Chapter 2
A nother?”
As the bartender came out from behind the bar and made his way over to them, John had seen his reflection in the blackened window. But Beth Collins, entirely caught up in their conversation, seemed to have been unaware of his approach until he spoke, and then she flinched.
John leaned away from her, smiled up at the bartender, and reached for the fresh drink. “Thanks, man. How’d you guess?”
“Well, from the look of things, one wasn’t gettin’ it done.” A chuckle rumbled from his barrel chest. “What about you, sweetheart? Something stronger this round?”
She tensed in reaction to being addressed as “sweetheart” but responded with a smile and a cool, “No thank you.” Like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
“In fact…” She opened her pricey purse and took out a twenty-dollar bill, as though she’d planned to have it at the ready rather than pay with a credit card. “This should cover our drinks. Keep the change.”
“’ppreciate it.” The bartender took the bill from her, and, as he lumbered away, socked John on the shoulder, saying under his breath, “Good luck, buddy.”
When he was out of earshot, she asked, “Do you think he’ll remember me?”
Was she kidding? If she’d been wearing a diamond tiara in place of the baseball cap, she couldn’t have looked more conspicuous in this setting. Despite the cap and plain white t-shirt, everything about her screamed class .
True, he’d only seen her from the waist up, but the t-shirt was made of stretchy stuff, and if the bottom half of her came even close to being as shapely as the top, he was thinking that an hour or two rodeo in a hasty-tasty motel wouldn’t be a bad way to play out the rest of the afternoon.
So long as they didn’t converse.
In answer to her question, he said, “Yeah, I think he’ll remember you. Why is that a problem? Does it throw a wrench into your sabotage scheme?”
“It’s not a scheme.”
He gave her a look.
She set both hands flat on the table and leaned across it. “Didn’t you understand what I said?”
“I understood perfectly. I also understand that this was an ambush. I hate myself for falling for it, but now I’m leaving.”
He glanced behind him toward the four at the billiard table and saw right through their seeming disregard of them. Of her in particular. He muttered a curse under his breath and sighed as he came back around. “Tuck that damn purse under your arm. Tight. Don’t make eye contact. Got it? Not with anybody. And don’t even think of arguing with me about this.”
He scooted out of the booth, reached down and took her by the elbow, and, when she was standing, steered her toward the exit. The bartender sent him a wink and a thumbs-up.
As they walked past the grungy group, the mustachioed one with the attitude and a matchstick in his mouth flipped him the bird. John ignored it, pulled open the heavy door, and guided the woman outside.
Rain clouds were gathering, so, although the temperature was seasonally cool, the atmosphere was damp with the promise of precipitation.
She worked her elbow free of his grasp and pointed toward a black sedan. “Figured,” he said.
Besides his SUV and the sedan, the only other vehicle on the gravel lot was a pickup truck with a bashed-in grill and two bullet holes in its rusty rear fender. He walked Beth Collins over to the sedan.
After she unlocked it with a fob, he reached around and opened the driver’s door for her. “Nice wheels. All the extra options.”
“I don’t know what half of them are for. It’s a rental I picked up at the airport.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“You flew in from New York?” That was an easy deduction. The show she worked for broadcast from there.
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound like New York.”
“I grew up in this area. Straight out of LSU I moved up there.”
“Where you trained to trick people into clandestine meetings. Or did you need training for that? Did the television network teach you how to do it effectively, or did it come naturally to you?”
Looking perturbed, she turned her head aside to watch an eighteen-wheeler on the highway blow past. Coming back to him, she said, “Mr. Bowie—or should I call you Detective Bowie?”
“How about John?”
Without calling him anything, she said, “I came down here specifically to talk to you.”
“Well, that’s too bad. Because I’m not talking. Tell your slick host that calling me an arrogant prick gives pricks a bad name. Tell your bosses that I was rude, lewd, misogynistic. Tack on whatever unflattering adjectives you want. I don’t give a damn about their opinion of me. In fact, the lower it is, the better I like it.”
To her credit, she kept her cool. “Aren’t you the least bit curious to hear why I think that what happened to Crissy Mellin will happen again, that there’ll be another victim?”
“Of course it’ll happen. A hundred times. A thousand times. Regrettable. Sad. Tragic. Violence against women is a malignancy eating away at the fabric of most so-called civilized cultures. But those crimes will be somebody else’s problem. Not mine.”
“But it will be your problem. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
If the bartender hadn’t interrupted, he might have asked her to elaborate, or at least asked, What the hell? But he’d lost the opportunity, and he was now glad he had, because he wasn’t stupid.
