Authors: Jennifer Estep
Then again, the day was still young.
When I’d washed away the blood, I dried off my hands, put on a clean blue work apron over my own dark jeans and long-sleeved black T-shirt, and stepped through the double doors into the front of the restaurant.
The Pork Pit was something of a dive, the sort of place that outsiders would turn their noses up at, but the locals flocked to it because they knew we served up the best barbecue in Ashland. Blue and pink vinyl booths squatted next to the windows, while more tables and chairs crouched in the center of the storefront. Matching fading, peeling blue and pink pig tracks curved over to the men’s and women’s restrooms, while a long counter close to the back wall featured padded stools.
It was too early for the dinner rush, so only a few folks were currently eating. My gaze roamed over the customers, but they were all engrossed in their barbecue sandwiches, burgers, fries, and other fixings, along with their sweet iced teas, fruity lemonades, and cold sodas. No one paid me any attention as I went over to one of the tables, grabbed a plate with a fresh grilled cheese sandwich and an untouched mound of onion rings, snatched a parfait glass that held a triple chocolate milkshake, and took everything back over to the counter.
“Well, that took
forever
,” a snide voice chirped as I rounded the end of the counter. “What did you do? Kill somebody while you were gone?”
The voice and the attitude belonged to a guy sitting
on the stool closest to the cash register. With his expensive suit, chiseled features, and perfectly cut and styled walnut-colored hair, most women would have considered him exceptionally handsome. Me too, if I didn’t also know how totally annoying he could be. I stopped and shot a cold, withering look at Finnegan Lane, not that the expression bothered my foster brother at all.
“Ah,” he said in a sly, knowing tone. “You did.”
His green eyes locked onto the food in my hands, and he perked up, like an eager puppy about to get a treat. “Hey, are you going to eat that?”
I rolled my eyes, but I set the plate and the milkshake down on the counter in front of him. Finn shrugged out of his gray suit jacket, tucked a white paper napkin in at his chin to protect his gray silk shirt and tie, and enthusiastically dug in. Chowing down on a dead man’s food didn’t faze him in the slightest. Few things did.
“As I was saying before you so rudely left to take out the trash,” Finn said, once he’d slurped down half the milkshake in a long swallow, “I really think I’ve outdone myself when it comes to your birthday this year.”
I sighed. “And I’ve told you,
repeatedly
, that I don’t want, need, or desire some stupid surprise party. We go through this same song-and-dance every single year.”
Finn grinned. “Exactly! Why, you might say that it’s our own little tradition. One that I am more than happy to uphold.”
I groaned.
“I will let you pick out the flavor of the cake, if that makes you feel better.”
“How very gracious of you.”
He beamed. “Isn’t it?”
I sighed again, but Finn started talking about cakes versus cupcakes, vanilla versus chocolate, buttercream versus cream-cheese icing. After a few seconds, my eyes glazed over, and I was in serious danger of falling off my stool from the sheer boredom of his ramblings.
Catalina Vasquez stepped out of the restroom and started to walk over to the table I’d cleared. She stopped when she realized that the food and the guy were gone, then headed over to me.
“Gin?” she asked. “Is something wrong? Why did that guy leave? I just served him.”
“Apparently, he had an appointment that just wouldn’t wait.”
Finn snickered at my deadpan drawl, but I ignored him.
“Go ahead and wipe down that table, please,” I said. “Trust me. That guy isn’t coming back.”
That table belonged to the idiot with the baseball bat who’d jumped me in the alley. He wasn’t going to do much of anything now, except rot out in the heat.
Catalina nodded, either not hearing or choosing to ignore the sarcasm in my words. “Sure thing. I’ll get right on it.”
I nodded and grabbed my book, as though I were going to read a few pages, but I kept my gaze on Catalina the whole time. When she’d shown up a few hours ago to work her shift, she’d murmured a polite hello to me, tied on an apron, and gotten to work. She hadn’t said anything about me saving her last night, and I hadn’t brought it up, but she’d gone out of her way to stay on the opposite
side of the restaurant from me all day. I didn’t know if it was because of the beat-down I’d given Troy or because she didn’t want me asking her any more questions. Didn’t much matter. I was getting to the bottom of things one way or another.
