Page 15 of A Witch-ish Guide to Protectors and Pendulums

I’d learned to play when I was a young teen. Jeffery and I actually met in a bar. He saw me playing with a couple of girlfriends and walked up to call next game. We were together from that day on.

I found the cue stick I wanted and chalked up.

“You first,” he said.

I bent over the table, aimed at the cue ball for the break, drew back my stick, and made my shot. The satisfying crack of the ball always made me smile as the triangle of balls spread out, hitting and bouncing off the sides of the green-felt covered table, sinking the seven ball. Solids. In pool, I had game. In interrogation, no game. Being completely out of my league and accepting it, I decided the best course of action was to simply go for it and ask. I mean, he’d beenexpectingmy call. What did I have to lose?

“What business did you have with Jeffery?”

“Oh, Simone…” He tut-tutted me, shaking his head. “Are you sure you want to go down this road?”

Okay. Score one for Beetle. I took my next shot, sinking both the five and the one balls.

He raised his eyebrow in my direction. Clearly, he’d figured revealing he knew my name would mess me up.

I’d bite. “How do you know my name?”

“I make it a habit to know everyone close to the people who work for me. How do you think I got him to work for me in the first place?”

“Fair enough.” My ball narrowly missed the corner pocket. “Your shot.”

Beetle nodded, surveying the table. He lined up his shot, drawing his stick back, but before he took his turn, he said, “Tell you what, I miss this shot, I let you walk away scot-free. Neither me nor any of my people will bother you again. I make it, you belong to me.”

I laughed, managing to make it sound incredulous rather than the freaked out that I was. “You’re not the Devil. This ain’t Georgia and unlike Johnny, I’m not willing to make a deal,” I answered, referencing The Charlie Daniels Band’s biggest hit, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

“Sweet, innocent Simone…” He paused for what appeared to be dramatic effect. “You have no idea who I am.” Yep. Dramatic effect worked perfectly. Anyone who said that didn’t ooze threatening would’ve been lying.

“Where is she?” someone barked loudly in a voice that sounded remarkably like Connor’s.

I whipped my head up to look at Beetle, who glared at the door, and I turned my head in the same direction, locking eyes with the man himself. Then, twisting back to say something, I didn’t know what, to the man I suspected was responsible for Jeffery’s death, I found him gone.Poof!

“What do you think you’re doing here?” Connor yelled my way, so I had to presume he was yelling at me.

The room went quiet.

His eyes raged with molten heat as he stomped over to me, then, wrapping his hand around my upper arm, he started pulling me, dragging me when I stumbled over my feet, out of the bar.

“Stop,” I demanded.

Connor didn’t stop.

“Stop!” I yelled louder, wrenching my arm out of his hold.

Rather than argue with me any further, he flipped me over his shoulder again, storming out to my jeep. I pounded on his back.

“Put me down,” I demanded.

But the jerk didn’t put me down, he fished my keys from my pocket, bleeping the lock then dropped me into the passenger seat. He rounded the hood to climb into the driver’s seat, started the engine, then sped out from the parking lot.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” I railed against his caveman-like treatment of me and the situation and whatever else I could rail against at the moment. Oh how I wanted to hurt him.

“Have to work tonight,” he grumbled. “But I had to come after you…”

“Whoa,” I said. “I never asked you to come after me.”

“Yeah, I know you didn’t, which is why you snuck off without telling me where you were going.” He was yelling by the end of his tirade.

“Calm down, Cujo.”

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