He’d spent the past three and a half years since the Mellin case walking a razor’s edge, trying to avoid embroilment of any kind. If he gave an ounce of credence to what Beth Collins had said and pursued it by even one baby step, it could easily tip the scales of the balancing act he had going with Thomas P. Barker, his boss and nemesis. Their antagonistic relationship was none of her business, and filling her in on it could stimulate further conversation, which he would avoid as fervently as he would avoid leprosy. But despite what he’d said about his disregard for the opinion of others, he didn’t want her to leave remembering John Bowie as a complete and utter asshole.
He shifted his weight, crunching the gravel beneath his boots. “Listen, Ms. Collins—”
Rather than listen, she interrupted. “The upcoming episode establishes that Crissy Mellin’s abductor is dead.”
“He fucking is . I cut his body down.”
“What if that young man wasn’t the culprit?”
“Oh. I see where you’re going. We got the wrong guy.” He scoffed. “The one we found hanging in his jail cell.”
“Yes, that one.”
“And the real bogeyman is still out there?”
“It’s possible.”
“Uh-huh.”
Agitated, she said, “How can you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Be so blasé. I just told you something that should rattle you. You’ve dismissed it out of hand. Like this isn’t extraordinary. Like it happens to you on a daily basis.”
“It does. We and every law enforcement agency in the world get dozens of crank calls every day. Crazies call with conspiracy theories or to report—”
“Never mind.” She turned her back to him and climbed into the car. “I began with you because you were quoted in one article as saying that the investigation was handled ‘hastily.’ Apparently, during the years since, you’ve had a change of heart. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She reached out to pull the door closed.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Knowing that he would probably kick himself later for what he was about to do, he grabbed the door above the window and held on. They played tug-of-war with it. He outlasted her and continued to hold the door open while she glared up at him from the driver’s seat.
She placed the heel of her hand over the horn icon on the steering wheel. “Let go of the door or I’ll lay down on this.”
He hitched his head toward the building behind him. “The scumbags come to your rescue, and after they vanquish me, what then? You’re left alone with them to have their wicked way with you? I don’t think so.”
She expelled a breath. “Please let go.”
“Why the subterfuge?” Asked out of context, the question got her attention. She stopped trying to close the door.
“What?”
“When you called yesterday, why didn’t you tell me straight off you were from that show?”
“You would have hung up on me.”
Correct answer. But as she’d said it, her gaze had shifted from looking directly at him to the third snap of his shirt. He spotted a lie. At least a half lie. “And?”
She didn’t say anything.
He lowered his pitch and volume. “And?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. Her shoulders slumped, her head dropped forward. The baseball cap fell off, and handfuls of streaky blond hair tumbled down around her head. With irritation, she tossed the cap onto the passenger seat and raked her hair back off her face using all ten fingers.
“I’m not representing the network or the show,” she said. “I came of my own accord and at my own expense.” She gave a soft laugh of chagrin as she looked up at him. “Please forgive me for wasting your time. Enjoy what’s left of your day off.” She tugged on the car door again.
He was about to release it, walk away, go home, turn on ESPN, crack a beer, and do exactly as she had suggested: enjoy what was left of his day off.
But in a split second of remarkably messed-up judgment, he changed his mind and held on to the door. “What makes you think he’s out there waiting to strike again?”
Now looking him straight in the eye, she said, “The blood moon.”
She held his gaze for a beat or two, then succeeded in pulling the door shut.
Mystified and annoyed, John watched her back the sedan out and jounce over the rutted parking lot to the two-lane highway. Several vehicles went past before she was able to turn left into the eastbound lane. While she’d waited for a clearing, he’d been able to get to his phone and take a picture of the rear license plate.
His impulse was to follow her. Common sense blared, Have you lost your freakin’ mind?
He watched until her car disappeared around a bend, then walked slowly over to his SUV. He opened the driver’s door but remained standing in the wedge, taking a moment to process everything that had happened since he’d walked into the bar.
No, even before that. Yesterday’s phone conversation with her had felt covert from the start, like she needed to speak in a half whisper, like she had something to hide. Or was… apprehensive. Scared? Guilty? Hell if he knew. But he’d wondered.
It had nagged him enough that he’d kept their appointment this afternoon. He’d arrived at this most unlikely of places curious, but also with a jaundiced eye. For the first five minutes, he had been amused, just as she’d called him on.
But now, he couldn’t shake the feeling that even if she was wrong, she believed it: “It’s going to happen again.”
Irritably, he swatted at mosquitoes that dared to light on him when he was this pissed off. First of all, he was angry at her for the intrusion. He didn’t need anything upsetting the rickety apple cart that was his present and future life.
Then he was mad at himself for being such a chump, driving all the way out here to meet the woman with the sexy phone voice and now standing here trying to keep mosquitoes from sucking him dry, mulling over her certainty that all was not right with how the Crissy Mellin case had been resolved.
He’d wanted like hell to accept the official sign-off of that investigation. He’d wanted to embrace it, then bury it deep, expunge it from his mind, rule it forever over and done with. Finis .
