Page 17

Because he was tired, he told himself. Just tired, and the workout this morning had kicked his butt. It had nothing to do with a woman he barely remembered and the tears she’d wiped away right there in front of him, making him feel like the worst kind of jackass for letting her think he was going to let her wrestle with her situation alone.
Not that he owed her anything. His old life was gone. Until she’d shown up yesterday, he’d have said those days were forgotten, too.
The kid he’d been back then had died a long time ago.
But today that felt hollow.
“Did she tell you her deal?” Jonas asked. He was a ruthless man with a soldier’s cool, harsh gaze, and his years out of the service hadn’t tempered that at all. Blue doubted he was interested intempering. The story he’d heard was that Isaac had tracked Jonas down out in the vast, impenetrable Alaskan interior and had found the other man living by his wits alone in a hut that had redefined rustic. And isolated. “Or did she sleep through that, too?”
The fact that Blue wanted to punch Jonas and/or demand he alter his tone when he talked about Everly was... not good. He did neither.
Instead, Blue relayed Everly’s account of what had happened to her that night, point by point. Both Isaac and Jonas listened in intent silence as he talked, letting him get out all the details before they asked any questions.
“Do you believe her?” Jonas asked when he was done.
Blue nodded. “I do.”
“You say you don’t really know this girl. She could be the psycho the police think she is.”
“I knew her when she was a kid.” Blue shrugged. “But she doesn’t feel crazy to me.”
Jonas studied him as if he’d given something away. “Your call, brother,” he muttered.
“What’s your take on her story?” Isaac asked, cool and easy, like he knew Blue was entirely too tense. Blue ordered himself to relax.
“If it was one asswipe, I’d think it was an accident,” Blue said after a moment and another attempt to clear his head with a swig of dark, rich coffee. “The roommate’sboyfriend Everly didn’t know about and a fight that got out of hand or something. Four separate asswipes sounds too organized to be a domestic squabble or even a visit from the local bookie gone wrong.”
Isaac looked intrigued. “I’m not opposed to getting my Eliot Ness on with some gangsters, if that’s the kind of ‘organized’ you mean.”
“Because that usually ends well,” Jonas said, rolling his eyes. “Most organized-crime idiots are known for making reasonable, rational decisions, like backing down when challenged.”
“They don’t have to be reasonable,” Blue retorted. “They just have to leave Everly alone.”
It wasn’t until the words were out that he realized there was too much heat in them. Jonas sighed but said nothing. A minute later he pushed back from the table, muttered something about hitting the head, and stalked off toward the back of the café. Other people might throw out a good-bye, but not Jonas, who preferred to simply disappear at will.
Another moment or two chugged by. There was the familiar sound of a screen door opening and closing in the back of the restaurant—which meant Jonas was using his departure as a message, since he made noise only when he felt like it.
Blue met his leader’s eyes blandly. “Don’t say it.”
“What am I going to say?” Isaac asked, sounding wounded and innocent, neither of which Blue thought he’d ever been in his life. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you play hero before. It’s cute.”
Blue made an anatomically impossible suggestion, politely enough, and Isaac laughed again. Louder. Longer.
“If you’re going to keep disturbing the other customers like this, I’m going to need you to leave.”
Blue looked away from Isaac to the woman who stood at their table then, making no attempt to conceal her usual impatient dislike of pretty much everything on earth—but especially of one Isaac Gentry.
Caradine Scott was the owner, only waitress, and head cook at the Water’s Edge Café. Her cooking was unpretentious, sized for the appetites of big, tough men who worked with their hands out there in the unforgiving Alaskan climate, and so good that on busy summer afternoons when the ferry came in, there could be a line of tourists out the door and halfway down the street—assuming she didn’t get annoyed and close the place down because she didn’t feel like cooking that day.
The cheerful decor of the café—bright colors and cute drawings on the walls by local kids, mismatched mugs and plates to create a charmingly eccentric feel—was a lie. Or not necessarily a lie—if Blue was feeling more charitable—but certainly aspirational. Caradine was not in any way cheerful. She was the most prickly female Blue had ever met in his life, which was saying something in a state that celebrated a kind of independent stubbornness that made most Alaskans too much for folks from other, softer, more contained places—the places people here referred to as “outside.”
Caradine cooked only what she wanted, when she wanted to cook it. She didn’t have a menu, which meant you ate what you were served or she kicked you out. Today she was wearing her usual uniform of battered old jeans, a stained apron wrapped around her narrow hips, and a loose T-shirt that failed entirely to disguise theshape of her body or the fact that she kept herself in excellent shape. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, her fingernails bore chipped black polish, and she had a smudge of flour on one high cheekbone, though no one would dare point that out to her and potentially lose a finger and/or get banned.
“You have one other customer,” Blue pointed out. Maybe with a touch of that edginess he was pretending he didn’t feel eating at him. “And Ernie’s deaf.”
Ernie Tatlelik was deaf, half-blind, and of indeterminate age. Weathered enough to be eighty but spry enough to be in his fifties. None of which kept him from being the best fisherman in Grizzly Harbor—or the luckiest, depending on who was telling the story and how jealous they were of his latest catch.
More immediately relevant was the fact that he was sitting in the corner of the restaurant with his gaze trained out the window in front of him while he ate, like he expected the pier to get up and amble off into the wilderness. Blue doubted the old man had the slightest idea anyone else was in the café at all.