Chapter Nineteen
The Tap Room reeked of spilled beer and forty years of cigarette smoke that had never quite aired out, even with the state’s smoking ban a decade in the rearview.
Remi crossed to the bar and claimed a stool across from the corner booth where Brad Hatton had parked himself, alone and hunched over a shot glass.
“What’ll it be?” The bartender was a heavyset man with a faded tattoo sleeve and the flat, unbothered expression that told Remi he’d seen every version of trouble a dive bar had to offer.
“Whatever’s cheap and on tap.” Remi passed over a folded bill and let his gaze wander the room, sweeping past Brad without lingering.
“Are you in position?” Anja’s voice came through the earpiece.
“Yep,” Remi murmured into his beer, lips barely moving. “He’s alone. Booth in the back corner. Two shots in and working on a third. He ordered them at the same time.”
Brad waved the server over and ordered another round without glancing at a menu. The bartender poured without comment, sliding the shots across the scarred wood to the server, who placed them in front of Brad. He knocked the first back in one motion, wincing at the burn.
“He’s drinking the hard stuff and putting them away fast,” Remi reported.
“Keep watching,” Anja told him. “If he’s meeting someone, it should be soon.”
Twenty minutes passed with nothing but Brad finishing the other two shots and staring into the middle distance.
Remi had the impression he was trying to drink his way past something that wouldn’t stay down.
Nobody joined him or so much as glanced his way beyond the server’s periodic check-ins.
Remi nursed his beer and let the room’s low murmur wash over him.
“No contact yet,” he reported. “Might be a solo night.”
“Or the meeting already happened somewhere else,” Anja replied, “and this is what it looks like when he tries to drown whatever he did to get that money.”
Remi used the dead time to pull his phone from his jacket pocket and thumb it open. Hollyn’s text sat at the top of the thread, four days old now.
Ribs still complaining, but the ER doc says I’ll live.
Also, I asked if I could sue the guy who hit me for emotional damages.
Apparently that’s “not how insurance works.” I remain unconvinced.
Thanks for strong-arming me into the ambulance.
You were annoyingly right. Please enjoy this victory because it’s the last one you’re getting.
He read it again, as he had a dozen times since it arrived, and found himself smiling before he could stop it.
Turquoise eyes. He hadn’t managed to shake those either, not in four days of case-board updates and Leo’s steady stream of near misses.
He tucked the phone away before anyone in the bar could clock him grinning at nothing and dragged his focus back to the booth in the corner, where Brad was three shots deeper into whatever he was trying to drown.
By the time Brad finished his next round, his voice had climbed several notches, loud enough to carry across the half-empty room. He tossed a remark at the server that made her flinch, though Remi couldn’t catch it over the jukebox. The bartender’s expression shifted from bored tolerance to alert.
“He’s getting loud,” Remi murmured.
A man at the pool table near the back, built like he spent his weekends doing manual labor and enjoying it, called over to Brad. Again, Remi couldn’t hear it, but Brad’s response carried clear across the bar.
“You don’t have any idea who you’re talking to.” Brad’s words slurred together, but the venom underneath them came through sharp and clear. “I could buy this whole sorry building and everyone standing in it, including you, bud, so step back.”
“Yeah?” The pool player calmly set down his cue. “Then buy yourself some manners while you’re at it.”
“Screw you.” Brad shoved up from the booth, swaying, and jabbed a finger toward the man’s chest. “You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
“Heads up,” Remi muttered. “This is about to get real ugly.”
It got real ugly real fast. Brad threw the first punch, more stumble than strike, and the bigger man barely had to do anything to send him sprawling into a neighboring table, glasses shattering across the floor as the table splintered in two.
Three other patrons grabbed their beer bottles and scrambled back.
The bartender reached under the counter for a baseball bat and deftly vaulted over the bar.
Yeah, this wasn’t his first fight. He’d probably broken up dozens like it.
“Out.” The bartender had Brad by the collar before he’d fully found his feet again, hauling him upright with a grip that brooked no argument. “You’re done. Get out and don’t come back.”
“You can’t—” Brad’s protest dissolved into incoherent muttering as the bartender frog-marched him toward the door past Remi’s stool, close enough that Remi caught the sour reek of whiskey and sweat.
“He’s coming out,” Remi mumbled under his breath as he slid off his stool and dropped a few bills on the bar. “Here’s our opening. Get ready.”
The night air outside hit hard after the bar’s stale warmth.
