Page 2 of Wham Line (The Last Picks #10)

The restaurant was already filling up—opening night, even a soft open, was an exciting event at a time of year in Hastings Rock when not much excitement usually happened.

Many of the patrons were locals, and I waved to Bliss and Althea Wilson—Bliss was helping Althea out of her coat, but Althea gave me a hearty wave back before digging her cellphone out of her bra.

Cyd Wofford was there with a woman I didn’t recognize, and Jemitha Green stood near the door, dictating into her phone—probably her first impressions, which she’d write up for the town paper.

With the instinctive sense for trouble most humans have, I found my gaze drawn to a couple at the bar.

They were White, and I pegged them as being in their fifties.

He had sallow skin and an almost aggressively full head of hair.

It made me think of a dog’s fur that had been rubbed the wrong way.

She had short hair she had dyed too dark, and she wore a lot of earth-toned makeup.

Like, a lot . They were leaning in toward each other, talking over each other—but quietly. And they were not happy.

A burst of familiar giggles brought my gaze around in an automatic search for Nalini (mostly to make sure she hadn’t somehow climbed into Keme’s lap). But she wasn’t anywhere near us; she was standing near the doors to the kitchen, talking to a man.

He was middle-aged, but you could only tell by the lines around his mouth and eyes.

His hair was glossy black and hung in expensively cut curtains.

And he was still trim in his tailored suit.

At least one of his parents had been East Asian, but one had probably been White—you could see that, too, in his eyes.

And he was handsome, which might have explained why Nalini was leaning in, laughing again, while he smiled indulgently.

The kitchen door swung open, and a young man rushed out, headed straight for Nalini.

He was carrying a drink, and his head was down as he stared at his phone.

At the last moment, he seemed to spot Nalini.

He stumbled left, crashed into a chair, and fell to the floor.

The sound of breaking glass ran through the restaurant.

Nalini was the first to react with a little scream.

The older man she’d been talking to took her by the arm and moved her aside, then crouched next to the guy who’d fallen.

Bobby rose up in his seat for a better look—probably deciding if he needed to help—and as my gaze moved automatically in his direction, I caught a glimpse of the couple I’d noticed at the bar.

The middle-aged man with the bristly hair was absorbed in his phone, but the woman with the earth-toned makeup was glaring in the direction of the recent disturbance.

Not just annoyance at having her conversation—or whatever it was—interrupted.

The look on her face was closer to rage.

By the time I turned my attention back toward the kitchen, the middle-aged man was standing, dusting off the younger man, and Nalini was headed toward us with a breadbasket.

I wasn’t trying to stare, but something about the interaction between the two men held my attention a moment longer—the way the older man curled his fingers around the younger man’s arms seemed too…

much, for lack of a better word. And then, as I was watching, the older man touched a stain on the younger man’s white shirt, where his drink had spilled.

Without missing a beat, the older man took off his suit jacket and held it out, ignoring the younger man’s protests.

Too much was an understatement.

The younger man was alright looking; nothing remarkable. He had olive-toned skin and wore his dark hair long, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty, with the mild acne to prove it. But some people didn’t care about pretty. Some people cared about young—and frequently, the younger, the better.

“—love what they’ve done with eco-friendly materials,” Indira said, her voice growing stronger as she and Fox moved toward us. “The reclaimed wood—”

She cut off as she reached our table, staring toward the kitchen doors, where the two men still stood.

Her face went slack, and for several long seconds, it was like she was gone.

She had one hand on the table, and slowly, automatically, she gathered a wad of the tablecloth.

Then something flickered deep, deep down, and her expression tightened again.

She released the tablecloth and smoothed out the almost-invisible wrinkles she’d left.

Her hand moved automatically again, adjusting the rolled silverware, straightening it in a line with the wineglass. Then her hand drifted to her side.

“Excuse me.” She turned toward the front of the restaurant.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Indira?” Fox took a step after her. “What’s wrong?”

Indira waved her hand at us. “I need some fresh air. No, stay. I’ll—” But whatever she meant to say, she left the sentence unfinished and strode toward the exit.

Phone forgotten now, Keme followed her with his eyes and then turned a worried look on me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Fox was staring at the front door. “Should I…”

“I could check on her,” Millie said.

Bobby shook his head. “She wanted to be alone.” His gaze moved to the man in the suit, now jacketless. “Any idea who that is?”

None of us said anything, though, because none of us did.

