“And you took it?” I gasped. “Won’t they come after you?”
“Nick was in charge of getting the pay at the end of the night. He’d been going hard and strong with the coke, and when he was stumbling out of there, the roll fell out of his pocket so I picked it up. Next day all the band members were pissed at him because he couldn’t find it. I hung around a few days and then told him I had to go back because my mom was sick.”
She stashed the roll back in her purse and smiled triumphantly. Katie had always had big balls. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if I ever took what I wanted the way she did instead of letting the world squeeze me so tight that I couldn’t breathe.
Once we stepped inside the casino we were stopped almost immediately because Katie was carded by security. For some reason, she always looked like a teenager just trying hard to look older. Mostly that skill appealed to the wrong kind of men. She proudly whipped out her driver’s license, then struck a pose while the guy glanced at the card and then back at Katie.
“Have fun, ladies,” he said handing Katie back her license.
“Oh, hon, we certainly will,” Katie assured him.
We walked a few steps and were swallowed up by a cloud of cigarette smoke and the strident chimes from the slot machines. We passed right through the tables and slots and zigzagged through the crowd to the bar on the other side of the expansive room. A blackboard outside boasted two-for-one drinks and free appies for another hour. The drinks were free if you sat at a slot machine but you couldn’t chat up men that way. Katie scouted the area and beelined for the bar, cozying up next to a hipster with spiky blond hair and large black earplugs in stretched lobes. I hopped up next to her and ordered a Coke. Katie ordered a vodka and club soda.
“No wine?” I asked, almost relieved she did not choose my beverage of choice.
“Too many carbs. I’m a vodka soda girl now.”
We shared spring rolls and chicken strips but mostly I ate them with glass after glass of cola and Katie laughed too loud and too long at spiky-hair guy’s dumb jokes. When happy hour fell into full-price hour, I told her I was hitting the penny slots. She barely looked back at me as I left.
I perused the casino for Denny. He was a floater so he could be anywhere. I asked one of the other workers and he told me that Denny was emptying ashtrays on the casino floor. Though I tried, I wasn’t able to find him so I sat down in front of a noisy machine and put in a twenty. Before long I was down forty dollars but a half hour later I was breaking even. Still no sign of Katie. I sent her a text telling her my approximate location and letting her know to send me a message if she needed rescuing from spiky-hair guy in the bar. She sent me a thumbs-up emoji in reply.
A strong bronze arm came around my neck and a voice whispered in my ear, “How’s my errand girl doing?”
“Errand girl?” I smiled up at Denny.
“Yeah, you know, you texted that you were out running errands yesterday.”
“Oh yeah. So you do read my texts,” I chided. “That reminds me, it’s Gramps’s birthday next week and I found a recliner I’d like to get. Could we use your truck to pick it up?”
“Sure, babe.” He leaned down and kissed me on the lips. “If I’d known you were furniture shopping I would’ve come along.”
He hated shopping so it was his attempt at being funny. I hated implying that my day had been spent searching for recliners instead of bodies but it wasn’t an outright lie. I had found a recliner for Gramps. I’d just found it the week before.
“You’re looking good.” He glanced over my body with a lusty grin. “Makes me think I should take you out more often.”
He’d never taken me out anywhere that didn’t have a drive-thru and I doubted that would change.
“The boss is all up my ass so I gotta keep moving.” He picked up the overflowing ashtray next to my machine and dumped the contents into the can he carried. “I take it Katie is holding court in the bar like the queen she is?”
“Got that right.”
“I’ll pop over and say hi,” he said. “Have fun tonight.”
He was gone then and it was just me and my machine. I won a little and lost a little over the course of an hour but I was bored and getting a headache from all the lights and sounds and too much cola. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to hit the jackpot tonight and neither would Katie. Unless you counted Katie’s jackpot as a game of hide the salami later.
I went for a walk through the casino. I popped my head inside the bar and Katie was exactly where I’d left her with spiky-hair guy, except his hand had moved to her thigh and she had only half an ass on her bar stool as she leaned into him. I went to the washroom and then headed outside to get away from the smoke and lights for a while. The Jeep was parked a few rows back under one of the light stands. When I glanced over at it I caught sight of a black vehicle parked one spot over.
“What the hell...”
With annoyance punctuating my steps, I made my way to the black sedan and noted the red rectangular sticker with numbers on it located in the corner of the windshield.
Agent Pierce was here.
Chapter Three
“Son of a bitch.”
I squinted into the darkness and looked for his tall, lean shape but saw only clusters of people either coming or going. After a few minutes I was in the lot without the company of anyone except whoever might be watching from the security cameras that studded the parking lot and building poles. It was getting chilly and a damp breeze lifted my skirt and iced my thighs. I returned to the warmth of the casino and casually walked the perimeter of the expansive floor. It was amazing how many tall, slim, dark-haired guys there were but none were Agent Pierce. I poked my head into the bar where Katie was still making time with her guy. I saw one Pierce-looking guy across the floor near the exit and made a beeline for him. He’d have to answer for the fact that he was obviously following me. But when I reached the location where I thought I saw him by the exit, there was nobody there. As I turned I nearly slammed right into Jonas, who was entering the casino.
