Kickout Clause (Savannah Martin Mystery)

by Bennett, Jenna

  He was quiet for a moment. “I ain’t Bradley. You remember that, right, darlin’?”

  “Of course I remember it.” Although part of me was still worried that once things were settled, all the magic would be gone. “I just don’t want to jinx anything.”

  “Getting married ain’t gonna change how I feel about you, darlin’.”

  Good to know. “I’m wearing your ring,” I told him, and flashed the bit of blue on my hand. “That’s good enough for now.”

  “If you say so. You ready?”

  I nodded, and accepted the handful of print-outs from his hand. We got our shoes and jackets on, and a minute later, was on our way across the courtyard to the car.

  Rafe put me inside and walked all the way around the Volvo, peering under the chassis, before he popped the hood. I sat there, with my hands folded in my lap and my heart knocking against my ribs, and watched him inspect the car for anything untoward. I was pretty sure it was unnecessary, that whoever had been upstairs—be it Walker or someone else—wouldn’t have the gall, or for that matter the knowledge, to blow up my car. So far, nothing that had happened had been anything but petty and vaguely threatening. But I’d had a car catch fire while I was driving it before, and I wasn’t eager for a repeat, so I was glad he wasn’t taking any chances. He was carrying his gun, too, and I appreciated that, as well.

  Everything must look as it should, because after a minute he closed the hood and slid into the drivers’ seat. “Looks fine.”

  “I’m sure it is. It was parked on the street, in broad daylight. It would take a bold criminal to sabotage it in front of everyone.”

  “Not that bold.” He turned the key in the ignition and listened to the engine catch. It sounded normal, at least to my untutored ear. Presumably to his as well, since he moved the gearshift before he continued, “All you’d need to do is bring a tow truck and a tool box. People would assume you were making a house call.”

  “Do car mechanics do that?”

  “Some.” He pulled away from the curb into traffic. “That’s not the point, though. If someone asked, that’s what you’d say. You were making a house call. And most people would think what you did—do car mechanics do that?—and then assume they do, cause that’s what you said you were doing. People mostly believe what they’re told.”

  Huh.

  “What about the tow truck, though? That isn’t something most people have sitting around.”

  “Would take me five minutes to get one,” Rafe said and made a left turn onto Interstate Drive.

  Surely not. “How?”

  He shot me a look. “You walk into a body shop, you say your car broke down a mile or two down the road, and that you’ll pay two hundred dollars for the use of the tow truck for thirty minutes. The guy in the shop will likely offer to do it for you, cause he wants to make more money, but you tell him you’re just gonna drag the car home to your own driveway where you can work on it yourself. It’ll take thirty minutes tops, you live just up the road, and then you’ll bring his truck back. When he says yes, and he will when it looks like you’re changing your mind and he won’t make the two hundred for letting you use the truck either, you ask him to toss in the overalls hanging on the hook so you don’t get grease all over your nice pants when you hook the car up, and he says that’ll cost you another fifty bucks. You grumble about the gouging, he laughs, and you drive off in the tow truck, with a pair of overalls you can put on to make sure you look like you belong.”

  “That would work?”

  “Sure,” Rafe said and stepped on the gas as we merged with traffic on I-24 east. “Would take me about ten minutes.”

  “But you’re you. You look like you’d know how to operate a tow truck and work on a car. We’re talking about Walker Lamont here. Nobody would believe that he was going to tow his own Mercedes back to his own driveway to work on it himself.”

  “Maybe he don’t look the same anymore,” Rafe said and steered the Volvo into one of the two exit lanes for I-65 south. “He’s been in prison for six months. It’s liable to change a man.”

  He should know, I guess. I slanted him a look. “Did it change you?”

  He shot me one back. “What d’you think?”

  “I’m asking you. I didn’t know you back then.” Not well enough to know whether two years in prison had changed him, or just honed who he was already.

  “I grew up right quick,” Rafe said. “You put an eighteen-year-old kid into medium security with a bunch of criminals, he’s gonna learn a lot, and not the stuff you want him to learn.”

