Lay It Down

by Cara McKenna

  No matter what his body could do to hers, Vince was shady. She had to keep remembering that fact, keep taking a mental highlighter to it lest the hormones convince her he was a good idea. A gun-toting ex-con was not someone who deserved to further manhandle her freshly banged-up heart . . .

  Yet these past few days had felt like an adventure—ever since he’d set his beer down next to her scotch, in fact. That was when her normal life had begun unraveling, rearranging itself in a big, dusty tangle. And suddenly free of obligations back home, Kim admittedly felt a bit hooked.

  She felt awake in a way she never had in all her years under her dad’s domineering thumb, nor during the ones she’d spent deferring to Ryan’s more subtle persuasion of control. She wanted to linger in this sharp-edged, feral little corner of the country long enough to be certain it wouldn’t seem like a weird dream, six months from now. There was nothing to rush home to. No rent to pay, no relationship to tend to, no friendships she couldn’t nurture long-distance in the interim, no further freelance yet lined up. And she had enough savings to keep herself afloat for a few months.

  Why go home? Absolutely no reason.

  Why stay? Also no reason, aside from curiosity. And a bone-deep craving to go off script for the first time in her life. Surely floating around without any real direction still trumped going where some man pointed her.

  But Vince wants me here.

  Shit. Wait. Had she escaped Ryan’s orbit only to get caught in Vince’s?

  I won’t stay for him, she decided, pulling into the diner for lunch. I’ll stay for me, and I’ll leave when I goddamn feel like it.

  And if I sleep with him again, that’ll be for me, too.

  After lunch she swung by the motel to reapply sunscreen and drop off some memory cards. The lot was nearly empty, just her, a Jeep in the farthest space, and that black Mercedes with the California plates now pulling up in front of room four.

  It was that British guy, she realized, watching his tall frame gracefully unfold itself from the vehicle. She wondered if he’d come from his outing with Vince. She slammed her car door and was about to shout a hello and ask just that, when he drew some very odd items from his trunk.

  A large red plastic bucket. Yellow kitchen gloves, still in their packaging, which he tucked under one arm. Lastly, a gallon jug of bleach, and then he tapped beneath the bumper with the toe of his shiny shoe and the trunk eased itself closed.

  Perplexed as to why a man who looked deeply averse to dirty work would require cleaning supplies in a room that came with daily housekeeping, Kim pretended to rummage in her backseat and kept spying.

  He went to his room, set down the items, and found his key. He eased the door in just a couple inches—almost like someone inside had set the chain lock. Kim saw his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying to his mystery roommate. After a moment, he gathered his weird purchases and slipped inside, the door shutting at his back. A second later, a hand snaked out to hook the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob.

  Kim frowned, unsure if this was suspicious or just odd. No more spying was possible, as the guy’s curtains were fully drawn, and she tried to set it aside. She’d tell Vince about it later, and let him decide whether or not to worry about it.

  It was her last day shooting, after all—her last chance to knock this job out of the park, and hopefully have Sunnyside inviting her back in the fall to photograph that eclipse for them. She’d relish that—an excuse to return. Might be fun to reprise her fling with Vince, after a couple months apart. Was that a thing adventurous, single women did? Keep interesting men stashed in various locations around the globe for trysts? If not, Kim thought they should.

  Pit stop done, she drove north along Railroad, then turned onto a construction access road. Strictly speaking, she might get chewed out for using it, but the previous day’s events had her in a thoroughly fuck-it-ish mood. If anybody stopped her, she’d apologize and play dumb and flash her contract with Sunnyside. Rules were for suckers and bores, she was coming to realize.

  The road followed the creek, and she stayed on it past the bulk of the construction, out toward an assembly of interesting props—a backhoe, a crane, a small yellow Cat loader, a few other empty vehicles and a mobile office trailer beside a porta potty. Construction looked wrapped for the day, no foremen around to bark at her about hard hats and demand waivers and permits. Still, she parked at a discreet distance.