Finn waited until he’d plowed through half of his food and Catalina had moved over to serve another customer before he looked at me. “This is what’s so urgent? Me tracking down info on one of your waitresses? This is what I canceled my afternoon nap for?”
I arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t know they let you take naps at the bank.”
In addition to helping me whenever the Spider needed a bit of backup, Finn also ostensibly worked as an investment banker, although
shameless, greedy money launderer
would have been a far more accurate description of his job.
He waved his hand. “
Let
is such a narrow word. The higher-ups at the bank want all their employees to be well rested. Sometimes I happen to take that rest on the couch in my office in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Next thing you know, you’ll be demanding milk and cookies afterward,” I muttered.
Finn eyed the almond-flavored sugar cookies in the cake stand on the counter with hungry interest. “I should get
something
for schlepping all the way over here on a moment’s notice. You can give me, say, a dozen of those cookies. After I finish my milkshake, of course.”
I snorted.
While Finn kept eating, I filled him in about my run-in with Troy and his goons, in addition to Catalina’s nice
car and her even nicer address. I also told him the tidbit Violet had mentioned about Catalina’s mother passing away.
“I’ve never heard of the guy, but if her mom died, she could be living off some sort of insurance settlement,” Finn suggested, polishing off the rest of the dead man’s grilled cheese. “That might explain the car and the apartment.”
“Maybe,” I murmured, watching Catalina seat a couple, hand them menus, and take their drink orders. “Either way, I want to know everything there is to know about her. And Troy Mannis too. He doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who takes the word
no
very well, much less the ass-kicking that I gave him and his friends.”
“Consider it done.”
Finn pushed his empty plate away and slurped down the dregs of his milkshake. But instead of untucking the napkin at his chin, getting to his feet, and leaving, he crossed his arms over his chest and gave me an expectant look.
“What?” I growled.
“You know what,” he replied in an annoying, singsong voice. “You’re the one who brought it up in the first place.”
I sighed, grabbed the glass cake stand, and pushed it over to him. Finn cackled with glee as he removed the top and started cramming cookies into his mouth.
“Now that we’ve taken care of business, let’s get back to what’s really important: your birthday party,” he mumbled between bites.
I groaned.
“Mark my words,” Finn crowed. “By the time I get done, you’re going to have the best birthday
ever
.”
I closed my eyes as he started chattering on about my party again. I would have laid my head down on the counter and cried, but there were too many witnesses for that.
• • •
After he got his sugar fix, Finn left the restaurant. In between torturing me with what he might cook up for my not-so-surprise party, he did also promise to dig to the very depths of Catalina, Troy, and anyone and everyone they might know. That was comforting, even if all the birthday talk wasn’t.
I kept one eye on Catalina as she worked her shift, but the rest of the day passed by quietly, and no one else came into the restaurant with the sole intention of killing me. In fact, nothing particularly noteworthy happened at all, and I was starting to think that I would get through unscathed.
Until two women strolled through the front door.
One of them was a giant, seven feet tall, with a short, sleek bob of golden hair, hazel eyes, and milky skin covered with a smattering of pale freckles. The other woman was my size, about five-seven or so, with a beautiful mane of wavy hair that flowed past her slender shoulders. At first, her hair seemed to be a rich sable brown, but then she stepped into a patch of sunlight, and I realized that it was actually an intense auburn, with coppery streaks woven in among her lustrous locks, almost like her hair was glowing with some sort of inner fire. Both of them wore expensive pantsuits, black for the giant and a cool white for the other woman.
Catalina directed them over to a booth that was right across from my position at the cash register, and the two women sat down.