  “Of course.”

  “I didn’t really belong there, you know? I know I beat Billy Scruggs within an inch of his sorry life, but it wasn’t like he didn’t hit me back. And I only went after him because he’d beat on my mama.”

  I nodded.

  “The only reason they gave me five years was ‘cause I’d been in trouble before. But it wasn’t any kind of serious trouble. Just stupid stuff. Borrowing someone’s car and going joyriding. Partying a little too hard. You know. Stuff a lot of kids did.”

  He certainly hadn’t been the only boy in Sweetwater to get himself into that kind of trouble. My brother Dix and Todd Satterfield got into their own share of scrapes racing Todd’s new sports car. And a lot of the boys got into fights. It was something to do in a small town on a Saturday night, especially after a few beers were consumed. Rafe used to get into it with Cletus Johnson all the time, but that had never resulted in a jail sentence. For either of them.

  Of course, the damage to Billy Scruggs had been a lot worse than anything he’d given Cletus, but still.

  “I was lucky the TBI kept an eye on me. As soon as I got recruited by one of Hector’s people, they offered me a chance outta there.”

  “Was it a difficult decision?” I’d never asked him any questions about this before, other than in passing, when the opportunity presented itself. We’d never sat down and actually had a conversation about it. I had always assumed it was something he didn’t want to talk about, and since he’d never brought it up, I didn’t know much about what that time had been like for him.

  He shook his head. “When the thing with Billy Scruggs happened, I was down in Alabama working on cars. I was just coming home to visit for a couple days. I was gonna go back and keep working and prob’ly end up with a garage of my own one day. Never figured on a life of crime. So when I got the chance to get outta prison early, I grabbed it. Wasn’t nothing I wanted in there.”

  “And it was a chance to redeem yourself.” Going to work for the TBI. Catching criminals.

  He glanced at me, and the corner of his mouth curled up. “Dunno that I thought about that, darlin’. I just wanted out.”

  “You didn’t want to do something good after you almost killed Billy Scruggs?”

  “I don’t regret what I did to Billy,” Rafe said. “If I had to do it over, I’d do it again. Except I’d make sure nobody knew it was me.”

  Ah. So he’d had no particular desire for redemption. And why would he, when he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong?

  The conversation lapsed after that. I sat in silence while Rafe maneuvered the car down Interstate 65 toward Brentwood. We exited on Old Hickory Boulevard and made our way toward Nolensville Road and the Shortstop.

  I had only been at the sports bar once before, last fall, and if possible, it looked even less inviting now. At least then, there’d been leaves on the trees and some jolly green tufts of grass growing in the gravel parking lot, while now, in the gloaming, everything was reduced to black and white and shades of gray. The trees stretched skeletal branches toward the lowering sky.

  The lot was full of cars. Full enough that we had to drive all the way to the back and slot the Volvo in beside a pickup with a gun rack in the bed and a bumper sticker that said “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God,” next to a Confederate flag.

  Rafe shot the gun rack an appreciative look. And chuckled when he saw the expression on
my face. “What’s the matter, darlin’?”

  I gestured to the bumper sticker. “It’s not that I mind the sentiment, really. I am perfectly happy to be Southern. And I have nothing against the Confederate flag. My great-great-great-grandfather fought in the War Between the States.”

  “Of course he did,” Rafe said. “So what’s the problem?”

  “I just don’t think it’s necessary to flaunt it. It’s one thing to feel that way, but quite another to go around saying so. You know?”

  He shrugged. “My grandfather had a bumper sticker like that. They don’t bother me.”

  They should. Especially if his grandfather had had one. Old Jim Collier had been a nasty piece of work, and a horrible bigot to boot. He’d beaten LaDonna almost into a miscarriage after she got herself pregnant by Rafe’s father, and he’d made no bones about the fact that he despised his mixed-race grandson. The first twelve years of Rafe’s life, living in a singlewide trailer with LaDonna and Old Jim, must have been pretty close to hell on earth, I imagined. I had seen the decrepit trailer in the Bog they had shared, and it had looked bad enough all on its own. When you added in Old Jim’s mean streak and drunkenness, you got what amounted to a pretty rough childhood.

