THREE WHISKEYS,and Boyd had hit that dangerous point of “drunk enough to come up with bad ideas and sober enough to carry them out.” Usually that meant a hookup with someone whose name he didn’t know and wasn’t going to find out.
But Boyd knew exactly where to find the only bad idea he wanted to fuck, and it wasn’t in a bar close enough to his apartment that he could stagger home later. No one in the Black Bear bar was tall enough, blond enough, or going to screw Boyd’s life up enough to play unsatisfactory stand-in for Morgan.
“Another?” the bartender asked as he cocked a pierced eyebrow at Boyd’s nearly empty glass.
Boyd tossed back the dregs, the burn of it sharp as it went down, and shook his head. “Beer,” he said, as though that would somehow sober him up. While the man stuck a glass under the tap to pull a pint, Boyd leaned his elbows on the bar. “You ever just… been involved with someone, and you just don’t know who they are? Or who that makes you?”
The bartender looked up at him for a second. “Ain’t we all?”
“What did you do?”
“Lost my job, lost my wife, ended up here.”
Close enough. “What do you wish you’d done?”
There was a pause that could have ended with the beer tipped over Boyd. Instead the bartender just gave a humorless chuckle and slid the glass over the bar.
“Got out of bed sometimes, talked to her friends, listened to her ex instead of punching him in the face.” He thought about that for a second, and his mouth twisted in a reluctant smirk. “Before I punched him, at least. He wasstillan asshole.”
Someone at the other end of the bar waved a twenty in the air. The bartender rolled his eyes and sauntered down that way, no hustle in his step. Boyd took a sip of beer and wished he could solve his problem that easily.
If he knewwhoMorgan’s old friends were, then he wouldn’t need to talk to them. He’d know who Morgan was—wasn’t—and that would… solve maybe 60 percent of his problems. Maybe. Boyd would still be suspended and halfway to in love with an ex-con who didn’t want to hang around.
Boyd caught the tail end of that thought and nearly choked on his beer. He coughed, spluttered, and wiped his mouth on the back of his arm. It felt like fizz and horror in his stomach, like falling in love involved an actual drop to a messy end.
For some reason, though, what it didn’t feel like was a surprise.
Boyd took a long, cold draft of beer and then set the pint down. He slid off the stool and felt the whiskey hit wherever it was in his brain that his equilibrium lived—not enough to make him stagger, but the floor pitched under him.
Yeah, that was where he needed to cut himself off.
He tossed a ten on the bar to cover his beer and, once the floor settled, headed for the door. It was late enough that the air had cooled, and there was a bite to it that gnawed at his liquor buzz. Give it enough time, and he’d sober up, enough, at least, to think better of what he was about to do.
Better get on with it, then.
Boyd pulled his phone out of his pocket as he cut across the narrow, angled lot and headed in the general direction of his apartment. He didn’t have the number in his contacts, but he didn’t need to. Over the years he’d dialed it enough that it was muscle memory for his thumb to tap it out.
“I need to speak to Ben Sullivan,” he said. “It’s important.”
“… Literary Agency,” the man on the other end finished his rote greeting out of habit, then regrouped. “Can I ask who’s calling? I’ll see if he’s available.”
“Boyd Maccabee.”
He didn’t need to say anything else. There was an intake of breath and then a quick request to stay on hold before the line switched to Muzak. Ben Sullivan’s whole career as a journalist was built on the Calloway case, and two of his true crime books were based on what he believed was the truth. It was never a lie—Boyd would give him that—but that never made it any easier to read his version of your life on paper.
Shay hated him, but Boyd didn’t know anyone better at picking the scraps of someone’s life out of the gutter.
The Muzak cut off midnote, and the receptionist asked him to hang up, with a promise that Ben would call him back soon.
“Soon” was under a minute.
“Boyd?” Sullivan said. He’d lost most of his accent, buffed it down to something Southern enough to be interesting when he got on the news but not enough to brand him. “I heard that there was new evidence in Sammy’s case. Is it true?”
“I need you to do me a favor,” Boyd said. He needed to get this over with before he thought about what a shit thing it was. “Someone called Morgan Graves. I need to know everything you can find out about him.”
He could practically hear the gears grind and roll in Ben’s head as he scrawled that down. “Is he a suspect? Another victim?”
“I don’t know,” Boyd drawled, or maybe slurred. “I think I love him.”
