by Lucy Score
My body was in full-on overdrive. The adrenaline from the flying vampire rat and the almost sex had my heart thumping in my head. Almost. Almost. Almost.
“You might want to—I don’t know—close the damn door next time?” Jonah offered.
“There was a bat! We weren’t—”
“We were about to,” Bowie interrupted.
“Hey,” Jonah said, holding up his hands. “Whatever you’re into. None of my business.”
I threw a shoe at him. “Hilarious. Get out.”
My gym bag shivered on the floor.
“What the hell?” Jonah stared at the bag like it was possessed.
“It’s the damn bat!”
My work phone rang on the nightstand. Shit. It was after midnight. I was no longer on call.
Bowie and Jonah were still yelling at each other.
“Would y’all shut the hell up for a minute?” I screeched. “Lo?”
“Cassidy.” For a shitty communicator, my dad’s voice sent a clear message. He needed a favor.
“What do you need, Dad?”
Bowie and Jonah shut up.
“I hate to bother you this late but I have a little situation and I could use your help,” he told me.
“I have a little situation of my own,” I said, eyeing Bowie’s still hard dick through his underwear. He and Jonah were taking turns looking at me and the gym bag.
“Ya see, it’s your grandmother.”
It was a short list, the things that scared my father. Losing me and Juney, Black Friday shopping, my mom’s mad face, and Gram-Gram. Gram-Gram was my mom’s mother. Most of us found her to be a hoot and a half. The woman packed a hell of a lot of energy and attitude into a four-foot ten-inch body.
“What did she do now?” I asked, moving around the bed to my closet and grabbing my uniform shirt. I pointed at the bag and the door. Bowie and Jonah stared at me like I was insane.
Covering the phone, I mouthed “get out” to them both. When Bowie hesitated, I pointed at the door. Our beautiful, shining moment of uncontrolled lust had been ruined by his brother, my father, and now my damn grandmother. I wanted to cry and kick something. George wandered in and curled up on my pillow. Apparently my cats weren’t bat hunters.
“She’s in a little scuffle at The Lookout.”
“Damn it,” I muttered. Bowie and Jonah carried my gym bag out of the room like it was an explosive. Bowie’s eyes met mine on the way out, and I could already see him rebuilding those walls that had always existed between us. Damn it.
“I hate to ask you, Cass. But you know I can’t arrest her again,” Dad said. The Christmas after Dad arrested his mother-in-law for vandalizing the church’s nativity scene would go down in Tucker family history. Gram-Gram had refused to speak to him and then handed him a gift bag with an “I’m a narc” t-shirt in it.
I ducked into the bathroom clutching my uniform to my chest. “I’ll go. Let me get dressed.”
“Just go as you are,” Dad suggested. “It sounds like it’s gettin’ a little out of hand.”
Me showing up in a sheet toga with almost-fucked hair wouldn’t settle any situation.
“I’ll be there in five. But I’m definitely callin’ in a favor on this,” I warned him.
“Name it and it’s yours,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief.
I dressed quickly and was scraping my hair back in a bun as I jogged down the stairs. Jonah and Bowie were coming in the back door. Bowie was still wearing only underwear. I had to turn my back on him so I wouldn’t weep with unrealized lust. So close. So damn close.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Fight at The Lookout,” I said, grabbing my coat and keys.
“You aren’t on call,” Bowie pointed out. I didn’t want to know how he was so intimately acquainted with my schedule. There wasn’t time to ask.
“It’s Gram-Gram,” I told him.
“Oh.” He got it. Of course he did. Bowie knew everything there was to know about me. Including the fact that my crazy little grandmother scared the shit out of my father and terrorized other senior citizens when the moonshine flowed a little too freely.
“Is your grandma okay?” Jonah asked, looking confused.
“I’ll fill him in,” Bowie promised.
“Great.” I pushed past them both and headed out into the cold night air. “Thanks for taking care of the bat,” I called over my shoulder.
