Page 41 of Texas Hold Em'
You know what this is about,I thought morosely.This is about Bates.
My mind flashed with terrible images of what might have happened to her, and I thought of Tracy Kiss, the poor stripper who’d been found murdered in a ditch almost two months ago.
Two months.
Where was the time going?
How had so much time passed since the bastard rolled into town and turned everything upside down?
I had half a mind to call Jackson and tell him that Carrie was AWOL, but I didn’t want to risk what he’d do to her if he found her. She thought he’d been hard on her the other day? Not even close. If hethought she’d snuck out and was making moves behind our backs, he’d do what he had to in order to protect the MC.
Which is what I should do.
I pulled down a side street and kept my head on a swivel as I searched for her. My bike rumbled loyally but I didn’t push her to her limits. I had to keep the speed off if I was going to spot Carrie. She might be in trouble.
Or worse.
I gritted my teeth.
I had to stop thinking like that. She wasn’t mine to protect, and for all I knew she was selling us out this very minute. I wanted to trust her. Hell, I wanted to trust her more than anything. But I couldn’t. Not yet. She still didn’t make sense to me, and she still wouldn’t let me in enough to tell me what she was really plotting.
If she brought us down, I’d never forgive myself.
It would all be on my head. A pair of pretty blue eyes and a killer ass made me dimwitted and weak.
So weak.
I gripped the handlebars and took another turn. Up ahead, a neon Open sign flashed at a dingy bar. I’d never set foot in the place because I knew it was owned by Bates.
A lightbulb flashed in my head and I cut across traffic to pull into the nearly empty parking lot. A big bouncer stood at the front door, and he glowered at me as I moved through the doors. No host greeted me, so I wove around tables and made my way to the bar where a gray-haired man poured a cocktail glass full of tequila and slid it down the bar to a guy in a trench coat who looked down on his luck.
I leaned on the bar but didn’t sit down. “Hey, man,” I said, “have you seen a girl in here tonight? Blonde hair, blue eyes, real smoke show, would’ve looked out of place?”
The bartender stared blankly at me.
Grumbling, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and slapped it down on the counter. “She’s about five foot three, slender, fit, too stubborn for her own good?”
“She was here.”
“When?” I heard the relief in my own voice.
“A while ago,” the bartender said with a greedy smile. He was missing an eye tooth and the others looked like they were rotting out of his mouth.
I put another twenty down.
He swiped it off the bar and tucked it in the front pocket of his button-down shirt. It was stained with grease and liquor. “About an hour ago. She came in alone, sat down for about half an hour, and then received company.”
“Who was it? Did you know them?”
The bartender shrugged.
I cast a wary glance over my shoulder. The bar was practically empty. A group of four played a quiet game of pool, and the drunkard three stools down from me nursed his tequila.
I turned back to the bartender and lifted a hand to curl my finger in a come-hither motion.
The bartender frowned.
I beckoned him forward again, and the fool leaned over the bar.
