The First Four Cases

Book 0 of "Tracie Dumas, Bounty Hunter"

Crime might not pay, but for Tracie, criminals pay the billsif she can catch them. This is an anthology of the first four erotic, darkly noir, and sometimes romantic cases of Tracie Dumas, the world's sexiest bounty hunter. This collection includes: A SMALL TATTOO, DISAPPEARING ACT, WORKING ROUGH STREETS, and A STRANGE WEEK.

~~~~~ PG Excerpt ~~~~~

It was my first time in the bar and I didn't know anything about Alice or Johnny when I walked in. If I'd been after them, I'd have known everything, but I was there following a lead. An informant had told me, for his usual fee, he'd seen someone who looked like the woman I was trying to track down tending bar there. He'd talked with her. It was an unlikely story, but I believed him because he admitted that he'd hit on her and struck out. And I had no other leads.

"The girl's a sexy platinum blonde," he'd told me. "Sharp tongue, though."

"I'm not asking you to sell her to me," I told him. "I just need to be able to recognize her, the way she looks now."

I wanted a better description, but he was the kind of guy that didn't see much more than a girl's body, and even more so when the girl turned him down. That left me with a name, Suzy, probably fake, and the address of the bar. I hoped the name Suzy was fake. The girl I was looking for was named Charlotte. Charlotte Mostra, to be complete.

In my line of work, I don't often find myself looking for women. Mostly it's men. That probably sounds weird, but keep in mind I'm talking about my work. On my own time I like guys and hot sex. But when I'm working, I'm a bounty hunter. And women don't seem to skip bail as often as men or get in the kind of trouble that someone bothers to put up a reward for them. Missing persons stuff, sure, but Charlotte had her own wanted poster and in my experience that was rare.

I'm good at my work. I think women have an advantage in this trade because it doesn't matter if they attract attention. It can even help. When a strange woman comes into a bar or club the first thought in their minds is not that they were followed. It helps even more than I don't look threatening. At five two and around 105, the menace factor doesn't enter into things. And I try to look good as that gets men thinking about me without wondering what I might do for a living. I'd lie about it anyway. People get turned off when they learn you're a bounty hunter. It sounds sleazy. Maybe it is. But it pays the bills most of the time and gives me a rush.

Normally my prey are men. They've skipped out on child support or jumped bail, that sort of thing. Tracking a woman was a different kind of challenge. You have to think differently when you put yourself in the high heels of a female fugitive. But as with anyone on the run, the best place to start was with why they were running.

Now this Charlotte had lots of reasons for running. Several hundred thousand, dull green reasons, as a matter of fact. She'd been the driver during an armored car robbery. The guys with the guns knocked it over and put the money in the getaway car. Before they knew what was happening, the lovely Charlotte drove away, leaving the others standing in the road.

Charlotte was smart. The cops I talked to thought she might even have been the brains for the operation, that she'd set it up from the beginning to skip out with the money leaving the others as a distraction for the law. After all, they had guns, and she didn't. But she did have the money--every last penny of it.