Chapter 7 #2
“Why not?” Avaline asked around her straw, loudly slurping down the watery dregs of her cocktail. “Martha’s acting like a little bitch, so I’m going to call her a little bitch. For that matter, so are you.”
Luella gasped.
“Quit fighting.” Martha yawned, her eyelids growing heavy. “I think I’ll just rest my eyes for a few minutes.”
“Boo! No! Wake up!” Iris hurled a balled-up napkin at her. It sailed over the top of the booth and landed on the floor. “What’s the number one rule of the Old Blue-Haired Baddies?”
“No baddie left behind!” they chorused.
Luella was making them matching embroidered jackets, she’d said, like the Pink Ladies wore in Grease.
“You’re not leaving me behind,” Martha groused. “This baddie just needs a little shut-eye. Gimme fifteen minutes and I’ll be back in fighting form. You’ll see.”
“I know what you need,” Effie said, slipping out of the booth. “Ever had an espresso martini? It’s a little like cocaine, but legal. It should perk you right up.”
“I’ve never done drugs before.” Martha’s frown was more curious than wary. “All right. Let’s do it.”
The ladies cheered.
“A round of espresso martinis, coming right up.”
She was halfway to the bar when a voice called out, “Hey, Effie! Over here!”
Curiosity piqued, Effie reversed course, nimbly wending her way through the crowd and past the pool table to the back of the bar where a man in a Mariners baseball cap stood halfway out of his chair, beckoning her over with a wave.
Three cozy-looking couples sat crammed around a four-top, all early thirties if she had to guess, around Finn’s age.
She kicked her foot up on the rung of the closest chair. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m—”
“Finn’s wife,” the willowy brunette to her right said, studying Effie over her beer bottle. “Yeah, we heard.”
“And here I was trying so hard to fly under the radar.” Effie pouted. “Who’d you hear the news from? Martha? Luella?”
Considering they were talking to her rather than whispering about her behind her back, unlike a small contingent of patrons who’d posted up throughout the bar that afternoon had done, it was unlikely they’d heard about her through Avaline’s branch of the grapevine.
Though the woman’s glare had grown less frosty the higher her BAC had climbed, she’d made no bones about wanting Effie gone.
Lucky for her, on that they were in accord.
“We heard it from the man, the myth, the legend himself.” The guy in the ball cap who’d called her over threw an arm around the brunette beside him and gave her a toothy grin. “We’re friends of your boy, Finn.”
Not her boy, she almost retorted, the words nocked on the tip of her tongue, but then the rest of what he’d said registered, and a slow smile crept across her face at the gift that this scruffy man with an unfortunate sporting allegiance had unwittingly given her.
“You should’ve led with that.” She dragged over a chair from a neighboring table and straddled it. “I’d wager you know all Finn’s secrets. What are those going to cost me?”
Plying Martha and the other ladies with booze in hopes of pumping them for intel she could use to bend Finn to her will had been a fruitless endeavor, the women keener on gossiping about the mayor’s new and significantly younger boyfriend than providing her with any useful dirt on the man currently scowling suspiciously at her from behind the bar.
“Hell, honey.” Across the table, a guy with close-cropped ginger hair and an equally short beard laughed. “I’ll tell you that man’s secrets for free.”
“Well, aren’t you a peach?” Effie simpered, stealing a fry off his plate. “Being so sweet to me, and I don’t even know your name.”
“We can fix that. I’m Monty. This is my wife, Chrissy.” He gestured to the woman sitting next to him, a blonde with round cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. “Then we’ve got my sister, Savannah; her girlfriend, Brittany; Peyton; and the dufus in the ball cap is her husband, Jeb.”
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Pleasure’s ours,” Savannah, who had the same shock of red hair as her brother and was dressed in a startling amount of camo, said. “I know I speak for everyone when I say you could’ve knocked me over with a feather when Finn told us he was married.”
“And what else did my soon-to-be erstwhile husband tell you all?”
A look went around the table, and though Chrissy seemed uncomfortable, practically folding in on herself, she was the one who said, almost regretfully, “Not to trust a word you say.”
Finn’s predictability bordered on tedious.
Her ilk, as a collective, was not to be trusted, sure, she’d grant him that, but she had been inordinately forthcoming, at great personal expense no less, as the memories she’d been forced to dredge up were no fun to relive.
And yet he could give her no better reason for refusing to renounce his vows than a senseless fixation on a decision he didn’t even remember making.
“Figures,” she muttered, rolling her eyes and gripping the slats of the chair, rising from her seat, ready to retreat to the other side of the bar. “I’d say it was great meeting you all, but—”
“Now, hold on. Seeing as Finn’s not the boss of us, I think we’re all happy to form our own opinions,” Peyton said. “That will, however, require you tell us about yourself, because, for reasons yet unknown, he’s been tighter lipped than a clam.”
Effie plopped back down in her seat.
“All right,” she said, stealing another fry. “What do you want to know?”
Another look passed around the table and Savannah asked, “What do you do?”
“My job’s the least interesting thing about me,” she fibbed, but it sounded like something someone in their generation—overworked and underappreciated as most of them were—would say. “I work in sales. The research and development side of things, currently.”
“What kind of sales?” Brittany, a tall brunette, asked.
“Solution selling. Or problem-centric selling, if you want to get technical.”
She was met with blank stares.
“We’re about outcomes over products. We pinpoint a customer’s problem, what they need, and half the time we do it before they’re even aware they’ve got a problem in the first place.
Hell, sometimes, we even cultivate the problem.
Take tax-filing software companies, for example.
They lobbied against the government preparing your taxes for you, thus creating a problem for which you now need a solution.
” Effie reached for the pitcher of beer in the middle of the table and frowned when she saw that it was empty.
“Essentially, we’re selling a problem that our customers can only solve with our services. ”
That was Hell’s onboarding process in a nutshell, the best way she could describe what she did without breaking the statute of secrecy to which all demons were beholden unless the human to which they were speaking was under contract or about to be.
“What services?” Jeb asked.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that. I signed an NDA.”
Savannah frowned. “That all sounds—”
“Corrupt? Unethical?” Effie smiled. “Shady?”
“I was going to say boring,” Savannah said with an apologetic little cringe.
When she put it like that, she supposed it sounded rather tedious. “I guess it kind of is. I used to at least be able to travel for work, but then I pissed off my boss and he put me on notice, so now I’m on desk duty for the foreseeable future.”