  She grabbed her camera and wandered downstream a hundred yards, thinking she’d wade into the shallow creek, try to get a shot of the massive orange crane arm reflected in the water, against the red backdrop of the mountains. She was just wadding her socks into her sneakers and toeing the cool current when she heard it—a human hush behind the elemental one. Voices. Two male voices, coming from the direction of the trailer, barely twenty paces from where she stood, though she couldn’t see their owners.

  Just construction guys. If she felt a ripple of anxiety, it was merely the instinct of an isolated woman finding herself among strangers.

  A loud, lamenting sigh from one of the unseen men, and she could make out, “It’s damn sloppy, is what it is. And it’s only gonna get sloppier, the deeper in we get. How do I know we can trust this guy to keep his mouth shut?”

  The other voice said, “We can’t know that. But we got the budget to make it probable. No reason to panic.”

  “The odd bonus’ll work for most of these guys, but this shit never stays buried. What if somebody else gets wind? What if this guy talks? What if there’s an Alex Dunn on that crew? Somebody too clean to buy out and shut up?”

  “You don’t hear Dunn talkin’ now, do you?”

  Silence. So quiet Kim could hear her heart beating in her ears. Alex Dunn.

  The same voice said, “This guy starts lookin’ twitchy, doesn’t sniff the bait . . . Threats could work where cash won’t.”

  “We can’t afford to make good, though. We can’t risk another Dunn. Project can’t handle the attention. There were people nosing around Jerry’s site this morning—he told me at lunch. ‘Bones,’ he said. They were looking for bone—” The guy stopped, like maybe a hand had been put up to silence him.

  “We gotta keep calm. I’ll do some thinkin’, and we’ll resume this chat tomorrow. For now, all you do is screw your head back on straight.”

  A scuff of shoes on gravel, and Kim’s heart shot into her throat. They were moving. Their shadows slipped from behind the trailer ahead of their bodies.

  No chance of hiding.

  Play dumb. Friendly. Oblivious.

  More scuffing, more shadows, and then the men were there behind her, Kim surely in plain view. She locked her eyes on her camera, forced herself to block them out and concentrate on the shot. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so fucking frightened, turning her back on those two strangers. But she kept her mouth shut, faked calm concentration with every cell in her being.

  Shoes stopped short in the dirt and one man said, “Whoa,” and that was her cue to act surprised, herself.

  She turned quick, fell back in the water, holding her camera out of danger as the cold current seized her back, soaking her jeans and the back of her shirt. “Jesus!” she called, then laughed as she righted herself and stood, dripping wet. “Holy shit.” She faked the amusement but felt every ounce of the shock. “You scared the crap out of me.”

  The first man was tall, navy blue tee shirt, dad jeans. Both wore hard hats. “Good God, where’d you come from? Who are you?”

  “My name’s Kim,” she said, sloshing from the creek. “The Sunnyside marketing team hired me to document the casino’s progress. I didn’t think anybody was still out here.”

  “You all right?” asked the second man. He was dressed as generically as his cohort. Both were middle-aged, neither particularly striking. Neither fat nor thin, no visible tattoos, not a flashy wristwatch or interesting belt buckle between them. She wished she could risk a sneaky photo. It’d describe them better than she
ever could.

  “I’m fine,” she said, squeezing water from her shirt. “Just a little wet. Long as my camera’s okay, so am I.”

  “Sorry to startle you,” said the second man, the nicer one. He seemed like he was buying it. The first man, though . . .

  His blue eyes were shrewd, his priority clearly not chivalry. “Kim, you said?”

  No point lying. It’d be an easy job to figure out who she was. “Kim Paget.” Pulse hammering her temples, she came forward and shook each of their hands. “I thought the equipment looked really cool, this time of day, with the sun coming off the rocks. Almost like dinosaurs.” She nodded toward the crane and backhoe. “Good stuff to wow the investors with.”

  The first man’s voice stayed cold, guarded. Unconvinced? Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “Not really safe to be out here,” he said, and her blood went cold as that creek, searching those words for a double entendre.

  “No, maybe not. I guess I figured if the construction was done for the day . . . Anyhow, I’ll clear out. Nice meeting you both.”

  “Sorry about the scare,” said the second man, friendly as you please.