  “Your grandfather was a horrible man.”

  He shrugged.

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you at all if you’d killed him.”

  He shot me a look. “I told you, darlin’. He drowned.”

  “I know you did.”

  “Maybe we coulda gone outside to check on him before the next morning, but I was just happy it was quiet.”

  “Of course.”

  “Wasn’t like I held his head under or nothing. Or my mama, either. The man drowned, pure and simple. With no help from nobody.”

  “I wasn’t saying he didn’t. Just that I would have been tempted to kill him if it had been me.”

  “Won’t say I wasn’t,” Rafe said with a grin, “but I was twelve. Not sure I knew how yet.”

  I let that ‘yet’ pass without comment, mostly because we’d reached the door into the Shortstop and it was time to stop talking and go to work.

  The place looked just like it had six months ago. A low, dingy cinderblock room with a long bar on one end and a couple of pool tables on the other. The space between was taken up by a dozen or so Formica-topped tables surrounded by what looked like a variety of discarded kitchen chairs. A couple of TVs—not of the flat-screen variety—were showing basketball. The clientele consisted of ninety percent men, and despite the implications of the bumper sticker outside, it wasn’t by any means a white bar. More than half the men present had darker skin than I did. I saw African-Americans, Hispanics, and even a couple of Asians. Most of them were dressed like Rafe, in jeans and Tshirts. Bradley must have stood out like a beacon in his expensive suit and tie.

  Last time, we’d sat at a table. This time, Rafe led me to the bar. “Bottle of beer,” he told the bartender as he kept a hand under my elbow to help me up on the tall chair. “Glass of sweet tea. And some information.”

  The man—a few years older than Rafe, with receding hair and a stomach that rounded the front of his T-shirt—arched his brows but didn’t comment, just went to get the bottle of beer and glass of iced tea. By the time he put them down in front of us, Rafe had pulled out his ID.

  “A friend of mine was here last night.” He showed the bartender his phone, where he’d stored a picture of Manny Ortega. “D’you see him?”

  “Sat at the bar. Ordered a beer.” The man had a rumbling bass voice. Or maybe it just sounded rumbling because they were both speaking softly. I guess they didn’t want anyone to know what they were talking about. “Something happen to him?”

  “He was shot,” Rafe said, pocketing the ID but leaving the phone on the bar. “Probably didn’t have nothing to do with nothing, but we gotta check.”

  The bartender nodded.

  “He was following this guy.” Rafe glanced at me, and I scrambled to pull the print-outs out of my purse. The man on the other side of me glanced in my direction and away again. I did a half turn on the seat to be more circumspect when I put the picture of Bradley on the bar.

  “Remember him?” Rafe asked.

  The bartender shook his head. “Can’t say as I do. We get a lot of people coming through here.”

  “He was meeting someone. Man in a suit and tie. He was waiting at a table.”

  They both surveyed the room; the bartender over Rafe’s shoulder and Rafe in the mirror behind the bar. I did the same. The back part of the room was taken up by pool tables, so there was nowhere to sit over there. Maybe Manny had been talking about one of the tables along the sides of the room when he’d described the table as being ‘in the back.’

  “Marsha was on yesterday,” the bartender volunteered. “You want I should get her for you?”

  “When she’s got a minute. No hurry. Can we get a couple cheeseburgers and fries?”

  “Sure thing.” The bartender moved off toward the kitchen pass-through, I assume to put in our order.

  Rafe lifted his bottle and swallowed half of it. I sipped daintily on my iced tea. Both of us trying to make it look like we had all the time in the world and this wasn’t a big deal. I guess Rafe didn’t want to risk putting the guy’s back up. To suddenly have the TBI show up on your doorstep asking questions, couldn’t be a comfortable feeling. Especially with the kind of clientele the Shortstop sported. I knew for a fact that several of Rafe’s former ‘friends’ had spent time here, because I’d met them last time I visited. Friends who were now guests of the state of Tennessee.

