Page 1 of Frisco

1

KALI

When two bikers started trading punches in the middle of the soup aisle, and my first thought was Why couldn’t they have picked the bakery section?, the universe was telling me something.

What was it telling me? That my life was sad. But newsflash, universe: I already knew that. I’ve known that since I came out of my mom’s vagina in the alley behind Grumps and Hoes. That was their witty name for a hardware store.

“Kal.” Otis was huffing as he ran up behind me, and even though I didn’t look, I knew he was pulling up his pants. They liked to sag down, a lot.

Otis was the manager of Friendly’s Grocery Mart. He always meant well, but Otis didn’t much like to manage. He came in, said hello to whoever was in his path, did a walk through the store, and then checked in with me. I didn’t have the official title, but I was the actual manager. I handled the scheduling, the inventory, and making sure everything ran smoothly. This wasn’t a position I’d volunteered for, but my second day back, the assistant manager took a smoke break and never returned. Maybe it was my age (I’m thirty-six), or maybe it was because Otis was flustered and came to me, asking me what was needed for the second shift.

My second day back.

Otis and I had history, but not that kind of history.

We’d both worked here in high school. I moved away, got married, never had kids, and I was back since my divorce was seriously fresh. Otis was the opposite. He never did anything. He stayed, and he just kept getting promoted. He’d made it about four positions to the general manager now. Friendly’s Grocery Mart was locally owned, but the owner spent most of his time hunting or drinking beer and talking about hunting. I could attest to this because he was at Bert’s Pub every night, drinking beer and—you guessed it—talking about the mystical buck all the local hunters liked to discuss.

But since the day I’d returned, everyone took note of my ability to have some idea of what was going on. And like an idiot, I couldn’t handle seeing a store falling into chaos. I’d run the store when I was in high school and college. So it was like pulling on an old pair of tennis shoes. There might’ve been mold, and holes where toes were supposed to go, but they still fit. Unfortunately.

“What are you going to do?” Otis panted as he asked.

“Kali, you want me to call the police?” asked Ben, our bagger who was only supposed to work part-time.

He ended up being here most of the time because Otis was an asshole and called him nearly every day, asking if he could pick up some extra hours. The schedule was handled. I did it, and the point of me not scheduling Ben every day was so that the actual bagger scheduled to work today would have to, you know, do his job. But unlike Ben, who was a hard-working high schooler who probably should’ve been given more breaks in life than he was going to get, the actual bagger wasn’t so great at his job… I didn’t know why he kept it.

I gave him a look, finding him on the edge of the gathering crowd. Noah Berrman, high school jock. The girls liked to come in and whisper, giggle, flirt when he was scheduled (which is probably why Otis hadn’t fired him), but Noah didn’t work. When a cute girl was in line, suddenly he was great at pretending to bag groceries, but he excelled more at standing, talking, winking, flirting, being the cool guy. Right now, though, he wasn’t looking too cool. He was as captivated as everyone else.

Seeing Mrs. Johnson gaping and Viola Prinnesly looking faint, I sighed. It was time to wade in.

“No,” I said to Ben. “Go back to work. Noah.”

He looked at me.

I motioned toward the registers. “Get back to work. Everyone, go back to shopping.”

“Don’t you stop this. This is better than Jeopardy.” Viola shook her wrinkled finger at me, but she wasn’t looking my way. She was busy drinking in all the biker goodness.

I had to admit, I understood. Muscles. There were muscles everywhere.

“Kal, you sure?” Otis breathed behind me.

I suppressed a shiver and a roll of nausea. “Yes, Otis. If Mike comes in, send him back out. These guys are Red Demons. You do not want to call the cops on them. Trust me.”

I heard the hitch in his breath and decided I didn’t want to know if it was from fear or excitement.

Most of the patrons had gone back to shopping, though Viola and Mrs. Johnson were doubling down. Mrs. Johnson had sat down on her walker. Viola leaned against the side of it, her cane resting beside her.

The two guys were trading punches, using cans of soup as weapons.

I liked soup. The soup didn’t deserve this treatment.

I didn’t know these particular two, but I knew the Red Demons. They were relatively new, but they’d been expanding fast, and normal folk like myself wouldn’t usually know this about them. I did because my brother had been friends with the Red Demons’ current VP, or at least the rumor was that Shane King was their VP.

They didn’t have a charter here, but they’d rolled into town a week ago. They’d been spending most of their time at Ruby’s Dexterity, a bar where the rougher folks around here could be found. Bert’s was where the tourists and not-rough crowd hung out. But if you wanted to hire a hitman, go to Ruby’s. I mean, that was the joke around Friendly, Indiana, but people said it for a reason. Because it was true.

Anyway, I still had two bikers and about five hundred dollars in damage to handle, so I waded in.

“Guys!” I shouted, my hands up.

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