  From the first man, a chilling load of nothing.

  “Bye,” she offered, and again she forced her body to do the impossible—to turn away from the threat, to move slowly. To tug her socks and shoes onto wet, dirty feet and head for the road as though she weren’t half a breath from an anxiety attack. She aimed herself toward her Jetta, straining through the crunch of her steps for sounds of pursuit, ordering her head not to turn. Not to give a thing away. She fell into a disembodied trance, the few hundred paces feeling like a moon walk—half speed, light as air. Trippy from the chemical rush.

  She got to the road, her car seeming ten times farther away than she’d guessed. Were they watching her? She didn’t dare turn to find out. Didn’t dare do anything but lock her eyes on the Jetta’s dusted silver and feign disinterest. Wring her shirt. Shoulder her camera bag.

  The car bleeped and blinked; then she was sinking into the driver’s seat and slamming the door. No relief. On the contrary, that spacey bubble burst with the click of the locks. She couldn’t see the men—the trailer door was open in the distance, so they had to be inside. Could they see her? Though no one was anywhere near her, she cranked the engine and punched the accelerator, tearing off the shoulder far harder than intended, scrabbling on gravel.

  “Chill. Chill.”

  Pebbles pinged the car’s undercarriage, and her heart punched her ribs. Adrenaline coursed like venom, making her woozy, and she breathed hard through her nose, straining for a calm that wouldn’t come. The road was deserted in both directions and she reached over, finding her phone in her open purse. It seemed to take an hour to scroll down her contacts list. She hit CALL on the only name listed under V.

  “Come on . . . Come on.”

  Nothing. A triple beep and the call was ended. She eyed her signal icon—zippo.

  She tossed the cell on the passenger’s seat. “Fuck this town.”

  Chapter 17

  Kim scarcely dared to glance in the rearview, but by the time she reached the town center, she’d seen no one behind her. Thank God. But now what? Not the motel—that was for sure. If the suspicious man wanted to revisit their conversation, that would no doubt be the first place he’d think to look for her.

  She needed Vince.

  She could try his house. Someone would be home, even if Vince wasn’t—his brother, or Nita. Failing that . . . Failing that, maybe she could try to hide out with that creep John Dancer and his judgmental cockatoo.

  She felt naked in the Jetta, certain that at any moment some truck would come shooting out of a side street in hot pursuit. Calm down. Calm down. You don’t even know what you heard. And neither do they, for all you know.

  Luckily for her, both Grossier brothers’ bikes were parked in front of their house. She parked the rental on the shoulder and jogged for the front door, banging loudly, spotting the bell, ringing it. The gang of crows watching her from their dead tree erupted in irritable caws.

  “Jesus!” came a familiar bass mutter, along with heavy footsteps. Vince appeared through the screen, his expression softening when he saw who it was. He pushed the door out. “You trying to give my mom a stroke or something?”

  “Sorry.” She muscled past him into the kitchen, heading for the sink to peer through the flowered curtains.

  “What’s got into you?” Vince asked. “And how come your ass is all wet?”

  Casey limped in. “What the fuck?”

  “Sorry,” she repeated, turning to face them. “I just heard something I shouldn’t have, I think. Something bad. About your friend who was killed, maybe. Maybe.”

  Vince’s black brows hitched together. “Whoa. What?” He tugged a chair from the dinner table and slid it toward her. “Sit down. What’d you say?”

  She didn’t sit, merely gripped the chair back with both hands. The men drew close.

  “I was taking photos, down by one of the building sites, way out north—it looked shut down for the day. And I heard these voices, one guy saying something about how they’d had to shut Alex Dunn up, or something like that . . . I can’t remember exactly. But it sounded bad. Like . . .”

  “Like murder-bad?” Vince asked, his face as hard and serious as she’d ever seen it.

  She nodded. “Maybe. Or at the very least, they were relieved he was dead, so he couldn’t talk. About the bones.”

  “Whoa,” Casey said.

  “He said ‘bones’?” Vince asked. “You’re positive?”

  She nodded. “Positive. They were worried, because of people looking around today.”

