“Cole’s meeting us at Martha’s Diner,” Jack said. “He wants to talk about the fighter protection detail before we head to the office.”
“Martha’s sounds perfect. It’s been a long time since I’ve been hungry for breakfast.”
“It’ll be even better if you don’t throw it back up.”
I sighed. “Truer words, my friend.”
Martha’s occupied a narrow brick building on the east side of the Towne Square, wedged between an antique shop and a law office with brass nameplates that had been there since before I was born. The building itself was original to the square—1802, according to the date carved into the cornerstone—and Martha Smith had run the breakfast counter for forty-three of those years with an iron spatula and a personality that could strip paint.
The Towne Square was where the four towns in King George County met, and many of the buildings surrounding it were on the historical register. Martha’s Diner was on the Bloody Mary side of the square, and her son Stewart was one of Jack’s captains at the sheriff’s department.
This early on a Friday morning, the square was already humming with small-town activity that made King George feel like a place time had decided to treat gently. Old men gathered on their usual benches near the fountain, already deep into whatever argument they’d been having for the last decade or so. A woman was unlocking the door to the bookshop with a stack of mail tucked under her arm. Two mothers pushed strollers along the brick sidewalk that had been laid before the Revolutionary War, their conversation punctuated by the babble of toddlers who had opinions about everything and vocabulary for none of it.
Cole was already in the back booth when we walked in, his Stetson on the seat beside him, a cup of coffee in front of him.
“You’re late,” Cole said. “You two must have been giving Margot some more blackmail data.”
“Don’t get cocky,” I said. “Pretty soon she’ll be able to send her army of robots directly to your house to listen through your bedroom door.”
Jack slid into the booth beside me, across from Cole. The air smelled like bacon grease and strong coffee and biscuits baking somewhere in the back—that combination that could make a person religious if they weren’t already. Martha had a rule about biscuits—they came out of the oven every twenty minutes from 5 a.m. to noon, and if you weren’t there when a batch was ready, that was your own personal failure.
“What can I get you, sugar?” Martha appeared in front of me, a coffeepot in each hand—regular in the right, decaf in the left. She was in her mid-seventies, built like a fire hydrant, with silver hair pinned up in a style that hadn’t changed since Carter was president and reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
“Scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuit, and whatever fruit you’ve got. And coffee.”
Jack ordered the same thing he always ordered—oatmeal and whole wheat toast. Jack’s body was a temple. Or whatever.
Cole had his usual—country ham, eggs sunny side up, and hash browns crispy enough to shatter—and Martha wrote it all down with the stub of a pencil she kept behind her ear, even though she’d been serving the same men the same breakfast for years and could have done it blindfolded.
The pleasantries lasted about as long as it took Martha to top off the coffees and disappear toward the kitchen, her orthopedic shoes squeaking softly on the black-and-white checkered floor. Then Cole leaned in, dropping his voice below the ambient clatter of silverware and morning conversation that filled the diner like white noise.
“The three fighters,” he said. “I’ve got deputies on all of them. Overnight, nothing unusual. T-Bone’s at his sister’s place across town. Marco’s at his apartment—had an overnight female guest. Darnell lives with his mom and was home all night.”
“Anyone approach them?” Jack asked.
“Not that my guys have seen. Day’s still young yet.” Cole turned his coffee cup in his hands—a habit he had when his mind was working faster than his mouth. “Scared people do one of two things. They run, or they reach out to whoever they think can protect them. If any of these guys are connected to Stavros, or if they get desperate enough to go to him, our tails will see it.”
“And if one of them leads us straight to the top,” Jack said. “We let them.”
“That’s the idea.” Cole glanced around the diner—an automatic sweep, the kind every cop did in every room without thinking about it, looking for exits and threats the way most people read menu items. “But there’s a flip side. Gyms talk. Fighters talk. And Vic knows we had conversations with T-Bone, Marco, and Darnell. Even if he doesn’t know what they said, he knows we showed interest. If he passes that up the chain to Stavros?—”
“Then Stavros has to decide whether three low-level fighters are a loose end worth tying off,” Jack finished.
“And based on what he did to Dre,” I said. “We already know the answer to that.”
That settled over the booth like something with weight, and for a moment none of us spoke. A plate clattered in the kitchen. Someone laughed at the counter—a full, easy sound that belonged to a world where young men didn’t get tortured and executed and thrown away like garbage. The coffee steamed between us, and outside the window the Towne Square went about its Friday morning business, oblivious and safe and beautiful in the way that only places untouched by violence could be.
The food arrived—Martha sliding plates onto the table with the precision of a card dealer and the implicit understanding that conversation would resume when she was gone—and we ate in the focused silence that came from being hungry and having too much to think about. The eggs were perfect, scrambled soft and buttery. The biscuits were a religious experience—golden-crusted and tender, the kind that fell apart at the first touch of butter and tasted like somebody’s grandmother had blessed the flour. And for a few minutes, I let myself just be a woman eating breakfast with her husband on a warm Friday morning in a town that still felt safe enough to leave your doors unlocked.
Jack left cash on the table and we stepped out into a morning that had already turned hot. The sun was high enough to burn off the last of the dew, and the brick sidewalks radiated heat that you could feel through your shoes. The square was busier now—more cars angling into the diagonal spots along the perimeter, more foot traffic flowing between the shops, the bookshop open with a sandwich board out front advertising a summer reading event for kids.
We cut across the square toward the sheriff’s office, Jack on my left, closest to the street, Cole on my right, his Stetson pulled low against the glare, his stride that lazy amble that ate up ground without looking like it. A mockingbird was running through its repertoire from the peaked roofline of the courthouse, cycling through stolen songs like a jukebox with no off switch, and the air smelled like warm brick and the last of the climbing roses that clung to the trellis outside the bookshop, their petals going papery and pale in the heat.
It was the kind of morning that made you forget what you did for a living. The kind that made you believe the world was as simple and decent as it looked from the center of a small-town square.
“If we can put that burner in Stavros’s orbit,” Cole said. “That’s our first direct?—”
I heard it before I understood it.
