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I hated that he knew I didn’t, but I shook my head to let him know.
Colt looked toward the door. “Maybe he could hang with Hope? A ride-along in dispatch or something?”
Wilson nodded. “Yeah, let’s set him up with that.”
With a quick nod from me, Austin stood and followed Adam out the door.
We waited in silence for Wilson to return a moment later, and when he did, Colt and Wilson took their seats at the table. Not me, though. Injury aside, standing gave me a sense of control over the situation. I leaned against the wall, arms crossed, staying in the game.
“I can’t say I love bein’ kept in the dark about the details,” Wilson said, his tone notably less gruff with Colt here than it had been when I’d refused to give him details at the hospital.
“Well, as I told you last night,” I said, “our client tried to go through official channels. He was shut down. What choice did he have?”
“If I knew what the case was, I could shed some light on that,” Wilson replied.
“We don’t need you to. At this point, it’s our gig.”
“This might be nothin’ but a money grab to you, but when someone gets shot in my town—on the property of someone I care about—I’m gonna get to the bottom of it one way or the other. You might as well bring me in on it.”
“You sound like Dakota,” I muttered, rubbing a hand over my jaw.
“Yeah, well, she’s loyal to a fault, and her heart’s in the right place even if she has no business gettin’ mixed up in whatever this is. I’m just tryin’ to do my job—keepin’ this town safe.”
I looked to Colt, feeling him out. He’d said Wilson was good people… but we rarely let law enforcement get involved in our cases beyond giving them a heads up that we were working on in case they got any calls about us snooping around or staking out houses.
Colt gave me a subtle nod, and I sighed. Now, I wished I could sit at the table with them, but if the leather couch hurt, those plastic chairs would be torture.
6?/?
dakota
The smell of melted cheese and garlic hit me like a warm hug the second I stepped into Crispy Crust for girls’ night. It was exactly what I needed after the bizarre day I’d had. Laney, Aubree, and Rory were already there, seated at our usual booth in the corner.
Laney gave me a little wave as I walked up, sliding over to make room as I took a seat. Aubree was busy digging into the basket of breadsticks on the table, and Rory was leaning back, sipping her soda with a knowing smile that made me instantly suspicious.
“I’m so glad we decided to do pizza. I need it.”
“Rough day?” Laney asked, handing me an off-white melamine plate from the stack under the pizza stand.
“Just… odd. I wish Hope wasn’t at work so she could back me up.”
“What happened in town square today?” she asked. “Did y’all really get shot at?”
“Ha! This town, I swear. No. A truck backfired. I wouldn’t have thought anythin’ of it if I hadn’t been swooped up by Mr. Tall, Dark, and Mysterious. Y’all should’ve seen it. He straight up used his body as a shield for me and Hope.”
“Oh, we heard plenty. Mrs. McClusky told everyone at the gym when she came in for her lunch-break workout,” Rory said.
Mrs. McClusky trading lesson plans for left hooks at the boxing gym owned by Rory and Travis Wilson still threw me for a loop, even though she’d been doing it for a while now. The woman was closer to one hundred than I was to my terrible-two’s, and she took her lunch breaks at a manly, Marine-Corps-themed boxing gym? But I guessed if anyone were the type to spend their time punching things and spreading gossip, it’d be Mrs. M.
“I’m sure she had a field day with it.”
“It was a hot topic right up until Travis walked in wearing that hundred-dollar scarf.”
Rory’s mention of the scarf had me grinning. Travis had been conned by Mrs. Abernathy into buying that it at the Caffeinated Squirrel when he’d been on the hunt for Rory. He’d blown in for info on her whereabouts and left with a hideous scarf—all because Mrs. A had worked her sweet, elderly magic. I had to admit, it was a little satisfying to see the guy who gives off motorcycle-riding bad-boy energy wrapped up in that colorful scarf, pretending he didn’t hate it.
“My, how the bad boy has fallen,” I teased.
“Oh, come on. He’s not a real bad boy. He’s a book-boyfriend bad boy,” she said with a laugh.
