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“Sure. Well, except when the hurricane hit. I missed a few nights then.”
The bartender swiped a white towel over the bar’s glossy surface. “He was in one other time and was all pissed off that the coverage was about the hurricane. Interrupting the sports on TV. Hell, I thought we were lucky to even be open, avoid being hit hard, y’know. No flooding except the back lot.” He tossed his towel into a bin of other wet rags.
Joe half turned on his stool and said to Nikki, “Hey, if you’re lookin’ fer him and find him, tell him he owes me a ten-spot for the Marlins game. Cheap ass is probably layin’ low to avoid payin’.” His attention back on the television, he said, “I could use another,” to the bartender.
Nikki walked back to her Honda and saw she was hemmed in, a blue Ford Escape backed in tight, its back end nearly touching the nose of her CR-V.
Irritating.
She’d have to jockey her way out of the tight space.
“Great,” she muttered, slipping into the warm interior. She started the engine and rolled down the windows to cool things off. Then, before trying to pull away from the curb, she slid her phone from her pocket to google the Braves’ schedule.
Sure enough, the Atlanta team had played the Miami Marlins at home on the night before the discovery of the bodies at the Beaumont estate.
Not really a surprise.
Bronco had been freaked.
And it was time to pay him a visit and find out what the hell he was doing in that basement and what he knew about Baxter Beaumont and Margaret Duval. Had they had an affair? Did it matter? Was it a reason for Harvey and Margaret divorcing? What had Andrea Clancy said? She dropped her phone into a cup holder.
She put her Honda into gear and inched backward, then forward, cranking the steering wheel, hoping to ease out of the space. Each time her back wheels hit the curb, she tried again, gaining inches and beginning to sweat. What kind of a jerk would pin her in like that? Backward. Forward. Backward again.
Finally, she thought she would clear the Escape.
Checking her side-view mirror before hitting the gas, she noticed someone lingering at the doorway of the bar, partially hidden by a lamppost. A man? A woman? She couldn’t tell as the sun was in her eyes.
So what if someone was looking?
Probably getting off on watching her frustration as she tried to maneuver into traffic.
Or maybe someone had overheard her talking to the bartender. She cranked on the steering wheel to get out of the tight space and hit the gas.
An angry honk blasted.
She hit the brakes, her car rocking to a stop as a BMW roared past her, the middle-aged driver raising an angry fist as the car, tires screeching, fishtailed into the oncoming lane, nearly swiping a minivan heading the opposite direction.
“Stupid bitch!” the driver yelled, speeding off.
Nikki’s heart jackhammered.
Several people smoking outside the bar were staring at her, and the figure hiding behind the lamppost?
Gone.
“It was nothing,” she told herself as she eased into the flow of traffic, her pulse still in the stratosphere, but she couldn’t shake the image of the person behind the lamppost surreptitiously watching her, and the memory of the intruder inside her home skittered through her brain.
“You’re being an idiot,” she said, and saw her worried eyes in her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Get over yourself.”
Traffic thinned as she eased out of the city and into farmland, where she spotted cattle grazing in lush fields, a tractor pulling a trailer toward a red barn, a few hazy clouds in a blue, blue sky. She told herself to calm down, to not let little things get to her, let the warmth of a lazy Georgia day settle over her. As she slowed to turn onto Settler’s Road, another vehicle, a delivery van, caught up to her and rather than slow, moved into the oncoming lane as she turned. Behind the van, a gray pickup with tinted windows, too, gave her wide berth and sped past.
Odd, she thought, but really not. Everyone was in a hurry.
As was she.
She hit the gas as the road wound along the banks of the river and using her GPS located the lane where several NO TRESPASSING signs had been posted.
“Too bad.” She ignored the warnings, her Honda bouncing a little on the rutted lane where little gravel had been spread. She drove through a thick stand of pine and maple trees that gave way to a small clearing and Bronco Cravens’s weathered cabin. A beat-up Ford Ranger was parked near a dilapidated garage.
