“I wouldn’t go that far,” Clay said. “She’s not dead.”
“Stupid bitch,” Arlo said, his voice ripe with contempt. It was a bit hypocritical in Clay’s opinion, but people were. “She always thought she was so clever, so much better than me. TJ might have been too stupid to put the pieces together, but I’m not. I’m smarter than she thought.”
Clay rolled his shoulders back to loosen them up.
“That bar’s pretty low, Arlo,” he drawled as he took another step to the side. He could just make out a thin slice of Arlo’s rangy body in the kitchen, a greasy cowlick of hair and one prison-inked elbow. He watched as Arlo shifted his stance and raised the gun into a shooting position.
“Yeah?” Arlo sneered. “How smart do you feel now, you smug son of a—”
His muscles tightened, and Clay snapped the gun up and pulled the trigger twice. Bullets punched through the wall—not through the holes that Arlo had already shot in it, although that would have been shit-hot—and hit their target with a wet thud. Arlo staggered backward as his arm fell, suddenly noodle-limp, to his side. His legs folded under him.
Bitch,Clay finished the sentence for him as Arlo hit the floor.Son of a bitch.
Clay, gun back in a ready position, stepped over Betsy’s legs. His boots squelched in the blood that had started to soak into the floor, thick and sticky.
“Holy shit,” Hadley said as Clay trod more gore into the kitchen. The barman was sprawled awkwardly on the floor in the corner of, with one hand cuffed to the old white stove. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you, boss.”
“Back at you,” Clay said as he tucked his gun back into his jeans.
“Who the hellisthat?” Hadley asked. “Do you know him? Is he dead?”
Clay crouched down on one knee and put two fingers under Arlo’s jaw. Badly shaved stubble itched against his fingers as he pressed up into the soft wattle of flesh, but that was it. It was performative, of course. Arlo had a neat dime-sized hole right in the middle of his forehead, but apparently, Hadley hadn’t caught that.
“Not yet,” he lied. “Just fainted. Asshole.”
He gave Arlo’s cheek a light slap; it was still warm but somehowfeltdead. Clay wondered why he’d lied. There was no reason to, and it wouldn’t hold up long. Arlo was conspicuously not breathing, and his brains would start to leak soon. Sometimes, though, you just had to go with your gut, and Clay’s said not to let Hadley off the hook just yet.
“What the hell did he want with you, Hadley?” Clay asked as he sat back on his heels. There was blood on the knee of his jeans, and he rubbed at it absently with his knuckles until it smudged down into another stain. “How did he even know where you live?”
Hadley got up onto his knees. He rubbed his jaw—a bruise darkening near the point of his chin—on the back of one hand.
“Ask him when he comes around,” he said. “He has business with Betsy, something about her telling TJ something? I don’t know. He isn’t exactly the most coherent fucker.”
At least one part of that story rang true.
Clay leaned back to look into the hall at Betsy. She’d passed out. Or died. It wasn’t as cut and dried as Arlo’s situation, but she wasn’t in a good place. Either way, she wasn’t about to answer any questions.
“Hey, boss,” Hadley interrupted him. He cleared his throat and raised his hands, making the chain rattle against the stove. “Cut me loose here, huh? Keys were in his pocket.”
“Yeah, I’m not going in there,” Clay said. “You’ll have to wait.”
He drew his hand back and slapped Arlo again, harder this time. The crack of palm on flesh was loud in the stripped-out little kitchen. Oddly enough, Clay felt a little worse about hitting Arlo’s corpse than he had about hitting Arlo. “C’mon, Arlo. Rise and shine.”
Hadley snorted out a dry little bark of a laugh. “Fair enough,” he said.
The front door creaked.
Shit.
Clay stood up and stepped back, the gun tucked out of view behind his leg. He caught sight of Grade over Betsy’s body as the younger man edged into the house.
“I thought I told you to stay put,” Clay said.
Grade pushed the door shut behind him. His gaze caught on Betsy and the puddle of blood and he paused for a second. Clay supposed he couldn’t be faulted for that, but it wasn’t shock on his face, just that same brief flicker of recognition. “If you took better care of yourself,” Grade said. “You’d probably be sure about—behind you!”
The sound of rusted metal hinges being torn apart underlined Grade’s warning, and then door of the stove caught Clay across the back. He grunted and lurched forward. His vision smeared gray at the edges—he had been hit in the head too many times—and pain twisted down his back and side in off-kilter configurations as nerves misfired and clenched muscles pulled up short. He’d felt worse. Clay caught himself on the doorframe, shook his head to clear it, and threw himself backward. He crashed into Hadley as the other man tried to push through the door. They both went down in a tangle of limbs and cursing, the stove door jammed awkwardly between them.
It wasn’t a pretty fight.
