I’ve talked to his teacher at the high school. She’s been trying her best to get him to apply for good colleges, but the father and older brother aren’t helping her.”

“
So he’s smart and the other members of his family aren’t. I can see where the kid might be having problems, but they did trash our building. What’s the plan with them?” Brock tossed him a file and waited while he looked it over. “You have pictures of them doing this?”

“
Video, too, but it’s just more of what you see there in front of you. I had set up the camera system about a month ago because I’d gotten a good deal on it and wanted to try it out there. It was an empty building not set for any sort of reconstruction for a while, and after finding out the system worked, I left it there so I’d know where it was if and when I needed it. I guess I sort of forgot about it until one of the cops asked if we might have the place on any type of alarm system.” He handed him another file. “I think we could benefit from purchasing more like it and putting them in the other buildings we have that are empty. Maybe just the entrance and exits, but it would pay for itself if anything like this happened again.”

Ryland handed him back both folder
s. “Do it. And press charges against the older boy, but not the younger. We don’t see him in these. Maybe we’ll find out he has some redeeming qualities and we can get him to work by cleaning up his mess. Let me know what you figure out with their dad. Maybe the apple doesn’t fall all that far from the tree.”

Brock asked him about the thing with Rayne.
“I heard that Alistair had to go down and straighten out a few things with one of her customers. And there was a girl involved that got hurt. Anything you want me to get involved in?”

“
I don’t know, but I’d ask Alistair. The girl’s name is Em Cole, and she works at Two but seems to be fine. The man was going to press charges last I heard because the girl hit him between the eyes when he grabbed her. I think Alistair is working on an angle to get that to go away. Apparently this guy is a known hothead, and has done stupid shit like this before.”

Brock asked him if he thought that the plant shops could use some of the cameras as well.
He laughed when Ryland glared at him. He and Rayne had been going around and around since she’d become a member of the family, and Brock loved to poke the bear, either one of them, every chance he got.

He placed an order for the cameras and made a few more calls to find out what he could on Harvey
Owens. It was noon when he realized that he’d skipped breakfast and was now starving. He decided to make a trip out to see Rayne and see if he could convince her to get some cameras too. He might even tell her that Ryland thought it was a dumb idea just to get her to do it.

A truck was pulling in as he got there.
He wondered if it was one of the ones she’d made a deal on and was happy for her and Neal. They were going to make this work, and he’d never been prouder of them both. As he pulled up on the other side of the large semi, he got out when the driver did.

“This place ain’t as easy to find as I was told.
‘Course there was a shit ton of traffic too.” Brock took an immediate and profound dislike for the guy and felt his cat stir along his skin. “You might want to tell the little woman that when she says to get off the exit, she should say that it’s a mile and a quarter, not a little over a mile.”

“A mile and a quarter is a little over a mile.”
He asked the man for paperwork, and after telling Brock he didn’t have any, the man asked Brock if he was there to help unload. “No. And you’re not unloading without paperwork.” The man took a stance that his cat and his beast didn’t care for. Both of them snarled at him to be released.

“Now see here. I got me a load to get rid of
, and she will by God take it.” Brock stood very still and waited on the man to make another move with the ball bat that suddenly appeared in his hand. He felt Neal coming toward him and turned just as he reached him.

“He claims he has a load
, yet he doesn’t have any paperwork. When I asked him for it, he got a tad pissy with me.” Neal looked at the driver, then back at Brock. “Do we take it?”

“Not without paperwork
, we don’t.” The man advanced toward them just as Rayne came out of the back end of the shop. She was not looking all that happy either.

“You might want to turn this rig around because whatever you’re hauling
, I’m not taking.” The driver looked at her and then at them. “And looking to them isn’t going to get you any help either. I run the show here, and if you have any doubts about that, I’ll use that bat for more than just pounding your head in. I’ll make sure I shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“You’re supposed to take all the loads that are dropped here.
I’m dropping this load if I have to leave the trailer and come back for it later. I’m not backhauling when someone from your outfit said they’d take it off my hands.” Rayne walked within a few inches of the man, and he took a step back. Brock saw her cat shimmer along her skin, and he was sure that the man had as well.

