“Was my job for more than forty years. Hard habit to break.”
“Shrink?” Lincoln guessed.
“Cop,” Carter countered.
Barry slid a heaping basket of steaming biscuits in front of Carter. “Winner.”
Lydia reached across the table and snagged one off the top. “Barry was the police chief until a few years back.”
“And opened a café?” Carter said.
“Wife did, decades ago. Now that I’m retired and got time, if I want to spend that time with her, I gotta be here. And I make better biscuits than she does.”
Jennifer leaned in and lowered her voice. “This place is always popular, but it’s real popular on Saturdays.” She jutted a thumb at Barry.
Lincoln returned her conspiratorial whisper. “How’s that work? Apex goes without biscuits the rest of the week?”
“Trudy makes everything else better than me.” Barry patted his big belly. “Fifty years of good eatin’ and good lovin’.”
“We’ll look forward to meeting her,” Carter said, grin widening.
“You’re a slick one.” Barry narrowed his eyes at Carter, even as one corner of his mouth curved up. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
For a panicked moment, Lincoln swore the ex–top cop had seen right through their cover. His panic rose exponentially when Barry shifted his blue eyes to him. “And I want blondie to answer.”
Carter scoffed, hand splayed on his chest in mock outrage. “My answer’s not good enough?”
“Shut up, Georgia.”
Lincoln’s panic receded a little. If Carter had fooled him on the accent, then Barry didn’t know. He suspected—he was fishing—but he didn’t know. Time for Lincoln to pull his weight as a partner. Except there was that tiny speed bump of having not discussed this part of their cover. An oversight, lost in the delays this morning and the unexpected party last night. The party. Fuck! He shifted in his seat, angling away from Barry and toward Carter. “You didn’t tell them this story last night?”
If Carter had, they were fucked. His only hope would be Susanne or Jennifer jumping in to tell the story for him. Which he didn’t think angry-Barry-Jerry would abide.
“No,” Susanne said. “He was just about to when you arrived.”
She, Jennifer, and Lydia hunched forward, forearms on the table, eagerly awaiting the story. It reminded Lincoln of Elena and her friends when they were younger, snuggled in sleeping bags on the living room floor. They would beg him for a scary story, and he would plumb his research and cases for remembered bits and pieces he could assemble into a good scare.
Carter stretched an arm across the booth behind him and smirked, that same one from the first day of class. “Go ahead and tell them, honey.”
Cocky asshole. And it grated that that smirk was the answer to Lincoln’s dilemma. He knew exactly what to do. He righted himself and turned his attention half to Barry, half to the ladies. “I was his teacher.”
“Ooh,” Lydia said, as she pulled her thick gray hair back into a ponytail. “This is gonna be good.” Her hazel eyes twinkled with interest, the same shared by everyone around the table, including Barry.
“What’s a librarian got to teach a survival expert?” he asked.
Carter’s arm tensed behind Lincoln. “We didn’t tell you that.”
“Didn’t have to.” He waggled his accusing finger at Susanne and Jennifer this time. “They were giving Lydia the 4-1-1 before you arrived.”
Carter relaxed, and so did Lincoln, continuing with his story. “I taught information science classes on the side at one of the community colleges. Carter was a student there.”
“When I got out of the army,” Carter said, picking up where he’d left off, “I knew the field part of survival training. Knew I wanted to bring certain aspects of it to local law enforcement agencies and other interested parties who might benefit. But this one”—he dropped his arm off the top of the booth onto Lincoln’s shoulders and squeezed—“taught me some of the technical parts of running a business. How to create systems for finding and storing data, which also helps with client databases.”
“That was eight years ago.” If Lincoln sounded genuinely impressed, it was the truth. Scared a little too. Carter had effortlessly spun all that from his head.
“And you’ve been together that long?” Barry asked. “They told Lyd you were newlyweds. Long time to wait.”
“Oh, no,” Carter said. “We only recently reconnected.”
