He was seconds away from starting the engine and putting the car in reverse when a huge guy stepped from the house and yelled something that made the dogs run toward him.
Pete stepped from the car, his knees a little wobbly. The man approached, and Pete realized the man really was huge. Not just tall, but muscular. He probably weighed about a hundred pounds more than Pete.
There was no way he could strong-arm this man into divulging anything. Whatever stories he got here were the stories he was going to get.
While he was greeting the man, another car pulled up. The two other people who’d agreed to meet with him had arrived. They’d done this on purpose, arranged a meeting with this beef slab of a man so Pete couldn’t force them to tell him anything.
The meeting went about as well as he'd expected after he'd been ambushed at the diner. He learned nothing concrete. The three of them just spewed anger and resentment about Ansley, not telling him any real information that he could put into print. If he wrote up their complaints about Ansley, he would be laughed out of town. He thought they had details about how their friend had died, but all they'd given him was pathetic teenage gossip.
The whole trip had been a waste. He needed evidence, and all he was getting was bullshit about how Ansley had worn pink the day these girls had picked to wear pink, and how she’d not given the guy her lunch one day when he said he was hungry.
This was absolute bullshit. He needed more. He needed the real truth about what had happened the night Ansley's boyfriend had fallen from the water tower, because this washed-up old high school drama wouldn't convince anyone that Ansley had killed her high school sweetheart.
Chapter 12
Link wokeearly and checked the weather, seeing that the storms headed their way weren’t set to arrive for another few hours. After grabbing coffee and a breakfast sandwich from the freezer, he called Bean and asked if he wanted to go for a run.
Bean grunted. “You’re up early.”
“Couldn’t sleep. Do you want to run?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll send a text. East Bragg?”
“Sounds good.”
Link saw the text go through, and the meeting time was thirty minutes from now. He had time to drink another cup of coffee.
Stanley was the last to arrive, but the first to be done with his stretching.
“Let’s go,” Stanley said as he bounced on his feet.
Link chuckled. “Just because you’re young and limber doesn’t mean you don’t need to stretch more.”
Stanley waved him off. “I’m fine.”
Mick snorted. “You say that now, when you’re my age, you’ll regret it.”
Stanley moved to Mick and grabbed his shoulders, giving them a squeeze. "I'm fine, old man."
“Oh God,” Link rolled his eyes. “Don’t start with that old man bullshit.”
Mick groaned as Stanley squeezed his shoulders again. “I am feeling a little old. Maybe I need a massage and a hot tub.”
Link laughed. Mick was the oldest and Stanley the youngest of them. They all had their strengths, allowing them to operate on a high level when they worked together. Other guys worked with them, but for the most part, the seven of them liked to do missions together. Ray had retired recently, and that had left a hole in their team, but they weren’t itching to fill it right away.
They took off running, meeting a group of men and women who all looked very young. They waved and said hello as they moved past.
Link thought back to when he’d been a recruit and how he’d been so wrong about everything. Maybe not everything, but most stuff in life had been a mystery to him. Back then, he’d been a little too naïve to really understand everything going on around him.
“You look serious,” Chase said as he jogged up beside him.
“Just thinking about life.”
“You ever get back in contact with that Marine?”
He smiled and nodded at the thought of Ansley. “Yeah. I talked to her last night.”
“How is she doing?” Chase asked.
