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“What do you want her for?” Judah replied.
Neither of them would answer. Stalemate.
Sean scrubbed his hand across his face. “I’m going to figure out where those messages are c-coming from.”
“It might be a dead end,” he said. “They all come from different accounts, plus—”
“It’s not a dead end. But it would be a hell of a lot easier if you’d let me talk to the service providers.”
“No. Somebody will leak it.”
“I know a few guys at Google, and—”
“No. Figure something else out.”
“Fine. Like I said, it’s not impossible. Just hard. In the meantime, she’s going to want to talk to you again about who knows you’re in Buffalo.”
“Okay.”
“And we’re taking off right after the show. I have an idea, but I need to work on my own equipment back in Camelot to get it done. We’ll catch up with you next weekend.”
“Fine.”
Sean stood and started to turn away, then stopped. “If she ends up hurt because of you, I don’t c-care who you are,” he said. “I’ll k-kick your ass.”
Judah laughed. “Right back at you.”
“I’m no threat to her.”
“If you’re not even smart enough to know that’s bullshit, I’m more likely to owe you an ass-whipping than the other way around.”
For a long moment, they took each other’s measure. Sean guarded his expression carefully, and Judah couldn’t get much of a read off him. The man didn’t like him; that much was obvious. No doubt it was payback for Judah’s attempt to get Katie into bed. Given the nature of his failure, he figured Sean would warm up to him eventually.
He didn’t know why he wanted him to, except that he trusted him. Not with Katie—though if Sean screwed that up it would be the result of self-destructive stupidity, not of meanness. But with the rest of this mess. With his life, he supposed, if it came to that.
Maybe it was because the guy reminded him of Ben. He had the take-no-prisoners confidence of someone who’d come out the other side of an ugly childhood.
“You know, I think you and I are going to be friends,” Judah said with a smile.
Sean shook his head and walked out. Grinning, Judah watched him go. He was as easy to rile as Ben, too. Men like that looked tough, but they kept their emotions right under their skin. All you had to do was scratch them in the right place, and you found out how deeply they felt everything.
He spun the marker in a slow circle on the card table, wondering for the thousandth time if Ben was the one sending him the threats. If it had to be Ben, or if someone else had found out what happened that summer.
How hard could it be to track his movements and discover he was in Buffalo? Everywhere Judah went, he got noticed. The woman at the front desk had taken his picture with her phone. He couldn’t slip through the world in secrecy. Hadn’t been able to do that in fifteen years.
It wasn’t necessarily Ben, but it could be him. And a nagging voice in Judah’s head kept saying, Find out. Hurry up.
Katie would find out for him. Katie or Sean, or both of them working together. And if it took them too long, he had another plan in motion that would speed things along to the inevitable conclusion.
He had to know, soon. But he wasn’t ready to face the past. Not quite yet.
Chapter Twenty
“Are you sure it’s a good idea to drive in this?” Katie asked. The thumping and whining of the wipers going full speed made her edgy. Fat snowflakes hurtled out of the blackness to commit suicide against the windshield.
Sean drove like he was in no hurry, which was comforting, but also kind of absurd. His haste to get back home so he could work on his own equipment was the whole reason he’d decided to drive back to Camelot tonight, rather than in the morning.
Not that she wanted him to rush—not with all this snow. The storm had blown up after they were already in the car, surprising them. The weather app on her cell phone said it wasn’t supposed to get any worse than this, and the driving conditions really weren’t all that bad, but Katie wasn’t a snow girl.
