The Real Mrs. Price (11 page)

“You need a menu?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I'll take the special. And a beer.”

“He was on television,” Lucy whispered. “On the news with Marlowe.”

Moments later, he slowly turned and looked over his shoulder right at Roman and Lucy. That good old intuition of Roman's kicked in, and he had a strong feeling that the man's being here wasn't a coincidence.

Their waitress brought the check. Roman paid, and the two of them left, but once outside, he searched the nearly empty lot for the black sedan that he'd seen that guy inside drive Marlowe away in. Roman pulled out his cell phone and took a picture of the plate. Illinois.

“What are you doing that for?”

“Just curious,” he said casually.

“You're not just curious, and since I'm still paying you, I'd like to know what's going on.”

He looked at her and sighed. Lucy stubbornly folded her arms across her chest.

“I want to know who he is and what he is to her.”

“Why would it matter?” Lucy curled one corner of her red-stained lips, and he surprised himself and almost smiled at the gesture, thinking that it was … cute.

Roman quickly shook it off. He wasn't here for cute. “If Marlowe did kill that guy in the car, she would've needed help.”

Lucy's eyes suddenly widened.

“There's no way she could've done it by herself,” he concluded.

A big, strong dude like that could easily manhandle the Ed Prices of the world. Marlowe was a lovely woman, so yeah. Finally, he could begin to make sense of a situation that had stumped him from the beginning.

*   *   *

Back at the hotel, Roman logged on to his laptop and plugged in the tag number of the sedan. Lucy refused to go back to her room and sat on the bed behind him while he pulled up the information.

He almost laughed when he saw it. “It's registered to a corporation. Acme LLC in Michigan.”

“Acme? What does that stand for?”

“Not a damn thing,” he muttered. “Remember those old Road Runner cartoons?” he asked, turning to her.

She nodded.

“Acme? They delivered the bombs and the anvils and all that crap that that coyote used to try and catch that Road Runner.”

Lucy smirked. “This is a joke. Right?”

He nodded. “On us.” Roman tried doing a search on Acme LLC in Michigan and came up empty.

She was disappointed, and it showed. “So it's a dead end?”

“Are you kidding?” he asked, excited about something for the first time in a long time. “It's a clue, Lucy.” He laughed unexpectedly.

“To what?”

“I have no idea. But that big sonofabitch doesn't want anyone to know who he is, which means he's hiding something, or the two of them are. I'd like to know what.”

Real private investigator work was boring as hell. All of a sudden now, this case had some legs underneath it. There was a real mystery here and a possible scenario playing out in his head, damn near to music. Who's to say that Marlowe Price didn't have a lover and that he didn't kill Ed Price for her? Stranger love triangles had happened.

“Does this mean you're not leaving in the morning?” She crossed one of those long legs over the other. Roman didn't think she'd meant it to be seductive, but it sure looked that way to him.

He hadn't been with a woman in ages, and he missed them, the feel of them, the smell, the taste. Women were traps, though, and the last thing he needed right now was for an anvil to fall on his head.

“This means I'll probably stay a while longer. See where this leads.”

She swept a tuft of hair back behind her ear, uncrossed her legs, and stood up to leave. “Good.”

He immediately got up and walked her to the door.

“Then I'll see you in the morning.” She smiled. “I'll bring you a bagel.”

 

Hungry Work

Obsession:

1. the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc.

2. the idea, image, desire, feeling, etc., itself.

3. the state of being obsessed.

4. the act of obsessing.

O
BSESSION.
I
S THAT WHAT
she was?

Obsessing. Is that what he was doing?

Processing
.

The thing about hanging out in a town like this was that there wasn't shit to do while he waited. Not having shit to do meant having too much time on his hands. Having too much idle time forced him to consider the kinds of things a man in his line of work had no business considering.

