He walked back to her, leaned in, and whispered, “Know my favorite part of that movie?” He put his hand on her breast and squeezed. “When Maverick and the chick get it on.”

She shoved him away. “Go!” She said it sternly, but she was smiling.

When Shaw felt he’d covered enough distance for it to be safe to stop, he pulled off the highway onto a rutted track that led into a dense thicket. He cut the engine and turned off the headlights. For what he needed to do, he would use the flashlight on his phone, which was new. Only he had the number.

He shone the flashlight over the seat to check on Jordie Bennett. Best as he could tell, she was still out cold and hadn’t moved since he’d placed her in the backseat. But she wouldn’t be unconscious forever, and he had to prepare for that inevitability.

He got out, retrieved what he needed from the trunk, then opened the backseat door and placed his phone on the floorboard to provide him light.

She was as limp as a dishrag, making it easy for him to reposition her arms and legs. Once, she murmured something unintelligible, and he suspended what he was doing until he was certain that she wasn’t about to wake up. The longer she was out, the better for him.

Better for her, too.

But she didn’t come around, so, moving quickly, he removed her sandals, cursing the dainty buckles on the straps, then efficiently secured her feet and hands. He was backing out of the door, when he paused to brush a strand of hair off her cheek. That was when he noticed the blood spatters on her face.

“Shit.” She would freak. He debated, then decided that taking a couple extra minutes wouldn’t matter.

When he’d finished everything he needed to do, he gently closed the backseat door and the trunk and got back into the driver’s seat. Her and Mickey’s cell phones were lying in the passenger seat where he’d tossed them as he made his getaway from the bar.

He started with hers and was relieved to see that it was getting a cell signal. He accessed the log of recent calls and scrolled through it rapidly, scanning the calls she’d made or received throughout the day today and for the past several days. All the names were listed in her Contacts. Nothing was noteworthy.

Nothing except the last call she’d received.

It had come in a few minutes after nine o’clock that evening. Nearby area code. A number with no name attached. She’d called it back twice. Shaw considered, then called it himself. It rang several times but went unanswered. He clicked off.

Turning his head, he thoughtfully watched her sleeping form for several moments. Then he shut her phone down, removed the battery from it, and placed both in the glove compartment.

He picked up Mickey’s phone, accessed the Recent calls and knew the Caller Unknown belonged to Panella. He would be standing by, waiting to hear “Mission accomplished” from Mickey.

“Too bad, asshole,” Shaw whispered. “You’re dealing with me now.” He removed the battery from Mickey’s phone, and locked it in the glove box along with Jordie’s. Now feeling the pressure of time, he started the car.

As he pulled onto the dark and deserted highway, he thought back over the evening. It hadn’t gone as he’d thought it would, but had actually turned out far better than anticipated. He’d come away with the primo prize. She lay unconscious in his backseat.

Chapter 3

Lord have mercy,” Hick sighed when they alighted from the sheriff’s office patrol car and surveyed the crime scene. “Bad as I expected.”

The chopper that transported him and Joe had set down in a field which, in early fall, served as a regional fairgrounds. A deputy shuttled them from there to the site of Mickey Bolden’s murder.

Portable lights had been brought in. The ugly tavern was lit up brighter than the Las Vegas strip. The men in uniform who were milling about cast eerie shadows that stretched into the surrounding forest before being absorbed by it.

“Worse,” Joe said in response to Hick’s summation of the situation. The two of them ducked beneath the yellow band that was intended to keep people off the parking lot but had been largely ignored. However, most of the trespassers were giving wide berth to the Lexus. He and Hick made a beeline for it.

An efficient young agent named Holstrom, one of the crime scene investigators from their New Orleans office, was consulting with a man whose natty seersucker suit and elfin countenance didn’t fit here in deep bayou country, where no one had the courage to identify all the hunks of meat in the gumbo, and the mere notion of gun control laws was knee-slapping hilarious.

Joe and Hick exchanged subdued greetings with their colleague who introduced the small man he’d been talking to as Dr. Something-or-Other, the parish medical examiner. All were wearing gloves, so they didn’t shake hands, which was just as well because they would have had to reach across the gulf of chunky, congealing blood between them.

Going straight to business, the ME said, “He’s already at the morgue, but when he was identified they called me back out here to talk to y’all. I’ve got pictures of what he looked like when I arrived.”

He tapped his iPad screen and held it up so they could see. He flipped through several photos of Mickey Bolden’s sizable corpse taken from various angles and distances. None were pretty. Joe almost felt sorry for the lawless bastard.

Hick, a devout Catholic, breathed a prayer and crossed himself.

Joe, who was also Catholic but less devout, said, “No need to ask cause of death.”

“He never felt it,” the ME said with more dispassion than Joe would have expected from a man with such a benevolent face.

Joe pointed to one of the photos on the iPad, specifically to the pistol lying within inches of Mickey’s outstretched hand. “Who retrieved his weapon?”

“First responders determined that it hadn’t been recently fired,” Holstrom said, “but they left it for the homicide detective from the SO to collect.”

“Good.” Joe also noticed in the photographs that Mickey’s hands were gloved. He asked about those.

“He wore them to the morgue,” the ME said. “I bagged them. A deputy picked them up, so the sheriff’s office has them, too. Chain of possession has been recorded.”

“Thanks. We’ll want the autopsy report as soon as—”

“I know, I know. You fellas never say, ‘No rush, Doc. Whenever you can get to it will be just fine.’”

He might look like a leprechaun, but he had the disposition of a rattlesnake. Joe decided he didn’t like him. Surveying the immediate area, he noticed a pair of markers that had been left in the gravel. “What was there?”

“Ms. Bennett’s purse and key fob,” Holstrom replied. “The detective retrieved them.”

Joe looked wider afield, searching for heel skid marks that would indicate that a scuffle had taken place or that someone—Jordie Bennett—had been dragged away. But there was nothing like that. “No signs of a struggle?”

“What you see is what we’ve got. We’re searching,” Holstrom added. He pointed out a team member who was several yards away, crouched down studying the loose surface of the parking lot. “But the manager, who also tends bar, estimated that when this went down there were fifteen to twenty vehicles in the lot.”