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“Sheriff?”
“I’m glad I ran into you actually.”
“And why is that? You finally stop playing with your dick long enough to find out something about who the hell attacked my father?”
His eyes narrow in annoyance.
“I suppose you’ve checked Rocky’s security cameras?” I ask. As far as I could see, the cheap asshole doesn’t have any, but Sheriff Hicks is about to confirm that for me.
“Rocky doesn’t have cameras. He says they spook his customers,” he says with a smirk that I could happily slap from his smug face.
“Convenient for him when people are getting the shit kicked out of them in his parking lot, right?”
“As far as I can tell, Mr. Decker, the only person around here who has any grudge against your father…” he licks his lips as he glares at me, “is you.”
I can’t help but laugh and that just makes his scowl deepen. I take a step closer to him. “You think I want my father dead?”
“Word around here is you hate his guts,” he snarls.
“Maybe,” I reply with a shrug. “But if I wanted him dead, he wouldn’t be lying in that bed, he’d be in the fucking morgue.”
Hicks has no response for that. He blinks at me. I know he’s looked me up. He knows who I am and so he knows I speak the truth. I might like to lie low here, but I’m the right hand man of one of the most powerful men in the goddamn country, it’s kind of hard to escape that.
“Is there anything else,Sheriff?” I glare at him and when he doesn’t reply, I brush past him.
“Just don’t leave town,” he shouts after me as I walk into my father’s room.
Molly is sitting by his bedside, she has a scowl on her face too. “Hicks is a jackass,” she hisses.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I think he believes you’re involved in this somehow, Jackson,” she whispers.
“Yeah, I kinda got that too.”
She looks at my father and her face softens. They haven’t always had the easiest relationship either, he let her down badly too, but she has been able to forge a meaningful and loving relationship with him. “Why would he think that?” she sniffs.
“Maybe somebody wants him too?” I mutter, thinking out loud to myself more than talking to her.
“But who and why?”
I shake my head. For once I have no clue. I spend so little of my life in this town, I have no idea who I could have pissed off enough. Or maybe blaming me is Sheriff Hicks’s easy out?
“No idea, Molly. But I know where to look next.”
* * *
The old-fashioned bellrings above my head as I walk into Johnson’s store. The place has barely changed since I was a kid. It’s like walking back in time. People still place ads in the window, buying and selling and offering services. Like they haven’t heard of this thing called the internet. It still smells the same too – of candy and newspapers. Suddenly, I feel like I’m twelve again, here to spend my allowance.
“Jackson Decker, is that you?” Hannah Johnson says as soon as I walk through the door.
“Sure is, ma’am,” I say taking off my hat like a good Southern gentleman.
She comes from behind the counter, tossing her long blonde hair up into a ponytail. Her daughter, Shannon, looks just like her.
Shannon and I were fuck buddies for a long time. She’s ten years younger than me, making her mom, Hannah only eight years my senior. She flirts with me every chance she gets, just like her daughter. At least just how her daughter used to. Even before I started dating Lucia, she met her husband, Ed and we’ve kept our relationship purely platonic since. They only got married last year, six months before Lucia and me.
“Hey, Mrs. Johnson. How are you?”
