AN: Did I mention I own nothing? I don't. Just playing. If you love them, the newest season of Walker (season 4) is out and has the SoT movie on it!

Trent Malloy was having the time of his life.

He sped down the streets of the Dallas suburban on his motorcycle, welcoming the unusually warm January morning. He was headed for the popular bar Uppercuts. Actually, at 7:30am he wasn't exactly going to the bar, but to the office of Thunder Investigations located above the bar. His private investigation business was rapidly becoming respected and renowned for its reliability, and currently the business was booming. To top off his flourishing job, he had recently been reunited with Margo Jones, who was quite possibly the greatest woman he'd ever met. He couldn't remember a time in his life when he had been happier.

Trent took the stairs up to the Thunder offices two at a time and opened the door, whistling merrily. "Good morning, Kim," he said to the perky red-head at the main desk. She flashed a sparkling smile.

"Good morning, Trent," she replied with equal enthusiasm. She gathered papers and followed the blonde into his private office. "We have your mail, your voice messages, and assorted letters of praise," she said as he hung his leather jacket on a peg behind the door. She laid these papers and a few manila folders on his desk. "You also need to sign off on these cases, and here's some coffee," she sat down a steaming flowery mug in front of him. "Excuse the mug. Yours was quite dirty—possibly even a health hazard—so it's soaking in my sink before I wash it."

Trent sat down at his desk and leafed through the pile as he took a sip of the coffee. A moment later, he realized Kim was still in the doorway, hands clasped in front of her nervously.

"Is it good coffee?" she asked in an over-sweet voice. Now Trent knew there was something wrong.

"What do you want, Kim?" he sighed as he set the mug down and folded his hands.

"A woman called here after hours last night," Kim walked forward, heels clicking on the floor tiles, to pull out a piece of paper from the stack she'd given him just moments before.

Trent read it and re-read it carefully. "No, Kim," he said as he handed her the small orange note.

"But Trent," she pleaded, "You should have heard this poor girl's voice. She's for real."

Trent sighed and ran a hand through his short blonde hair. "I hate these kind of cases, and you know that," his voice was an almost whine. "And now we can finally afford to be selective on whose cases we take!" How was it that Kim could talk him into anything? And she wasn't even pleading like she normally did. Maybe he was going soft…

"I'll help you," she rushed to say as she handed the note back to him. "You'll need someone good with computers anyway."

Trent looked down at the paper in his hand. "'Looking for internet soul mate,'" he read aloud and scoffed. "Why?" he raised his eyes to the ceiling. The white plaster held no answers for him, and he sighed. "Fine. I'll take it." Kim actually squealed in delight.

Carlos Sandoval was pissed.

The handsome Hispanic mulled over his misfortune as he idled in what had to be the biggest traffic jam in all of Dallas—ever! Where Trent was always 10 minutes early, Carlos was always 15 minutes late. Carlos yawned. He wasn't sleeping nearly enough, and hadn't been since his re-encounter with the Ramirez gang last month. A few months before he retired as a police officer, he had done an undercover assignment to bring down the notorious gang. Bringing them down meant becoming close to the gang, especially the boss and his family, but an undercover cop could never lose sight of his goal. He had been forced to arrest some good friends, and that weighed heavily on his mind. His guilt only worsened after Raoul, Ramirez' younger brother, had called him a traitor at gunpoint during his re-encounter. That made him question his loyalties, his morals.

To make matters worse, his beautiful, smart, doctor girlfriend dumped him. She dumped him. Carlos was never the dumpee! He was the dumper!

Carlos sighed. She may have been smart and had an amazing body, but she was kind of a bore, he supposed. He sure hoped Trent had found some interesting cases to take his mind off of things.

He should have known better than that. When Carlos finally arrived to work, Trent was beginning the Internet Love case, leaving Carlos to make contact with the Haunted House woman. When they first started working together, Trent named all cases for the people paying, but Carlos and Kim had soon adopted an improved nomenclature. The Smith case—where one ex had stolen the others's purebred show poodle—became the Ex in the Doghouse case, and the Thompson case—where a senator's wife became the leader of a violent political movement—became Watergate II. Not exactly original, but it made work more fun.

The Haunted House woman, as it turned out, was a widow who had called about a week ago, claiming that the spirit of her recently deceased husband would not leave her alone. Almost immediately after he hung up with Gwendy, the nice grandmotherly woman paying Thunder Investigatons to look into things, Carlos' cell phone rang.

"Carlos. Margo." Margo always answered the phone like that: identifying the person she called and then herself. As if there weren't a little thing called "caller ID."

"Hey, what's up?" he asked, scribbling down a few last notes. There was a pause. "Margo?"

"I'm going back undercover, Carlos," she said finally.

Carlos sat back in his chair. "Wow. I thought they had you on a desk job forever?"

"Me, too, but the shrink cleared me for field work, and I guess I'm the best agent for the job."

"Have you told Trent?" Carlos asked.

"No. You know he won't like it," she said. "Things have been going so well, and I don't know how to tell him."

Carlos chuckled a little. "He's a big boy, Margo. And you can kick his butt if he gets out of line. Are you sure the reason you don't want to tell him doesn't have more to do with your own anxiety about it? You did almost die last time…"

Now Margo laughed. "Who died and made you my therapist?" There was a pause as she thought it over, and she sighed. "I think you get smarter the longer you're single. You're right, of course. Damn you, Carlos!"

Carlos heard the front door open. "Hey, I gotta call you back. This will all work out, ok?"

"Ok," she said.