got that black eye recently?” Luke asked.
“No wonder you’re a big city detective,” Chris replied sarcastically. “You obviously don’t miss a thing.”
“Watch your mouth,” Luke warned. “Just tell me what happened.”
“I don’t answer to you, Reynolds.” A chair scraped the wood floor.
“Chris, have a care, now. Don’t stand up!” Beth called out.
“Beth, I’m fine.”
“Yeah, right,” Luke scoffed.
Frannie grimaced. Uh-oh. It was becoming obvious that the conversation wasn’t going to get much smoother. Putting aside her intention to wrap up some ice in a dishtowel for Chris’s face, Frannie hurried back and attempted to ease the tension in the room.
“Luke, perhaps you could wait a bit to ask your questions? He is hurt, you know.”
“I don’t think so.”
Fixing a glare on Luke, she took her guest’s arm and guided him across the room. Of course he didn’t need any help, but his expression looked so guarded, she didn’t want him to think he was all alone. “Here, Chris. Please sit, wouldja?”
But to her surprise, he glanced at Beth. For the first time, his eyes turned tender.
“Please,” she whispered.
“Fine.” Chris sat down gingerly.
Worried, Frannie turned Beth’s way. Had Chris been injured in all sorts of other places besides his face? “Do you need to go see the doctor? We could take you. I mean, Luke could.”
“I don’t need the doctor.”
“Chris, what happened?” Luke asked, this time obviously tempering his voice.
As Chris sipped the water, Frannie felt the tension in the room rise. All of them wanted to know the truth, but it didn’t seem as if Chris felt his pains were any of their business.
After draining almost half the glass, he set it down carefully on one of the coasters and then straightened up with a sigh. “I guess I’m not going to get out of telling you all my story, am I?”
“Nope,” said Luke.
“We are only trying to help you, Chris,” Beth added.
Chris’s jaw tightened. “All right. Here’s the deal. I work for the DEA.”
That meant nothing to Frannie. She’d heard Luke explain the letters, but she’d already forgotten what they stood for. Warily, she met Beth’s eye. Beth shrugged, too. Only Luke seemed to find the statement interesting.
“Do you have any identification?”
“It’s up in my room. You’re welcome to go through my papers. But do you really think I’d make that up?”
“Probably not.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t remember what a DEA is,” Frannie said.
“Drug Enforcement Agency,” Chris explained. “I was asked to go undercover here in Crittenden County.”
“You came here, looking for drugs?”
“For drug dealers.” Chris exhaled. “There’s a lot that’s going on, but suffice it to say that Perry Borntrager’s death has caused quite a disturbance in a lot of circles. We’ve got some informants who say he was the middleman between St. Louis and this area. When he died, the people above him on the food chain got desperate.”
“So that’s where you come in?” Luke prodded.
Chris nodded. “We were hoping his suppliers would be so desperate that they’d accept me fairly easily.” Fingering the sunglasses in his hands, Chris added, “I even said the reason sales were slow was because there were more police in the area than usual.”
Luke grimaced. “So let me guess—they picked you up to show you just how unhappy they were with you.”
Chris nodded as he shifted, then winced. “Pretty much.”
Gesturing around the cozy living room with the overstuffed floral couch, Luke said, “I don’t understand why you would stay here and not someplace more private.”
“I thought it might be a good place to start out. Everyone knows that the Yellow Bird Inn doesn’t get a lot of customers. I thought I could pretty much come and go as I wanted, unobserved.” With a sardonic direction Beth’s way, he said, “I thought I was pretty much under the radar, too . . . until Beth here showed up.”
Across from Frannie, Beth gulped. “Me?”
Chris smiled wryly. “Yep. You asked more questions about my business than Frannie did.”
“I don’t know whether I should be embarrassed about that or not,” Frannie said. “After Luke said I was too nosy, I decided to give my guests more privacy.”
“I shouldn’t have been so rude,” Luke murmured. “You were fine.”
Frannie gazed at Luke and felt her heart skip a beat. It seemed to her like there was much more meaning in his words than what he was saying out loud.
Oblivious to the new tension rising between her and Luke, Beth spoke again. “Now I’m embarrassed. Oh, Chris. My questioning didn’t cause the men to come find you, did they?”
Right before