  In fact—and I hadn’t realized it until now—maybe this wasn’t a safe place for Rafe. He’d been instrumental in putting those ‘friends’ behind bars, while he had skated through unscathed as usual, courtesy of the TBI. His incarcerated friends might have friends out here who resented that fact. As the bartender went down the bar to talk to someone else, I leaned closer to Rafe. “Is this place safe for you?”

  He shot me a surprised look, and I elaborated. “Last time we were here, you were meeting those three guys you were pulling those open house robberies with. Ishmael and Antoine and whoever.”

  “A.J.,” Rafe said. “Ishmael Jackson, A. J. Davies, and Antoine Kent. What about them?”

  “They’re in prison now.” At least I hoped they were. “But what if they have friends? Aren’t you afraid someone’s going to take a potshot at you?”

  “Over one of them three? Not likely.”

  “One of them could have had a girlfriend who depended on the income or something. Someone who didn’t appreciate you helping to put them in prison.”

  “Nobody knows I had anything to do with putting them in prison,” Rafe said mildly. And added, “till now.”

  Oops. I looked around. Nobody seemed interested in us, but I lowered my voice anyway. “I just don’t want anything to happen to you.” Especially because of me. And dragging him here had been my idea.

  “I don’t want nothing to happen to me either, darlin’. If I thought this was a bad idea, I wouldn’t have come.”

  Good to know. Nonetheless, I felt a little more uneasy than I had up until now. The guy next to me on the barstool—not Rafe, the guy on the other side—was giving me the creepy-crawlies. Not that he was doing anything. He wasn’t even looking at us. His attention was fixed on the TV above the bar. But just the fact that he was there, a few feet away, was enough to make my neck hair prickle. He looked like the truck outside, with the gun rack and confederate flag, could belong to him. You know the type: big and beefy, with practically no neck and less hair.

  Then again, I was probably just letting my prejudices show. Most likely he was just some guy on his way home from a nine to five job in a factory or somesuch, with a tired wife and a couple of kids at home, stopping off for a beer before dealing with them.

  Or not. No wedding ring. No sign of one having been removed.

  Before he could turn his head and think I was checking
him out, I put him out of my mind and focused on Rafe instead.

  “What now?”

  “We watch the game, wait for our food, and talk to Marsha when she comes over.” He didn’t take his eyes off the TV, although I was pretty sure he kept an eye on everything in the mirror behind the bar at the same time.

  It’s not like him to sit with his back to the room. He and Tamara Grimaldi both have this ingrained habit—probably born from necessity—of keeping an eye on everyone coming and going, so they won’t be surprised by anyone pulling a gun. Shades of Wild Bill Hickok, or something. Whenever we go eat together, it’s always a battle between the two of them over who gets the seat in the corner. They leave my posterior exposed most of the time. It’s a good thing I trust both of them to have my back.

  Anyway, since he couldn’t keep an eye on the room from where he was sitting, I felt pretty sure he was watching it in the mirror. He straightened imperceptibly just a few seconds before the waitress with the beehive—the same one who had waited on us the last (and first) time we’d been here together—came to a stop beside him. “Whatcha need, hon?”

  “Friend of mine was here yesterday.” Rafe turned the phone on to show her Manny’s face. “Sat at the bar, had a beer.”

  Marsha shrugged. “I work the floor, hon. I mighta noticed him, but then again, maybe not.”

  “He was following this guy.” Rafe moved the printed pictures over to his other side, with the photo of Bradley on top. “Remember him? He was meeting someone. Another guy, middle-aged, both of’em in suits and ties.”

  Marsha nodded. “I remember. We don’t get a lot of guys in suits come through here, you know? This is more of a blue collar clientele.”

  Indeed it was. There wasn’t a tie in sight tonight. Just a lot of Tshirts, a few sweatshirts, and a Henley or two. The guy next to me—the guys on both sides of me; Rafe and the other one—were wearing jeans and Tshirts, and so were 90% of the rest of the people present. Even the women.