Death Takes a Ride (The Cate Kinkaid Files Book #3): A Novel

by Lorena McCourtney

  “We go up to the bar and order a couple of 7UPs. Then we ask the bartender if he’s seen Zig around tonight.”

  “And if he has?”

  “We take our 7UPs and go find Zig. I’ll hang on to you all the time.”

  Cate found that assurance both comforting and dismaying. Should a licensed private investigator need to be hung on to?

  “And what if the bartender takes umbrage at the question, like we’re being too nosy about customers? Like maybe we’re undercover cops or something?”

  Mitch tilted his head as if that were a possibility. “Okay, we say we heard this Zig might have a Harley for sale. It could be true.” He surveyed the sea of chrome and leather overhung with scents of exhaust and dust. “Surely some of these bikes are for sale.”

  Cate didn’t feel any burst of enthusiasm, but she nodded. “So, we find Zig. How do we start a conversation with him? If we mention Andy or Mace, we may scare him off immediately. Or all his friends will instantly gang up on us, like piranhas in a puddle.”

  “We can start by saying something about a good crowd here tonight. Or good music. You know, small-talk stuff.”

  “You sure that’s what bikers talk about in bars?”

  Mitch’s scrunch of eyebrows confirmed what Cate already knew. He had no idea what bikers talked about in bars. But he had an answer. “We could ask him about that Harley we heard he has for sale. Or if he knows someone else who has one.”

  “What if the bartender says he hasn’t seen Zig? Or he’s never heard of him?”

  “Cate, I don’t have a script figured out for every alternate universe possibility.” Mitch was just short of an eye roll of exasperation. “We’ll just have to play it by ear.”

  Yeah, right. If they still had eardrums after two minutes inside the Midnight Logger.

  Most helmets were hanging on handlebars or plunked casually on seats, but Mitch and Cate stashed theirs in the trunk of the Purple Rocket. She was rummaging in the trunk for her purse when an “oh no!” thought hit her.

  They’d taken Clancy back to Mitch’s condo when they went to get the Purple Rocket, but he’d sensed right away that he was about to be shut out of an adventure. He made such a mournful objection to being left alone in the condo that they finally took him back out to the SUV where he was content to wait, as he often waited for Mitch.

  But in the confusion of doing that, Cate now realized her purse was still sitting on the counter in Mitch’s condo. Everything from driver’s license to PI identification card to money and lipstick was in it.

  Okay, no problem. She could get along without all that. Mitch could pay for their 7UPs.

  Music twanged louder with every step they took toward the bar. Three guys burst out the door and one yelled something distinctly uncomplimentary at the other two before heading across the parking lot. Cate’s steak and potatoes square-danced in her stomach. She saw no way this scheme could work, and this place practically screamed “in over your head!”

  She stopped short, another dismaying thought hitting her.

  “Mitch, did you suggest coming here tonight on purpose to make me see that I’m no way qualified to be a private investigator, with or without a license?”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “Is it?”

  Mitch grabbed her shoulders and yanked her around to face him. “Cate, I have serious concerns about your being a PI, that’s true. It doesn’t strike me as the safest of occupations.”

  Cate couldn’t argue that. She might intend to do mundane, everyday investigative work, but killers seemed to gravitate to her. Like bikers to a biker bar.

  “But I suggested coming here tonight because I wanted to help out. Now I’m beginning to think I should have settled down with Clancy in front of the TV and watched an old Garfield DVD. He likes Garfield.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be unappreciative. Maybe I asked that because sometimes I have serious doubts about my PI abilities.”

  Mitch dotted a kiss on her forehead. “You’ll do fine.”

  “It would be nice if all investigations could be conducted with nice people in cozy little tea shops or toy stores.”

  Mitch grinned at her. “Cate, with your luck, one of the tea drinkers would drop dead from arsenic in her tea. Or there’d be a murderous clown in the toy store.”

  They’d reached the two steps leading up to the main entrance. The wave of music pounded into Cate’s eardrums and skin. Her teeth sizzled. She took a steadying breath before they stepped into the blue haze.