I jumped into my car and was dialing Scarlett before I even got it in reverse.
“‘Lo?” she said sleepily through the car speakers.
“I don’t know if I just had sex with your brother,” I announced, steering the car in the direction of the bar and flooring it.
“WHAT?”
Scarlett was now wide awake.
“Which brother? How do you not know if you had sex? Are you drunk? Is he drunk? Which brother is it?”
She fired off questions like bullets. Pew. Pew. Pew.
“Bowie and it’s a long story. But I need to know if I need to update my list of sexual partners.” If that was my one and only sexual experience with Bowie…well, hell. I didn’t know what I’d do. All those years of closing off and keeping my distance had just imploded, resulting in one or two inches of the most intense sexual experience of my life.
“Bowie! Bowie Bodine? Good guy? Next-door neighbor Bowie? ‘Never ask me about Bowie again’ Bowie?”
“That’s the one,” I said accelerating up the steep hill to The Lookout.
While the rest of town was asleep on this frosty winter night, The Lookout’s lights were blazing, and the parking lot was half-full.
“How do you not know if you had sex with Bowie?” Scarlett demanded. “I’m coming over. This is a face-to-face discussion. Ouch! Jedediah! Stop clawing the shit out of me!”
“It’s a technical Tab A Slot B question,” I told her. “And I’m just pulling into The Lookout for a disturbance.”
“If you don’t call me tomorrow I will hunt you down and—ouch! Stop biting!”
“George and Eddie never bite me,” I teased, throwing the car into park and climbing out. At least the fight hadn’t spilled out into the parking lot.
“That was Dev biting me, not the cat,” Scarlett said smugly.
A barstool exploded through The Lookout’s plate glass window and landed with a metallic thunk on the sidewalk. It rolled back and forth over crystals of glass.
“Shit. I gotta go.”
“Tell Gram-Gram I said hi.”
26
Cassidy
My grandmother was a woman of contradiction. She went to church twice a month, baked an exquisite lemon cake with homemade icing for my birthday every year, and was currently wielding a pool stick at Myrt Crabapple.
Myrt had a good seven inches and fifty pounds on my grandmother. But her glass eye and arthritis evened the odds. She was trying to break a beer bottle off of the bar. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Nicolette was calmly filling a pitcher of ice water to dump on them.
“Gram-Gram!” My voice snapped with authority. Unlike my father, Gram-Gram could usually forgive me for playing cop.
My grandmother dropped the pool cue.
“Shit. It’s the po-po,” Myrt yelled. Myrt thought she was whispering, but without her hearing aids she couldn’t hear a damn thing.
“Cassidy, sweetie! What are you doing here?” Gram-Gram asked sweetly. She was wearing her Bootleg Bingo sweatshirt, and judging from the bingo cards and overturned tables everywhere, the games hadn’t gone someone’s way.
“Who threw the stool?” I asked calmly.
Nicolette placed the pitcher on the bar and nodded to me. Bootleg senior citizens were an unruly bunch, but a good dousing was usually all it took to break up any altercations. They didn’t much care for their polyester outfits to get wet.
“What stool?” my grandma asked innocently.
“The one spinning around like a top in front of Trent McCulty’s pickup truck.”
/> “She did it,” Myrt hollered, pointing a gnarled finger at Gram.
The crowd around us erupted as everyone tried to explain all at once. I looked at them. White hair and crooked glasses. Flannel and ugly sweaters. A shoving match broke out between Old Jefferson Waverly and Marvin Lloyd. Granny Louisa and Estelle were trying to look innocent over by the jukebox.
“Knock it off, y’all,” I shouted over the din, reaching for the pitcher of water.
I could have given it another minute. Neither man had much energy and they were both already huffing and puffing like steam engines. But I’d had a rough night and I just wanted to go home and figure out whether or not Bowie and I had sex and what, if anything, that meant.
I threw the water in their faces and then tossed the pitcher on the ground. “Everybody better get real orderly or I will drag every single one of you downtown, and y’all know how uncomfortable the cots are in that cell.”
