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Correction–wasa friend.
“So this is what goes on down here?” Parker scoffs, his eye already swollen and purple from the interrogation I’ve started in the basement of The Blue Whiskey.
“You don’t want to do this,” he pleads.
Lars stares at him, arms crossed in front of him, with the quiet judgment of a disappointed big brother. From the other side of the room, I can feel Vaughn watching me, worry oozing from his pores. I haven’t been myself. I’m running on vodka and rage, and I’m not in the right mind to make a smart decision.
But I don’t give a shit.
Not when it comes to Megan.
“You’re right, Parker. I don’t want to do this but yet here we are.” I lower my gun but keep it at my side as I pace in front of him. “Now, let’s go over it again.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times.”
I lift my gun again, pointing it straight at his balls.
“Are you being a smart ass?”
“Tell the story until it makes sense,” Lars says, speaking for the first time since we’ve been down here. “You’re leaving something out.”
Parker’s head drops.
We’ve been beating his ass for thirty minutes, but it turns out that all we actually needed was a bit of condemnation from a very disillusioned Lars.
“I dropped you off. I stayed in the car like you asked me to do. I was playing on my phone, texting a woman I met a few weeks ago.”
“Too much backstory,” I say, sick of his bullshitting.
“Okay,” he huffs. “That’s when I spotted the car. Fabre’s car. He was having some sort of argument with Naomi outside of the car, and then she finally got in. He didn’t make her, and neither did the goon with him. She got in on her own. I know she’s Megan’s girl, but I didn’t think anything of it. ”
He takes a painful breath, probably because I kicked him in the ribs for ten minutes.
“Continue,” I say, not giving a shit about the pain he’s in.
“It might have been five minutes later when I noticed Megan. She came out of the apartment and didn’t have a handbag like she usually does. I figured she was going for a walk or something.”
“And you didn’t keep eyes on her?” I ask in an accusatory fashion.
“Whatever she was doing was none of my business. The apartment is her home and she had a sad expression on her face. I guessed that you two had some sort of an argument, and she needed a beat.”
“Is that right? You know my fiancee that well that you can sense when she needs a beat?”
Parker looks up at me with a fiery determination in his expression. “You had me follow her for months so yeah I think I know her.”
I smack him against the side of his head with the butt of my gun, and he howls in pain.
“I can finish this,” Vaughn interjects, knowing that he’s only interfering because he thinks I’m about to kill Parker.
I’m not.
I don’t take life and death lightly.
And whatever role Parker’s played in all of this, I know that the real person I have beef with is Naomi’s father.
I raise two fingers, signaling that I want Vaughn to back off. I’ve got this.
“What happened next?” I ask him. “And stick to only the facts.”