More than three years’ distance from it, he’d been this close to coming to terms with it. Now… her . Her of the just-got-laid hair. She’d refreshed his memory, resurrected doubts, awakened an obsession that had the potential to wreck every aspect of his life all over again, turning lousy into lousier.
No way in hell, lady . No matter how delectable your lips.
All the while his anger had been mounting toward Beth Collins, he’d been staring hard at the entrance to the beer joint. “Screw it,” he said, and underscored that by slamming the door of his SUV. He stalked over to the padded door, pulled it open, and went inside.
The barkeeper looked up from his magazine and gave him a lupine smile. “Struck out, huh?”
Without replying or breaking stride, John walked up to the matchstick guy who’d given him the finger and socked him in the gut.
“She must’ve been speaking metaphorically.”
John was lying on his sofa, his head on the armrest, fully clothed except for his cowboy boots, which were on the floor. In his right hand was a bottle of beer, held upright on his stomach. In his left was a makeshift ice pack he was holding against the side of his face.
“‘Blood moon’ could be a metaphor for lots of things, right? Doomsday. A reckoning. Armageddon. Spells, and prophesies of end times, and spooky shit like that. I don’t think she meant it in a literal sense.”
He’d turned the ceiling light off because it had been an irritant to his swollen, discolored eye. The TV was on, but he wasn’t paying any attention to the programming, and he’d muted the audio because it was contributing to his headache. A handful of ibuprofen tablets had blunted neither it nor the additional aches and pains that kept him trying to find a more comfortable position on his lumpy couch.
The beer—his second—had gone down real good, but he’d eaten only half of his carry-out burger. The remains of it lay on its foil wrapper on the coffee table. He gestured toward it with the beer bottle. “Help yourself.”
He called the dog Mutt, because the animal defined the word. One morning as he’d been about to leave for work, he’d noticed something underneath his car that looked like an unraveling burlap tow sack that had been wadded up and discarded. Upon further inspection, he’d discovered that it was a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.
He’d made the mistake of getting a slice of leftover pizza from his kitchen trash can and tossing it to the bag of bones before driving away. When he’d returned home that evening, the mutt had been curled up on his front porch. Another slice of dry pizza had sealed the deal. He became John’s dog.
He’d broken the neglected animal of his habit of scarfing food, convincing him that it was no longer necessary to snatch at it and swallow it whole. But now, having been given permission, Mutt made short work of the burger, then lay down in the narrow space between the coffee table and sofa. Yawning hugely, he laid his head on one of John’s boots.
“You’re welcome.” John eased himself up, swung his legs off the sofa, stepped over the dog, and scooped the trash off the coffee table. On his way into the galley kitchen, he downed the remainder of his beer, then disposed of the empty bottle and trash, and pitched the plastic bag of melting ice into the sink.
As he reentered the living room, he said, “Looks can be deceiving, you know.” Mutt didn’t raise his head, but he opened his eyes and looked at his owner. “She was hot, all right. That hair. Brown eyes, but not dark like chocolate. Lighter. Like really good whiskey.
“Nice rack. Not overly endowed, just… nice.” He got lost in the thought of the allure of a plain white t-shirt, then pulled himself away from the remembered image.
“As I was saying, she looked normal, but she had to be a certified kook. It’s as simple as that. Or maybe not a kook, maybe just bored. Needing attention. Turning a dull afternoon into an adventure. Except that coming all the way from New York to seek adventure here makes no sense.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “She remembered my name from years back, but that would be easy enough. Bowie like the knife. So she… she…”
Mutt raised his eyebrows inquisitively.
John cursed and made a slicing gesture. “Never mind. Let’s just scrub this whole damn day from memory. Don’t bring it up again. Okay?” Mutt closed his eyes. “All right then.”
He went down the short hallway into the bathroom and switched on the light fixture above the sink. He braced his hands on its rim as he leaned in and regarded his battered face in the mirror.
No permanent damage had been inflicted, but he wondered how he was going to explain to Barker the obvious drubbing he’d taken.
I got mugged. Can you believe it? Coming out of a 7-Eleven with a six-pack and a bag of chips.
Damn dog tripped me up. I stumbled into the edge of the closet door. About broke my neck, and it hurt like hell.
Or maybe he would avoid the encounter altogether and just call in sick. I feel like shit, hammered shit, so I took a Covid test. Guess what?
Barker would smell those lies from a mile off. He decided to sleep on it, see how he looked in the morning, and decide then how he was going to explain.
He showered. The hot water eased his aches and pains, but he stayed in the stall until it ran cool. He dried, pulled on a loose pair of gym shorts, and was making his way back down the hall toward the living room when someone stepped into the connecting doorway, filling it with a menacing silhouette that said, “Hey, asshole!”
It was the matchstick guy.