I growled at my phone and started to put it down but then thought better of it and added a thumbs-up emoji to the text, even though I had no intention of reading the article. That deed accomplished, I put my phone in the passenger seat beside me and trained my eyes on a town house a block away.
My mother had a lot of nerve trying to establish a normal mother-daughter relationship at this late date, especially on a night when I was on a stakeout of sorts. My partner in both love and business, Ken, had bet me twenty bucks I couldn’t serve papers on a particularly squirrelly man. I’d taken the bet.
One, my quarry had gone more than a week without frequenting his favorite watering hole. Two, he wasn’t expecting a woman to serve him papers. Three, he especially wasn’t expecting a ringer for Kate Beckinsale—plus twenty-five pounds and only if you squinted—to serve him those papers in an Irish pub at ten o’clock on a Monday night.
At least that’s what I hoped.
Just as I was about to give in to boredom and read the article from my mother—or rather, have the phone read it to me so I wouldn’t have to take my eyeballs off the town house—John Dalton emerged from the front door. He looked both ways and tiptoed to his car.
I let him get a good head start because I knew where he was going.
Nothing better than allowing one’s target a false sense of security to help one get a job done. Dalton’s wife had tipped her hand about sending him divorce papers, and he had been keeping a rather low profile ever since. Ken had given up, but he detested serving papers and would’ve found just about any excuse to push that job off on me. While Icouldserve these papers late, I didn’t want to. I’d given myself the same deadline the state of Georgia gave to process servers: five days.
In twelve hours, my time would be up.
Would that invalidate the service? No. Would it drag the lawsuit out even more? Probably.
Most importantly for me, I would lose the twenty-dollar bet, and I hated to lose.
He drove past the Marietta Square, then made an abrupt turn.
I kept going but then doubled back to a mostly empty parking lot often used for people who had to go to court. Sure enough, as I walked up the cracked sidewalk toward the old Carnegie Library, I spotted Dalton’s car in the next lot over.
Casually, I took a right and walked toward Finnegan’s Pub.
It didn’t take me long to find him sitting at the bar chatting up the bartender, an older lady with smooth olive skin and short spiky silver hair. He leaned forward to ask her something, and she arched an eyebrow. She had no time for his bullshit.
I liked her.
When the guy to my quarry’s left slid from his stool, I ambled over and took his place. John Dalton looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my cleavage before bouncing back up to my eyes.
“Hi,” I said with just enough smile to encourage him.
“Hi,” he said with a grin.
Oh, Stella. No matter what Ken says, you’ve still got it.
The bartender placed a pint glass in front of him, then asked me, “What’ll you have?”
“Something red, please,” I said, my eyes not leaving Dalton’s.
She walked away muttering, and I reached inside my leather jacket to act as though I were looking for something. I pulled a stack of papers from the inner pocket and asked, “Could you hold this?”
“Sure.” He took what I offered.
“Thanks. Oh, and by the way? You’ve been served.”
His eyes widened, then narrowed before he washed all emotion from his face and said, “Uh, no comprendo inglés.”
“Ha sido notificado.”
At least I hoped that was right. Since I wasn’t required to say anything when I handed over the papers, it was literally close enough for government work.
He sighed. “Fine. You can’t blame a man for trying.”
He put a ten on the bar and then took his papers and his beer and headed to the other side of the bar, muttering all the while.
“I was afraid you were actually interested in that guy,” the bartender said as she placed a glass of wine in front of me.
