the impression that he had severe shit happening in his life.
“Wait, what? For real, they found a hand?” I mused out loud. “And not just bones, a real hand.”
“Marco said it looked really cool. Can I go and see it? Please, Dad.” He glanced back at the reception desk, his job right at this moment, where he would sit and study. My first instinct was to say no because I was a responsible dad, but my curiosity had me grabbing my cell and then opening the front door of the hotel and waiting for Harry to catch up. We had enough weird in this town without a disembodied hand, but if there was one thing I knew, knowledge was power. Why was there a hand, whose dog was it, and why was the tall, sexy blond in my town?
It was the blond whom I focused on first as we joined the back of the small group standing outside a cordon of police tape. I recognized at least one journalist whom I thought had left town two weeks ago, but had clearly come back here on speculation and hit the scattered-bloody-limb jackpot, because on the sidewalk, in the shade, was a hand. There wasn’t a lot of blood, apart from that on the dog’s fur, and the hand itself was anemic. The way it was lying I could see the nails as the fingers curved, but other than that, nothing. My fingers itched as my brain put two and two together, and I forced my own hands into my pockets in self-defense.
Harry had gone to stand with Marco, the two of them heads close, talking about what, I didn’t know. My son and my sister’s son, cousins, were joined at the hip, as close as brothers, and easily the best friends I’d ever seen.
“I have to go back,” Luca muttered close to me. “You got them?” He meant the terrible twosome, Harry and Marco, and I gave him a fake shocked glance.
“You’re leaving me with them and a hand?”
He elbowed me and ambled away toward Calabresi's, where he lived and worked, giving me the finger as I huffed.
The blond was chatting to Sawyer, Logan, and Heather, along with Drew, who hovered to one side as if his world had been shaken.
He and I had come a long way in the last few weeks from quiet animosity with too many awful memories on his side to a desperate need to make things right on mine, straight on through to finding our way back to friendship. I wasn’t sure everything was back to normal, but he glanced my way, and when I gestured at the body part and lifted an eyebrow, he met my gaze steadily and shrugged. It seemed he didn’t know any more than we did.
Then the whispers started.
“Fire.”
“There’s FIRE tattooed on his hand.”
“Fire? Isn’t that… I know someone has that tattoo… I’ve seen it.”
By the time they reached me, it seemed like every person standing there had a different theory from police to vagrants to that guy who used to work in the shoe store. I knew that tattoo, and I’d only seen it once, and when I met Sawyer’s glance, I could see he’d come to the same conclusion.
Adam Gray.
There was more discussion between the cops, and the blond standing with them.
“Who’s that cop standing with Uncle Sawyer?” Harry asked at my side, staring up at me as if I had all the answers. One day we’d be eye to eye, and the way he was growing, like a string bean, it wouldn’t be long at all.
“I have no idea,” I said, but it seemed Nicky did know because she turned in front of me, and I should have known she’d have been there, always the center of everything. She was the one person I never wanted to be stuck at the grocery store with because she had this way about her that frankly scared the shit out of me.
“He's Special Agent Lucas Beaumont, and he's here about everything,” she announced, just loud enough to cause a tidal wave of oohs and aahs in the group.
I couldn’t help but glance over at blond dude with a new optic. This sexy, gorgeous, uptight, suited man was a federal agent? Well, that was just shit. While the sexy, gorgeous bit was great, the fact he was a fed, with some of the questionable contacts I had online, meant he was dangerous to have around town. If he ever found out about