Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

next to her in her underwear. She finally cracked open the door, and they began walking across the parking lot. As they did, Danny examined her. Her clothes were still damp, and they stunk of Rio Grande water, but she remained drop dead gorgeous. He could only imagine what she looked like if she had a hot shower and a little time to freshen up.
    They strode past the club’s front door and walked down the side driveway to the tennis courts. Before Danny could see the courts, he heard them. They were the tennis tarts, as his mom used to call them, ladies having their morning lessons before they gathered in the clubhouse grill for lunches comprising of the club’s signature southwestern salads and stout Bloody Marys. He heard shoes pounding against the court surface, hard breaths puncturing the air, and the accented commands of the foreign tennis pros who had found their meal tickets in America. The sounds brought back years of memories in a matter of seconds. The menagerie included both the games when his dad used to beat him, when Danny was a young kid just learning the game, to set after set in his early teenage years, when the old man complained when he couldn’t return any of Danny’s fierce, left-handed serves. Of course, everyone complained about playing a left-handed tennis player. The balls always spun the wrong way. It was the same way Danny felt about his mind. Thoughts just spun differently inside it.
    “I’m doing all the talking, agreed?” Danny reminded Sydney as he led her to the group of clay courts at the back corner of the tennis area. Besides confessing the real reason he was at the cabin, Danny had also confessed to Sydney that Booker was the reason he knew so much about the monastery. Booker was heavily connected to Phoenix Oil, the corporation that had purchased both the monastery and a sizeable piece of Booker’s Senate seat.
    Sydney nodded. “Yes. I’ll just stand there and look pretty.”
    “I’m sure these guys will be drooling over you,” Danny gave her the once over, “even in your current … condition.”
    Sydney pretended to swoon. “Oh Danny, I bet you get all the girls with compliments like that.”
    Danny could hear Senator Booker Halsey’s grief-spewing drawl before he spotted him.
    “Damn it, Brick! The way you move, we should be playing fucking triples instead of doubles!”
    Danny stopped outside the far corner of the court and crouched down to see underneath the windscreen. He recognized all four players, their aged feet shuffling across the scratchy clay surface. Booker and Brick Burdett of Phoenix Oil were in the near court. In the far court were Skeeter Coburn and Jimmy Trotter. Skeeter owned an oil-refining company, and Trotter was the one they called Garage Sale Jimmy. He made his money in oil early, still in his forties, by hauling in a mammoth gusher after nearly a decade of drilling one dry hole after another. Since making his initial fortune, he had tripled it by buying up troubled oil and natural gas companies all around Houston and then selling off the pieces. Jimmy was the one who bought Danny’s father’s company shortly after his death at a cut rate and had sold off everything within a year: the pipelines, the land, the machinery, everything.
    Danny stood back up and walked toward the courtside bleachers. Sydney followed him. With the combined net worth of the men on the court close to a hundred million dollars, Danny was expecting bodyguards perched on them. But the bleachers were empty, as were the rest of the courts around them. Only men of this stature could get away with a friendly game at eight o’clock on a workday morning.
    Booker was about to serve when he stopped and looked over at Danny. The other three men followed his lead, but it was Jimmy Trotter who first broke the silence.
    “Holy shit. Is that little Danny Cavanaugh?”
    Danny had no idea how much these men knew about the recent events in his life. And he had no idea how much they knew about the events of the last twenty-four hours. But he had only one play, and so he played it. “Sorry to interrupt your game, gentlemen.” Danny stared at Garage Sale Jimmy. “And Jimmy.” The old man smirked a “fuck you” look back at him, but Danny was already focused on Booker. “Booker, we need to talk.”
    The senator huffed. “I’ve got a game going on here, Danny.”
    “We need to talk right now, Senator,” Danny said quietly. “Trust me. It’s more important than playing for