Marlowe Price should've been just a piece of a complicated puzzle that would ultimately lead him to her husband. She should've just been a nice bonus, pretty ass, tasty ass, delicious, that he should've been able to fuck, come, zip up his pants, and walk away from. But for the last two days, he'd hardly been able to think about anyone or anything else. That bothered him. He wasn't here for her. How many times did he have to remind himself of that?

Plato had come here with a simple enough agenda. Find Ed Price, take care of the problem, and leave, but since he'd taken her to that hotel yesterday, he couldn't get the image of Marlowe, knowing that she was naked under his T-shirt, out of his mind. Tantalizing creamy, thick thighs particularly left an impression on him. Marlowe was most definitely an obsession, but she was absolutely not letting him get close enough to sample any part of her.

Sex was sex was sex. It was what it always was and what it would always be. It was procreation and pleasure. The procreation part he'd nixed a long time ago. But he still held on to his conviction for the pleasure part. With her, though, he found himself fixated on time, on savoring that woman in slow, delicious motion. He imagined that torturous kind of lovemaking, pulling nonstop orgasms from her until the sheets were soaked and she begged him to stop and yet held on to him as if her life depended on him.

Plato abruptly closed the door on his fantasies and adjusted his rock-hard cock straining against his jeans.

Pleasure? Yes. Connection? What kind? Physical. Yes. Emotional? What did that even look like? What would it feel like? Emotions were catalysts for disaster. They made the water dirty, the mind open and susceptible to dust and debris. Twenty-plus years of doing this kind of work had taught him that with emotion came a kind of professional impotence. He didn't have the luxury of feelings like empathy, sympathy, love, or consideration because they could get him killed. Nothing was personal to a man like Plato. Not even death.

*   *   *

Ed Price wasn't dead, and he wasn't far enough away. Instinct told Plato that, and he trusted it because instinct had saved his ass and earned him one hell of a good living. The air was foul because cowardly mother fuckers like him left an odor. And now, Plato wasn't the only one following Price's trail. Marlowe had some very valid reasons for finding the man. A living, breathing Price would save her life. Lucy Price, on the other hand, was the fly in his Kool-Aid. What would finding him alive do for her? She could've just loved him. She could've just wanted her husband back, despite learning that he had married another woman. Right?

*   *   *

Plato had no idea what the hell this woman put into these steaks, but he had become addicted and went into withdrawals if he went longer than twelve hours without one. The attractive couple sitting at a table behind him got up and left not long after he'd arrived. Lucille Price he'd recognized. Her gentlemen friend he did not. He wasn't worried, though.

“Here you go,” the nervous woman said, setting his order down in front of him. “Can I get you anything else?”

She never could look him in the eyes for some reason, and he was starting to wonder if he should be eating her food at all. He didn't trust people who didn't make eye contact.

“Steak sauce,” he told her.

She forced a smile. “Oh, I'm sorry. I'll be right back.”

Plato's phone vibrated in his pocket, alerting him to an incoming text message.

Roman Medlock, private investigator.

Mrs. Price's boyfriend was a PI. Interesting.

“Here you go,” the woman said, damn near dropping the bottle of steak sauce on the counter. “I'm so sorry.”

“What's wrong?” he finally asked impatiently, startling the woman.

For the first time since he'd been coming here, she looked at him. “I'm sorry?”

“You don't like the way I look? Sound? Smell? What?” Plato challenged.

The woman stared at him.

“You've got me feeling some kind of way, and not a good one. Have I done something to you?” he asked.

He waited. She took a deep breath and finally spoke up.

“You're Marlowe's devil.”

She looked and sounded absolutely relieved that she'd finally gotten that nonsense off her chest.

He stared blankly at the woman like she'd just spoken to him in Mandarin.

“I'm her cousin, Belle,” she said nervously, as if, now that she'd actually made eye contact with him and referred to him as the devil, she was now obligated to volunteer information. “She told Shou Shou, our aunt, about you.”

“Shou what?”

