AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Entirely possible.”
“Who is it, then?”
“James Carville.”
“The old man. Huh.”
“The old man?” McCrae repeated.
“Gray hair, ponytail?”
McCrae nodded. That was exactly how he would’ve described the man he’d met five years earlier, though he’d thought the man had just grayed early.
“He’ll be in around two. Punctuality isn’t his strong suit. Mine neither, but then nothing really gets going till later.”
McCrae forced himself not to look at the time. “Maybe I’ll have something to eat.” The early-morning stale muffin he’d shared with Fido wasn’t cutting it. “What’s the favorite around here?”
“Duck burger. Made with beef,” she added, clearly a point that had needed to be mentioned more than once. “The usual suspects—tomato, onion, lettuce, and avocado, and pepperjack cheese, too.”
“Sold.”
She went through a swinging door presumably into the kitchen to place the order. When she returned, she refilled his beer, though he protested he didn’t need a second.
“It’s on me. Gotta keep in good with the cops,” she said.
“I’m not from around here.”
“Doesn’t matter. Karma works everywhere.”
A few other customers started trickling in. McCrae nursed his second beer and worked on the piled-high hamburger and fries Marla, as she told him her name was, put in front of him. He was impatiently checking his phone every five minutes when Carville walked through the door, his ponytail a good deal longer than it had been five years earlier.
He noticed McCrae right away and looked like he wanted to bolt.
“Remember me?” McCrae asked, though he’d only seen the man once before the investigation was co-opted by Hurston.
“You were with that cop’s father.”
Ah, yes. He’d been with Quin, and Quin had been sick with grief, alternatively silent and seething or loud and explosive.
“Didn’t get to talk to you much before the investigation moved to another investigator.”
He made a sound of disgust, low in his throat. “That bullshit asshole who directed my answers.”
“How do you mean, ‘directed’?”
“I mean, like, he said, ‘You saw no evidence that he’d roofied her, correct?’ and then when I said, ‘I’m pretty sure I did see him dump something into her drink,’ he said, ‘Well, it was dark and you couldn’t see,’ and I said, ‘It wasn’t that dark’ and ‘Yes, I could see,’ which he didn’t like, and so we went around a few times. Spooked me.”
“That why you left?”
“That, and I was losing my apartment. Landlord was jacking up the price, but that cop was the last straw.”
“So you did see Penske put something in the woman’s drink that night.”
“Yeah . . . if that’s his name, Penske . . . pretty sure. She didn’t know about it. I was going to tell her, but then they went outside, and they seemed all right. I don’t know . . . I kinda shrugged it off. You see a lot of stuff at a bar.” He made a face. “We all left when the placed closed. Didn’t think about the car at the far back of the lot. People leave ’em in the lot all the time. I didn’t learn till the next day they’d been shot.”
“Anyone else notice them that night?”
He shrugged. “I was the one serving them. That cop talked to everybody.”
