Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Closing time had its own particular rhythm, and Regan knew every beat of it.
Glasses washed and racked. Register counted and logged. Tables wiped, chairs up, floor swept in the pattern her father had taught her—back to front, left to right, so you didn’t track dirt over clean ground.
The jukebox unplugged. The neon signs killed one by one until only the Coors Light in the front window was still going, then that too, and the bar went dark except for the kitchen light she left on because her mom always insisted. Leave a light on, Regan, just in case .
In case what, she wasn’t sure, but her dad had always done it, and now it was one of the small ways her mom honored him.
She’d been doing this since she was seventeen. On all the nights she helped her dad close, and the nights after he was gone, when she’d had no choice. The routine was the routine. It didn’t require thought, which was either a comfort or a problem, depending on how much she had on her mind.
Tonight it was a problem.
She tied off the last garbage bag and hefted it toward the back door.
The Malbec situation was going to require a call to their distributor in the morning.
CB Briggs had sat at her bar this afternoon with his mother’s eyes and his easy smile and the kind of stillness that made you feel like whatever was in the room with him had already been assessed and found manageable.
I’ll think about it , she’d told him.
She was still thinking about it. About him.
The back door opened onto the back parking lot, and the night air hit her immediately. It was cool after the heat of the day finally gave up and let the mountains take over. She stood on the step for a second, garbage bag in hand, and just breathed in.
The sky was enormous. Out here, away from the city light pollution that made the night sky a flat orange smear, the stars were the real thing—dense and close, the kind of sky that made a person feel appropriately small.
She found the cluster of stars she always looked for first. Was it Sagittarius?
Lyra? She couldn’t remember. Her father had pointed them out to her when she was nine, standing in this same spot on a summer night, him pointing up with a patience she hadn’t fully appreciated until he wasn’t there to offer it anymore.
“Hey, Dad.” She felt slightly ridiculous talking to him like this, but on days like today, it was comforting. “I think the Malbec vendor is ripping us off. Third short order in two months. Mom keeps arguing that he’s not, and then I show her the spreadsheet, and you know how that goes.”
The stars didn’t answer, but they didn’t have to.
She was quiet for a moment. Up on the hills behind the bar, the lights of the house she’d grown up in were dark—her mother already home and asleep, the way she usually was by now. From here, she could just make out the shape of the roofline against the sky.
“I think I’m doing okay. With the bar. I think you’d think so, too. Still wish you were here. Man, do I miss you.”
The stars stayed bright. A light breeze brushed past her cheek.
She wasn’t into any life-after-death woo-woo stuff like her friend Nassar, but her breath caught anyway.
She raised her fingers to her face, just for a second, allowing herself to remember the feel of her dad’s big hand patting her cheek when he was proud of her.
Hot tears pushed at the back of her eyes.
And then her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. She heaved the garbage bag into the dumpster, dusted her hands on her jeans, and turned toward her car.
It sat under the single working light at the far end of the lot. She’d been meaning to get the other two bulbs replaced for a month, which was one more item on a list that kept growing faster than she could work through it.
She was fishing in her purse for her keys when the arm came around her from behind.
It happened fast. One second, she was alone, and the next, she was off the ground, her back slammed against a chest that felt like a wall. The arm locked across her collarbone, squeezing. Her purse hit the ground. Her keys skidded across the asphalt.
“Easy,” a voice said, close to her ear. Low, male, deliberate. The voice of someone who’d done this before. “Stop moving, and this goes quick.”
She stopped moving for approximately one second, and then she drove her elbow back as hard as she could into his ribs.
He grunted, but his grip only tightened.
She stomped down on his instep, threw her head back toward his face, got a handful of the arm across her chest, and dug her nails in. He cursed, low and vicious, and shifted his grip from her collarbone to her throat.
“I said stop.”
The pressure on her throat was immediate and terrifying in a way that her brain catalogued even as the rest of her kept fighting. She clawed at his forearm. Kicked backward. Got enough of a connection with his shin to earn another curse, but not enough to matter.
He was too big. She’d known it the moment he lifted her. She was five-six, fit, and fighting as hard as she knew how, but it wasn’t enough. That knowledge arrived with a cold clarity that was worse than the fear.
“Here’s how this works.” He wasn’t even breathing hard. “You’ve got until Friday to have the money ready. Eight hundred, cash, in an envelope for me to pick up at the back door at nine p.m. You do that, nothing happens to you or your mother.”
Mom .
“You—” she started.
He tightened his grip, and the words cut off. The world went narrow and gray at the edges.
Her fingers found skin, found the edge of something—a jacket collar, a chain—and yanked. He grunted, and his grip shifted just enough that she got half a breath.
“Be a shame if something happened to a nice lady like your mom,” he said.
Regan saw red. She got her chin down and bit his forearm.
He swore, loudly this time, and the grip loosened even more. She sucked in air and screamed.
The arm came back to her throat harder than before. She was off the ground again, and the gray at the edges came back. She didn’t stop fighting, though, her hands scrabbling at his forearm, legs kicking.
The stars blurred.
Mom .
She thought of her mother asleep in the dark house up on the hill, no idea that this was happening. She had no idea that this was where Regan’s months of investigation, her stubborn refusal to pay, and her absolute certainty that she could handle it had landed them both.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have ? —
She heard a man’s voice—not her attacker’s—and a solid thud. Her attacker released her, but as she fell, the world went black.