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“He thinks I’m still too involved personally to be clear-eyed about Carmen.”
“Well, yeah.”
“But he told me he liked the way I’ve been investigating and the conclusions I’ve drawn, and he thinks I should work to be a detective.”
He pulled her beer bottle away and slid the whiskey glass along the bar, closer to her. “Is that what you’re going to do, then?”
“There are no openings at West Knoll, but that’s my plan. I’ve been stuck in a rut. Might as well move on.”
“And if you’re a detective, you can look further into Carmen’s death.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Bailey smiled faintly and answered, “You’re onto me.”
“Drink,” he said, nodding toward the glass of whiskey.
“I told you. It’s not my drink.”
“Drink,” he insisted.
“This is worse than high school.”
“You’re an officer of the law now, and it’s my duty to make certain you remember how to have fun. You do remember, right? Fun?”
Bailey shook her head. Not because she was answering him, because she didn’t know what the hell was holding her here with him. He was too pushy. Too ready to do the wrong thing. He hadn’t matured all that much from high school, and yet . . .
“I think you qualify for the ‘Bad Influence’ label,” she told him.
He grinned at that. “Most definitely.”
“You’ve changed since high school.”
“I was always a bad influence.”
“No.”
“No?” he queried, one eyebrow lifted.
“You and Sumpter were just Tanner followers, not really bad.”
She heard her words as soon as they were out and cringed a little inside. No man liked to be called a follower. She should have chosen what she said more carefully.
But Penske just gave her a crooked smile. “Jesus, it’s hell to be dumb, isn’t it? I wanted to be Tanner. I saw him there, with all those girls, women, after him, and it seemed like he had everything. I wanted it all. Right then. Right now.”
She was relieved he hadn’t taken offense. “We all paid him a little bit of homage,” Bailey admitted.
Another roar came from the billiards table. Bailey looked over at them sharply. She half-expected one of them to bash their pool cue down on the other’s head, and she tensed. She’d dealt with the Crassleys enough to know what she needed to do before things got out of control.
The pressure of a glass into her palm brought her head snapping back around.
“Take a sip or two,” he said. “For fun.” When he was certain she wasn’t going to drop her drink, he held his nearly empty one up to his own lips.
The pool players were grudgingly racking up another game. No blood. No fight. Bailey resisted the urge to look at the time on her cell phone and instead lifted up her glass in a toast. “To fun.”
“To fun!” He grinned, tossing back the last swallow of his as Bailey brought the glass of whiskey to her lips. She sipped, thought, “Yuk . . . but not horrifically terrible.” She took a second sip and a third, none of them more than a small swallow.
“There ya go,” he said.
“Are we going to go eat at Danny O’s?”
