by Jennie Marts
She pulled a pair of high-heeled boots from her tote and kicked off her tennis shoes. “I usually wear these with a dress, but figured they might look the part if I tucked my jeans into them.” She nodded at Edna. “Not that anyone is going to notice I’m even in the bar with ‘Biker Babe-elicious’ in the room.” She peered at Cassie, then let out a low whistle. “Speaking of babe-elicious. Wow, Cass, you look amazing. Check out those curves.”
Cassie’s cheeks went pink, and she hugged her arms around her chest. “I feel silly.”
“Don’t,” Piper reassured her with an encouraging smile. “You really do look great, Aunt Cass.”
“Where’s Maggie?” Edna asked.
“She couldn’t make it,” Cassie explained, the pinched expression on her face relaxing at the change of subject. “Her son had a soccer banquet or something at school she had to go to. She said she’s sorry to miss this, but I’m not sure she said it with much sincerity.”
Piper wished she could miss it. She’d much rather spend the night curled up on the sofa with the still-nameless dog and a good book.
But that didn’t look like it was going to happen. And if any of this helped to figure out who killed Brittany, this crazy scheme would be worth it. “So, what’s the plan?”
“We need to stick together, or at least in pairs of two, so no one is on their own,” Cassie said.
“Why don’t I stick with Piper and you three get a table and work the room,” suggested Edna.
“How the heck are we supposed to do that?” Sunny asked.
“Ask questions. Talk to people.”
“And say what? Anyone have any clues as to how this girl got murdered across town?”
“I’d suggest going for a little more subtlety,” Edna explained. “See if anyone knows this kid Kyle or can tell us anything about him. If he hangs out there a lot, maybe someone knows something about him. And nobody needs to worry. I’m packing tonight.” She patted the front of her chest.
Cassie gasped. “You’re carrying a gun in your bra?”
“Not an actual gun, but the next best thing.” Edna reached down the front of her shirt and pulled out a small pink rectangular-shaped item that resembled a cell phone. “They call this little baby The Terminator.”
“What is it? It looks like a mini-tape recorder.” Sunny reached a hand toward it, but Edna snatched it away.
“It’s a stun gun. And it’s got five hundred and fifty megavolts of power packed into this little pink box.”
“Where in the world did you get a pink stun gun?” Claire asked.
“Where I get everything,” she answered with a shrug. “On Amazon. Only cost me eight ninety-five.”
Claire shook her head. “Just don’t stun yourself with it. We don’t need to add an electric boob-blunder to this night. It’s crazy enough as it is.”
Edna harrumphed and stuffed the pink stun gun back into her blouse.
“Fitz said he would try to grab a spot at the bar with Kyle,” Piper said, trying to deflect any more attention aimed at Edna’s bra baggage. “I’m going to try to sit on his other side, and hopefully I can listen in on their conversation.”
“Good plan. I’ll try to get the bartender talking,” Edna said.
“I think you’d better stay at the table in the back of the room,” Cassie said. “I’ll sit at the bar with Piper and chat with the bartender. People tend to talk to me. I think I remind them of their mother, and I’m a good listener.”
“You don’t look like anyone’s mother tonight,” Claire said. “I say we show up and get the lay of the land and wing it from there. We’ll all have our phones so we can text each other if the plan changes.”
“Sounds good,” Piper agreed. She wore a simple outfit of jeans, her favorite pair of Chucks, and a slouchy black hoodie over a gray T-shirt. Her plan was to blend in, but with the bar, not the patrons. Let the other women serve as distractions, her plan was to fade into the background and not draw any attention to herself. “We should probably go in separately so as not to draw attention to ourselves.” She gestured to Edna. “Well, any more attention to ourselves.”
Claire grinned. “I guarantee no one in that bar will notice us once Ms. Authentic Betty Biker Babe walks in.”
Edna held up her hand. “That reminds me. We all need code names.”
“Code names?” Claire raised an eyebrow at Piper, who shrugged. She was used to Edna’s elaborately hare-brained schemes.
