Justice for None: Texas Justice Book #1 Read Online Free Page B

month before taxes. Not enough to live on, but way more than the wound he had received deserved. But the department had been happy to get rid of him at any price. And he couldn’t blame them. One way or another, his career in the Homicide Division had been over. Thanks to the Sutton brothers.
    Val took shaving cream and a razor out of the medicine cabinet, lathered up and started scraping away the stubble, but his mind stayed stuck on the Suttons; Lamar and Lemuel.
    Victoria’s comment at breakfast, comparing Randall Rusk to the Sutton brothers, had stirred the memories up again. No, that was a lie. The truth was that Lamar and Lemuel were always with him, lurking in the shadows. They had been dead for four years and he still thought about them almost every day - not of the shootout, he avoided that memory at all cost - but of the aftermath. That wasn’t surprising, considering that Lamar and Lemuel’s deaths had ended his career on the police force and almost landed him in the morgue right beside them. And if the talking heads on the TV news had had their way, Valentine would have ended up in a prison cell.
    The violent deaths of Lamar and Lemuel and the crippling of their sixteen year old sister, Abby, had made a big splash in the national news thanks to a shaky smart-phone video of Val kicking in the Suttons’ front door followed moments later by a barrage of gunfire. When Valentine had staggered out of the house fifteen minutes later, bleeding and only half alive, five people lay wounded or dead in the rooms behind him. But Val hadn’t been responsible for all that destruction. He hadn’t been the one who shot and crippled Abby Sutton. No matter what the news agencies said about ‘crossfire’ and ‘stray’ bullets, he knew it for a fact. He had watched the teenage girl go down, shot in the back by someone outside the death house. Someone Val had never seen.
    But no one had believed Val. Not even Victoria, though she pretended that she did. Sometimes he had a hard time believing it himself.
    If only the doctors had been able to remove the bullet from Abby’s spine to run a ballistic comparison to Valentine’s service weapon, but the surgery had been deemed too risky. Abby would have to live with a hunk of lead embedded in her back and Val would have to live with the label of a kill-crazy cop.
    ‘Vicious Valentine’ was the tag some jackass reporter had given him. And the name had stuck. The reporter had accused Val of cold-bloodedly executing the Sutton boys, a story that the citizens of Dallas were all too willing to believe. And so were Val’s bosses downtown.
    An Internal Affair’s lieutenant with eyes like a stuffed fish had given Val a choice: retire or they’d charge him with a pair of homicides. And the charges would have stuck. Val would have gone to prison for a very long time. But he felt no remorse. Some things had to be done. A barrier had to be constructed between the innocent and the darkness and sometimes that meant that the rules didn’t apply; that there were no rules. But he hadn’t tried to explain that to the lieutenant. He had just tossed his badge and gun on the man’s desk and walked out without a word. Twenty-one years of his life gone, but at that moment he hadn’t given a damn. He was being ripped apart by the media, his career was DOA and he was burned out. Too much death, too much time in the black, and it wasn’t just the Suttons. Altogether, Val had worked seventy-three homicides. And killed seven men in the line of duty.
    Seven…
    The number stuck in his head as he finished shaving. Not that he had any regrets. All seven had gotten exactly what they’d been looking for. And, if they’d been better shots, Val would have been the one lying inside a chalk outline. But that’s where the real issue lay and he knew it: he didn’t care. Not about them. Not even a little bit. What did that say about him? Other than the fact that he was a damned good shot?
    Vicious