Page 19 of Take a Hike
“You left this.” He held out his closed fist, and Charlie automatically reached out to take whatever it was he was offering.
She stared down at the charred remains in her palm for a solid ten seconds before asking, “Uh…what is it?”
“Your screwdriver.”
“My screwdriver.” She poked at a metal bit with her free hand. “I guess I can see how it could’ve once been a screwdriver, but mine?”
“You dropped it in the fire.”
“Wait—is this the screwdriver I used to try to take off the back door of the coffee shop?”
His scowl deepened as he glared at the remains on her palm. “It was much too small for that.”
“Yeah, it broke.” She looked meaningfully at the pieces he’d just given to her. “Plus it’s Lou’s broken screwdriver. Why are you really here?”
A door across from them opened, and a man with a sour expression stuck his head out into the hall. “Can you keep it down?”
“Probably not.” Charlie had never been very good at maintaining a proper inside voice. When the man continued to glare at her—but not in a hot-Kieran-type way—she rolled her eyes and pulled her key card out of her sock. “C’mon.” The light by the door flashed green, so she grabbed Kieran’s sleeve and tugged him behind her into her room. Not even waiting for the door to fully shut behind them, she slapped the light switch on and turned to face him. “Now, why are you really here?”
He scowled at her so hard, looking completely offended by her presence, that she almost felt like she should leave the room—but then she remembered that it washerroom and that he’d come to her for some reason. It was just that his resting-crank face was so severe that it was constantly in a state of get-off-his-lawn-edness.
She made a get-on-with-it gesture. “You’re very hot and entertaining to stare at, but it’s been aday, so say what you came to say and then let me collapse on thatextremelycomfortable-looking bed.”
That entertaining, baffled look entered his eyes, softening the edge of his glare, and the tips of his ears turned red again, possibly in response to her comment about his hotness. Just when she thought she was going to have to kick out his silent butt, he spoke. “Your sister found Cobra.”
It took a long moment to process that statement. Even though it was only four simple words, she had to pick it apart to figure out the meaning of each one. Finally, the light bulb in her brain flickered to life. “Oh! Fifi’s dead body!” She grimaced. “Now I’m sounding like Daisy—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Daisy’s adorable. Okay, now I’m sounding like Lou. Let me start over.” Clearing her throat, she organized her thoughts into a straight line. “Fifi did indeed find the remains of Cobra Jones, the previous leader of the militia formerly known as the Freedom Survivors.”
Kieran blinked only once, which was fairly impressive. Charlie often reduced people to silent stupefaction, blinking so rapidly that it looked like they were trying to send a messageusing Morse code. “Formerly known?”
“Really? That’s the part you got stuck on?” Charlie shrugged. “Apparently there’s a petition out to change the local militia’s name. Not sure where in the name-change process the murder club is, so that might be premature, but I have a feeling it’s inevitable.”
“What’s inevitable?”
She gave him a consoling pat on the arm. Even if he wasn’t involved in the militia—and she really hoped he wasn’t—his dad had been, so there might be some nostalgia connected to the old name. “The murder clubreallyhates Freedom Survivors—the name, not the actual militia.” Her head cocked slightly. “Possibly the militia too, which is understandable, since they do seem to be rather murder-y. Sorry.”
His glare took on an intensity that she hadn’t seen from him yet. “Do youevermake sense?”
She opened her mouth to tell him that she was making perfect sense, and that his listening skills must be the problem, when a heavy-handed knock on the door made her jump.
“Either that’s some sort of law enforcement officer or I have more than one brother-in-law with a cop knock.” Charlie took a step toward the door, but Kieran blocked her with his body as he peered through the peephole. For just a raw second, she wondered if she was stupid to have let this possible militia member into her hotel room, and whether she was about to be held hostage by said militia member, but then Kieran opened the door.
Peeking around his rather massive body, she saw the pair inthe doorway.
“Ah,” she said. “Just a family of cop knockers then. Everyone come in and shut the door before the crabby guy yells at us again.” Glancing at Kieran, she gave him a reassuring flap of her hand. “Not you—the guy across the hall.”
By the way his eyebrows squashed into an even more angry line, he wasn’t soothed by that.
Fifi maneuvered past the guys and sat in one of the two chairs by the window. Charlie grabbed the other before one of the guys could take it, although they seemed content to lean against opposite walls, flexing and watching each other suspiciously.
“So why are you here?” Charlie asked her sister with more curiosity than annoyance. “I told you it was just Kieran.”
“We weren’t sure ‘just Kieran’ wasjustKieran, if you know what I mean,” Fifi said, making faces filled with hidden messages. The problem was that Charlie wasn’t having any luck translating.
“Not really,” Charlie admitted. “Because of his possible ties to the militia formerly known as the Freedom Survivors?”
“Exactly,” Fifi said, even as Kieran sighed impatiently.
“I’m not in the militia.”
