Page 5 of Legends: Easton (Legends of Fire Creek #3)

Bailee pulled the laces into a tight bow, securing the high-end running shoes.

She stood, wincing at the creaky floor that seemed louder than usual in the quiet house.

She stilled, listening intently, but she shouldn’t have worried.

Gran slept like the dead, and nothing short of a tornado ripping through the house would wake her.

Bailee wished she could be so fortunate.

She’d never been a sound sleeper, and her time undercover made her too jumpy to slumber more than a couple of hours at a time.

She couldn’t count how many times she’d cleaned her house from top to bottom in an effort to tire herself out.

Reading or watching a streaming service didn’t help. The only thing that did was a run.

Running in the middle of the night wasn’t advisable, but once she started, she’d been hooked.

After her parents caught her sneaking back into the house at three in the morning one night, they’d talked her into using the treadmill they kept in a spare room of the house.

It didn’t give her the same high as running in the open air, but to ease her parents’ worries for her safety, she’d agreed.

Gran would lecture her as soon as she figured out Bailee snuck out, but she likely wouldn’t insist that her granddaughter stop.

Fire Creek wasn’t without its share of crime, but it was safer than running alone at night in Louisville or Gainesville, where her parents lived.

Bailee also had Roxy to accompany her. She painted an imposing figure at night should anyone try to attack her.

That is, until an attacker realized Roxy was an oversized marshmallow.

Bailee crept down the hall past the open door to Darby Anne’s room. The light snores coming from inside assured her that Gran was sound asleep. The tip tap of Roxy’s nails against the hardwood reminded her to take the dog to a groomer sooner rather than later.

She disabled the house alarm long enough for her and Roxy to slip out the back room.

The high-end alarm system was overkill for the small house situated in a quiet subdivision, but not long after she started with Louisville PD, Bailee had insisted on it for Gran’s house and for her parents’ home.

Not only did it protect them, but it gave Bailee access to watch over them through a secure video feed.

It made living far away a bit more bearable.

Using her cell phone to reengage the alarm, Bailee pocketed the device in her spandex leggings and proceeded to warm up her limbs. Roxy took the opportunity to sniff various spots in the backyard before squatting over one to relieve herself.

The clock on her smart watch read twenty-three minutes after midnight when her foot first hit the pavement in front of Gran’s house.

She started at a leisurely pace to allow herself time to grow accustomed to the terrain.

Gradually, she increased her pace until she hit the stride that would last for a few miles without overextending her endurance.

Roxy kept up with her, trotting at her side, ever the silent companion.

The temperature was still in the eighties as was typical for an Alabama summer, but with the sun down, the humidity wasn’t as thick, allowing her to run comfortably. The houses were shrouded in shadows with only the occasional porch light shining through the dark.

Bailee preferred to run without earbuds muting her awareness of her surroundings.

Though she wasn’t afraid to run late at night, she took precautions.

Her ankle holster held a .380 caliber pistol, and tucked into the pocket at the waistband of her leggings was a Swiss army knife.

The weapons paired with her combat training as an officer made her a tougher target to take down.

Cicadas chirped a loud song, and a lone owl hooted from a tree as she and Roxy ran by.

Bailee felt the stress ease from her body as she pushed herself harder and harder.

Her muscles flexed with exertion. Her breathing came in heavy pants.

Sweat glistened on her skin, but still she ran, traversing a winding path through the subdivision.

As she went about her days, she’d learned to push thoughts of the last year from her mind.

On her runs, she allowed her mind to wander, permitted herself to remember.

The department shrink told her that would be the best way to deal with her PTSS before it developed into a full-blown disorder.

So she indulged in the dark thoughts. Her anger fueled her strides as she gave her emotions free rein.

Bailee was a rookie detective, assigned to a team of five counting her.

Her four colleagues were males who had been with the LPD longer than she had.

She reported for her first day knowing she had a lot to prove, and she hadn’t been wrong.

The team leader, also her new partner, had pulled her to the side, away from the others, to give her a pitch that felt more like a threat and less like a real talk about life as a detective.

Jimmy fixed her with a hard stare. “You don’t belong here.

The Chief seems to think that you earned a spot on our team, but we both know better.

You’re here to satisfy a need to diversify our department with a little female blood, but you have no place here.

I give you one week, maybe two if you’re stubborn like I think you may be.

After that, you’ll run screaming to be placed back on patrol.

What the Chief hasn’t told you is that if you can’t hack it with us, you’re through at the LPD.

I’ll look forward to watching you crash and burn. ”

In other circumstances, Bailee would have viewed the warning as a challenge.

If she’d been a bit more na?ve, she would have easily believed that Jimmy was testing her.

He wanted to see if she had what it took to withstand anything the team threw at her.

But she saw the calculated gleam in Jimmy’s dark, beady eyes. He meant what he said.

She chose to hold her tongue. Instead of telling him why he was wrong about her, she went about proving he underestimated her.

She didn’t go rogue, pursuing investigations on her own and against department protocol, but neither did she roll over while the team treated her more like a gopher than a competent detective.

Instead, when the team mocked her, she gave as good as she got.

When Jimmy tried to shut her out of investigations, she pursued her own hunches and brought him any evidence that would shape the case.

He took credit for most of her work in the early days, but she wasn’t worried.

She knew her time would come, and she could wait for that time.

That’s where her stubbornness came in handy.

Two weeks turned into a month. Then a month morphed into four. Closing cases became a competition, and soon Bailee’s partnership with Jimmy earned them the top rank. They were the dynamic duo.

When their caseload was light, Bailee turned to cold cases, searching for a new perspective.

They were able to close a few of those. The others never fully accepted her, but she was no longer considered a liability.

She wasn’t one of them, but she wasn’t an outsider either.

