“When you called yesterday, why didn’t you tell me straight off you were from that show?”
“You would have hung up on me.”
Correct answer. But as she’d said it, her gaze had shifted from looking directly at him to the third snap of his shirt. He spotted a lie. At least a half lie. “And?”
She didn’t say anything.
He lowered his pitch and volume. “And?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. Her shoulders slumped, her head dropped forward. The baseball cap fell off, and handfuls of streaky blond hair tumbled down around her head. With irritation, she tossed the cap onto the passenger seat and raked her hair back off her face using all ten fingers.
“I’m not representing the network or the show,” she said. “I came of my own accord and at my own expense.” She gave a soft laugh of chagrin as she looked up at him. “Please forgive me for wasting your time. Enjoy what’s left of your day off.” She tugged on the car door again.
He was about to release it, walk away, go home, turn on ESPN, crack a beer, and do exactly as she had suggested: enjoy what was left of his day off.
But in a split second of remarkably messed-up judgment, he changed his mind and held on to the door. “What makes you think he’s out there waiting to strike again?”
Now looking him straight in the eye, she said, “The blood moon.”
She held his gaze for a beat or two, then succeeded in pulling the door shut.
Mystified and annoyed, John watched her back the sedan out and jounce over the rutted parking lot to the two-lane highway. Several vehicles went past before she was able to turn left into the eastbound lane. While she’d waited for a clearing, he’d been able to get to his phone and take a picture of the rear license plate.
His impulse was to follow her. Common sense blared, Have you lost your freakin’ mind?
He watched until her car disappeared around a bend, then walked slowly over to his SUV. He opened the driver’s door but remained standing in the wedge, taking a moment to process everything that had happened since he’d walked into the bar.
No, even before that. Yesterday’s phone conversation with her had felt covert from the start, like she needed to speak in a half whisper, like she had something to hide. Or was… apprehensive. Scared? Guilty? Hell if he knew. But he’d wondered.
It had nagged him enough that he’d kept their appointment this afternoon. He’d arrived at this most unlikely of places curious, but also with a jaundiced eye. For the first five minutes, he had been amused, just as she’d called him on.
But now, he couldn’t shake the feeling that even if she was wrong, she believed it: “It’s going to happen again.”
Irritably, he swatted at mosquitoes that dared to light on him when he was this pissed off. First of all, he was angry at her for the intrusion. He didn’t need anything upsetting the rickety apple cart that was his present and future life.
Then he was mad at himself for being such a chump, driving all the way out here to meet the woman with the sexy phone voice and now standing here trying to keep mosquitoes from sucking him dry, mulling over her certainty that all was not right with how the Crissy Mellin case had been resolved.
He’d wanted like hell to accept the official sign-off of that investigation. He’d wanted to embrace it, then bury it deep, expunge it from his mind, rule it forever over and done with. Finis.
More than three years’ distance from it, he’d been this close to coming to terms with it. Now… her. Her of the just-got-laid hair. She’d refreshed his memory, resurrected doubts, awakened an obsession that had the potential to wreck every aspect of his life all over again, turning lousy into lousier.
No way in hell, lady. No matter how delectable your lips.
All the while his anger had been mounting toward Beth Collins, he’d been staring hard at the entrance to the beer joint. “Screw it,” he said, and underscored that by slamming the door of his SUV. He stalked over to the padded door, pulled it open, and went inside.
The barkeeper looked up from his magazine and gave him a lupine smile. “Struck out, huh?”
Without replying or breaking stride, John walked up to the matchstick guy who’d given him the finger and socked him in the gut.
“She must’ve been speaking metaphorically.”
John was lying on his sofa, his head on the armrest, fully clothed except for his cowboy boots, which were on the floor. In his right hand was a bottle of beer, held upright on his stomach. In his left was a makeshift ice pack he was holding against the side of his face.
“‘Blood moon’ could be a metaphor for lots of things, right? Doomsday. A reckoning. Armageddon. Spells, and prophesies of end times, and spooky shit like that. I don’t think she meant it in a literal sense.”
He’d turned the ceiling light off because it had been an irritant to his swollen, discolored eye. The TV was on, but he wasn’t paying any attention to the programming, and he’d muted the audio because it was contributing to his headache. A handful of ibuprofen tablets had blunted neither it nor the additional aches and pains that kept him trying to find a more comfortable position on his lumpy couch.
The beer—his second—had gone down real good, but he’d eaten only half of his carry-out burger. The remains of it lay on its foil wrapper on the coffee table. He gestured toward it with the beer bottle. “Help yourself.”
He called the dog Mutt, because the animal defined the word. One morning as he’d been about to leave for work, he’d noticed something underneath his car that looked like an unraveling burlap tow sack that had been wadded up and discarded. Upon further inspection, he’d discovered that it was a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.
He’d made the mistake of getting a slice of leftover pizza from his kitchen trash can and tossing it to the bag of bones before driving away. When he’d returned home that evening, the mutt had been curled up on his front porch. Another slice of dry pizza had sealed the deal. He became John’s dog.
He’d broken the neglected animal of his habit of scarfing food, convincing him that it was no longer necessary to snatch at it and swallow it whole. But now, having been given permission, Mutt made short work of the burger, then lay down in the narrow space between the coffee table and sofa. Yawning hugely, he laid his head on one of John’s boots.
“You’re welcome.” John eased himself up, swung his legs off the sofa, stepped over the dog, and scooped the trash off the coffee table. On his way into the galley kitchen, he downed the remainder of his beer, then disposed of the empty bottle and trash, and pitched the plastic bag of melting ice into the sink.
As he reentered the living room, he said, “Looks can be deceiving, you know.” Mutt didn’t raise his head, but he opened his eyes and looked at his owner. “She was hot, all right. That hair. Brown eyes, but not dark like chocolate. Lighter. Like really good whiskey.
“Nice rack. Not overly endowed, just… nice.” He got lost in the thought of the allure of a plain white t-shirt, then pulled himself away from the remembered image.
“As I was saying, she looked normal, but she had to be a certified kook. It’s as simple as that. Or maybe not a kook, maybe just bored. Needing attention. Turning a dull afternoon into an adventure. Except that coming all the way from New York to seek adventure here makes no sense.”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “She remembered my name from years back, but that would be easy enough. Bowie like the knife. So she… she…”