“Of course. We can’t use our real names. That’s the point of being undercover,” Edna explained. “I think I’ll go with Ginger. Ginger Lafayette. I always wanted to be a fiery redhead.”
“I thought you said code names, not stripper names.”
“Hmm. I see your point.” Edna tapped her chin. “Okay, I guess I’ll go with the one you suggested. You all can call me Betty tonight.”
Piper shook her head, amused Edna didn’t see the irony of the nickname. “How about if we just agree that no one talks to me at all.”
“Let’s make it easy and go by Phoebe, Monica, and Rachel.” Cassie pointed to herself, Sunny, and Claire as she assigned each one a name then looked at Piper. “And you can be Joey.”
Piper rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”
“Nobody is going to be anybody if we don’t get over there,” Claire said, pointing toward the door. “I’ll drive my car with Cass and Piper and we’ll follow you two over. Cassie and Piper can go in first then we’ll wait about ten minutes and I’ll come in with Monica and Sweet Cheeks Lafayette.”
“Now that sounds like a stripper name,” Edna said, following Sunny out the door.
Twenty minutes later, a socially-awkward college freshman and a smoky-eyed middle-aged mom in tight jeans walked into a bar.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the beginning of a joke, although Piper felt an odd compulsion to giggle as she and her aunt crossed the room toward the long bar where she spotted Fitz and Kyle.
Fitz was right, the place was kind of a dive. Dark and dismal, a few neon beer signs adorned the wood-paneled walls. Four or five tables sprawled across the concrete floor with a few booths lining the wall. A juke box softly played a classic rock ballad and the smack of a pool ball cracked through the air as three burly guys in flannel played a game at one of the two pool tables at the far end of the room.
The scents of stale beer, peanuts, and disinfectant warred with each other in the stuffy air.
The bar was fairly quiet, only one other guy sat nursing a beer at the other end of the bar.
Piper took the seat next to Fitz but didn’t acknowledge him, and Cassie…er, Phoebe, took the seat next to her after subtly brushing a few crumbs from the bar stool.
The bartender, a tall, muscled bald guy with a thick mustache and salt and pepper goatee, ambled toward them and slapped a couple of cardboard coasters on the bar in front of them. A snake tattoo curled around his huge muscled bicep, just visible under the sleeve of his white T-shirt. He wore a black leather vest and eyed Piper with a shrewd appraisal. “What can I get you ladies?”
Cassie smiled and peered behind the bar. “Do you have a drink menu?”
Piper dug an elbow into her side. “She’s kidding. She’ll have a rum and coke, and I’ll just have a coke.” She offered him what she hoped was a casual shrug. “I’m driving.”
And under-age, but she appreciated the bartender’s slight nod and the fact he didn’t point that small issue out.
She snuck a quick glance at Fitz’s glass and was glad to see it looked like he was drinking soda as well. A half-empty glass of beer sat on the bar in front of Kyle, who looked like he’d slept in his clothes and hadn’t combed his hair in days. He held his forehead in his hand as he leaned against the bar, as if the weight of simply holding his head up was too much for him to bear.
Piper felt a pang of sympathy for him, until she remembered he might be a murderer, and her empathy dried up faster than a cheetah with its tail on fire.
“Here you go,” the bartender said,
clunking down their drinks in front of them. He eyed Cassie appreciatively and offered her a flirty grin. Or the closest thing Piper could imagine to flirty from a giant muscled tattooed biker dude. “I’m Snake,” he told them, which explained the reptilian ring of tattoos. “Holler if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Mr. Snake. I mean Snake,” Cassie stuttered, as she raised her glass and took a tentative sip.
Piper was impressed when she held it together and swallowed the sip, especially after the grimace she made.
Luckily, Snake’s attention was elsewhere. His eyes had gone round as he stared at the door, and Piper had a feeling Monica, Rachel, and Sweet Cheeks had just entered the building.
