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“Case solved.”
“Yeah.” She didn’t look all that happy about it. “I was hoping it would last another couple of days.”
“The price you pay for being good at what you do.” He set down her cell. “It would have been a lot more interesting if you’d had to shoot him.”
“Life can be cruel that way.”
When they reached Hill’s apartment, she took more photos of him unloading the set. It was nearly time for Keith to start work, but Coop made her stop at a Taco Bell where he had a couple of 7-Layer Burritos and she ate half of a steak gordita. Even with the windows down, the car smelled of chili powder, cumin, and lust.
She’d been up front. She’d told him she used men for sex, but she was hardly the picture of a man-eater with those blueberry eyes that looked straight at him. His own scruples about sleeping with an employee had conveniently vanished. Piper was no ordinary employee. Half the time he felt as if he worked for her.
She wiped a dab of sauce from her chin. “This was Duke’s idea of fine dining. Taco Bell and a Big Gulp. You would have liked him.”
That was debatable. Overprotecting a daughter with such an adventurous nature while he also bullied her had been an epic fail on Duke Dove’s part. Coop returned his empty food wrapper to the bag. “Not his taste in football teams.”
She gave him her wicked look. “The Bears are a man’s team—the monsters of the Midway as opposed to you pansy-assed glamour boys from the ’burbs.”
“Despite our winning stats.”
“Duke’s opinions weren’t always supported by facts.”
“Just like yours. I swear, if I see you in that Bears jersey one more time, I’m going to rip it off you.”
The words hung in the air between them. He couldn’t stand it a moment longer, and he reached across the seat. She leaned against him, but only for a second before she pulled away. “Don’t make me cuff you.”
She was such a punk. Such a stubborn, sexy, driven, funny little punk.
She tried to talk him into going home, but he wasn’t having it, and she eventually gave up. “The bar is on the fringes of Bridgeport,” she told him as they headed south on Halstead. “Right by Bubbly Creek.”
“Bubbly Creek?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve lived in Chicago this long and never heard of it.”
“I’ve been a little busy.”
“It’s the South Fork of the Chicago River, but nobody calls it that. A hundred years ago, all the meatpacking companies around the Union Stock Yards dumped their waste in it. I did a term paper for a college biology class.” She paused and glanced over at him. “Term papers are the things all of us who actually went to class had to do.”
He gave her his cowboy drawl. “Wouldn’t know about that. I was too busy cruisin’ around town in the shiny red Corvette the alums bought me.”
She shot him her withering look, which was so damned cute he would have kissed her nose if she’d been another kind of woman. “So, Bubbly Creek?” he said.
“The slaughterhouses threw their carcasses in the water—guts, blood, hair—every putrid thing you could think of, then tossed in all the processing chemicals, too. After a while the creek started to bubble from the decomposition. That’s how it got its name. Sometimes the sludge got so thick that people could walk on it. The government’s poured millions into cleanup, but it can still bubble on a hot day.”
“Mother Nature takes a long time to get over being pissed off.”
“Women are like that.” She pulled into a crumbling parking lot next to a squat, aluminum-framed building with an Old Style sign hanging above the front door. “Keith’s come down in the world,” she said.
He needed to get this over with. “Before we go in, you should know . . . I was doing some paperwork at the club today, and when I came out, somebody had slashed my tires.”
“What?!”
He’d known she’d go ballistic, and she didn’t prove him wrong.
“Why didn’t you tell me this right away?”
Because he hated to admit she was right about these incidents not being arbitrary. Worse than that, he hated knowing somebody was getting the best of him. “It could have been random,” he said.
“Don’t even start with me about that.”
