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I looked over my shoulder suspiciously. He didn’t look like somebody who was implying I needed help. Which I was going to. I couldn’t move this dead weight on my own.

Fuck!

“Have at it. Again, remember to keep it on the linoleum.” Simon handed me a set of keys then turned to go back to the office door.

Roan leaned into the van and pulled the unconscious man out, then picked him up and hefted him over one shoulder.

Fuck!

Shut the fuck up, Davies, or Beaumont or whoever the hell you are. You can walk. You can jog. You can run. You can fuck. You have a woman who you love, so just shut the fuck up about those few things you can’t do!

“Where do we go?” I asked Simon.

“Around to the back.” He laughed. “Probably should have had you drive there. Oh well.” He hefted the man up a little more.

By the time we got to the back entrance, Roan wasn’t even breathing heavy. Those were the days.

“My fiancée, Lisa, really likes Marlowe. She’s really impressed.”

“Were you born and raised here?” I asked.

“Yep. Went to school with Beau. I was a few grades ahead of him. I ran into him a couple of times when we were in the same country, fighting the good fight. Your brother is a good man.”

I liked hearing that.

“What brought you back to Jasper Creek?”

“I put my time in and was at that point where I either needed to become a lifer, or go take over the family business, ya know?”

I nodded, like I did know. But I didn’t.

“Anyway, I come back here and I find out that my Dad’s moved to Florida and my brother might still be in Tennessee, but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with our old service shop. The cherry on top is that Dad has put this know-it-all female in charge of the business. He’s given her carte-blanche on how to run it.”

“Why would he do that if you were going to leave the service and run it?”

“Oh yeah, when I decided to leave the service and come home, I decided to make it a surprise.”

“Ah. Fuck.”

“It gets worse. Guess who’s renting the old family homestead?”

“The know-it-all female?” I ventured.

“You’ve got it in one.”

“What did you do?”

“I ended up proposing.” He laughed. “There might have been some other shit that went on between me showing up and me proposing, but the important part is I proposed and she said yes.”

I chuckled.

Roan pointed with his head. “There it is. That door.”

I moved forward and with the second key I tried, I was able to open the lock. We were in a big storage facility with a cement floor. “Where’s the linoleum?”

“We either use the bathroom or the kitchenette. I prefer the kitchenette. More space to move around.”

I nodded. Cement was bad because blood had a nasty habit of soaking in, and you weren’t able to totally clean it up. Linoleum was easy to clean up.