Around ten o’clock, though, Theo tapped Liam on the shoulder and took his seat, motioning to her for a beer when she got a moment.
And all the awkwardness was back. She slid his beer to him, and he nodded but never looked at her, his eyes sliding all around the bar, then looking at his phone.
She’d done him wrong the first time they’d ever met, and she supposed seeing her after all these years just brought all that back. But what he didn’t know, what she hadn’t had a chance to tell him, was those stolen moments with him had changed her.
He wouldn’t care anyway. She’d played a stupid trick, and it had shown her what she was missing in life, and by the next time she’d seen him, her sister had been dead.
“Hey, Dusty! Can I get an old-fashioned?”
“Sure, Harold.” She smiled at one of her regulars who always came in for two old-fashioneds and a Coke to go which she was pretty sure he spiked out of the flask in his pocket.
Her bar was a regular’s bar. She prided herself on making it comfortable and easygoing, without all the drama of hookups. Granted, it was a bar downtown with a college nearby, and she couldn’t keep the young people out—the twenty-somethings looking for a good time on a Friday night, or the thirty- and forty-somethings who reeked of desperation and loneliness—but for the most part, her bar consisted of regulars, mostly men and a few women who came for a drink after work before going home. She had a few who were creatures of habit and used the comfort of her place to get drunk in, wherein she always called a ride before they left.
And since today was Friday, she was prepared for the influx of strangers looking for a good time.
She didn’t have shot specials, though, so they’d probably leave after just a drink or two. That was her way of keeping the riffraff out. She served the royal fucks, pink panty pulldowns, and gummy bears, but they were seven dollars a shot, just like everything else.
Dusty wasn’t rolling in money by any means. In fact, most months she barely broke even. But she loved her bar and the camaraderie it provided, and she wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Dusty turned around with Harold’s old-fashioned and caught Theo staring at her ass. As soon as she spun, his eyes flew to the wall of liquor behind her as he took a sip of his beer and casually turned in his seat to watch the rest of the bar.
She smiled to herself as she handed Harold his drink, dropping a napkin down under it.
“You got a new admirer?” he asked as he waggled his eyebrows. He was as cliché as they came. A professor of economics at the local university, he wore corduroy jackets with elbow patches and smoked a pipe, although not in her bar, of course.
“No. He’s a friend.” Not really, but whatever. She wasn’t going to tell her customers she had a security detail.
Raised voices had her spinning to the other corner of the bar. A man stood with a woman, crowding her into the bar. He wasn’t a big guy, but his belly was touching the woman, and her body language was that of a woman who’d had enough. Dusty stood there long enough to hear the man say, “Come on, don’t be a tease,” before she moved.
“I’m not teasing. I’m not interested.” The woman was shrinking into herself, her arms crossed in front of her chest, her drink forgotten behind her.
Not safe at all.
“Excuse me,” Dusty interrupted, seeing Aaron approach from the corner of her eye. “Is there a problem here?”
“No problem,” the man smiled as he tried to sling an arm around the waist of the woman, who squirmed out of his reach.
“Actually, it really looks like a problem to me.” Aaron crossed his arms over his massive chest and stood next to Dusty, a united front. Aaron, a short squatty guy built like a boulder, was her barback and bouncer on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. “Unless, of course, you were leaving. If that’s the case, I’ll walk you out.” Aaron smiled a friendly smile, but it held an underlying menace.
Dusty loved the guy. He was a giant teddy bear.
“Sure. Okay,” the man conceded, knowing if he didn’t walk out with Aaron, he would be physically thrown out.
“You okay?” Dusty asked the woman as Aaron led the douchebag out of the bar.
“Yeah. I just wanted a fucking drink and to decompress after work. Dudes just don’t get that, do they? That a woman can enjoy herself alone? Ugh.” Turning back to the bar the woman picked up her drink, but Dusty stopped her.
“You weren’t watching that. Let me get you another, on the house. Sometimes these assholes tag-team, one of them distracting you while the other doses you.” She looked around. “I’m not saying that’s what happened. I just want you to be safe, because men are terrible specimens of humanity sometimes.”
“Thanks.”
Dusty went to replace the drink, while Aaron came back around the bar to stand behind her.
“He’s gone, but he’s pissed. I’ll keep an eye out.”
“He just didn’t like being spurned. He’ll be okay.”
She’d told Aaron about her experience last night. A little of it anyway. He was on the lookout for the men to come back.
“You gonna have any issues tonight with those guys again?” He was incredibly soft-spoken, but she’d seen him physically carry grown men out of her bar without a backward glance. He’d won state three years running in powerlifting in high school, and even though he sounded like a mouse, she knew he could squash one with his pinkie finger.
“Surely not.” She laughed uncomfortably.
“You need me to walk you to your car tonight?”
“Nope. My friend Theo is here for that. Thanks so much, though.” Theo raised his beer in a silent salute to Aaron, who went in for a fist bump that Theo ignored.
“Friendly guy,” Aaron muttered after the slight.
“Well, he’s effective.” Desperate to negate any speculation about her and Theo, she changed the subject. “Will you double-check the beer cooler? Last night we ran out of Shiner.”
