I reached out and patted her arm. “You did good, thank you for—”
“What the fuck is going on here!?”
A man and his cronies stormed through the front doors, startling the young woman so much that she jumped. Ice went everywhere, and she scurried from the barstool and rushed toward a back exit.
“Wait, wait, wait. Not that doo—”
And the second she slammed through it, the alarm blared once more.
“God damn it!” I roared.
I whipped around to face the men.
“I take it you’re here to retrieve bodies,” I said.
One of the men in all-black suits rushed up to me, glaring me down as if he was supposed to mean something to me. “So, it’s true? He’s dead?”
I nodded. “And one of the women he was with. So, you guys can either start talking or we can start investigating. Your choice.”
Just before either of us swung, though, Angel interrupted things. “You guys really need to see this. Come on.”
We all looked around at one another before we followed Angel up the steps. We passed the bodies and we passed the VIP room where the crime had occurred and we found ourselves standing behind the private bar on the second floor. And right there behind the bar, collapsed with her eyes wide open, was Mora.
The bartender that had been scheduled that evening for the private affair.
“Shit,” I hissed, “get me a blanket.”
The men in all-black suits turned away. “We need to see his body.”
I pointed. “He’s the one next to the stairs.”
And as the men walked away from us, I dipped down and whispered a soft prayer for the lovely woman we had just hired mere weeks before.
Then, I stood to my feet and drew in a deep breath. “Angel?”
“Yep?”
I slowly turned to face him. “Call Fangs. We need church, and we need it now.”
TWO
ARIA
I looked down at the time in the corner of my laptop and groaned. Graveyard shift sucked absolute balls, especially when there was nothing to report on. It was only midnight, and I had six more hours to go before I could head back to my newly-rented apartment and start unpacking boxes.
Because I’d only just moved in two days ago.
I mean, I grew up in Twin Bays, but I left for college. I packed up my shit, drove to the beautiful city of Los Angeles, and never looked back.
Until my mother died, of course.
I sat there, staring at all of the tabs opened up on my computer as I went through and refreshed every single one of them. I was a production assistant on the assignment desk at a small television station. When I wasn’t getting coffee for my news director or the on- air talent, I was fielding phone calls and emails for practically everyone at the station. It was grunt work and I hated it, but I guess I had to pay my dues in order to eventually get the dream job that I wanted which was to be an investigative journalist.
The worst part about this job was the hours. Because the station was understaffed, I ended up working the graveyard shift more often than not. Add that to the fact that I was the only female at the news station, and now it wasn’t hard to see why I’d rather be literally anywhere than at that desk at that time of night with my Assignment Editor breathing down my back.
“Got anything good?” he asked as he perched over my shoulder.
I hated how close his lips always got to my ear. “Nope.”