Spinning slightly in her chair, Piper, and the rest of the bar watched the three women walk in.
Edna paraded through the room, followed by Sunny, who stared at the floor and looked like she wanted to sink into it. Claire sauntered behind them, her gaze coolly assessing the room as if it were an everyday occurrence for her to accompany a second-grade teacher and an old lady dressed as biker chicks into a trashy bar.
A waitress, presumably the only one in the bar, sidled up to their table in a tiny skirt and cowboy boots. A grin covered her face as she walked away from their table, then leaned over the bar next to Cassie to relay their order. “The ladies at the booth in the back would like a pitcher of Coors Light and three glasses. You should have heard that little granny talk. She was cracking me up. She told me her ‘hog’ was in the shop then she asked me if I knew where she could score some weed. The skinny one mouthed she was her grandma and didn’t get out much. They’re a hoot.”
It took all of Piper’s willpower to keep her eyes from rolling. So much for Edna staying low key and blending in. But hey, whatever it took. Who knows, maybe Edna would become best pals with this waitress, and she’d finagle a piece of key information from her. Piper had seen Edna do it before—the woman might be a little wacky, but she had skills.
Speaking of skills, Piper needed to focus on her own part of this scheme. She pulled her phone from her pocket and laid it on the bar next to Fitz’s arm. He had his back to her, but his elbow rested casually on the bar.
She set her phone to record then turned it upside down and pushed it as close to Fitz as possible without seeming to be too obvious.
He shifted on the bar stool, just the smallest amount, but enough to slightly brush his arm against the side of her hand—just enough to send a spark of heat darting up her spine.
She could almost feel the warmth of him radiating off his body, and she wanted to nestle against his back, but they were here to do a job and she had her part to play, which was being the back-up recorder.
Letting the phone do its job, she leaned forward on the bar, sneaking an occasional glance at Kyle as she tried to nonchalantly listen to Fitz’s conversation with him.
“I know it’s gotta be tough, dude,” Fitz was saying as Kyle threw back the rest of his beer and signaled for another. “How are you really holding up?”
Kyle drew his hand through his already messy hair. “Not very well. This shit is messing with my head. I mean, first Brittany, and now Lisa. I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“I knew about you and Brittany, but I didn’t know you knew the other girl, too.”
“Yeah, she went to high school with us. I only knew her a little back then. I met her this one time at a party, but that night turned into a shit show of the highest order, and I didn’t really talk to her again at school. Then I saw her here on campus at the beginning of the school year, and we’d started talking again.”
“What do you mean by a shit show?”
Kyle shook his head, and his eyes went teary. “Oh man. I don’t know if I can even talk about it.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“It was. I did some stupid shit. It was a bad night. Brittany and I were in a fight, and I’d been drinking. A lot. I met this girl. Lisa. She was different than anyone I’d ever known.”
“Different how?”
“Just different. You know, not someone we would ever even talk to at school. She hung out with a different crowd. Kids we would never be seen hanging around. I don’t even know why she was at that party.”
“I get it. So, what happened? I take it you did talk to her.”
“I did. She was cool. And like I said, Brittany and I were fighting and this girl, she was a good listener. And really pretty, under all the makeup and junk she wore. At least I think she was. I was already pretty messed up then we did some shots and one thing led to another, and we ended up in one of the bedrooms. Then this kid, he must have been a friend of hers because they looked the same, he walked in on us and caught us together, her half-naked and me with my pants around my ankles.”
“Oh dang.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t what I was thinking. Actually, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was just reacting. I was drunk, and I’m ashamed of myself.”
“We all do stupid stuff when it comes to girls.”
“That wasn’t all I did that was stupid.” He lowered his voice, and Piper leaned closer, straining to hear him. “The girl was an idiot move. I never should have fooled around on Brittany. But like I said, this girl wasn’t someone we would ever even talk to. It was bad enough Brit was going to kill me, but now everyone in school was going to make fun of me for hooking up with this girl. I had to shut that kid up, and make sure he didn’t tell anyone what he saw.”
