“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s not like they slept together.”
Kim looked him right in the eye in that moment, and Brendan just couldn’t keep his face as deceptively neutral as it needed to be. How had years of interrogation training not prepared him for such a simple lie?
It was game over.
“Oh my—”
The last word was muffled by Kim snatching her hand from Brendan’s and covering her mouth. Was it too late to smash Brice’s teeth in?
“Are you fucking kidding me, Brendan? After all this shit with you pretending to like me?”
“That was yesterday.” Brendan knew it was lame, but he didn’t have any other legs to stand on.
“Oh, so that makes it okay? No, don’t answer that. We’re done here.”
And there she stood, arms folded tight, chin up, but wavering slightly. He’d really done a bad thing here. She’d liked him and he’d let her down right as she’d dropped her guard.
“I can drive you home—”
“You are nuts if you think I’m getting back in that truck with you. You need to go.”
This was music to Brice’s ears. He perked up as he probably figured his odds of scoring just skyrocketed.
“Fine, just do me a favor and don’t sleep with this limp dick junkie.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do.” She turned and stomped off towards the brightly lit restrooms.
“That was a dick move,” Brice said, now that the two men were alone.
“You just made a big mistake.” Brendan lunged towards the smaller man.
Brice backpedaled into the bar so hard that he knocked a few shot glasses clean off the backside with his flailing arm. Before Brendan could say anything else, the bartender, a graying old man with a funny Irish hat on, came to say he’d call the cops if Brendan so much as touched one of his best customers.
It wasn’t worth the trouble. Brendan backed down and stormed out into the night.
Chapter 29
A second set of fifty pushups drew to a close and Brendan was still pissed. He’d spent most of the night tossing and turning and punching his pillow, but now even his old trick of working out to vent the frustration had little effect. Normally after one hundred pushups all anger and consternation fled with the rest of his pent-up energy. Apparently this was all too heavy to wash away with physical exertion. He sat with his back against the wall and banged his head against it.
He’d already beaten himself up mentally over whether or not he should’ve tried harder to lie to Kim and defend his name. The back and forth was fruitless, though. At the end of the day, she needed to know, so it was probably best to get it all over and done with now, rather than breaking her heart even more at a later date.
But more importantly, how the hell did Brice know about Brendan staying over with Michelle, yet Grant apparently still had no idea? If Brice was so willing to tell Kim about it, surely he’d told others.
Man, he should probably just pack up his things and leave town again. This could get real ugly, real fast.
There was still the slim possibility that his brother really didn’t know. If so, then maybe it was a perfect opportunity to skip town. Why stay on the beach when the category 5 hurricane is roaring past the seawall? The smart money was on leaving.
Brendan snuck out of Grant’s old room and scoured the house looking for his mom’s phone. Eventually he found it wedged between one of the couch cushions and the armrest. His phone didn’t have Grant’s number in it, but his mom’s would. He touched the button to light up the screen and wasn’t prompted for a password. That made sense; his mom would never be able to remember a password anyway, so why bother?
The secondary benefit of using his mom’s phone to call his brother was that Grant wouldn’t screen a call from his dear mother. Brendan touched the screen to initiate the call, and then waited through a few painfully long rings before his brother answered.
“Hey Grant. It’s Brendan.”
“Oh, hey there,” Grant said amiably enough. “Good to hear from you, but I’m kind of busy right now. I’ve got to get a bunch of stuff packed for this road trip. Customers hate it when I’m late.”
“Sure, okay.” Brendan felt relieved for the first time in twelve hours. “When are you leaving?”
“In a few hours, around noon probably,” his brother said. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to know?” Brendan had no reply to that. “Do you need help with something? I can push the time back a little if I need to.”
“No, no. Nothing like that,” Brendan said hurriedly. “Was just curious, that’s all.”
“Okay, man. Cool. You still going to be in town when I get back?”
“Unless you’re heading to the Arctic or something, I should still be here.”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you later.”
With that, Grant ended the call and Brendan collapsed onto the couch. He now had two options. Either he could bail out of Shallow Creek and wait for his family to be ripped apart by this inevitable drama, or he could keep pushing on with his meth investigation. Regarding the latter, he didn’t have much to go on. Kim suspected that Grant had a hand in it, and the fact that he made a legitimate career out of peddling chemicals seemed so obvious that it couldn’t possibly be true.
Grant had mentioned he had some customer visits to make in a few hours. Brendan hadn’t tailed anyone in a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity to refresh his skills. Hell, the activity might help clear his overburdened mind. And what was the harm? Grant was probably doing exactly what he’d said, dropping in on his clients.
And if not? If his brother wasn’t the freaking angel that everyone thought he was, would that lessen the blow on Brendan when the shit finally hit the fan? Wishful thinking, but it was enough to get Brendan off the couch and hunting for his pants and a clean shirt.
As he dressed, he ran through a few options in his head for how to proceed. Grant would probably recognize Brendan’s truck, since he saw it at the bar on Sunday night, so he’d need to get some new wheels. The family vehicles were all out of the question, and he didn’t really know anyone else well enough to ask to borrow their car or truck for an undisclosed purpose, so that left him needing a rental car. There were only two such establishments in town that he knew of, so he pulled out his phone to search the Internet for more information.
He just hoped he wouldn’t have to take a crappy little rental Hyundai off-road.
Chapter 30
The non-smoking rental pickup stank of stale cigarettes and staler body odor. Each little bump in road flustered the worn-out shocks and twisted chassis into an orchestra of creaks and thuds. This Ford Ranger had certainly seen better days, but it hadn’t given Brendan any serious grief yet.
That said, umpteen passersby had stopped to ask if he needed any help. An ailing old truck sitting at the side of the road with the hood up wasn’t that uncommon around town, but Brendan had forgotten this was the kind of place where people would actually stop to offer assistance. As he waited for his brother to pull out of his neighborhood through the only exit, Brendan now worried he’d attracted too much attention already. He definitely had a lot to learn about being slick in the civilian world.
After convincing the eighth Good Samaritan that he had his broken-down truck under control, Grant’s shiny new red pickup eased out onto the road. Brendan slammed the hood down and jumped in, stumbling around in his haste to get the vehicle in gear. Of course the only one the rental place had left was a stick shift. Why wouldn’t it be? Brendan hadn’t driven one in about five years, but it came back to him one jolty gear change at a time.