Page 128 of Highball Rush
“What happened to her?”
“This is good, too,” he said, practically laughing. “So someone outs her, right? Gets their hands on a DNA sample—don’t ask me how, because I don’t know—and makes her come clean. So she loses her fancy apartment and the allowance they were giving her. Guess she wasn’t happy because she came back and tried to blackmail them. Said she’d go to the media and tell the truth about their agreement. I’m sure you can guess how that ended.”
“Tell me.”
He made a slicing motion across his throat.
“Damn,” I said. “You have to do it?”
“I hired a guy,” he said. “It cost me a little extra, but I don’t like killing girls if I don’t have to.”
I stopped myself from saying that hiring someone to kill a girl wasn’t any different than doing it yourself. But we were so close. I just had to hold it together a little longer.
“I don’t know, man. This all sounds like a bunch of made up bullshit to me.”
“All true,” he said, putting a hand on his chest and hiccupping again. “Swear it on my mother’s grave. So anyway, my boss keeps getting more and more paranoid, right? I really think he might be going off the deep end. Then he finds out some former social worker’s been trying to dig up stuff on his daughter. Guess who got saddled with that problem?”
“You?” Holy shit, he was going to tell me about Shelby’s kidnapping.
“Damn straight it was me. But, hey, the boss man pays me good money to take care of shit like this for him.”
“What’d you do?”
“It was almost too easy. I found out who she was and did some research. She had some guy stalking her a while back. He was perfect. Legitimately crazy. So I tracked him down and gave him some rather specific information about her whereabouts. It was like throwing a dog a stick. He couldn’t help himself.”
“Did it work?”
He hiccupped again. “Well enough. She backed off. But then it got worse again. Some local guy got hauled in for questioning about the daughter. So the boss man sends me out here to find out why. The guy’s nobody, just some redneck carpenter who had an old picture of her. It was a total dead end, just like the rest of her case. I keep trying to tell him he’s in the clear. We have science on our side, for fuck’s sake. The dumbass lab tech was easy as shit to buy off. And after thirteen years, or however long it’s been, his daughter isn’t going to turn up.”
“Sure doesn’t seem like it,” I said. “But what does all this have to do with you being stuck out here, bored off your ass?”
He rolled his eyes and reached for the full beer Nicolette had quietly set in front of him. “He’s convinced something is going down in this little backwoods town. Sent me out here to fill him in on all the gossip in case her name starts being mentioned again—you know, more than usual. Like maybe somebody knows something. I shouldn’t complain too much, though. The drinks are good, and the women aren’t bad, either.”
“A man’s gotta do something to pass the time.”
“Damn straight.” He took a swig of beer, sloshing some in his lap. He didn’t seem to notice. “I hooked up with a sweet piece of ass last night. Dumb as a box of rocks, but who cares, right?”
I risked a quick glance over my shoulder. Jameson was watching, wide-eyed. We were thinking the same thing.
“No shit? Who was she?”
He barely got the mug back on the bar. “Does it matter? She had two names. Missy something? No, that wasn’t it. Misty? That’s it. Misty Lynn. Crooked fake tits. Hard as concrete. She wasn’t a bad lay, but afterward she wouldn’t shut the hell up. Kept whining about her ex-boyfriend.”
My back and shoulders knotted with tension. “Huh.”
He shook with a sloppy, drunken laugh. “Get this. She said her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend is my boss’s fucking missing daughter, Callie Kendall. Swear to god, this town is obsessed with that girl. As if she’d be back here, dating some redneck, and the whole world wouldn’t know. Like I said, my little side job last night wasn’t blessed with much upstairs.”
“You pass that on to your boss?” I asked, trying hard to keep the alarm out of my voice. “I mean, obviously it ain’t true. Probably best to keep the rumors out of it.”
“Nah, I told him. If he got wind that I’d heard something and hadn’t let him know? He’s so on edge lately, he’d probably put a hit out on me.”
It ate up every scrap of willpower I had not to wrap my hands around this fucker’s neck and choke him out. I couldn’t even think about Misty Lynn. Damn her. A red haze tinged my vision and fire seared through my veins.
Jameson casually sat on the stool on my other side and whispered, “Easy.”
Nicolette slid another shot glass across the bar. “Looks like you could use another.”
“You know, I’m liking this town more and more,” he said, grinning at her. He tossed the shot back and winced.
