Crazy in Love by Lani Diane Rich Read Free Book Online

the machine, his brain getting to work on sorting out the stuff that didn’t make sense. For one, why had Rhonda called him? If she knew that Chase was guilty of something, didn’t it make sense to go straight to the police? Why call a disgraced—and prematurely retired—rookie cop? Even if he was still on the force, he’d be little more than a grunt with the ability to ticket people for speeding and indecent exposure. He was small potatoes any way you sliced it, so it made no sense for Rhonda to be beating down his door.
    Unless maybe she was implicated. Maybe Chase had somehow gotten her to break the law without her realizing what she was doing. Jake knew precious little about Rhonda Bacon, but in the months following his termination from the Scheintown Police Department, he ’d done some digging on everyone connected with Chase. From what he’d gathered about Rhonda, she was quiet and easily intimidated, and Chase was just the kind of asshole to use her as a human shield should the circumstance require it.
    Jake put the beer down on the coffee table and rubbed his hands over his eyes. He could feel the build happening, the energy pooling under his feet. This was it. This was his chance. He could jump on it, try to take Chase down, and finally end this thing. It wouldn ’t bring his dad back. It wouldn’t get him his job back. It wouldn’t even make him feel better about the night he followed Elaine Placie, her rhinestone flask and her killer legs, out to the parking lot at the police station while that laptop disappeared.
    But it would feel really, really good.
    On the other hand, this was also an opportunity to heed the plaintive advice of Mercy, his three other sisters, and his mom, and just move on. Grow up. Pass Go. Collect $200. This was what his oldest sister Liv liked to call “a defining moment”, a moment in which you have a choice, and you can either choose the path that leads to growth and enlightenment, or you can continue fucking everything up just like always.
    Liv would be disappointed, but he wasn ’t that interested in growth and enlightenment. He was more interested in finding that laptop, which was impossible. It had surely been wiped clean and either tossed or sold. But that was the beauty of fantasy, no reality required, and in his, he would bring that laptop straight to Gerard Levy, dump it on his desk, and let the justice system take care of Gordon Chase. Then the town would throw a big parade, give him the key to the city, and beg him to come back to work. With a raise.
    And as long as he was fantasizing, he wanted Elaine Placie back, too. Not in the sexy con-artist way she’d used to tank his career, but rather in the humble, remorseful, begging-for-forgiveness way. Jake leaned back and closed his eyes, picturing her in an orange jumpsuit, blond hair scraggly, wrists manacled, mascara smudged and running, as she begged the judge not to blame Jake.
    “ It’s not his fault,” she’d say. “Do you see these legs? He was only human, Judge. And I’m so, so, so”—here, she’d turn her eyes, welling with tears, to Jake—“so sorry. I was wrong. And naughty. Very, very naughty.”
    That, of course, wasn ’t going to happen, either. Less than a week after Jake had traded his career for silky legs and a rhinestone flask, Elaine Placie had cleaned out her apartment and conveniently disappeared. Jake had looked for her for a while with some fantasy of her testimony helping to take Chase down, but the trail had gone cold before he could find her. His best guess was that she was out there somewhere, living under an assumed identity and sleeping on a mattress stuffed full with cash courtesy of Gordon Chase. The assumed identity seemed like overkill to Jake, but if she was the kind of girl who’d distract a cop on watch for money, who knew what else she had done? And an assumed identity was the only way to explain how there’d been absolutely no blip on any of the radars he’d set up