“So, what did you do?”
Kyle shook his head again and scrubbed his hands across his face. “It all happened so fast. And the details are a little blurry. But I was pissed, and the kid knew it. He just stood in the doorway, like he was frozen or something. I remember the way his mouth opened and shut like this stupid goldfish my little sister had when we were kids. I yanked up my pants and started yelling at him that I’d kill him if he told anybody. Then he ran. The stupid kid ran.”
Kyle made a funny sound—a cross between a hiccup and a burp and stared miserably into his beer. “I think about that night sometimes, and I always wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t run.”
“What did happen?”
“I took off after him. I don’t know what I was going to do. Try to talk to him or scare him. I don’t know. He just took off, and I started chasing him. I chased him through the house, and he ran out the back door and past a couple of my buddies who were standing at the keg. They saw me running after him and joined in the chase. The house was over off Brookdale, you know the neighborhood with all those trees and the forest service land behind it?”
Fitz nodded.
“Well, he ran into those trees, and we ran after him. It still seems like something out of a dream. I think I’ve blocked out a lot of what happened that night. It was like we were crazy cannibals or something, chasing after this kid like we were going to eat him. All three of us guys were acting nuts, screaming and running through the trees like we were hunting a wild animal.”
“Did you catch him?” Fitz’s voice was low, and Piper could feel his back bristle and his muscles tense as he listened. She realized her own hands were clenched in fists.
It was hard for her to listen to Kyle’s story without wanting to punch the guy. The way he described going after that kid, who hadn’t done anything except been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Yeah. We did. He must have tripped or something and hurt his leg because he was lying on the ground next to this big tree, curled up against it like he was trying to disappear into it.”
“What’d you do?”
Kyle’s cheeks sagged, like his whole face was melting with the misery of telling the story. His voice was barely above a whisper now. “We taught him a lesson, I guess. We roughed him up and made him swear not to tell anyone. He was scared shitless. I’m pretty sure he pissed himself. But we didn’t care. We were beyond caring. It was like that mob thing they talk about happening where the motions of the crowd take over.”
; She was pretty sure Kyle was crying now. She couldn’t see his face around Fitz’s shoulder, but his voice had that husky scratchy sound, and he sniffed a couple of times.
“We left him out there. We left that kid out there all by himself.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing ever happened. I never saw the kid again, and us guys never talked about it. We just showed up at school on Monday and acted like it never happened. I saw Lisa in the halls a couple of times, but I pretended not to know who she was. I know it was a dick-move, but I was a high school senior, and I was kind of a dick. And I didn’t know what else to do. I was ashamed of myself, and I just wanted it all to go away and pretend it had never happened. Brittany and I made up and everything went back to normal.
“Except now Brittany’s gone, and so is Lisa. Two women murdered, and I’ve been with both of them.”
Kyle was still talking, but Piper didn’t hear what he said. She turned as the commotion of a group of six or seven rough-looking bikers entered the bar. They were loud and burly, and the sound of their laughter and swearing filled the bar. Their very presence seemed to take up all the air in the room.
They moved as one toward a grouping of tables, shuffling chairs and pushing three of the small tables together then settling in around them. One of the guys whistled for the waitress, who clomped over in her cowboy boots.
Piper had been so engrossed in Kyle’s tale, she hadn’t noticed what the other women were doing. Peering around the room, she took stock of her fellow undercover cohorts. Her aunt had turned away from her and seemed captivated by a story Snake was telling her.
A perky personality and smoky eyes must be his thing because he’d been flirting with Cassie and trying to talk to her all night. Piper hadn’t been paying much attention to their topics of conversation, but she recognized the ‘listening’ mode of her aunt.
Cassie was a great listener—she asked real questions and had this way of making a person feel like everything they had to say was valuable and important. She’d always thought her aunt could charm a snake. Evidently, it was true. Even a menacing six-foot four bearded biker snake.