  And came up against a plaid-shirted wall of muscle.

  A big man, as tall as Mitch, forty pounds heavier. Marine haircut. Blue plaid shirt. Something like a miniature baseball bat hanging from his belt.

  “I’ll need to see some ID, please.” He spoke loudly enough that Cate had no trouble hearing him in spite of the drums and guitars and voice of a singer doing a stomping version of “White Lightning.”

  “What difference does it make who we are?” Cate asked, half-indignant about an invasion of privacy, half-embarrassed at being here. She could see now that the shadowy movement was dancing, not brawling, but her nerves were into tornado mode anyway.

  “Not who you are. How old you are.”

  “Oh.” Cate was momentarily uncertain whether to be pleased or indignant. She wasn’t in the habit of frequenting places with an age minimum, and she hadn’t even thought about this. But she was certainly old enough. “I’m thirty.”

  “Great.” He pushed them outside, where the music was a fraction below ear-shattering level. “But I need to see ID. We ID everyone who looks under forty. We got busted last year when the cops found two underage kids here. It isn’t going to happen again.”

  “Just show him your ID,” Mitch muttered. He’d already pulled out his wallet and was offering his driver’s license.

  “I don’t have it. I left my purse on the counter in your condo.”

  The man used a small flashlight to check Mitch’s driver’s license, nodded, and handed it back to him.

  “I can vouch for her,” Mitch said. “She is thirty.”

  “The big three-oh,” Cate said. “Some women won’t even admit it when they get past twenty-nine.”

  “No ID, no admittance,” the wall of muscle said.

  “But we don’t intend to drink anything.” Cate could hear herself sounding a little desperate now. “We’re just looking for a guy. Zig is his name. Short, heavyset, bald—”

  “Look, I don’t care if you came to look for your swingin’ grandma or your lost dog. No ID, no admittance. Would you step aside, please. There’s someone behind you.”

  The man let the couple behind them in without checking ID. Cate was briefly indignant. How come she and Mitch were being singled out? Then she realized that, although the couple might be wearing black leather and have helmets tucked under their arms, they were in at least their sixties. Bikers came in all shapes, sizes, and ages.

  The man turned back to Cate and slightly less sternly said, “The restaurant’s open. If your friend wants to come in and look for someone, you can go over there and get a cup of coffee or a burger or something.”

  Mitch nudged her arm. “That okay with you?”

  It wasn’t okay, but Cate didn’t see that she had any other choice. “Okay. But I am thirty. I had a birthday three months ago.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “I’ll walk her over to the restaurant and be right back,” Mitch told the doorkeeper, or whatever he was. He grabbed Cate’s elbow and turned her away as if afraid she might do something that would earn them both a whack with that weapon dangling from the doorkeeper’s belt.

  At the door to the restaurant, Mitch gave her another kiss on the forehead. “Calm down. I’ll go play detective for you.”

  Cate went inside. Music from the bar was piped into here too. Not bad music, she decided grudgingly. The singer was into a good version of the old “Tennessee Waltz” classic now. A few people sat on stool
s at the counter, but only a couple of the booths were occupied. Cate slid into an empty one.

  She had first been un-eager to go into the blue haze of the Midnight Logger, but now that she couldn’t go in, she felt let down. Left out. What kind of a PI couldn’t even get into a bar to check out shady characters?

  A waitress came over with a glass of ice water. Cate asked for coffee. As the waitress was leaving, she thought of something else. She had no money to pay for coffee. Great. What now? Arrest for defrauding a place of business?

  She thought about slipping out before the coffee arrived, but she wasn’t eager to be out there wandering around in the jungle of motorcycles. She wasn’t, in fact, even sure she could locate the Purple Rocket alone. Was there another way, a back way maybe, into the bar, so she could get in and look for Zig herself? Hey, there must be! A delivery entrance or fire exit. She could slip inside—

  She booted that thought before it got any farther. If Mr. Marine or a clone caught her, he might do something more drastic than simply escort her outside. Maybe he’d call her parents. Or pastor. Or the police. The dreaded Three Ps of teenagerhood come back to haunt her from high school days.