“Did you leave any money inside for me?” he asked, smiling and revealing the space of his missing tooth.
“Lots of money left,” I said. “Seems like none of it wants to come home with me. Hope you get lucky tonight.” Then I quickly added, “At the tables I mean.”
He laughed, put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a friendly squeeze.
“If I win, I’ll be taking you for dinner. Maybe even McDonald’s if you’re nice to me.”
“Okay, Mr. Generous.” I pulled out of his embrace. “I’m going to go check on Katie.”
With a half wave to Jonas I wound my way back across the casino floor where I was nearly taken out by a very drunk woman twice my size. She was teetering on impossibly high heels and just as I drew near her arms windmilled comically. One thick hand grabbed hold of my shoulder while the other clamped onto a slot machine. I waited patiently for her to steady herself, allowing her pungent bouquet of wine and vomit to briefly invade my sinuses. It made me want a drink.
“Sorry,” she mumbled and tilted off in another direction.
When I was rounding the last bank of slots a slight movement in my peripheral vision had me scanning the crowd. In that boisterous crowd I had the palpable feeling I was being watched. Suddenly I heard Katie’s voice above the rest of the din and turned just as she rushed up to me.
“There you are!” she exclaimed. She linked her arm in mine and leaned in to whisper, “Can we spend night at your place? Don’t want to bring him back to mine, you know, ‘cuz Mom’s there.”
Her words were slurred and her hot boozy breath tickled my ear.
“Sure. I don’t mind.” Not really anyway. “So you guys ready to go then?”
After Katie scooted off to the ladies’ room, she returned wi
th her fingers braided in her date’s, and we left. The two giggled and guffawed as we went from the weighty noise of the casino to the airy din of the evening air dotted with drops of rain.
When we got to the Jeep the black sedan was gone. Part of me reasoned that black cars were a dime a dozen and the red sticker could be for anything and it probably wasn’t Pierce’s car. I was just being paranoid. My head explained it away while my gut knew it was a lie and I had a sickly feeling in my chest.
I played taxi with Katie and spiky-hair guy in the back seat mauling each other.
“Hey-y-y, don’t do that,” Katie squealed.
A few seconds later she tossed her heavy gold hoop earrings into the cup holder in my console up front.
“Keep those safe, Julie, they’re my favorites but this guy is determined to chew them right off my ears.”
I made a mental note to put Katie’s earrings away someplace safe because I knew she’d forget them in the morning.
When we got to the trailer, they fell out of the Jeep and giggled like teenagers as they ran in the rain, burst into my home and stumbled into the spare room. The walls were thin and every groan and moan seeped into my ears and caused me to cringe. After a few minutes I grabbed a cup of water and went outside. The rain was only the occasional spit now as I lowered myself to sit on the old wooden steps. I drank my water and stared out into the night. Beyond the clutch of cedar trees down the road I could make out the glimmer of a light inside Gramps’s house. I pulled out my phone and called.
“You waiting up for me?”
“Nah, just watching the TV,” he replied, his voice low, gravelly and half-asleep. “Did you have fun?”
“Yes, but not too much fun.” I paused. “You don’t have to wait up. I’m not drinking.”
“That chicken stuff you did in the crockpot turned out real good,” he said, not acknowledging my comment. “But it gave your dog the farts. I’m going to have to Febreze the hell out of the place for two days.”
“Don’t feed him table scraps, Gramps.” I chuckled. “You’ll spoil him and turn him into a beggar.”
“You raise my great-grandson your way, and I’ll raise him mine.”
Wookie was the closest thing to a great-grandchild he was likely to get and we both knew it. After some small talk about the weather we said our goodnights and I watched his window in the distance until the light flicked off. I sat there, the cold of the steps seeping through my jeans and making my lower back ache. The sound of the headboard hammering the wall inside punctuated the night. I focused on the sway of the tall weeds on the edge of the acreage and let my thoughts drift. When my mind decided to recite all I knew about the missing girls, I got up and kicked gravel around the edge of the driveway.
The drizzle had stopped and the clouds parted as a cool wind skipped across my little corner of Whatcom County. As I stared into the starless pitch night, my thoughts went to the other two abducted girls and I wanted a glass of wine so bad I could taste the sour sting of it in the back of my throat.
* * *
The next morning the three of us went out to breakfast at Big Al’s Diner and I let Katie catch the tab. In the harsh daylight Spiky Hair Guy looked like a tired old man playing dress-up and Katie looked bored. After breakfast, we dropped her date at a house up the road and I brought Katie home.
“I’m going to sleep until next week,” she announced as she languidly crawled out of the Jeep. “I’ll call ya.”