The giant glanced around, her cold gaze taking in everyone, from the other customers to the waitstaff to the people passing by on the sidewalk outside. I recognized the hard stare and the mental calculations. So she was a bodyguard, then, one who seemed to be exceptionally protective of her client, judging by the way she sized up every person who walked by in terms of how much of a potential threat they might be and how fast she could take them down. And I was willing to bet that it was
fast
. Her body wasn’t as heavily muscled as that of other giants, but her tall figure hinted at a lean, coiled strength that would crack out at you like a whip—fast, stinging, and merciless.
In contrast, the second, shorter woman seemed completely unconcerned by her surroundings. Then again, why should she be worried when she had a seven-foot-tall meat shield watching over her?
The auburn-haired woman took the menu that Catalina offered her, then glanced around the storefront. Her face was neutral, but I got the feeling that she was analyzing every single thing in the restaurant, albeit in a different way from how the giant had.
Finally, her gaze met mine.
Sculpted eyebrows, high cheekbones, heart-shaped mouth. Her features were flawless in their symmetrical beauty, and her creamy skin had a faint pink undertone to it, which made her look even more vibrant and alive. Her eyes were a vivid green, the intense color standing out against the black of her large pupils.
She realized that I was staring at her, and a small smile split her crimson lips, revealing her perfect white teeth. She returned my stare with one of her own, seeming deep in thought, before nodding at me. Then she turned back to the giant, leaned forward, and murmured something to her friend. The giant’s flat gaze flicked to me for a few seconds before she too leaned forward. Soon the two women were engrossed in their conversation and not paying any attention to me at all.
That should have reassured me, but it didn’t.
I frowned. Something about the woman’s soft smile and thoughtful expression nagged at me, making me think maybe I’d seen her somewhere before, somewhere important, somewhere that I should remember—
“Problem?” Sophia rasped.
The Goth dwarf was standing off to my right and stirring the pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce that was bubbling away on one of the stoves, flavoring the air with its rich, smoky mix of cumin, black pepper, and other spices. Sophia had noticed my keen interest in our new customers.
I kept staring at the two women. They both ignored me completely, which made more and more alarm bells start going off in my head. The only people who did that to me in my own restaurant were the ones who had some sort of sinister and dastardly plans for my demise.
By this point, the two mystery women had given Catalina their order of cheeseburgers, sweet-potato fries, and macaroni salad and were talking softly to each other in between checking their phones. Neither one of them so much as glanced in my direction, but I felt like they were aware of me all the same.
I hopped off my stool, went over to the counter close to where Sophia was standing by the stoves, and started slicing veggies for the rest of the day’s sandwiches. As I whacked my way through a red onion, I subtly tilted my head in the direction of the two women.
“You ever see them in here before?”
Sophia matched my casual cool move for move, reaching over and grabbing a ladle for the barbecue sauce as though she weren’t really eyeing the women.
“No,” she replied, sticking the ladle in the sauce. “Giant looks strong, though.”
“Do me a favor. See if you can snap a photo of them before they leave, and send it to Finn. Maybe he knows who they are.”
Sophia grunted her agreement, and we both went back to work.
An hour later, the two women had finally finished their meal and pushed their plates away. Sophia chose that moment to stroll back to the restrooms, tapping her fingers on her phone as though she were texting. She discreetly angled the phone at the women as she passed them, then finished her text and slid the device into the back pocket of her jeans before disappearing into the bathroom. She didn’t give me a thumbs-up, but I knew she’d gotten shots of them.
The two women slid out of the booth. I thought that they might come over to the cash register to pay for their food and make some not-so-veiled threats about ending my existence. But instead, the giant threw several bills down onto the table, then opened the front door for the other woman.
The two of them strolled outside. A black Audi with tinted windows pulled up to the curb, and the giant opened the back door for the auburn-haired woman. A few seconds later, they were both inside the vehicle and cruising away to parts unknown.
Even though they had left and nothing had happened, the strange tension I’d felt ever since they’d stepped into the restaurant didn’t ease. I went over to their booth and peered out the windows, but the car and the women were long gone. Maybe they’d just wanted a hot meal and nothing else. Maybe they hadn’t had any hidden agenda for eating in my restaurant. Maybe I was just being overly paranoid—even for me.