6

      “I need cash, Mother. I’m tapped out.”

      Ann Wade Pendleton pursed her lips as she stared at her wayward son. She’d received some shockingly bad news this morning and had abandoned the campaign trail for her ranch in Midland, Texas, seeking solitude to think about what she should do. Surprise, surprise, she’d discovered J.D. hiding out at the ranch, which boasted far more oil wells than cattle.

      Luckily, she’d kept her Secret Service contingent out of the house, so knowledge of her “dead” son’s presence, and the public relations disaster that would have resulted, had been narrowly averted.

      She could remember being glad, as her only son grew from a boy into a man, that he’d inherited his father’s good looks and athletic ability. J.D. was tall and blond and blue-eyed. He’d become a star football player. He’d also learned at the master’s knee how to charm a woman, how to lie to her and cheat on her and still smile at her without a hint of guilt.

      She almost didn’t recognize the gaunt figure with shaggy blond hair and sunken blue eyes who sat slumped in the studded black leather chair across from her. The charm was long gone. What she saw in her son’s eyes was desperation. And despair.

      She contemplated the road to J.D.’s downfall from her seat behind the ancient oak desk where her deceased husband had kept track of his dwindling fortune. Dwindling because Jonas David Pendleton, Jr. had gambled his oil money on every half-assed hare-brained investment scheme that came along. Another trait he’d passed along to his son.

      J.D. had married a woman with enough money to keep them living in luxury their entire lives and had frittered it away in a few years. It was her son’s enormous unpaid gambling debts that had gotten him into trouble with D’Amato, and given the mobster the leverage he needed to involve J.D. in the brokering of guns for heroin that had led to her son’s ruin.

      Ann Wade settled farther back into the oversize chair made of polished cow horns and covered in black-and-white spotted cowhide and asked her son, “What happened to the quarter million I gave you last fall?”

      “It’s expensive to stay invisible, Mother. Bribes. Payoffs. Blackmail. And the sons of bitches found me in Brazil anyway. I was lucky to escape with my life.”

      Ann Wade’s insides wrenched when her son reached toward the festering scab on his face where a bullet had gouged a path through his flesh. Fortunately, he dropped his hand before touching it.

      “Actually, getting shot is the least of my worries,” J.D. said. “I think Dante D’Amato has something far worse than a bullet to the brain in mind if he ever runs me down. Probably a bullet in each knee and two in my balls—for a start.”

      “Why don’t you give him back the heroin he told me you stole from him?” Ann Wade said.

      “He’s already made it clear it’s too late for that. Besides, I don’t have it anymore.”

      “What happened to it?”

      “I stowed it in a cargo container on the deck of a tramp steamer. The container went overboard during a hurricane. What are the chances?” he said ruefully.

      Ann Wade knew her son wasn’t as nonchalant as he was trying to appear. Besides the infected-looking scab across his left cheek, he had another bullet wound in his thigh that hadn’t yet healed. The hitmen D’Amato had sent to hunt him down had left her son wounded and shaken.

      She wasn’t so sanguine herself. She was practically a shoo-in to be selected as her party’s next presidential candidate. Everything could fall apart in a heartbeat if J.D.’s criminal activities, not to mention the fact that he’d faked his death and deserted his post in wartime, became known. God forbid the public learned that she’d paid her son an extortionate amount of cash to disappear.

      She could understand why some mothers ate their young.

      “This can’t continue, J.D. You have to come to some accommodation with D’Amato.”

      “You have twenty million dollars to spare?”

      “No, I don’t!” she snapped. “It’s bad enough that I’ve had to keep the Texas attorney general off D’Amato’s back since that mobster found out you’re still alive. I was able to justify that by saying D’Amato is the federal government’s problem, not ours. I even managed to reassign Jack McKinley, the Texas Ranger hottest on D’Amato’s trail, as a bodyguard for my grandsons. But I don’t like being blackmailed by that conniving bastard.”

      Ann Wade patted at her short, perfectly coifed blond hair and pressed her lips together to smooth her pink lipstick, both activities that helped her to calm down. It was never a good idea for a woman in politics to show too much emotion. But she was seriously annoyed with her son.

      “I shudder to think what that scoundrel might expect from me once I’m president,” she said. “You need to disappear, J.D. Somewhere I can be sure D’Amato will never find you.”

      So long as her son was alive and about in the world, D’Amato had a very large sword to dangle over her head. Once she was president, any accusations D’Amato made without J.D.’s body in hand could be explained away.

      J.D.’s casket in Arlington Cemetery was empty because there had supposedly only been enough of his body left after the ammo dump explosion to identify his remains through DNA. J.D. had given the sample of his DNA, along with a great deal of cash, to the lab tech making the identification. So, no body, no proof her son had survived.

      J.D. made a disgusted sound in his throat and shoved himself onto his feet, limping over to the wet bar. “So nice to know you care, Mother.”

      Ann Wade watched as J.D. poured himself a Dewar’s and drank it down, then poured another double shot, drank it and carefully set down his glass.

      He turned to her and said, “What did you have in mind for me to do? I tried disappearing. It didn’t work.”

      “Then perhaps you should stop running and start fighting back.”

      “How?”

      “You’re the demolitions expert. Figure it out.” If D’Amato was dead, it would solve both their problems.

      “D’Amato has a half-dozen bodyguards around him at all times. His home in Houston is impregnable. His cars are kept in underground garages. He has no family left except that bastard son of his, and Wyatt Shaw has security even tighter than his father’s.” He cracked his knuckles, then added, “Well, there may have been a loophole or two, but those have been closed since that hooker was found strangled in his bed.”

      “And you know all this how?”

      “I’m not as dumb as you think, Mother. You’re not the first one to consider blasting the problem out of existence.” He poured himself another drink and gulped half of it down.

      Ann Wade almost smiled. There were some things J.D. had learned from her. Shrewdness.