The kitchen doors flew open, and a woman stormed out.

She was built big: tall and generously proportioned.

Her honey-blond hair was tied back in a bun, and beneath her chef’s whites, her skin was pink from the heat of the kitchen.

The sounds of pots and pans and voices calling out orders rose for a moment before the doors swung shut again.

“Mal,” she shouted, “are you insane?”

The younger man—still wearing the borrowed suit jacket—blanched and scurried away (and almost knocked down a server in the process).

The older man, with a look on his face somewhere between patience and resignation, turned to face the woman.

“It’s our soft open,” he said in that let’s-be-reasonable-dear tone that I was sure had led to a lot of episodes of Snapped: Men Deserve It!

“Whatever this is, don’t you think it can wait—”

“It’s my restaurant! Mine! Who the heck do you think you are?”

(That’s kind of what she said.)

Everyone else in the restaurant had forgotten about dinner because the show was so interesting.

(Mr. Ratcliff, seated at a table for one, was so excited that his nose was twitching.) Even the servers had paused, frozen in the middle of their choreographed ballet around the dining room.

The only sounds filtered in distantly from the kitchen.

“It’s our soft open,” the man she had called Mal said again, but his tone was harder this time. Taking the woman by the arm—never a wise idea, in my opinion, especially when the woman in question is an expert with knives—he turned her toward the kitchen. “And you’re making a scene.”

“ I’m making a scene—”

But that was as far as she got before he steered her through the swinging doors.

For a moment, the silence in the dining room was total. One server, whom I recognized as a distant relation of the Archer clan, stood paralyzed, silverware clutched in one trembling hand.

Then someone started to laugh.

It was the sallow-skinned man, the one I’d seen having that, uh, intense conversation at the bar. He slid off his stool, still laughing, and turned toward the exit. He laughed the whole way, and even after he’d left, his laughter carried in from outside until the heavy doors fell shut behind him.

That released the rest of us. The Archer cousin with the silverware sprang into motion.

Nalini hurried toward a service corridor at the back.

And the woman with the earth-toned makeup left the bar and made her way toward the kitchen.

She passed through the swinging doors without missing a beat, and then she was gone.

Fox was the first one to speak. “Well, not exactly what I was expecting.”

“That was so awkward,” Millie said.

Awkward wasn’t the word I’d have chosen— stressful came closer; I was sweating, and I hadn’t even been involved in any of the confrontations.

But Bobby’s quiet “It’s over now; let’s just have a good evening” went a long way toward settling the rest of us.

Except for Keme, who chose that moment to kick me under the table and then look significantly at the restaurant’s main entrance.

“Ow!” But he was still glaring at me, so I amended it to “Uh, oh, I guess I’ll go check on Indira.”

Bobby put a hand on my arm and looked at Keme.

To his credit, Keme did shrink down a little and mumble, “Sorry.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, fighting a laugh.

I was halfway to the front doors when a pop came from somewhere nearby. I glanced around for a champagne bottle and took two more steps. A second pop sounded in the distance, and my writer brain matched the sounds up with something else: gunshots.

By the time I’d turned around, Bobby was already out of his seat and running toward the kitchen doors. Fox and Millie were staring after him. Keme had on his most feral expression and was gripping Millie’s arm.

I sprinted after Bobby.

When I passed through the swinging doors, the steam and smells of the kitchen met me: onion and hot oil and fish.

I glimpsed stainless-steel worktables and a walk-in refrigerator and the kind of ugly-but-practical tile that seems to abound in commercial kitchens.

Men and women in Mizzenmast uniforms stared at me.

Bobby was already halfway to a door marked EXIT on the far side.

I stumbled out into the alley on the other side about five seconds after him. It was dark, and the trickle of rain had thickened into a steady, soaking drizzle. Bobby knelt on the ground next to someone—at first, all I could make out was a white shirt.

When I took a step forward, Bobby raised his head and waved me back. “Stay where you are! Call nine-one-one.”

I dug out my phone. “Who is it?”

“Mal.” Indira’s voice made me jump. She stood under the eave, hidden in the thicker shadows there.

In one hand, she held something silver that caught the light in long, gray smears.

Like the rain, I thought as my brain struggled to process what I was seeing.

Like a smudgy bit of light and rain that she’d somehow caught hold of.

But it wasn’t, of course. It was her gun.

“Thomas Malick.” And then, in the tone of someone answering a question, she said, “My ex-husband.”