She wasn’t sure where she fit, but she didn’t care.

She was doing what she loved, what she was meant to do. She could overlook the rest.

One evening, while the other members of her team left for a night of drinking at the local cop bar, Bailee stayed behind to review a cold case.

It was a robbery/homicide that remained unsolved for five years, and she was engrossed in the details when Shantayle Barnes rushed into the precinct, hysterical and frightened.

The shift sergeant had asked her to speak with Shantayle. She was too panicked for Sarge to make sense of why she was there, and he thought a woman would have better luck calming her down.

Bailee didn’t bother being offended by Sarge’s assumption. She was too curious about the young girl. Judging her to be in her early twenties, Bailee noted her long braids, beautiful dark skin, and wide eyes. Her tall frame shook as if she was dealing with shock from some type of trauma.

After bringing her water and reassuring her that she was safe, Bailee was able to calm her enough to find out what was going on.

“He made me watch. He said it was my destiny, that I was a part of it now. I’m not. I don’t want to be. I can’t. But how am I supposed to forget what I saw? How do I get away from it? I don’t know what to do.”

The despair in Shantayle’s voice had hurt Bailee’s heart. She wasn’t usually so affected by a witness’ emotions, but the young girl touched something deep inside her that made Bailee want to help.

“I want to help you, Shantayle, but until you tell me exactly what’s going on, there’s little that I can do. If you’re in trouble, we can protect you, but you have to trust me enough to tell me what happened,” Bailee had coaxed, hoping to break through the girl’s hysteria to find out the truth.

“He killed Andre. They beat him until he couldn’t stand.

Then they shot him. Right in the middle of his head.

They made me watch. They wouldn’t let me look away.

It’s my fault. I knew Andre was betraying them, and I thought by telling them, they would make him go away.

I didn’t know they’d kill him. I swear I didn’t. ”

It took another hour to piece together the details of what Shantayle witnessed.

Andre was an enforcer with the Blood Disciples who apparently didn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.

Despite the fact that Shantayle was the granddaughter of BD leader B Diggs Barnes, Andre harassed her, hoping to hook up and secure his status within the gang.

To get him to leave her alone, Shantayle had gone to her grandfather to tell him how Andre was dipping into the family drug business by running a side hustle he hid from the gang.

Shantayle only wanted Andre to go away and leave her alone, and she figured if he was no longer in the gang, he had no reason to harass her.

Only B Diggs had a different idea of how to deal with Andre’s betrayal. With the help of Shantayle’s father, T-Loc Jones, B Diggs tortured Andre to get intel on his drug business. They also got him to admit how he harassed Shantayle.

They’d forced Shantayle to watch and see how her loyalty to the gang was rewarded. They insisted she was an accomplice in Andre’s punishment, which planted her firmly in the gang’s world of criminal activity.

They hadn’t counted on Shantayle’s resistance to gang life.

B Diggs had pimped her mother out to T-Loc to honor the man’s loyalty to the gang, and the result was Shantayle, who had no doubt that she faced a similar fate to her mother, a shell of a woman who was tied to a mean man and a life that was bound to kill her.

Bailee’s conversation with Shantayle resulted in the young girl becoming her confidential informant.

Shantayle agreed to help bring down the gang from the inside with the promise that once the LPD could close the case, they would help her go into hiding, to escape the life she was born into but wanted no part of.

Shantayle’s intel proved to be invaluable to the LPD.

Bailee and her team were able to hit the Blood Disciples hard, and somehow the young girl managed to stay under B Diggs’ radar.

The man never suspected her involvement with law enforcement until Shantayle uncovered something that got her killed and turned Bailee’s world upside down.

With the help of streetlamps and her eyes growing accustomed to the dark, Bailee was able to spot Gran’s house in the distance. She slowed her pace until she was walking to cool down from the intense run.

She crossed the street at an angle to head for the front yard. Her foot landed on an uneven portion of the pavement. The unexpected shift in the terrain had her shoe tilting to compensate, turning her ankle and wrecking her balance.

Sudden pain shot up Bailee’s leg, and she struggled to remain upright and not face-plant on the pavement. Since she was closer to the sidewalk than to the yard, she hobbled back and lowered herself to the concrete underneath a streetlamp.

Roxy crowded around her, sensing something was up, and Bailee impatiently pushed her to the side, murmuring words of reassurance to the pet.

Hissing through the pain, she studied her throbbing ankle.

Already, the joint showed signs of bruising and puffiness.

She didn’t think she’d broken anything, but the sprain was painful enough to make walking a challenge.

She waited for the pain to ease to a dull ache. Then she carefully stood, balancing her weight on her good ankle. The distance to Gran’s house wasn’t far, but when she tried stepping forward using her injured ankle, the pain was enough to make the distance feel more like miles instead of yards.

The sound of a motor shattered the quiet around her, and only a moment passed before headlights beamed in her direction.

She hadn’t expected to come across a motorist in the quiet neighborhood where the residents rolled up the sidewalks once the streetlights came on.

Hurrying to Gran’s house before the vehicle reached her wasn’t an option, but she didn’t like standing there, alone and obviously hurt, when a stranger drove by.

The vehicle was close, and she positioned herself behind Roxy to wait.

She hadn’t bothered to leash the dog because Roxy never ventured far from her side.

Now she wished she had a harness or a leash for Roxy to have something to hold on to and ensure the dog stayed between her and anyone who might stop.

She held her breath, one hand resting on Roxy’s fur and the other ready to reach for her knife. The vehicle drew close. Her heart started to pound when she realized it was slowing as it approached.

“Keep going,” she whispered to herself as she watched. “Keep going.”

Only it didn’t. She could see now that it was a Jeep, dark in color, and it slowed down enough to swing onto the driveway of the house next to Gran’s and stopped.