It was sharp with the promise of rain. Brad stumbled off the curb, catching himself against a parked car and muttering something venomous about small-minded people who didn’t understand what real money looked like.
Remi fell into step behind him, closing the distance with the patience of a predator who already knew how this ended.
“Hey, buddy.” Remi draped an arm over his shoulder. “Let’s have a chat.”
Brad turned, blinking against the streetlight, confusion crossing his face for half a second before Remi steered him hard and fast toward the Escalade idling at the curb, its rear door swinging open.
“What the hell—”
Brad’s protest cut off abruptly as Remi shoved him inside and climbed in after him, pinning him against the far door before he could process what was happening.
“Go,” Remi instructed. Anja shifted into gear and took off.
Brad breathed heavily and blinked at the three faces surrounding him.
The Escalade’s cabin reeked of alcohol, body odor, and whatever bad decisions had filled the hours before they found him.
He squinted at Remi beside him, missed Anja’s eyes in the rearview mirror on the first attempt, found them on the second, then stared at Leo, who’d turned around in the front passenger seat.
Brad’s face scrunched in concentration before recognition finally broke through.
“Leo!” His whole body sagged with relief. “Thank God. I was napped.” He frowned. “Kid-napped. Kidnapped. That’s what I said. Grabbed off the street. Call the cops.”
“Nobody’s calling anybody.”
“What?” Brad blinked several times, each one slower than the last. “Why not?” He leaned forward, swayed, then caught himself against the door. “Wait.” He peered toward the front. “That’s your girlfriend driving.”
Anja’s eyes lifted to the mirror.
Brad pointed at Remi. “And you. You were in the office the other day.” His finger drifted several inches to the left of Remi’s face. “What’re you doing here?”
“We just want to talk, Brad.” Leo spoke evenly, but Remi caught the strain beneath. “That’s all this is.”
“Talk about what?” Brad gave a loose, incredulous laugh. “You don’t grab a man off a walkside to talk.”
“Sidewalk,” Remi corrected.
Brad frowned at him. “That’s what I said.”
“It wasn’t.”
Brad waved that away, nearly smacking himself in the face in the process. “Whatever. Sidewalk. Walkside. There was walking involved.” His attention swung back to Leo. “What the hell is this?”
Nobody answered him. Anja merged onto the highway, and the silence stretched long enough that Brad’s bravado started curdling closer to fear.
“Say something.” His voice climbed. “Somebody say something. You can’t just kidnap a guy and then not talk to him. That’s rude.”
“We will,” Anja answered from the front, her eyes flicking to the mirror. “When we’re ready.”
“This is kidnapping.” Brad’s hands had started to shake, though whether it was from the alcohol or the situation was hard to say. “Actual kidnapping. You people have no idea who you’re messing with.”
“Enlighten us,” Remi invited.
Brad flinched at finding him so close. “Back up.”
“I’m sitting still.”
“Well, do it farther away.”
Remi settled deeper into his seat. “Better?”
“No.”
“Good. Talk.”
“You’ll find out.” Brad attempted to straighten, but the door was doing most of the work of keeping him upright. “There’s going to be pell to hay for all of you.” He frowned. “Hell to pay.”
“We got there,” Remi assured him.
“Hell to pay from whom?” Leo wanted to know.
Brad didn’t answer. He turned toward the window instead, watching the highway lights blur past, his mouth working around words he apparently had enough sense left not to say.
“Does Renee know?”
Brad’s head snapped around so fast at Leo’s question that the rest of him took a second to catch up. “Know what?”
“About you.”
Brad stared at Leo, then returned his attention to the window. “You think this ends with you dragging me into a car?” He muttered the words at the glass. “You have no idea the kind of people I can call.”
“Then call them,” Anja prompted. “Go ahead. We’ll wait.”
Brad patted one pocket, then the other. He frowned and tried the first one again.
“You took my phone.”
“We did.”
His lips twisted into something aiming for a smirk but too drunk to stick the landing. “Then how am I supposed to call them?”
Anja met his gaze in the mirror. “That does complicate things.”
Remi coughed into his fist.
“You don’t get it.” Brad jabbed a finger toward the front, lost track of who he’d been pointing at, and lowered it. “None of you get it. This whole thing is bigger than you, Leo. Bigger than that stupid firm.”
“Bigger than Vic Shaw?” Leo asked.
Brad stiffened. “What?” The alcohol hadn’t disappeared, but something cut straight through it.
“Vic Shaw,” Leo repeated. “Was he part of whatever this is too? Before you decided he wasn’t useful anymore?”