  The coffee arrived, thankfully without a demand for immediate payment, and she sipped it morosely. Not even midnight yet, and already she’d turned into a PI pumpkin.

  28

  The minutes dragged by. Five minutes. Cate nursed the coffee carefully. She didn’t want to ask for a refill. Eight. Mitch would surely pay for the coffee when he showed up. Eleven minutes. At least the restaurant was smoke free. She didn’t have her little notebook to make notes in, but she found a pen in her pocket and jotted down a rough record of the day on a couple of paper napkins. Where was Mitch?

  Okay, she was being overly impatient. He needed time to find Zig. Make biker small talk. Work up to what Zig knew about Mace Jackson and Andy Timmons.

  Sixteen minutes.

  Maybe he’d decided to sit there, sip his 7UP, and enjoy the music for a while. Let her stew in her incompetence. How could she have walked off and left purse and ID on the counter?

  Seventeen minutes.

  Hey, there he was coming through the door! Cate rose in her seat and waved at him, and he turned her direction. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet as he wobbled down the aisle between booths. Did he actually drink something?

  He slid into the booth across from her, reached for her cup of coffee, and took a big slurp. “Caffeine,” he muttered. He had a hand plastered to the side of his head. He worked his jaw back and forth.

  She sniffed, catching both the smell of smoke from the bar plus another less identifiable scent. “What is that smell?”

  “Beer.”

  “Beer?”

  “I got slugged on the side of the head with a beer bottle. It wasn’t empty.”

  She could see the dark splotch on his clothes now. She looked closer at his face. Not wobbly from drink. Wobbly from a hit on the head. The point of his jaw was already swelling.

  “Oh, Mitch, I’m sorry! What happened?”

  He took another sip of the coffee, then fished a chunk of ice out of her water glass and rubbed it over the swelling joint.

  “I went up to the bar. They didn’t have 7UP, but I got a Sprite. I asked about Zig. The guy said he’d only been working there a couple weeks and didn’t know any Zig. He pointed to some guys sitting over at a table and said maybe they knew him. I took my Sprite and went over there. There were eight guys at the table. They all looked like your description of Zig,” he added, sounding as morose as she’d been feeling.

  “And they hit you with a beer bottle?”

  “No, they were okay guys. Friendly. They dragged up another chair and made room for me to sit at the table with them.”

  “Did they ask why you wanted to find Zig?”

  “Yeah. I said he was a friend of a friend, and they seemed okay with that. They just talked back and forth—shouted, actually. You couldn’t really talk in there. Anyway, they shouted about who Zig was and was I sure it wasn’t Zack instead of Zig, and someone asked, what was his ride, and I didn’t know.”

  “So then they hit you with a beer bottle?”

  “No. Then one of them said something about, hey, wasn’t he that guy had the old Moto Guzzi—”

  “What’s a Moto Guzzi?”

  “Disease? Pizza? But probably it’s some brand of bike I never heard of.”

  “And then they hit you with a beer bottle?”

  “No. Then someone suggested maybe that red-haired Rita from Springfield was Zig’s old girlfriend and somebody else said wasn’t that her sitting up there on a bar stool. So I went over to talk to Rita on a bar stool. I asked her if she knew someone named Zig.” He paused and dipped into the glass for more ice. “And then I got slugged with a beer bottle.”

  “Rita hit you?”

  “No, some guy I hadn’t even seen walked up behind me and yelled something about, hey, stay away from her, and then he whacked me alongside the head.” Mitch ran a finger over his teeth as if making sure they were all still attached.

  “He thought you were trying to pick her up?”

  “That was my general impression. He didn’t want me talking to her anyway.”

  Cate was fairly clear on the biblical instructions about getting hit. If someone struck you on the right cheek, you should turn the other cheek to him also. Did that apply to a whack with a beer bottle in a biker bar?

