Page 6 of Blood Moon

True, he’d only seen her from the waist up, but the t-shirt was made of stretchy stuff, and if the bottom half of her came even close to being as shapely as the top, he was thinking that an hour or two rodeo in a hasty-tasty motel wouldn’t be a bad way to play out the rest of the afternoon.

So long as they didn’t converse.

In answer to her question, he said, “Yeah, I think he’ll remember you. Why is that a problem? Does it throw a wrench into your sabotage scheme?”

“It’s not a scheme.”

He gave her a look.

She set both hands flat on the table and leaned across it. “Didn’t you understand what I said?”

“I understood perfectly. I also understand that this was an ambush. I hate myself for falling for it, but now I’m leaving.”

He glanced behind him toward the four at the billiard table and saw right through their seeming disregard of them. Of her in particular. He muttered a curse under his breath and sighedas he came back around. “Tuck that damn purse under your arm. Tight. Don’t make eye contact. Got it? Not with anybody. And don’t even think of arguing with me about this.”

He scooted out of the booth, reached down and took her by the elbow, and, when she was standing, steered her toward the exit. The bartender sent him a wink and a thumbs-up.

As they walked past the grungy group, the mustachioed one with the attitude and a matchstick in his mouth flipped him the bird. John ignored it, pulled open the heavy door, and guided the woman outside.

Rain clouds were gathering, so, although the temperature was seasonally cool, the atmosphere was damp with the promise of precipitation.

She worked her elbow free of his grasp and pointed toward a black sedan. “Figured,” he said.

Besides his SUV and the sedan, the only other vehicle on the gravel lot was a pickup truck with a bashed-in grill and two bullet holes in its rusty rear fender. He walked Beth Collins over to the sedan.

After she unlocked it with a fob, he reached around and opened the driver’s door for her. “Nice wheels. All the extra options.”

“I don’t know what half of them are for. It’s a rental I picked up at the airport.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“You flew in from New York?” That was an easy deduction. The show she worked for broadcast from there.

“Yes.”

“You don’t sound like New York.”

“I grew up in this area. Straight out of LSU I moved up there.”

“Where you trained to trick people into clandestine meetings. Or did you need training for that? Did the television network teach you how to do it effectively, or did it come naturally to you?”

Looking perturbed, she turned her head aside to watch an eighteen-wheeler on the highway blow past. Coming back to him, she said, “Mr. Bowie—or should I call you Detective Bowie?”

“How about John?”

Without calling him anything, she said, “I came down here specifically to talk to you.”

“Well, that’s too bad. Because I’m not talking. Tell your slick host that calling me an arrogant prick gives pricks a bad name. Tell your bosses that I was rude, lewd, misogynistic. Tack on whatever unflattering adjectives you want. I don’t give a damn about their opinion of me. In fact, the lower it is, the better I like it.”

To her credit, she kept her cool. “Aren’t you the least bit curious to hear why I think that what happened to Crissy Mellin will happen again, that there’ll be another victim?”

“Of course it’ll happen. A hundred times. A thousand times. Regrettable. Sad. Tragic. Violence against women is a malignancy eating away at the fabric of most so-called civilized cultures. But those crimes will be somebody else’s problem. Not mine.”

“But it will be your problem. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

If the bartender hadn’t interrupted, he might have asked her to elaborate, or at least asked,What the hell?But he’d lost the opportunity, and he was now glad he had, because he wasn’t stupid.