I didn’t have to work so I spent a few hours at Gramps’s doing his laundry. We played a couple hands of twenty-one between loads and half-listened to CNN reveal the horrors of the world in the background. After a grilled cheese lunch I told Gramps I was going to get some groceries. I went into town and paid for the recliner I’d been eyeing for his birthday. The color was driftwood, another name for light brown. Not much different than the one he’d had since I was a kid but this one had a built-in cup holder, the fabric wasn’t torn, and the reclining option actually worked. I told them someone would come by and pick it up in a few days then I texted Denny the store details, sent him a picture of it and asked if I could come along when he picked it up.
The grocery store had pork chops on sale and I brought them to Gramps’s for dinner. I coated them in bread crumbs and fried them like Grandma used to except in olive oil instead of lard. Gramps had three and he talked excitedly about going to meet some of the boys for fishing the next day. I’d been worried his fishing friends would abandon him after the rush of consolatory visits after Grandma passed, but he seemed to see them more than ever. Growing up I’d been surprised he had friends. Nobody had ever come to the house that I knew of, not that Grandma would’ve approved of it anyway.
Before settling back inside my trailer, Wookie and I went for a long walk around the property. There were about a dozen acres left from the fifty Gramps originally owned and farmed. Row after row of red raspberries had bushed up from the ground and I’d picked them until my fingers bled. Gramps and Grandma hired out almost all the work until it was just more beneficial to sell the land to those who actually enjoyed working it. The remaining acres were waist-high weed-choked grasses where Wookie loved to hunt rodents. On the far corners of the twelve acres were sheds that used to house tools and maybe still did. I never got within a hundred yards of one if I could help it—there was nothing but soul-leaching pain within the weather-beaten timber.
Once inside the trailer, I turned on the TV and the news announced the discovery of Luna Quinn’s body, contributing the find to “the hard work of our investigators.” No mention was made about the location or the white ribbon. The feds were playing their cards close to their chests. At least Pierce had kept his promise and my name wasn’t mentioned, although I had a feeling that was just as much to mind his own ego and protect the reputation of the FBI.
Wookie lavished me with love and kisses after my night away. That made it difficult to do anything but sit and think, since I was the prisoner of the hefty mutt, but I didn’t mind having a relaxing day. As the hours slipped from day to evening I checked my phone a few times for a missed call or text from Katie, Denny or even Pierce, but nobody was focused my way.
The next morning I kept Wookie at home since Gramps was headed out to fish. I needed to be at the station by eight and, even though jogging was not my favorite thing, I took the dog for a long run to give him exercise before I left for work. The air was cool and we puffed out steam like dragons as our feet skipped along the winding road. I knew every ditch and every hump on that stretch of road that paralleled the I-5. We headed back after a couple miles and when we got back inside Wookie noisily slurped from his water bowl and left a slobbery trail back to his bed. I filled up his rubber treat toy with dog kibble and peanut butter before I made my way to the station for my shift.
My shift went until two o’clock and it was slow. I could pretty much tell how well the Canadian dollar was doing by the amount of business we had on any given day. I spent a lot of time listening to my book with one earbud in and the other free to listen for customers. Margie came in to relieve me, a surprise because she usually only worked really late or early shifts. She was the manager and she got to pick the schedule of this station and a few others.
“Jonas’s in agony because of some tooth situation,” she explained. “I’m going to work a double. Need the hours anyway so no biggie.”
Jonas hadn’t looked like he was in pain when I saw him at the casino, but it sure as hell wasn’t my concern. I was just glad I hadn’t been asked to pull a double shift. I changed my mind on that thought when I walked outside and found Agent Pierce leaning against the driver door of my Jeep.
“What do you want?” I could not even bother to hide my annoyance.
“Good afternoon to you too,” he said. “Beautiful day we’re having. Sun is shining. Birds are chirping. All is right in the world.”
“Is it?” I folded my arms over my chest. “Is everything perfect in the world? It’s all sunshine, lollipops and puppies today? Is that why you’re here? To tell me how wonderful things are?”
His smile faltered and I felt bad.
“I thought we’d go for a drive,” he said.
“Where and why?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other.
An old man pulled up on the other side of my Jeep and eyed us curiously. Blaine was not a big town and locals knew each other either by name or by sight. Fortyish-year-old Agent Pierce in his designer jeans and shiny sedan did not look like he should be talking to the twenty-five-year-old girl who worked the gas station.
“Ya okay?” the old man asked.
“I’m good. Just having a word with my uncle,” I quipped.
The old guy looked skeptical but headed inside to buy the pack of smokes he got every day at this time. Pierce opened the passenger door of his car and motioned for me to get inside. I was tempted to refuse but I was also curious. Maybe they’d found the other two girls. I climbed into the passenger seat and noted not a trace of dried mud on the floor mat from our trip the other day.
He’s hunting a killer and takes time to get his vehicle detailed?
Pierce climbed into the driver’s seat and turned to face me.
“I was thinking that we could drive near suspected locations just to see if you—” he struggled for the words “—feel anything with your...”
“My what?” I blinked at him innocently, wanting him to say the name.
“Those divining rods.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“It did last time.”
“That was a fluke.” I pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Last time I had the rods in my lap and we literally drove over top of the bridge where her body was. I have to be pretty close for them to work.”
A Grave Calling Page 5