Hawk insisted that air conditioning was for pussies and that cars were meant to be driven with the windows down in all kinds of weather, which meant freezing our asses off in the winter and baking like a cake in the summer, all to the soundtrack of Hawk’s heavy metal playlist.
“He wouldn’t have asked for a meeting if he hadn’t,” Hawk yelled back.
He slowed down as we approached a small squat building with peeling white paint about five miles outside of Blackwell Falls. A dusty red pickup truck, a motorcycle, and an older brown sedan were lined up on the gravel parking lot out front, a faded yellow and blue sign that readLast Stopemerging from the ground.
The Last Stop diner looked like what it was: a forgotten hole in the wall known only by locals, one that was passed by the tourists filing in and out of Blackwell Falls in favor of the familiar chain restaurants off the highway.
Hawk pulled next to the red pickup and turned off the car. The sudden silence was blissful and I rubbed at my ears, half expecting them to be bleeding.
“Let me do the talking,” Hawk said as we got out of the car.
It didn’t need to be said but I understood why he said it. Talking to his former coworkers from the FBI wasn’t a no-risk proposition. It was easy to think they were still on the same side, but the work we did — and the work they did — made them enemies.
We walked the short distance to the diner’s single glass door and stepped into a large room with scuffed white linoleum floors and a long counter on the other side of the kitchen, which was visible through a wide passthrough. A middle-aged woman with platinum hair and bright-red lipstick poured coffee for the two locals at the counter while a rotund guy in a grease-spattered apron worked the grill on the other side of the wall.
“Morning!” the woman called out.
She reached into the pocket of her apron and set a ticket on the table in front of the guy whose coffee she’d just poured.
“Morning,” I said.
Hawk homed in on a guy sitting at a table in the back of the room, as far away from the counter as you could get, his baseball cap shielding everything but a mustache that looked like it belonged in the 1970s.
“Coffee?” the waitress asked as we passed the counter.
“No thanks,” I said.
After almost three months of living with Cassie, I’d gotten spoiled. Her shop really did make the best coffee.
I nodded at the guy with the baseball cap and slid into the chair by the wall. Hawk took the seat directly across from his FBI crony.
“Morning,” Hawk said.
“If you say so.” The guy took a drink of his coffee, then wolfed down bites from the plates on front of him, a smorgasbord of half-eaten food that ran the gamut from French toast to meatloaf to a club sandwich.
Now that we were closer, I caught the shadow of a strong nose and dark eyes under the baseball cap
“Thanks for meeting me.” Hawk glanced at me. “This is my friend, uh…”
“John Smith,” I said.
I wasn’t giving this fucking fed my name.
“Dave Jones,” the guy said, washing down his food with another swig of coffee.
Touché.
The waitress appeared with the coffee pot.
“Get you two anything?” she asked, pouring coffee into “Dave Jones’” coffee cup.
“We’re good,” Hawk said.
“Give a shout if you change your mind.”
Hawk waited until she was out of earshot to speak again. “I take it you got something on that transaction record?”
Jones sat back in his chair, picked up a toothpick from the table, and started picking at his teeth. “You could say that.”