  “So what did you do?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to do anything. I was still wiping beer out of my eyes when some other guy slammed a fist in the jaw of the guy who hit me. Then Rita clobbered that guy with a big black purse the size of a suitcase. Somebody shoved her off the bar stool and she bumped into me, but I guess she thought I bumped her and she whacked me with the purse too.” He felt the back of his head and then his nose. “I crashed into the floor, and somebody stepped on my hand.”

  Cate looked at his hand. It didn’t have an actual imprint of a boot heel on it, but a couple of knuckles were scraped raw.

  “Did they call the police?”

  “I don’t know. Chairs and bottles were flying and a table went down on top of me. I crawled out from under it and then through a whole forest of legs and feet. When I finally had a chance to stand up, it looked like half the bar was in a big brawl.”

  “What about Rita?”

  “Last I saw, she was swinging that purse like she intended to mow ’em all down. The music was still playing. And people who weren’t fighting were dancing like nothing was happening.”

  Was there a designated musical accompaniment for a biker brawl?

  “I’m going to have to sit here for a few minutes before I get on the bike again.” Mitch shook his head as if trying to dislodge the lingering cobwebs.

  “I’m sorry about … everything.” Cate had never had any big desire to learn to operate the Purple Rocket herself, but now she wished she could do it. Then she could help Mitch out to the bike and they could just disappear into the night.

  “And I didn’t even find out anything about Zig,” Mitch added glumly. “I guess coming down here wasn’t such a helpful idea after all.”

  “It was a great idea.” But sometimes even the best of ideas didn’t work out. That was PI work.

  Cate dipped another napkin in the ice water and carefully cleaned around the raw spots on Mitch’s hand. The lump on his jaw was getting bigger and his nose redder. He was using his other hand to prop up his head now.

  She looked up when the door of the restaurant flew open and a woman strode in. Uh-oh. A woman with red hair and eyeliner that swooped into dark wings at the outer corners of her eyes. And a big black purse with metallic studs and fringe. With the strut of a one-woman parade, she headed for a booth beyond Cate and Mitch but stopped short when she spotted Mitch. She was short and a little chubby, young enough that the guard guy would have checked her ID, but not as young as Cate had thought at first glance.

  The woman leaned o
ver to look closer at Mitch. Cate half rose in her seat, feeling protective. Mitch was in no condition to be on the receiving end of another slugger swing with the purse.

  Instead, with what sounded like real concern, the woman said, “Hey, you okay? I wondered what happened to you.” Only then did she seem to notice Mitch wasn’t alone. Her blue eyes gave Cate a frosty inspection. Cate had the impression the woman would rather have found Mitch sans probable girlfriend.

  Cate half-expected a surly grunt from Mitch. Yeah, sure. I’m great. I always sit around holding my head in my hands as if it’s a soggy squash about to fall off the vine.

  But Mitch was nicer than that. “I’m fine.” Although he did glance warily toward the door as if expecting a beer-bottle-wielding biker boyfriend might be following her.

  “Did I hit you? I didn’t mean to. It was kind of dark in there.”

  Mitch waved a dismissive hand. Well, actually it was just a fingertip wave, as if his joints weren’t all that well connected at the moment.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with that idiot Maxie. It’s not as if I belong to him or something. None of his business who I talk to.”

  Mitch apparently wasn’t going to ask the question, but Cate, with her own wary glance at the door, did. “Where is Maxie now?”

  “I told him to get lost. Go back to whatever rock he crawled out from under. Dumb creep.”

  Hopefully that meant Maxie wasn’t out there recruiting reinforcements with beer bottles to launch a full-scale assault in the restaurant.

  “Have the police arrived?” Cate asked, also hopefully.

  Rita gave her one of those what-planet-are-you-from looks that she seemed to get a lot lately. “Why would they call the police? It was just a little fight. Not like it was a riot or something.”

  Cate hadn’t been aware of a rating system in biker bar brawling. Learn something every day.

  “Oh. Well, that’s, um, good, then,” she said. Then, uneasily wondering about the dismissed “dumb creep” and where this left Rita, Cate asked, “Did you and Maxie come here together?”