Page 25 of Bad Seed

“Got a minute?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Liz said. “Come in, come in. There’s something I need to tell you as well. I was just waiting for you to get in your office.”

Larry sat down, this time without the attitude. “I want to apologize. I overstepped myself about your new event. I know better. Truth is, I let personal problems interfere with my job. It won’t happen again.”

Liz breathed a sigh of relief. “No problem. We’ve all been there. So, I got a call from Dad. I think Mom is guiding this decision, but it’s probably for his own good. He’s thinking of putting the hotel up for sale and has gone into preparatory mode. As you know, businesses like this always require an up-to-date profit-and-loss statement, and so he’s sending a CPA to the hotel to do our annual audit, instead of waiting for year-end like we always do. He wanted me to reassure you that this in no way affects your job here. This is all still up in the air, but he wants to be ready, just in case.”

“Ahhh, I wondered how his health was faring. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy decision for him,” Larry said.

Liz shrugged. “I’m sure it wasn’t, but this hotel is only a small part of Dad’s holdings, and he needs toslow down, for sure. Oh…he’s comping a suite for the CPA. Her name is Harley Banks. The comps include meals and hotel services, so she’ll work from inside the suite. She’ll have full access to the hotel computer system, but in view only. She won’t be interfering in any way with daily entries, etc. She’ll just be getting the data she needs to do the audit. But since you have nothing to do with the intake of income or payout to vendors, none of that will affect you.”

Larry nodded. “Right, but I’ll always be available to answer any questions for her, should the need arise.”

“Perfect,” Liz said, and smiled.

He slapped his legs and then stood. “Well then, if that’s it, I’ll let you get back to work. Have a good day.”

“You, too,” Liz said, and then watched as he left her office.Mission accomplished, she thought, and went back to work.

Larry wasn’t concerned about the audit. Everything ordered was paid for. Every bank statement was balanced. He was in the clear.

Chapter 5

Justine was still dawdling through her makeshift lunch and booze, and wondering what Brendan “Hotshot” Pope thought when he found the note she’d left on his door. In her mind, she was imagining him worried, or maybe even scared. But the biggest error in that was assuming he would react the way she might react, should the situation be reversed. She’d threatened men before and been rewarded for it. What she didn’t yet realize was that threatening any Pope was a dangerous thing to do. It meant threatening the whole family, something that should not be taken lightly.

She pulled up a TikTok reel and watched it three times, laughing hysterically and already buzzed as she drank the last of her spiked cola. After a few minutes, she tired of social media, threw her phone down on the sofa, carried what was left of her sandwich to the kitchen and dumped it in the garbage, poured another shot of whisky in her glass and chugged it like medicine. The liquor burned all the way down, but she felt good. All warm and just the tiniest bit fuzzy. Fuzzy enough to make another rash decision as she headed for her roomto change.

She came out a short while later dressed in black Lycra pants that clung to every crevice of her ass, a pink clingy sweater, and a white fur jacket and boots. After a swipe of her reddest lipstick, and leaving her long blond hair in a long, messy mane, she was good to go. She was itching to party and whatever came with it. There was a whole town full of strangers she didn’t know and would never see again. If she was lucky, she’d get laid. She didn’t care where it happened, whether in the back seat of a car on a lonely road, or wherever the dude was staying.

But she needed transportation to get where she wanted to go, and went looking for her father’s car keys. She found them on top of his dresser, left the hotel without leaving a note or a text to let him know where she was going, and headed for Trapper’s Bar and Grill on the strip. The parking lot at the bar was only half-full. A little early for the lunchtime crowd to begin arriving, but never too early for a drink at the bar. She parked, got out, and walked into the place like she owned it.

***

Louis Glass, the bartender at Trapper’s Bar and Grill, was drawing a beer for a customer at the bar when he saw the woman walk in. He knew the moment he saw her she was going to be trouble, because she paused afew steps inside the entrance, scanning the room like a buzzard looking for roadkill, and then headed for the bar. When she chose the only empty stool between three men to her right, and two to her left, she’d marked herself as product. They’d either look, or they’d buy. It didn’t matter to her as long as she got noticed.

Then she shrugged out of her fur jacket and draped it across the back of the barstool, making the lack of a bra under the pink sweater immediately obvious to the five men she’d surrounded herself with.

“Be right with you, ma’am,” Louis said.

Justine tossed her head and flashed a big smile. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere,” she drawled.

One of the men on her left leaned toward her.

“Buy you a drink, sugar?” he asked.

Justine shrugged. “Sure, why not? Whiskey. Neat.”

Louis heard her and frowned. He’d been a bartender long enough to know this one came to drown something. She was either mad as hell at someone, or she’d been let down in some way, and he would have put his money on anger. Unaware she was already riding an alcohol high, he made a mental note to keep track of her drinks.

***

Oblivious to the bartender’s hawk-eye attention to her drinks, Justine launched into her Dallas barhopping behavior and turned into the life of the party.

But the man who’d bought her first drink soon figuredout she was more than he wanted to deal with, paid his bar tab, and left while she was downing shots with a guy who played backup guitar at one of the music venues.

That man two-stepped her around the little dance floor until she was dizzy, at which point she excused herself, claiming she needed to powder her nose, and staggered off to the ladies’ room, while diners began coming in for lunch.

By the time Justine returned, business was booming. Tables and booths were filling up. Background music was all fiddles and guitars, but muted enough for private conversations among the diners. Servers were hustling between the kitchen and the tables, taking orders, delivering orders, and refilling drink glasses.

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