Page 40 of Moonshine Kiss
“Excuse me?” His eyes iced over.
“‘Round here we prefer the term hillbilly.”
His thin lips twisted in what might have been a smile. “Hillbillies then.”
“We’ll do our best to be respectful,” I told him.Yeah, right. Bootleg Springs had a hive mind, and if their police department wasn’t stepping up to protect them, they’d take matters into their own hands. It was gonna be a real mess.
I turned to leave and then paused in the doorway. Something had been bothering me since that press release. “You sure are organized, sir.”
He looked up from his laptop again.
“We no sooner got the call that someone had leaked the DNA results and you had a whole press conference organized.”
“If you want to accuse me of something, deputy, man up and say it.”
It was my turn to give him that long, cool stare. “No, sir.”
There was a simmering pissed-offness cooking away under his cool surface. “Maybe you’re not used to how investigations work,” he suggested grimly. “But right now the more attention on this case, the more information we’ll dig up. People can’t hide in the spotlight. Someone somewhere is gonna remember something that your daddy missed the first time around.”
I kept my face cool and neutral.
I’d known it in my gut. Connelly had been the leak. And then he’d gone and lectured us on keepin’ our gums from flappin’.
I turned to leave.
“One more thing, deputy. You might want to decide where your loyalty lies. With this department or somewhere else.” He turned his laptop around so I could see the screen.
It was an article with a picture of me glaring down the loafer-wearing moron in Bowie’s driveway.
Live-in cop girlfriend defends suspect’s son, threatens press.
Well, hell. It looked like things were about to get real messy.
20
Cassidy
It had been a long, shitty week. Not only were the assorted “journalists”—and I used that term very loosely—wreaking havoc on my town, but Detective Connelly had decided the only way I could prove my loyalty to the department was by becoming the perfect lackey. He had me scanning, faxing, and general paper pushing all the days of my life.
My dang papercuts had papercuts.
Meanwhile, he and my father had been sitting down with every witness interviewed in the original investigation looking for any information that may have been overlooked. Connelly didn’t come right out and say it, but his attitude made it clear that he thought Bootleg was a bunch of ignorant rednecks policed by a smaller group of even more ignorant rednecks.
I couldn’t say that I much cared for his barely veiled contempt. Neither did Mrs. Varney, who said the man was slicker than owl shit. Or Fanny Sue, who’d been berated by the man over a misunderstood message. Fanny Sue was so mad, when she spotted a drunk Otto Holt mid-piss on Connelly’s front tire, she just turned around and went whistling on her way.
It was an hour from the end of my shift tonight. An hour before I could go home and smush my fur friends. And I was relishing the fact that the Man Who Shall Not Be Named had left on some vague, urgent, “nobody questions a homicide detective” business. He probably had to poop or kick a nest of baby squirrels.
I used the opportunity to grab one of the ancient cruisers in the parking lot.
It was a Thursday night on the cusp of winter and Thanksgiving. Dark. Cold. Quiet.
Very quiet.
The only people on the streets were press. You could tell them from everyone else by their shoes—usually loafers—and the tech gadgets permanently affixed to their hands. Where were my neighbors? I cruised up the hill to The Lookout. The parking lot should have been full but there were only a handful of vehicles parked up against the building.
I looped around and drove back into the heart of town.
Storefronts were dark, which wasn’t unusual for 9 p.m. on a Thursday. But whatwasunusual was the fact that the apartments above Bootleg’s retail spaces and the houses were dark, too. Where in the hell would my entire town have gone?
