actually met my ex there.” The memory didn’t generate tender feelings, but the circumstances around the meet did. “Humiliated him on the court in front of his buddies.”
“He was a cop, you said.” His tone was carefully even. “Did you keep his name after the divorce?”
“Never took it.” She watched the general appearance of the buildings flanking the streets erode with each block. “Didn’t see the point.” She sometimes wondered if she’d known intuitively it wouldn’t last and had wanted to save herself the headache of switching back. The thought was vaguely depressing. She might have entered the marriage for all the wrong reasons, but she liked to think she’d gone into it with some level of commitment.
“What’s his name?” His tone was entirely too casual as he slowed the car for the members of the pickup baseball game to scatter from the street. “Maybe I’ve run into him.”
With well over six thousand police officers in the PPD ranks, it was doubtful, but she told him anyway. “Mac Langel.”
His expression was shocked. “You were married to Mac Langel?”
“Relatively briefly. Watch that kid.”
His attention switched back to the street, where a girl who couldn’t have been more than four was darting out in front of him. “Mac Langel. Wow.”
Pursuing the topic was a mistake. Intellectually, Risa knew it. But there was a load of disapproval layered over the disbelief in his voice. She blamed the poor choice she was about to make on hunger and lack of sleep. Not to mention, she never had gotten that coffee. “You know him?”
“A little.”
After that reaction, she’d expected a bit more detail. “Sounded like more than a little.”
He turned into a deeply rutted parking lot wedged against a Thai restaurant. “Enough to know you were way out of his league.”
The unexpected compliment softened something inside her. Just when she thought she had him pegged, he could take her unaware. “Thanks. And just so you realize I caught it, nice dodge.”
He hesitated long enough to put the vehicle in park. Turn off the ignition. Then he faced her. “Okay. He’s an idiot. Got a chip on his shoulder and a constant need to prove himself. I don’t like playing with him or against him on the court. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be partnered with him. You had a lucky escape.”
Shrugging, she said only, “It was a long time ago. I was looking for . . . permanence, I guess.” Something that had always been sorely lacking when she was growing up. “We seemed to have a lot in common.” Oddly, she appreciated the rude sound he made at that. She’d come to realize that when it came to values, at least, she and Mac were continents apart. “What about you? Any former spouses you’d like me to rip on?”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Never been married. Had someone serious a few years ago. Then I had to take over guardianship of my nephew and she bolted.”
A nephew. All sorts of layers were exposing themselves in Nate McGuire today. “Your nephew lives with you?”
“My sister’s back now, too. It’s complicated.” He opened the car door and got out, leaving Risa to agree silently. She’d never had any siblings, but she could certainly attest that family was complicated.
The Thai restaurant didn’t match the address they were looking for, but the liquor store next to it did. Its flickering neon sign promising WINE, BEER, SPIRITS wasn’t a match for the one they sought, but she hadn’t expected it would be. The last telephone listing for Zena’s Place that Shroot had discovered was in the 1992 Yellow Pages.
What was even more disheartening was the fact there was no building at all directly across from it. An empty lot punctuated the street front like a gap-toothed grin, litter and rubbish piled in precarious heaps.
Without much hope, she followed Nate into the store and found him already speaking to the middle-aged eastern Indian clerk there. “We have been here nine years,” he was telling Nate. “Bad neighborhood. Very bad. I have been robbed thirteen times. My third insurance company is threatening to drop me. Maybe I will move the business. But to where? Other places sell liquor, too.”
Rather than aisles of product, he had his wares displayed from floor to ceiling behind the full-length counter. Obviously an attempt to prevent shoplifting.
“Was this place a liquor store when you bought it?” Nate asked him. A stooped, grizzled old man shuffled through the front door.