AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He smiled.
Once I’d climbed into the passenger seat, he moved to close my door.
Before he could, I raised my hand. “Can I ask you something?” I glanced at the curb, then back at him. “It’s a bit inappropriate. Disrespectful, even.”
He looked curious. “Shoot.”
I watched his expression carefully for any changes, as Gram had taught me. “Are you really a sheriff?”
“Born and bred.” Smooth, so smooth, like he’d been asked and answered a thousand times before.
He moved the door an inch, almost as if he was debating closing it in my face. The motion pulled back the sleeve of his shirt enough to afford me another glimpse of coiled ink. He noticed my gaze and removed his hand. “That’s a mighty strange question, coming after the arrival of my team and from a woman keen to verify credentials. Be like me running your license after we talked last night and then asking, are you really Marcy Davins?”
I moved closer with the wary, standoffish smile of a fox sniffed out by a hound. “Who else would I be?”
“Well then.” His smile brightened. “Shall we?”
chapter 4
THE DOORBELL
The sheriff thumbed to the backseat.“So I don’t know where there’s coffee ‘round these parts, but I’ve got a couple cans of something claiming to be cold brew behind your seat.”
“Left at the end of the road; there's a Dunkin' Donuts five minutes down.”
A black Mercedes pulled into the cul-de-sac and parked beside the cruisers. Putting the truck in reverse, the sheriff sighed. “I’ll be honest with you, Miss Davins, you’ve kicked worse than a hornet’s nest.”
I did my best to keep my tone subdued, but at his comments felt the pressure of gnarled claws, a crushing inevitability, weighing on my throat. “I’ll be honest, too, Sheriff Harlowe. After the night I've had, hot coffee—hold the bourbon—is the pickup I need.”
“It’d be a waste, Miss Davins.”
“Why’s that?”
“Once you hear my half of our conversation, you won’t take so much as a sip.”
“Says you.” I glanced behind the seat. “Quite rude, you know, asking a girl out only to offer her slop from your truck floor.”
“An abysmal date,” he agreed, starting the engine. “Good thing this is strictly business.”
“Positive relationships are critical to success in business, too.”
“Right you are, Miss Davins.” He smiled and lifted a hand in the direction of the Mercedes, where a portly man in a black suit and aviators had exited the vehicle and appeared to be hurrying toward us. When the man realized the sheriff wasn’t stopping, he spat and kicked the head off a tulip growing beside my mailbox.
“Yikes,” I said.
“I’ll replace your plant.” The sheriff fiddled with his mirror. “Look, if you’re starved, we can stop.”
“We don't need to stop at all. Dunkin' has this option called a drive-thru, where you pull up to this little box and a voice asks what you want.”
“Very funny, Miss Davins.”
We took the long way ‘round the cul-de-sac, past the Vilkas household, the lone home in this picket-fenced neighborhood to fly a coiled serpent, 'Don't Tread on Me' flag over the garage. Motorcycles and cars crammed the driveway. A silver van parked beside the mailbox.
The driver jumped out in the flirty swirl of a yellow sun dress. Stephen’s sister, I remembered, unable to recall her name. She was beautiful, shapely but not too heavy, with dark hair and rich mahogany skin laced with lighter patches—a result of vitiligo, I think it was called. The lighter spots dappled her neck and trailed into her face up into the corner of her right eye.
Stephen’s sister was more social recluse than butterfly. While I knew the siblings shared the property, I hadn’t so much as waved to her since January, when she’d been stringing blue balloons on the light posts for a relative’s baby shower as Lisa and I happened to be walking past.
She unbuckled a toddler from the backseat, but as we drove past, held a hand to his squirming chest and turned. Through the sheriff's tinted windows she can’t have seen much, but her eyes tracked our progress.
