Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

He’d sent Donita into the other room. Away from this, before his father came home.

Levi’s dark looks and athletic prowess meant he never had to try very hard to be popular. It didn’t hurt that his father was a state senator. Of course, that job paid shit wages in Alaska, but his dad also ran successful car dealerships in Juneau and Anchorage – and spent much of that money on bail and attorney fees for his only son.

Levi’s superman curl had gotten him dates with every single cheerleader on the squad. He’d started for the varsity basketball team since he’d been a sophomore, driven a new Mustang from his dad’s inventory every year, and never had to sling pizza dough or drop French fries like the other guys he knew. With good looks and a healthy allowance, he’d never really had to be particularly nice to anyone.

Oxycontin found him when he was nineteen after a knee injury heli-skiing with friends behind Mount Juneau. He’d met Donita when she was picking up her mom from rehab. She wasn’t like the other girls. He actually had to put in effort with her. She didn’t see his superman curl or his uncanny ability to shoot three-pointers all day long. Unlike everyone else, she saw him for the junkie he was. But she also saw promise.

He pushed away from the desk, trying to figure out what he had to do.

The folder had been open when he came in. He closed it and slid it back into the lap drawer, where he thought it belonged. It was going to be up to him to take care of this. His father wouldn’t do it, but the men he worked with might. And they would be brutal.

His stomach did flips. For the first time in months he craved a hit. Something to dull the fireworks flashing in his brain. Something to help him relax.

But Donita was on the other side of the door. No. She deserved better than that.

He leaned forward, rubbing his eyes with the heels of both hands.

“Oh, Dad,” he whispered, lip quivering, wanting to spit. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Chapter 16

Van Tyler slipped on a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses to protect his baby blues against the glare coming off the Gastineau Channel. The tortoise-shell frames matched his dark hair, which was important, especially with Ensley in the car.

He turned right off Tenth Street onto Egan Drive, heading northwest toward the airport.

“We’re supposed to meet in three hours,” he said, loosening his tie, glancing sideways at his leggy assistant. He hoped he looked cool, nonchalant. He was a damned good lawyer, but not much of a playboy. In truth, long hours at the US Attorney’s office kept him so underwater as far as a social life was concerned that he hadn’t been on a date for over six months. He would never have dreamed Ensley Rogers would be interested in him at all. They were both single, so there was no problem there, but he was also her boss – and that was definitely a problem. Grant Henry, the US Attorney, took a dim view of workplace romance. He’d made it clear from the day he was appointed that any dalliance by one of his assistants with administrative staff would be viewed as sexual harassment. It made no difference to him if the staffer said he or she was a willing participant in the affair. They could get another job and date all the assistant US attorneys they wished, but so long as they were employed by the Department of Justice, subordinates could not give consent to their bosses. It was a smart rule, one that Tyler himself would likely have enacted had he gotten the nod for US Attorney – but those legs… those tight wool sweaters… Ensley Rogers didn’t just say yes, she screamed it.

She’d been the one to bring up the fifty-mile rule. An FBI agent had once flirtingly told her that the normal rules did not apply when you were more than fifty miles away from your house. His ring, he said, could stay in the nightstand drawer until the end of the assignment. That agent had taken up cigars, which his wife hated, saying he would blame the odor on other agents when he returned home.

“You’re not wearing a ring,” said Ensley, who was eleven years Tyler’s junior at somewhere around twenty-six. “And I’m not trying to get you to take up cigars. I’m just saying the US Attorney and his stupid rules are five hundred miles away. What we do on our own time is none of his business, and anyway, no one here cares if I sneak into your room at night.”

She was a GS 7, knocking down somewhere around thirty-eight grand a year. Maybe she wanted to marry a lawyer. Or maybe she just liked him. Ensley was a solid nine on the Richter scale of smoking-hot women, but it’s not like he was an ugly bastard. He was reasonably fit. Ambitious enough that he’d probably be criminal chief if he won this trial. So what if she just wanted to marry a lawyer – so long as he was that lawyer, it seemed like a pretty good deal for both of them.

Given such rock-solid reasoning, Van Tyler had crumbled like cheap concrete, throwing caution and his career to the winds. It was heady stuff hanging out with a younger woman. He liked it, and did everything in his power to keep it rolling, going so far as to confide far too much about things that should have remained confidential, and even bringing her along for a meeting with a confidential source. He should have brought Anthony Hale with him, the case agent from the DEA, but Ensley’s legs won out. Tyler decided not to tell Hale about the meeting until it was about to go down.

Ensley checked her Fitbit. “Three hours, huh?”

“Yeah,” Tyler replied, contemplating the bombshell this informant would throw into the