We had one official jail cell in town. And most of these fine citizens had spent at least a night in it at some point.
They all shut up real fast.
“Now, tell me who threw the stool so we can get on with it.” Bootleg Justice required the instigators of bar fights to participate in the clean-up as well as paying for any property damage.
“I’m tellin’ you! It was Gert!” Myrt shouted.
“I was mindin’ my own business, trying to climb up on that stool and it slipped right out from under me,” Gram-Gram insisted.
“It slipped out from under you through a plate glass window and into the parking lot?” I asked wishing to God it had been my father who responded to the call.
“Between you and me,” Gram-Gram said in a stage whisper, “the floors in here are real greasy. Just like the food. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”
“Hey, now!” Nicolette said, taking offense.
Gram-Gram shot her a beaming smile. This was part of her street cred, lying to the authorities—usually her family—about whatever mess she’d stirred up.
“Okay, this is how it’s gonna go. Y’all are going to clean up every bingo card and broken shard of glass. Gram-Gram, since the floor is so slippery, you’re gonna mop it and then reimburse Nicolette here for the window. Then I’m going to drive you home and decide what kind of fine I’m gonna slap you with.”
Gram-Gram pouted prettily, adjusting her pink frame glasses.
“Anyone have any problems with that?” I demanded.
“No, ma’am,” they barked in unison.
“Good.”
The soggy and chastised elderly of Bootleg Springs hopped to, pulling out brooms and dustpans, righting tables, and straightening chairs. Nicolette handed my grandmother a mop. “You know where the bucket is.”
An hour later, with The Lookout sparkling clean, the window boarded up, and the geriatric population on its way home to bed, I plunked Gram-Gram in my back seat. It wasn’t a police cruiser, but she still had a reputation to uphold.
“When are you gonna stop causing trouble on Bingo Night?” I asked.
“When are you gonna start having something to do instead of fixin’ trouble on Bingo Night?” she countered.
“Tonight.”
She hmm-ed knowingly. “I thought you looked a little hot and bothered. Did you swipe right on a hot one?” she asked.
“We’re not discussing this.”
“Did he have a man bun?” Gram asked. “I love a good man bun! I wish Marvin could have one but his combover won’t reach.”
“It wasn’t a man,” I lied. “It was a bat. It flopped my face.”
Gram shifted gears into caring grandparent. “Poor sweetie! I hope it didn’t bite you.”
I turned onto Spirits Lane. “No. Bowie caught it in my gym bag and he and Jonah released it into the wild.”
“Bowie, huh?” Gram mused pointedly. “When are you two gonna quit dancin’ around it and get naked already?” Gram-Gram had two boyfriends and another in the hopper in case one of the other two became defective or up and died.
I dropped Gram off at her cute little brick-front row home. She waved to me from her front step like I’d chauffeured her to and from church.
Suddenly irretrievably exhausted, I headed home. I squeezed my car into the garage and trudged up the walkway toward my back porch.
“Everything okay at Bingo Night?” Bowie was leaning on a porch post on his side of the railing.
I paused on the step and climbed up to his level.
“Your door wasn’t locked,” he told me, crossing his arms over his chest.
“What door?” This was Bootleg Springs. My back door was never locked.
“The one between us.” His face was shadowed in the soft glow of the porch light.
I was tired. Too tired to play any more games. “It’s never been locked, Bowie.”
He swore quietly and toed one of the spindles between us. I knew that to him, tonight had been a mistake. One he didn’t want to repeat.
“So, that’s it then? That’s all it’s gonna be?” I pressed. I wanted him to say the words. “You’re just gonna go back to thinking about me as a little sister.”
We both knew there was nothing little sisterly about what had happened a few short hours ago. But I wanted him to lie to my face. To give me something to hate him for. A reason to give up on him again.
He didn’t answer me, so I stepped closer until the railing pressed against my hips. I grabbed him by the front of the sweatshirt he wore to ward off the chill.