“No prob, Boss.”
A brand-new sort of torture filled Theo with dread as he sat on the barstool watching the woman who looked exactly like his dead wife fulfill all these men’s fantasies by serving them drinks and laughing at their jokes. The undercurrent of danger, from knowing those men had been there, made it that much more painful. There was a very real threat that he could relive the worst moments of his life.
He tried to distract himself with her bar itself. From the background paperwork, he knew she had purchased it with the inheritance from her family. She’d lost them all, every single one of them. And this was what she’d done with the money they’d left behind. As far as bars went, it was an okay tribute, not that his sunshine or her parents drank. But it was comfortable and a little bit homey, with overstuffed wingback chairs around small tables situated around the room. The bars on the street were pretty small, and this one had an intimate feel, even though it was filling up fast with patrons willing to stand around and huddle in clusters.
He didn’t see the men he was looking for. He wasn’t expecting to, honestly. Guy Falco and Mark Daimler had families now and couldn’t be out and about every night like they used to. In fact, tonight, Mark was taking his kids to see the new Disney movie at the theater across town, and Guy was out with his bowling team, no doubt winning a tournament with his wife and their couple friends. Alberto Pina was the one he was looking for. Single and an alcoholic, he still lived with his mom and was out most every night. Tonight, he was supposed to be at the corner bar in his own damn neighborhood since he was a creature of habit, but Theo was ready for him to break the routine after finding Dusty.
He’d been watching them last night when they’d come here, having followed them on their boys’ night up and down Sixth Street as they popped in and out of bars. Mark was the one who had come last week and seen her, after a fight with his wife. Theo hadn’t known they’d come for Dusty, though, and apparently, Dusty hadn’t noticed him in her bar, noticing her. No doubt, he’d brought the guys back so they could ma
ke plans to relive Sunny.
He stifled his shudder.
That’s okay. He had plans of his own. After tonight, theirs would be disrupted.
Theo walked into Dusty’s apartment after she’d closed up for the night to check it out before letting her in. She stood in the hallway just outside the door while he walked around the tiny space, ignoring the reminders of Sunny everywhere. The reminders were in how different the two women were, a study in contrasts. He couldn’t help it. Dusty was organized chaos, where Sunny had been compulsive in her tidiness. Sunny preferred light colors, pastels, white-painted wood, where Dusty’s space was covered in deeper jewel tones and dark wood. Sequins sparkled from random places, like the sheer drapes, a throw pillow, some of the tiles in the kitchen.
The bedroom showed the chaos of her true nature though. Clothes were everywhere, the bed unmade and rumpled, and candles sat on every exposed surface. He closed his eyes at a sudden memory of her lush mouth and fantasies of these very rumpled sheets, the forbidden fantasies he hated her for.
Inhaling deep, he heard the hoarseness of his own voice as he called out, “All clear. You can come in.”
He backed out of the room and made his way to the living room where he tossed the throw pillows off the couch and sat. He had to get his head somewhere else, back in the present, away from that kiss and the memories of his treacherous thoughts. He loved his wife. He still loved her. This woman wasn’t her, no matter how much they looked alike. He’d told himself that then, and he would do it until the day he died if he had to.
He leaned his head on the back of the couch and closed his eyes, listening to her move around the space. He’d been told to be here, until Lilith came in the morning, but he was pretty sure that was going to be hell on earth.
Nothing to be done about it.
Maybe if he just addressed it, things would get better. So he got as close to the elephant in the room as he dared.
“I was sorry to hear about your parents. Walt and Brenda were really nice people.” He’d met his fucking wife’s parents at her damn funeral, and that was a memory he would take with him to the grave. He had no idea if they were nice, except for Sunny’s stories about them.
“Yeah. They were. It was sad. I came back to stay with Mom after Dad…went, and it was hard to see her suffer so much.” Dusty’s voice was quiet, and he knew this was hard for her to talk about. “But it all made me see that I needed to do something else with my life besides be the rambling woman everyone called me. I needed to stake out some roots somewhere, and this city makes me feel closer to Sunny.” Her voice cracked at the end, and Theo felt a semblance of empathy, a foreign feeling he hadn’t felt in a while. Admittedly, he’d been stuck on his own feelings of rage and vengeance for years. He had an urge to hug Dusty and be a part of what she was feeling right now, but he knew he’d be feeding off it, and for some reason that didn’t seem right with her.
“A lot of things happened back then, some I wish I could change,” he started to speak, gruffly, hoping she would understand what he wasn’t saying. “But know this…” He wanted her attention and he got it. She was looking at him with those wide, glassy blue eyes that stood out against the porcelain skin she shared with her sister and the black dye job she didn’t. “I am making things right. You won’t have to worry about those guys for long.” It hadn’t escaped his attention she hadn’t mentioned their names once during the meeting at SEPS.
He didn’t speak their names much either. He wouldn’t give them that power over him. He was about to squash them like the bugs they were.
Dusty nodded at him and went into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door with a click before starting the shower. He would wait until she went to bed, then leave.
He could start this tonight.
