Chapter 2
Travis is crouched deep in the undergrowth, his blood boiling as he listens to Adam talk about a human being as if she were a dog that he was selling.
I’ll get the recording like Nick wanted, and the cops will take care of this piece of human trash.
The other men disappear, but Travis stays frozen in place. He wants to leave, but he can’t.
It goes against his every instinct to leave that half-conscious woman alone with Adam.
When Adam lands a kick to her stomach with a sickening thud, Travis loses control.
Without thinking, he springs up out of the bushes and lunges for Adam. His legs are a tightly coiled spring let loose, his arms acting on pure instinct as he tackles Adam to the ground.
“Run!” he shouts at the woman.
The rest is a blur.
A knee to his stomach, driving the air from his lungs.
A sharp knife. Warm blood, mostly Adam’s.
Adam’s frenzied scream as he lunges forward, head lowered.
And the look of pure terror on his face as he teeters at the edge of the cliff for an eternity of a split second, then falls.
Travis woke up in a cold sweat.
Nightmares had plagued him ever since that night. And they were getting worse instead of better.
He got out of bed and took a shower, trying to wash away the last of his dreams. Instead, memories of that night came in flashes. Worry gnawed like a rat at his guts, and nothing that he did seemed to make it any better.
He still didn’t know what had happened to the woman.
He’d sprinted to the edge of the cliff and watched helplessly as Adam fell down and down. He’d seen him land far below – too far to see the gore that must have accompanied his landing.
And by the time he came to his senses, the woman was long gone.
He had tried to find her, searching through the dark woods in vain. When he felt reasonably certain that it was safe, he had called out. Telling her that it was safe, offering her a ride into town, to wherever she needed to go.
But nothing.
Eventually, he’d realized that his shirt was soaked in blood that wasn’t his own.
And a new fear had taken hold.
It wasn’t the first time that Travis had killed a man.
The first time had been a freak accident, a bar fight started by a stranger. Travis had pushed him away, and the man had flown backwards, cracked his skull on the bar, and that was that.
He had been so young, and the judge had taken pity on him. Time served and community service. But he didn’t expect to get so lucky a second time.
Needing to be busy, needing something to occupy his hands, Travis walked a mile to the Bottlenose.
It used to be that he only went in at dinnertime, when the bar opened. These days, he was there from opening until close, finding ways to keep busy. Which was easier than it should have been, because Scot was dropping the ball more and more lately.
Travis had been taking on more responsibility, so grateful for the distraction that it almost eclipsed his worry for his friend and employer.
Travis walked into the quiet restaurant. The air was warm with the smell of bacon and waffles, and he felt a rare bite of hunger in his stomach. His appetite had been a mess ever since that night, but he ate three meals a day… or at least two, mechanically, trying to keep his strength up.
Scot needed him.
He walked through the Bottlenose, to Scot’s office in the back. He wasn’t surprised to see him there so early. Scot was there in his restaurant bar from morning until midnight; he had been like that from the time that Travis had started working there as a teenager, washing dishes in the kitchen.
Scot had bailed him out after he was arrested for manslaughter. He was the one who spoke up for him in court and kept him on even after he became a convicted felon. Travis loved him like a father.
But he could still be a royal pain sometimes.
”Good morning,” Travis said. Scot nodded in greeting without looking up from his book keeping. ”How are you feeling today?”
”I’m fine,” Scot said irritably.
”Need a hand with anything?”
Scot gave him a long, level look. ”Don’t fuss over me like I’m an old man. Get out of my office.”
Travis responded with a mock salute, which softened Scot’s expression into something resembling a smile.
He went into the kitchen and asked them to whip up some breakfast for him. He didn”t much care what. Then he went behind the bar and busied himself with emptying the dishwasher and shelving pint glasses.
When his breakfast came out, an omelet loaded with local veggies and sharp cheddar cheese, he ate without really tasting it.
The knife. The shirt. The recording.
He had gotten rid of all three.
But where was the girl?
He scraped his plate clean and passed it back to the kitchen. The beer taps glistened with a beckoning shine, but he turned away from them and filled a pint glass with seltzer and lime.
The demons of his past could haunt his sleep all they liked; he would not become a day drinking bartender. He refused.
He never drank on the job, rarely even drank after the job these days.
He had tried that the first week after Adam’s death, hoping that enough whiskey would drown out the nightmares.
It had only made them worse.
And so he had stopped before he couldn’t.
The trouble with trying to keep busy at the Bottlenose in the daytime was that there wasn’t nearly enough work or enough people to keep his thoughts from spiraling. Thoughtless chores like drying glasses were no help to him.