  “Meaning me and Welch?”

  “Presumably. They saw me. And I saw them. They saw me see them,” she added, her voice growing high and hysterical, throat closing like a bear trap.

  “Breathe,” Casey said, and she took a long, ragged drag of air.

  “They know what you heard?” asked Vince.

  “I don’t think so . . . I pretended they surprised me so much that I fell into the creek, to make them think I’d had no idea I wasn’t alone. One of them seemed convinced, but the other . . .”

  “What’d they look like?”

  “Like, generic middle-aged men. White guys wearing hard hats. Construction guys, probably. I don’t even know what color their hair was. Jeans, sweatshirts, boots.”

  “Facial hair? Anything?”

  She felt herself growing hot, frustrated. Their faces were already fading. “No, just . . . God, I don’t know. I mean, I’d recognize them if I saw them again. I . . . Shit, shit, shit. They know my name. Why the fuck didn’t I ask theirs?” Why hadn’t she stuck around, waited until they’d left the trailer, and snapped a couple photos with her zoom?

  Vince curled a heavy hand around her shoulder. “It’s okay. You did what you had to—who knows what those guys are capable of. Getting the fuck away was the best thing you could’ve done.”

  She shrugged his hand off, unnerved by a sudden realization. “The thing your mom said—about me being the ears and the eyes.”

  From Casey, “Who-o-oa. Fucking spooky as shit.”

  Vince avoided Kim’s gaze for a moment, then nodded stiffly. “Shit. Yeah.”

  “She really is seriously psychic?” Casey asked, riveted.

  Vince ignored him. “Goddamn. Can’t pretend I’m surprised, but I didn’t want to believe you’d get caught up like this.”

  “It’s true, what she said,” Kim said, overtaken by a deep panic she hadn’t quite registered. This really did sound like a murder, and now she was wrapped up in it. If she wanted to help Vince, that was. Or, she could beat it hell out of here, prioritize her own safety. Fuck of a choice.

  “What the heck do I do?” she asked.

  “You don’t stay at the motel anymore,” Vince said. “That’s for sure. I’m taking you to Three C. Case—stay with Mom. Call Nita if you need to.”

  Casey’s mouth ope
ned and shut a couple times before he replied. “Fine. But I got questions for you later.”

  “Don’t know when I’ll be home.” Vince disappeared into the next room. When he returned, he was shrugging into his holster, next his jacket. Kim felt suddenly less critical of the gun. She followed him out the door, scanning the street for approaching vehicles but finding none.

  “Follow me in the car,” Vince ordered, and for once his bossiness was welcome. That tone said he knew what he was doing and wasn’t afraid—things Kim couldn’t claim at the moment.

  He took off on his bike and she tailed him. His dust made it hard to see too far down the road, and she was grateful for that. That left only her rearview to obsessively monitor.

  They reached Fortuity’s gritty heart in five minutes flat, and Vince pulled into the forecourt of an old commercial garage, faded paint on cinder block telling her it was Eastside Auto—or had been, ages ago. Didn’t look like an active business now.

  Vince held up a hand to tell her to sit tight, then dismounted. He crouched before one of the garage’s wide, shuttered doors, freeing a padlock, then hauling up the panel as he stood. Standing aside, he beckoned Kim to enter.

  He followed her car inside and opened her door as she killed the engine. “Grab what you need and let’s go.”

  She snagged her camera bag from the back and her jacket, her room key, her phone from the passenger’s seat. A minute later, the garage was shuttered once more and she was strapping on Vince’s helmet.

  “Rate we’re going,” he said, “I oughta just buy you your own.”

  Bike or helmet? she wondered, but the motor roared and she couldn’t ask. She also couldn’t ask where they were going. She just let him transport her, grateful to press her trembling body to his steady one and catch her breath, calibrate her heartbeat to his.

  Does this mean I trust him?

  Maybe. Or maybe it just meant she knew him better than she knew anyone else in this town. Maybe she simply trusted that he shared what felt like a bad dream—these suspicions of murder. And this fear for her safety, if Vince let himself experience an emotion as pushy as fear.