Page 36 of Diesel’s Desire

Seventeen years I’ve spent building a life on one side of a line I used to think was simple. Law on one side. Everything Evan Cole became on the other.

I just asked his club’s newest bride to help me figure out how to investigate the most powerful man in Briar Fork, because the law I swore an oath to won’t touch him, and somewhere out past the quarry road, a six-year-old girl could be running out of days.

I start the engine.

I don’t feel like a cop anymore, driving home in the dark. I feel like somebody standing at the edge of a line she’s about to cross for good, and the strangest part of all of it is how little that scares me compared to the alternative.

19

DIESEL

Iclock her ride the second I roll past Mac’s, tucked between a rusted Silverado and somebody’s boat trailer. Her own truck, not the cruiser, but I know it the way I know my own hands. I’ve spent three weeks memorizing every inch of her life I can get close to without spooking her off completely.

I should keep riding. Head back to the clubhouse, deal with the shit Jenson’s got piled on my desk. Instead I swing into the gravel lot and cut the engine, and my boots hit the ground before my brain finishes arguing with me about it.

Inside, the jukebox is playing something twangy and half the regulars are hunched over their beers, minding nobody’s business but their own. I hear her before I see her—that clipped, controlled voice she uses when she’s two seconds from losing her patience and refuses to let it show.

“—tired of men in suits worrying about overtime budget,” she’s saying to the bartender, who nods along like a man who’s learned it’s safer not to comment. “Just give me the whiskey, Ronnie. Neat.”

I slide onto the stool two down from her before I let myself think better of it.

“Put that on my tab,” I say.

Ronnie’s eyes flick to Penny like he’s asking permission. She turns her head slowly, and when she sees me, her jaw goes tight enough to crack walnuts.

“I don’t need you buying my drinks, Cole.”

“Didn’t ask if you needed it.”

She glares at me for a long three-count, the kind of look that would’ve sent lesser men out the door. I’ve never been a lesser man where she’s concerned.

“Fine,” she says. “One drink. Don’t make it weird.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Ronnie pours. I nod him off when he hesitates about mine, and he sets a beer in front of me and disappears down to the other end of the bar like he wants no part of whatever this is.

“Rough week?” I ask.

Penny stares into her glass like it owes her answers. “Rough case.”

“The Miller girl.”

She exhales through her nose and takes a slow sip, like she’s deciding how much to give me. “Five days. No ransom call, no sightings that check out, nothing. And every lead I chase dries up before I can prove it’s a lead at all.” Her fingers tighten around the glass. “I keep thinking about her parents’ faces. Not the paperwork, not the pressure from the higher-ups. Just... their faces.”

I tilt my head. “You’ll find her.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” I say. “But I know you. You don’t stop till you do.”

She looks at me like she wants to argue and can’t find the footing for it. For a second the bar noise fades out and it’s just her and me and all those years compressed into the space between two stools.

“You look like hell,” I tell her, because it’s true and because somebody needs to say it. Dark circles under her eyes. Shoulders pulled up around her ears like she’s braced for a hit that never stops coming.

She rolls her eyes. “Thanks. Really boosts my confidence.”

“Wasn’t an insult.” I turn my beer bottle a quarter turn on the bar top. “C’mon. Take a ride with me.”