“Said you were the one coming for her. She told us that even before you got here.”

Marlowe knew he was coming? How was that possible?

“And I'm a … what did you call me? The devil?”

She swallowed. “Devil. Yes.” She nodded. “The bones told her you were coming.”

“Whose bones?”

“Possum.”

Possum. “Possum. Isn't that a rodent?” Plato couldn't believe that he was sitting here having this conversation. “A possum's bones said that I was the devil and that I was coming for Marlowe?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“Like Satan?”

“I believe so. Yes.”

Plato leaned back and thought about this for a moment. He'd been called a lot of things in his lifetime. Mother fucker. Asshole. Sonofabitch. He'd been called names in twenty different languages, and in all this time, in all those countries and circumstances, he couldn't recall anyone ever referring to him as the devil or Satan or Lucifer.

“So these bones,” he probed, giving way to his curiosity. “They what? Predict the future?”

“They reveal things,” she explained. “Things that the spirits think you need to know.”

“And you and Marlowe and this Shou Shou all believe I'm the devil.”

Her gaze shifted back and forth in thought. “The bones said it.”

“Do I look like the devil?” She truly believed what she was telling him, but Plato couldn't help it. Teasing her was not even hard.

She frowned. “How should I know? I've never seen him.”

“Has Marlowe?”

She didn't answer.

Well, that explained why Marlowe treated him like a leper and why she damn near choked herself in all those weird necklaces he'd seen her wearing last night at the hotel. They probably warded off evil spirits or something. Granted, in his lifetime, he had done some pretty devilish things, and if there was such a thing as heaven and hell, he'd likely end up in the latter, but to be walking around town with people actually believing that you're Beelzebub?

He couldn't help it. Plato just started to chuckle, shook his head, leaned over his plate, and started to cut into his steak. Poor Belle backed away like she really had just seen Satan.

 

It's Still Burning

Q
UENTIN
P
ARKER WANTED TO BELIEVE
Marlowe's story. He stood back and watched police officers search through every inch of her yard, even getting down on their hands and knees looking for a shell casing or any other kind of evidence left over from a month ago that could provide some truth to her story.

“If a murder had taken place back here like you said, Marlowe,” he said over his shoulder to Marlowe standing anxiously on her back deck, “all that rain we've been having has probably washed away any evidence.”

Marlowe didn't say a word. She knew that things weren't looking good for her. All that Quentin had right now was a theory, but it was starting to morph into something more concrete with each passing day. Marlowe Price had found out that her husband was in fact married to another woman. She became jealous and then angry. Angry enough to kill him. Shit like that happened, and he was building a strong case for motive. Pressure was coming down hard for him to hurry up and solve this thing.

“Ninety-nine percent of these mother fuckers couldn't find Blink, Texas, on a map six months ago,” Mayor Brewer had grunted at Quentin and the mayor's brother, the prosecuting attorney John Brewer, both standing on the other side of the mayor's desk. He was talking about reporters. “Now they're buzzing around here like flies on shit. This is not the kind of attention I want on my town.”

“None of us do, Randall,” John had retorted.

“Then put that bitch to trial and get this shit over with.”

“We're working as quickly as we can, Mayor,” Quentin had respectfully said. “But the evidence we have isn't even circumstantial.”

“Social media's got that witch burned at the stake, Chief,” he'd said angrily. “They've got half the public buying into the same crap you call circumstantial. Why's it working for them and not you?”

“Because I've got to take her to trial on more than what's going on in social media, Randall,” his brother had answered. “You're talking about sending a woman possibly to death row over sensationalism and fucking public opinion without the benefit of a fair trial. She'd have an appeal filed and lawsuit along with it before they'd even closed the door on her cell.”

The mayor had glared at them both. “I don't care how you do it because Marlowe Brown doesn't mean shit to me, but she's a blight on my city. She's shit in my yard, and I want her cleaned up.”