“You know which drugs I mean. He’s mentioned it in passing.”
I found that hard to believe. Alex didn’t have a setting forin passing. “He’s clean now,” I said. “Years and years.”
“Once it’s under your skin, though…” He pressed a hand on the table in front of me in a gesture I took to mean concern for my welfare. “Look, you might want to—”
The door behind me opened, and frozen air rushed up the back of my neck. Quin leaned back from me and stood up.
I turned. Alex was coming into the tavern, eyes darting anywhere but mine. He towed a few people behind him, a guy in a dark jacket and tie and a couple of men in blue, their service weapons in place. Probably the guy in the suit had one under his jacket. Guns had a gravity to them all their own, trapping my attention in a loop of scenarios, every one of them bad. Whenever a uniform came into McPhee’s with his sidearm visible, I had trouble not concentrating on it, imagining it drawn, pointed.
“Dahlia McPhee?” the guy in the suit said. Alex leaned in to correct him before I could do it.
Quin took a step back, and never finished saying what I might want to do.
Ihadwanted to do so much. At the moment, I only wanted to survive the week.
17
“Detective, uh, wants to ask you some questions,” Alex said.
“Aycock,” the cop said.
There was a pause as we all absorbed this information.
Quin spoke up. “Maybe in the office, Alex? For, uh, privacy?”
Alex looked around, surprised to find customers still scattered among the tables and booths, all of them watching us.
“We’ll keep an eye on the till,” Quin said, gesturing toward Lumpy Jim, who had returned to his stool to watch the proceedings. Maybe he’d never left his stool.
In Alex’s office, the detective took the seat behind the desk, presumptive. But then he seemed reluctant to put his elbows down on the desk. I sat across from him in the seat Sicily had cleared. From a pocket inside his jacket, the cop pulled out a small notebook and a business card. He slid the card across to me.
Detective Vince Aycock, sure enough.
“Divine, then?” His voice took on an official tone, letting me know we were definitely heading intonotebookterritory. He slapped at his breast pocket until he located a pen. He clicked it a few times in his thick fingers and then appraised me with raised eyebrows. “Divine? I’ve got that right?”
“D-E-V,” I said. “Like Ott Devine.”
“Who?”
“He, uh…” I said. It never seemed worth the effort to explain. Sometimes I wished I’d just chosen something else. But it sounded great, spoken into a microphone. “Ott Devine made Patsy Cline a member of the Grand Ole Opry.”
“Your granddad or something?”
“No,” I said. “He worked for the… Patsy Cline, the first woman to join the…? Never mind.”
Alex, hovering near the door, spoke up. “Just a name she liked. From country music.”
“So it’s a name you go by? An alias?” the cop said.
I didn’t like the turn this was taking. “It’s my legal name,” I said.
“All right,” the cop said. “Dee. Vine.”
Aycock, wasn’t it? He’d never once wanted to changehisname?
“And you discovered the victim, Miss Dee-vine?” Aycock said. “What were you doing in the alley?”
“I saw someone lying back there.”
