He leaned in closer and replied quietly, “You have no business being here.”
“I have a friend who has a friend he cares about who has a fiancée who, I’ve heard, is tied up in some business here. He’s in knots about it. He loves her. And he can’t afford Lee. He can’t even afford Dick Anderson.”
Dick Anderson was another local PI, less expensive than Lee and his boys, also less talented. Though, a nice guy.
“So enter me,” I finished.
“Whatever shit she’s wound up in here is shit you don’t want swirlin’ around you.”
I had a feeling he was not wrong.
“I’ll exit this situation shit free. Promise,” I assured him blithely.
“You do not have the skills to do that,” he contradicted me.
My back went up, but my attention sharpened.
“Do you know the job I’m on?”
“Yeah,” he didn’t surprise me by answering. He’d already mentioned “the bitch” I was after. “Brody spilled,” he went on. “You pulled him in, gave him the name. He talked to me. When he did, I decided it was time to stop delaying our talk.”
That Red Bull, vodka and gaming session was exchanged for information and confidentiality.
If Brody got me good shit, he’d get his Red Bull and vodka. But for this crap, I was so totally not spending the afternoon with a joystick in my hand when I could spend it with Ren and a better kind of joystick in my hand. Or in other parts of me.
Brody. God, such a big mouth.
“Ally,” Darius called again, and my attention returned to him. “Focus, woman. What I’m saying is important.”
“What you’re saying would be important if you had info on the woman I’m checking out.”
Darius stared at me.
This lasted a while.
I let him. I could be patient.
Or I could be patient for a while.
Luckily, I was able to be patient for the while it took Darius to break his silence and mutter, “Stubborn.”
Told you Darius had known me a long time.
“So, do you have info on this chick?” I pushed.
“No. Don’t know who the fuck she is. What I know is that two kinds of women walk in those doors.” He jerked his head to the door to the bar. “First kind is looking to score, and by that I don’t mean get laid. I mean tweaker bitches too stupid and too desperate for their fix to stay away. The second kind is looking to get laid, but if that happens, they also get paid.”
I knew both. I hadn’t seen one woman there, outside me, who was not one or the other.
Therefore, this gave me nothing.
“You don’t care,” Darius declared, and I focused on him again.
“Care about what? I mean, you aren’t telling me something I don’t know.”
“Care about your brothers, your dad, your friends worried about you.”
I felt something unpleasant slither through me. Something that forced me to ask, “Has Lee shared with Indy?”
“No,” he said firmly.
I liked the firm, but I needed more.
“Eddie with Jet?”
“No, Ally. No fuckin’ way. They tell their women what you’re doin’, those crazy bitches will be all over gettin’ in on the act. You think those men want their women involved in this brand of shit? That is, when this brand of shit doesn’t hit them when they’re actually not doing anything to buy it, rather than doing what you’re doing, which means doing something that might buy it.”
No. I didn’t think that.
So good.
That secret was safe.
And it was a secret for precisely that reason.
I could sense danger, and stay away from it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t court it. And the Rock Chicks had had enough of that. With their track record, there would probably be more. I didn’t need to be the one to bring that down on them.
Not to mention, if I did, Lee, Hank, Eddie, Vance, Luke and Mace would lose their badass minds, and I really didn’t need that shit. Badasses were a pain in the ass to deal with. The Rock Chicks didn’t agree, but then again, they were getting orgasms regularly given to them by said badasses, and it was my experience that colored a woman’s thinking.