He brought his hands to my shoulders, squeezed. “Cass, honey. We can’t.”
I was tired. That’s why I dropped my head to his chest. That’s why my heart did that stupid tumble when he rested his chin on top of my head. I’d been in his arms twice tonight. And both times had been thoroughly unsatisfying. I wanted more and I hated myself for it.
“I promised,” he said quietly.
“You promised what to who?” I demanded. Whom? Whatever.
“Ask your dad,” he said wearily.
27
Cassidy
“Girl, what are you doing here this morning?” Bex asked as I trudged into the station the next morning. “I thought you’d be sleeping off Gram-Gram’s shitshow at The Lookout.”
I’d intended to catch up on some sleep. Instead, I’d sprawled out on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the man on the other side of the plaster and studs. My room was marked by him now. I kept picturing him, bursting into my bedroom, fists closed and ready for a fight. The wall that he pushed me up against, almost shoving himself into me.
It felt like fate. Like it was something that had been written in the stars before either of us were gleams in anyone’s eyes. Destiny. Right.
Ask your dad.
Those words sent my guts to churning. I had a question for my father all right. And I was going to get an answer.
“Sheriff in?” I asked her, ignoring her question.
“In his office.” Bex nodded toward the shoebox my father called an office. My gaze slid to the conference room.
“Connelly’s out today,” she said, reading my mind.
Good. I had a feeling a little family drama was about to play out and I didn’t much care for any outsider audiences.
I headed for Dad’s office and nodded at Bubba, who was watching an epic fail video on YouTube and combing his mustache.
My father was hunting and pecking on his keyboard, his readers perched on the end of his nose.
“Mornin’ sunshine,” he said, taking in the bags under my eyes.
I closed the door and flopped down in the rickety chair in front of his desk. “How’s the Kendall investigation going?” I asked. You couldn’t just ask a direct question to my father. You had to ease him into talking. Get him used to the flow of words leaving his mouth. Warm him up with a topic he was comfortable with.
“Not a whole lot of new information. The blood on the sweater was hers, but they didn’t find any DNA evidence in or around Jonah’
s house. Cadaver dogs didn’t catch a whiff of anything on the property either. So far Connelly’s comin’ up with squat on the speeding ticket. There’s nothing in that area that ties to Jonah Bodine, Sr.,” he recapped.
I nodded. Nothing new there. “Anything interesting come up in any of the new interviews?” I hated to think that Connelly had brought in the press and pissed off our entire town for nothing.
Dad’s mustache quirked. “Nope. Nothing new. Which didn’t please His Highness. He could’ve gotten the same info reading the old case files, but he seems to think we dropped the ball somewhere along the way and let the suspect get away with murder.”
He said it without malice. My dad was a peacemaker at heart, and even with an opinionated bigwig breathing down his neck, nothing much ruffled his feathers.
“What do you think about it all? Do you think Jonah did it?” I asked.
“What do you think?” He’d always done that. Ever since I announced that I was going to be a cop, he’d talk shop with me. He taught me to trust my instincts. There was only one area of my life that they’d let me down: Bowie.
I kicked back in the chair and thought it through. “I can’t see it. Maybe it’s because I grew up with his kids. Jonah Bodine was an asshole at times, but I don’t see murderer.”
“Then how’d he get that sweater?” Dad pressed, warming to the topic.
“Found it maybe. Hell, what if he didn’t even find it? What if Connie found it and worried he’d had something to do with it?”
“Why wouldn’t she destroy it? If she thought it was evidence, she and Jonah didn’t have the warmest relationship.”
I thought back to that night when a shadow-eyed, teenaged Bowie had walked into my living room with the rest of his siblings. I’d walked right on up to him and hugged him hard. I wanted to share my family with him. I wanted him to feel like he belonged somewhere safe.
“Blackmail?” I suggested. But that didn’t sit right either. “Proof maybe? In case he was accused?” We were missing too many pieces.