Well, it was less excruciating than being completely alone with his thoughts. But only slightly.
When two uniforms came through the front door, he froze in shock.
Even though his rational mind told him that it was just John and Ed coming in for their usual coffee and BLTs, the fibers of his nerves screamed a visceral warning.
He had felt uneasy around cops ever since his first arrest. That anxiety had eased and abated over the years, especially around guys he knew like the handful of local cops in town, but it had never quite gone away completely.
And now it was worse than ever.
Every police officer”s uniform, every squad car, made his blood turn to ice.
Adam‘s death had been all over the news. Coroners had found knife wounds on the body and called foul play. Local news had a field day with it, the first exciting thing to happen on their quiet coastline in ages.
Newspapers and cheap websites were one thing. Travis could avoid those easily enough. What he couldn’t avoid was the talk.
Every night since the incident, the bar had been filled with locals gossiping about the body found just outside of town at the bottom of a cliff. The body with wounds sliced across its arms and chest. ”A clumsy attack,” they had called it, quoting one of the newspapers.
At no point had Travis wielded the knife.
Adam had cut himself in his frenzied attempts to attack Travis. Some of them must have happened when Travis grabbed Adam‘s arm and pushed it back, forcing the knife away from his own throat. But he couldn’t remember any of it clearly.
The rapid-cycle news had already forgotten Adam, and the local gossip had turned to other things. But Travis knew that the case was still open. He knew that police officers – not John and Ed, but officers further afield where the death had taken place – were still looking for Adam’s supposed killer.
He’d gotten rid of the most damning evidence, including the recording from that night and the wire they’d snuck into Adam’s car, but he’d spent many sleepless nights wracking his brain for something he could’ve missed. And many more wondering what had happened to the young woman who had witnessed it all.
”Dammit!”
Travis‘s attention was wrenched back to the present by the sound of Scot’s voice and the bright noise of breaking glass.
This wasn’t the first glass that Scot had broken lately. Or the fifth, or the tenth.
Travis had begged his employer to go to a doctor and figure out why his hands and legs had stopped cooperating with his brain, but Scot refused.
”Are you okay?”
”Stop asking me that,” Scot snapped. ”And clean up this glass.”
Travis watched Scot out of the side of his eye as he swept up the wreckage. Scot leaned heavily on the bar, struggling to catch his breath.
”I am going to make you an appointment with the doctor,” Travis said quietly as he dumped the broken glass into a trashcan.
”You’ll do no such thing,” Scot said sternly, meeting his gaze.
”You need to…” But Travis trailed off as Scot stormed back to his office, stumbling slightly along the way and catching himself on the back of a chair. He retreated and slammed the door behind him.
Travis went back to his mindless tasks of getting the bar ready for another night, hours before he needed to. A text came in from Keely, and his heart jumped in his chest.
What time do you start work tonight? Want to do something before you head to the Bottlenose?
Travis picked his phone up and stared at the message for a long minute.
He wanted to reply. But he wouldn’t.
I bet you can’t finish a quadruple scoop at Kula, Keely challenged.
The message made him smile. Not an easy thing to accomplish lately.
His heart broke as he switched his phone to airplane mode and shoved it back into the pocket of his jeans. He felt like a jerk for ignoring her. But encouraging her would be worse.
He cared about Keely. He’d cared about her even when she was a gangly teenager with spots on her face, and he cared about her more than he should now that she was a gorgeous young woman.
But she was Nick”s sister. And she’d been through too much already.
She was off limits.
If it weren’t for extenuating circumstances, the minor detail of her being his best friend”s little sister was an obstacle that Travis would gladly vault. He knew that Nick would be okay with them seeing each other if that were the right thing for Keely. But it wasn’t, and he wouldn’t.
Travis was damaged goods. He was a convicted felon, technically, and he had no idea where he would be a year from now, a week from now. It could so easily be a jail cell.
Worst of all, Adam was Keely‘s ex-boyfriend.
He didn’t imagine that she harbored much affection for the man who had gotten her hooked on drugs and used the resulting addiction to turn her against her family, but he couldn’t imagine her shock at learning that Travis had been the one to push Adam off of that cliff – albeit unintentionally.
The subject of Adam’s death hadn’t come up when he was around Keely and Nick and Chloe. God knows that Travis wasn’t going to bring it up, and Nick wasn’t. And the girls hadn’t. So he had no idea how Keely had reacted to learning that her ex had met his end at the bottom of a cliff.
Maybe she had been relieved. Maybe not.
All he knew was that she deserved better than Adam.
And she deserved better than him, too.