I wanted to know more about their relationship. I also wanted to confirm that I wasn’t being fooled by her like every other man that crossed her path.
“Talk to the warden there,” I said to Darby, finallytearing my eyes away from the monster in my hands. I slid the picture into the folder and shut it. “See what other information you can get from him about our boy here. Figure out when Rees is up for parole next.”
“Yes, sir.”
25
JAGG
It had been another nonstop day and when the clock on my office wall clicked to eight-thirty, I decided to take a break.
I rolled to a stop next to a browning pine tree and cut the engine, a blanket of humidity replacing the breeze from the drive. The air was still, stifling. Heavy. The flickering neon light of Frank’s Bar flashed off the trees. Laughter followed by a fiddle from a country song floated through the air. A million stars twinkled around an almost-full moon.
Damn full moons.
It felt like everything was aligning for something big.
I could feel it in my bones.
My aching, creaking, popping bones.
Halfway across the parking lot, I decided on a whiskey instead of that beer.
I pushed through the front door. There was a different scent lingering in the air that night—Aqua-Net and cheap perfume.
It was Karaoke night at Frank’s Bar. Less known as BerrySprings’s Single’s Night. The place was packed. Funny how quickly people forgot about a slain cop.
I ignored a few cat calls as I made my way through the Stetsons and Old Spice, beelining it to the only open seat at the end of the bar—my seat.
“Howdy do, Detective?” Frank called out from behind the taps, a sweat of sheen across his brow, a fresh tattoo down his forearm. “The usual?”
“A double.”
“You got it. Be just a minute. Damn full moon.”
Good to know I wasn’t the only one who believed in ill decisions at the turn of the tides.
As if on cue, the juke box switched to an old Bobby Bare song calledMarie Laveau.Took me a second to realize the song was about an ugly witch from the Louisiana bayous. Took me even less than that to register the giggles and chiding at the other end of the bar. Something piqued in me, a sixth sense if you will. I leaned back on my stool, zeroing in on the notorious Aldridge twins. Two wild, twenty-something southern spitfires who thought they ran the town and every man in it. Their blonde, over-teased hair sat like helmets over pointy shoulders, barely-there tank tops, and wranglers that gave new meaning to the word camel toe.
As quickly as I noticed them, my gaze shifted to the strands of dark curly hair peeking out from the center of a group of big-bellied cowboys next to the twins.
Sunny.
The volume on the jukebox was turned up…
Down in Louisiana, where the black trees grow, lives a voodoolady named Marie Laveau with a black cat’s tooth and Mojo bone…
… followed by the bullies’ pitched voices like nails on a chalkboard…
“Never knew skin could be that pale or rip that easy. Bitch is a walking commercial for vaccines.”
“Didn’t know herpes could spread to your arms.”
“Gross. Probably fell off her broom on her way to hospice. Bitch has got stage-five something fo sho.”
“Careful, she’ll turn us into a frog.”
“No, this one’ll shoot you through the eye…”