Dusty couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed captured by thoughts of Theo and her, both past and present. Having him here in her apartment was something she’d never imagined, even after calling him for help. Honestly, she had no idea what she had expected; she’d been too scared to expect much. But his presence in her apartment was doing strange things to her, and she couldn’t sleep.
She heard him change clothes and rustle around on the couch some before stilling, his heavy breaths filling her tiny apartment.
Then he got up and left, the door opening and shutting behind him.
What the hell? He was supposed to stay, wasn’t he?
Tossing clothes on, she ran downstairs and to her Corolla. She followed Theo’s beat-up pickup to a run-down part of town, where a man was sitting on his front porch steps, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. Dusty parked down the street with her headlights off, so she couldn’t see more than that.
Her jaw dropped as Theo hit the guy with a stun gun and picked him up like a sack of potatoes, slinging him over his shoulder and tossing him in the back of his truck. He leaned over it and did something to the man before getting into the cab and driving off.
His earlier words came back to her, about taking care of things. The man’s build matched Alberto Pena.
If she continued to follow, she would know more than she should. Ah hell, she already did.
She should be scared. Theo wasn’t the same man she’d known a decade ago. He was dangerous now.
But was he a killer?
Dusty couldn’t stop herself. She followed at a discreet distance, an undeniable need to know what was going on taking over her common sense.
She should be at home, safe, in bed.
She parked her car outside a warehouse on the channel by the airport.
Part of her wanted to turn back and get in her bed and pretend she didn’t know what was going on. But the bigger part wanted to see whatever he was doing.
He had hoisted the presumably unconscious man onto his shoulder and carried him into the warehouse ten minutes ago, but she still sat in her ancient Corolla trying to figure out what to do.
There was a time in her life when this would have been a no-brainer. A time in her life when she would just go home and smoke a joint, forgetting about everything. But that was before Sunny had died, before her parents had died from a broken heart, when she was a free spirit. Sure, she still had some of that, but some part of her had integrally changed. She had lost a part of herself with Sunny, and her death had left a hole inside her that she’d never been able to fill.
She didn’t harp on it anymore, but the attack, and being around Theo all the time tonight had really brought it all back for her, slamming it into her chest like a train.
Dusty supposed Theo felt the same way about Sunny’s death, although he couldn’t have felt the exact same. Seeing her must have brought all the old feelings back for him too. And now he was doing something about it.
She decided she wanted to see.
It smelled terrible.
But it was deserted, and she tiptoed through shipping containers and buildings until she heard noises.
Inside the warehouse, she followed the noises until she got to a corner with a man dangling from the ceiling with chains wrapped under his shoulders, arms tied behind him, mouth gagged, and feet scraping the floor. She’d been right. It was Alberto Pina. Dusty inched closer to hear what Theo was murmuring to him.
Plastic crunched under her feet, and with that noise, Dusty realized two things. She was closer than she’d meant to be, and this was premeditated. This couldn’t be something Theo had thought of since she’d called him. No. This took preparation, planning, and time.
The plastic sheeting stretched across the floor told Dusty that he had been planning this for a while.
“Do you even know why you’re here? Do you even remember through the drugs and alcohol you’ve ingested?” He scoffed softly. Theo’s voice was incredibly soft, yet intense. Danger coiled under the tension of his muscles, captivating Dusty. She stared, mouth agape, as he spoke. “You obviously don’t recognize me, and that’s okay. I’ve changed. And it’s because of you, you piece of shit.” Theo spun around and grabbed someth
ing off a table.
It looked like a long-handled branch cutter, but it had been modified somehow so the mouth of it was bigger. Alberto’s eyes widened. His muffled cries turned to screams. Theo just stood there, patient and calm, until he quieted.
Dusty was incredibly tense as she took in everything she was watching. She didn’t think she’d made any noise and she was hiding behind a large stack of boxes, but the plastic must have been louder than she realized because Theo called out to her.
“Dusty? Come get a good look. This is one of them.”
Taking one step to the side, she showed herself. Alberto’s eyes grew impossibly wide, and his mouth started moving around the gag, blubbering something in recognition. His body seemed to relax a bit, as if he finally knew why he was here, but Theo didn’t move to release him. He didn’t turn to acknowledge Dusty, either.
“You figured out they’re identical, yeah? You remembered Sunny as soon as you saw Dusty in her bar, and you were making a plan to do it again. Maybe I should do it to you, huh?” Theo walked around Alberto in slow, measured steps as he spoke, until he was behind the man. From his side, he slid a bucket near the floor at Pina’s back. Stuck in his bindings, he twisted and turned to see what Theo was doing, to no avail.
His eyes fell on Dusty’s, pleading with her. She could make out the words “please” and “I’m sorry” through the gag, but Dusty was too caught up in what was happening.
“You remember her screams? Her begging for mercy? For you to stop? But you got off on that, didn’t you? You’re a sick little man, going for your own power trip because your mommy won’t let you have it anywhere else, so you rape innocent women. Right?” Theo’s face was a powerful mask of fury as Dusty watched memories from the past flit across it. “I should thank you, though, right? You only raped her. You didn’t do the other things. The knife work. The broomstick. At least you weren’t impotent.”
The Secrets We Keep Page 3