Instead of saying
anything to the man, she pulled out her cell phone and watched him. Brock would not fuck with Rayne on a good day, and this didn’t look to him like it was one. When she turned her back on the driver, he reached for her the exact moment that Rayne put her hand out. When he touched her, he fell to the ground twitching. Neither he nor Neal went to the man.

“Hello, this is Rayne Golden
, and I have…. Yes, that’s true. Yes, I’m sure, but…. No. And, hell no.” She turned to look at Neal and him. “And what did this man look like that you…? Oh, I see…and when was this again?”

She told the person to wait and went to the back of the trailer and read off the seal numbers on it
, then all the other numbers on the back. The trailer number was first, then the license plate. Then she went to the front of the rig and flipped the man over and took out his wallet.

“It says here his name is Doug P. Hamilton and he’s from Iowa.
And, yes, before you ask me again, he did claim he had no paperwork.” There was a long pause, and then she turned to him. “Call the police for me, would you, Brock? And Neal? I would like it if you were to go and get some tie-down rope and tie our man up while we wait.”

Brock pulled out his phone and made the call.
He could see that Rayne was upset and didn’t want to make her more so. As she put her own cell phone away, she helped Neal tie the man up who was just coming around.

“What going on
, love?” Neal held her in his arms. “Did he steal this load? Or is it something else?”

“He stole it from the distributor three days ago. It was sitting on a lot attached to another truck
, and he took it and killed the man that was driving the rig. They have it on tape at the rest stop. There’s a manhunt out for him as we speak.” She looked up at him. “He was bringing it here to hide it for a few days. Then if no one caught him, he was going to take it on to somewhere else to sell it off. The woman I spoke to said that there has been a bulletin out on the trailer since it was taken, and she had me verify all the numbers. When the police get here, we’re supposed to have them call her back and she’ll walk them through opening the seal and seeing if what’s supposed to be in it is actually there.”

When the police arrived,
Jake Rider, Brock’s drinking buddy, had him hold the phone while he cut the seal. The trailer was loaded, and he could see even from where he was standing on the ground that it wasn’t plants or dirt. He saw the car before he saw anything else.

“It
’s two cars, and I’d say that one of them is worth more than I make in two or so years.” Jake laughed as he continued speaking to the dispatcher. “Yes, ma’am, I’d think that was about right. The man who first found him is Brock Golden. Want I should put this driver up for you until you can get the proper paperwork down here to me? Yes, ma’am, I can do that too. It would be my pleasure, actually, to help out.” He looked at Brock.

“Are you busting up car thefts now
, Jake, or does that get in the way with your flirting with women over the phone?”

Jake flushed. “She said that the owner of these here cars is giving a reward to the person who finds them.
I told her that would be you since you stopped him from dropping and running off until the heat was off. She said that she’d seen this before and was glad that someone had the sense not to take a load without paperwork. She sure was happy to get these back for him. Then there is the little matter of him killing the driver. She said the police in Iowa are gonna be really happy like to have him back. They have a nice little cell just waiting for him.”

Brock helped Jake load the man into the
cruiser and made sure he hit his head a few times in the process. He could have been gentler, but what fun would there be in that? Besides, he was pretty sure that Jake had a little party waiting for him back at the jail. He was forever getting flowers for his pretty wife, and Rayne gave him a good frequent buyer discount.

~~~

Em watched the lot. As soon as the police had shown up, she’d found herself a hole to hide in and stayed there. She was still waiting for the police to leave when a shadow fell across her. She turned slightly to see a customer moving by her slowly and speaking to the woman next to her.

She could read lips but didn’t much care for it.
Most of the time, people would look away from her and she’d only get a portion of what they were saying. The notepad worked best here, and people didn’t seem to mind her writing her answers to their questions, but there were a few that didn’t have the patience to wait for her and would walk away. If the person had been mean to anyone else in the shop, she’d take a lot longer to write and smiled when they walked away. She looked back at the lot when the customer moved on.

The man she’d met earlier was standing next to another man who looked like he could almost be his twin. But this man was taller than Neal and much broader.
He looked as if he worked out a great deal and probably took some sort of drugs to help him look like one of those big weightlifters. But for whatever reason she didn’t think so. She would also bet that he didn’t work out at one of those fancy gyms like she’d seen on television either, but got his muscles from hard work and sweat.