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legs.’
    Clay closed his eyes and blindly searched a drawer for his bottle of painkillers. He’d nearly had a heart attack when he’d seen Alyssa leaning against her car, where his much more experienced partner, Nicki, should have been.
    Except Nicki was on vacation at the beach an hour away and had not answered her phone all day yesterday.
    ‘Yes, I did mind,’ he said. ‘I was going to go it alone, but you were already there, waiting for him. What were you thinking, showing up like that?’
    ‘That you needed help,’ Alyssa said quietly. ‘That the little boy needed help. You had one chance to plant that device. If you hadn’t, where would that little boy be now?’
    ‘Probably halfway to Mexico,’ Clay admitted.
    He’d been hired by a woman desperate to find her son. Her estranged husband, a dangerous foreign national, had grabbed the boy and the cops hadn’t been able to find either of them. Clay had been able to draw the husband out with a message from the wife, knowing the man wouldn’t risk bringing the child.
    He’d wanted Nicki to pretend to have car trouble, distracting the husband with her cleavage while Clay planted the tracking device, hoping the husband would lead them to the boy. Alyssa had done the distracting instead while Clay had done his job, and now the boy was safe with his mother. The husband was in jail, awaiting arraignment on a whole laundry list of charges.
    It had been risky. But that’s why desperate people hired Clay and Nicki.
    Nicki was also a former cop – and Clay’s first patrol partner. She’d left DCPD years after Clay had started his agency, right about the time Clay’s old PI partner had married and moved to Chicago. Clay and Nicki now shared the agency and a mission. They helped desperate people when the cops couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
    Sometimes that meant breaking a few rules. They were good with that.
    Nicki had been dependable, but Clay had been fixing a lot of her mistakes lately. She’d been preoccupied. Moody. He hoped she was using this vacation to work through whatever shit that was messing with her mind.
    ‘We saved the day,’ Alyssa said. ‘I did a good job.’
    ‘You did. But you could have been killed. Promise me you won’t do that again.’
    ‘Promise to train me.’ She lifted a brow. ‘And I won’t do it again until I am.’
    Clay ground his teeth. ‘I’ll think about it.’ He resumed his search for the painkillers.
    ‘Left bottom drawer,’ Alyssa said. ‘I reorganized your desk.’
    He blinked into the drawer. So she had. ‘Wow. Thank you.’
    She inclined her head regally. ‘You are welcome. So, back to Evan?’
    ‘Yeah. Evan.’ Nicki had asked him to keep an eye on her clients while she was away, but he’d gotten wind that the child’s father was about to bolt hours after Evan had first missed a check-in. The search for the boy took priority. Now, Evan was two days more missing than before. ‘Something’s wrong.’
    ‘Should we assume the crazy-assed stalker bitch from hell found him?’
    ‘Shit.’ Clay shook out his last three tablets. Seemed like he’d just bought that bottle. Probably because he had. ‘I don’t want to, but we have to now.’
    ‘You’re gonna eat a hole in your stomach,’ Alyssa chided mildly.
    He ignored her, chasing the pills down with cold coffee. ‘Margo couldn’t have found him if he’d followed Nicki’s instructions. He must have gone back.’
    Alyssa sighed. ‘I thought Evan was smarter than that.’
    ‘He has kids, and that always makes people stupid. He probably wanted to see them one more time before he became Ted Gamble.’
    ‘So what are you gonna do?’
    ‘Go look for him. If he’s dead, we need to report Margo. If he’s changed his mind, we need to recover all of his new ID.’ He checked his watch. It was a five-hour drive to southern Virginia with traffic. ‘I can be in Newport News by mid-afternoon.’
    ‘I’ll get the name of the hotel Nicki used when she went down