might be tough finding someone to practice with. I’d probably break one of my parents or my friends. Maybe my kid brother.”
“There you go.” Dash picked up their damp towels and held open the door. “How old is he?”
“Sixteen going on thirty, with the mood to match.”
“I remember those days.”
She almost asked him right then. Why did you drop out of high school and leave Whispering Pines? Did you really hitchhike across the whole United States? What made you go to California? What made you come back?
But she didn’t. Their mood was light and celebratory, a fragile bubble that hovered in the air between them, and she didn’t feel like bursting it. “See ya next time, Dash.”
“See ya.”
“HEY, BOSS, THERE’S a bunch of kids hanging out in the parking lot,” Hans said when he came in from throwing out the garbage.
“That’s not really a crime, last time I checked.”
“Except Martha McGee complained that they scratched her Mustang.”
Dash sighed. “Didn’t she complain about something like that last month?”
“And the month before.”
“She’s the only person I know who drives a Mustang in the middle of a New York winter.”
Hans chuckled. “I know. But she’s got a ton of money, and she spends a lot of it here.”
Dash pulled on his jacket. “Okay, show me these kids who are terrorizing the neighborhood.” He followed Hans out the back door, which opened onto a large public parking lot that ran half the length of Main Street. At six o’clock it was still pretty full, a combination of late-night workers and his own gym clients. He’d paid to have security cameras put in last year, along with better, brighter lights. He saw at once the group Hans was talking about.
Five teenagers, four guys and a girl, all wearing thick winter coats with hoods pulled up over their faces. They stood in a dim corner of the lot, and it wasn’t hard to tell what they were up to. Or maybe, Dash thought, that was just because he’d seen the same shit a dozen times a month living out west. Three were smoking a blunt. Another held a bottle in one hand. They talked in hushed tones, and as he watched, two of them exchanged something that looked like a wad of cash.
“Hey, there,” he said as he walked over. They were jumpy and twitchy, and they turned and scattered as soon as he got near. The girl had a duffle bag over one shoulder, and she grabbed a pill bottle from one of the guys and stuffed it into the bag before taking off on a jog across the street.
“Not the place,” Dash called as they disappeared. Hell, he wasn’t naive enough to think drug deals didn’t happen in Whispering Pines, but he hated to see them right behind his place of business. If his parole officer got wind of anything like this, he’d be a dead man.
“What are they, fourteen?” Hans said as Dash returned to the back door. He stood shivering in the cold.
“Somethin’ like that.” Dash shook his head. He’d gone down that road, made those same mistakes, almost a decade ago. At sixteen he’d thought he ruled the world. He’d left Whispering Pines with grand plans, good looks, and a sweet-talking tongue. And it had been golden for a while, until everything crumbled around him. Man, he hated to see other dumb kids making those same mistakes and assumptions.
“Call the cops,” he said as they walked back inside. “Let ‘em know.” At the very least, he could get on record that he’d seen it, reported it, and stayed far away from it all.
Chapter Ten
Friday morning, Sienna overslept. When she finally opened her eyes, the time on her phone read a quarter to eight. She’d slept right through her six-thirty alarm.
“No!” She leaped out of bed and pulled on the first thing she saw, an old sweater with fraying sleeves and the same pair of jeans she’d worn the day before. She splashed water on her face, tied her hair into a ponytail, and grabbed her makeup bag on the way out the door. Outside, two inches of newly fallen snow covered her car. Of course. She opened the trunk and realized she had no idea where she’d left her snow brush. At her parents’ house? At the gym?
“Hey, Sienna.”
She looked over her shoulder to see Ella Ericksen coming down the stairs behind her. Ella and her sister Becca lived upstairs from Sienna, though they rarely crossed paths. Ella had a designer