She sighed. They needed a place to stay, and the only thing in their way was about thirty aquatic turtles. “Fine. Fuck it. Let’s go broker some baby turtles.”
Chapter 10
The Shell Station
49 Days until Busy Season
The Shell Station,a bar thirty miles southwest of Timber Creek, looked exactly how it sounded. The building itself was a disused Shell gas station that’d been reconfigured sometime in the nineties. The exterior was still the iconic yellow and red with large windows and a sign out front advertising unleaded gas for $1.97 per gallon. The interior was packed with men, women, and far more children than a non-Wisconsinite would know to expect.
The front door stuck a little but reluctantly flung open with a hard yank, spilling AC/DC into the busy parking lot. Painted pegboards covered the walls. On the right was a bar constructed of mostly card tables. Behind the tables were taps, a soda gun, and a few handles of liquor resting in a kiddie pool full of crushed ice.
“Is this”—Elliot gestured to the slapdash-looking setup—“a temporary thing?”
“It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. The kiddie pool’s new,” she remarked. She imagined a broken mini fridge was to blame. She cupped his hand, roping him through thecrowd like she knew what she was doing. He squeezed back firmly. Too firmly.
“Are you good?” she asked over her shoulder in a way that didn’t solicit an honest or thorough response.
Arms passed pitchers of beer and baskets of cheese curds over heads and around bodies with the familiarity of a family barbecue. These people weren’t family, but they might as well have been, and Lainey and Elliot stuck out.
Lainey felt a new persona slipping onto her shoulders like a jacket. Her “I Belong Here” persona. It was a subtle but significant shift. “You look around while I grab us some drinks.” She tapped his upper arm and drifted into the direction of the kiddie pool.
Somewhere within the throng of patrons was a man with a microphone, narrating the turtle activity just out of sight. She returned to Elliot’s side, handing him a beer and keeping the other for herself as a prop. Lainey didn’t drink—she found alcohol and a chronic migraine condition to be a lethal combination—but an empty hand would draw unwanted attention in a crowd like this. Her eyes searched the edges of the crowd for any man who looked to be about Gran’s age.
“Are we looking for someone in particular?” Elliot asked, clasping her free hand again.
Lainey scanned his unreadable expression for insight into the hand-holding thing. “Uh, we’re looking for the person who can eventually give us what we want.”
“Can you let me into the plan a bit more than that?” he asked, annoyed.
“That wouldn’t be any fun, now, would it?”
“This is much louder and more volatile than Pottery Barn.”He looked down at her and leaned his head in close. “I need a little more information this time around.”
Something lit up in her chest at the wordsthis time around. Which was ridiculous because he didn’t mean anything by it.
But it explained his nerves. He was feeling stage fright over his role in whatever odd little scheme she was about to cook up.
“Fair,” she agreed. “We are trying to infiltrate the inner circle here, and the best way to earn their trust is by betting on something.”
“The raffle tickets are behind the bar.”
“The raffle tickets are for suckers. We’re looking for something with higher stakes.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he muttered, dropping her hand to massage his jaw. “All right, fine. I guess I’m doing this.” He clapped his hands together, like he’d done some internal calculus she wasn’t privy to. “Where would one find someone running a high-stakes turtle betting ring? I’m guessing he’s not working the room dressed as the Monopoly man.” He rolled tension from his shoulders.
“All I know is that my grandmother used to date him, so we want someone in their seventies who looks like they might’ve had their heart broken by the first Elaine Davis.”
He gave Laney a tight affirmative nod. “The one who boned Vincent Groff? Got it.”
“Don’t use the wordbonedwhen referring to my grandmother, but…yes. Vincent wasn’t her only conquest in this town.”
“Does she have a type?”
“Not physically, but confidence is big for her. She likes someone who can quietly command a room. Think Sam Elliot.”
“Jesus, the plan is to find the most ruggedly handsome man in rural Wisconsin at this disused gas station?”
“Why are all straight men so hot for Sam Elliot?”
