Page 62 of Don't Let Go

Sympathy lived in Patch’s voice. I could understand why. It sounded like she hooked up with a shitty guy.

“She never left Juniper. She’s worked in that diner since she was fifteen. Still lives in the house she inherited from her parents and drives an old model Ford truck. It’s a piece of shit, but I bet it would be a sweet ride if she could afford to fix it up. Her income and outlay are pretty standard for a small town waitress. She makes enough to cover her bills, and nothing else. She doesn’t have any extravagances that I can track down. Pretty clean medical record, no significant debt there…”

“Sounds too good to be true?” Locke asked as he took another bite of the cherry pie. If it had a poison in it, it wasn’t fast acting cause he wasn’t dead.

“Maybe,” Patch hummed, but Locke was right. She was having trouble with some part of it. “I want to keep looking into this. But she called the sheriff’s office, by the way, she wanted to make sure Sheriff Nelson knew there were some new folks in town.”

Did she now?

I swallowed another mouthful of coffee. The sugar couldn’t do anything against the bitterness, no matter how valiant the struggle.

“What did the fine gentleman have to say to that?” McQuade hid the fact he was asking a question by covering his mouth with his cup.

“Told her he knew, and to get the hell off the phone and back out there to watch you. He wants to know where you go and what you do.” She didn’t like that anymore than we did. “How do you boys feel about baiting the hook?”

“Depends on what we’re using for bait,” McQuade said in a tone that dictated quite clearly that we wouldnotbe using her.

“Mark Reynolds is the guy you have me watching, Remy,” she said, blowing right past McQuade’s stern tone. “He’s relatively new to Juniper, moved there about two years ago. Keeps to himself, has a place over the barber’s, little apartment. He’s currently sitting in there staring at our SUV in the parking lot. His angle isn’t good, and he’s got his curtains mostly closed, but I’d say he wants to talk.”

Sounded like it to me.

“Since you boys have an audience, why don’t you split up? We need more cameras and I want to know which of my three bachelors they are interested in the most.”

Her three bachelors?

I smoothed away the smile before it could form. She was having fun and I would never begrudge her this, whether she was teasing us or not.

“Sounds like a plan,” Locke said, finishing his pie before he eyed mine. “You gonna eat that?”

I just stared at him.

“Fine, I’ll take it for the team. But if I keel over dead, just appreciate my sacrifice.”

I rolled my eyes and I wasn’t alone in that. Splitting up was a good idea. I tapped a quick message on the tabletop.

“Agreed,” McQuade said. “We’ll send you to the bathroom, then we’ll head out front.”

I nodded once. I wanted to go see Mark Reynolds. He was worried about something. Was he worried about us or for us?

Definitely a question worth asking.

By the time they finished their pie, I was ready to hit the toilet. They rose and I left them to head to the back where the doors were marked for cowboys and cowgirls.

How quaint.

Inside, I appreciated the fact that it was clean. I took care of business, washed my hands, and then went to the window. It was a decent sized one and opened up to face the back.

“All clear,” Patch told me. “Everyone is watching Locke and McQuade out front.”

I couldn’t hear them, she must have switched the channels on our comms. “Make sure you loop me back in with them if they get into trouble, luv.”

“Will do.”

I opened the window and let myself out. Closing it behind me took no time. I used the buildings for cover and moved along the back of them toward my destination. How lucky for me there were wooden steps leading up to the apartment above the shop.

Very convenient.

“Hold,” she warned me before I cleared the next to the last building. The heat was a slug in the face after the coolness inthe diner. The whole place justfeltwrong. It was hard to put a definition on the why.

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