for sure was that he didn’t feel right. Maybe he should have just done her when he had the chance and moved on.
“Hi, Kyle. Hey, I’m at work, baby, and you know that big tall guy who came in the other day with the blonde cop? He was back in here today, asking me questions and it scared me, you know, what you said, about you getting into trouble by hanging out here?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Marci,” he’d said, trying to calm her, though there was something in her voice that sounded more like she was acting spooked instead of being afraid. And he knew her well enough now to know she didn’t scare easily. Hell, she wasn’t even scared the other night. She might have been pissed. She might have even known that if she hadn’t done what he wanted he would have killed her right there like the rest of them. But she didn’t come off scared. He liked that in a woman.
“OK, listen. What the hell did the guy say?” he asked.
“He was talking about missing bartenders,” she said. “Girls that had worked at a bunch of places, up on OPB and down off Seventeenth Street and even here that that blonde cop thinks were kidnapped.”
Kidnapped, he thought. Christ, Marci, you’re such a child.
“Yeah, well, those are a bunch of rumors, Marci. They’re like urban legends that assholes like to sit around at the bar and yak about like it’s all intriguing when it isn’t anything more than girls walking away from their job, gone down to Key West or someplace. Don’t tell me you never wanted to just walk away and get the hell out of there?”
That fucking Richards, he thought. Still pushing that shit and now she’s got some goddamn P.I. into it because nobody in real law enforcement will believe her.
“But this guy says that he found some kind of evidence. Some kind of body part or blood or something that’s going to prove who did it and all they had to do was find out when certain people were in the bar when Suzy disappeared,” she’d said.
“Body parts? That’s what he said? Body parts?”
Christ, he thought, don’t lose it. Just get it out of her.
“He said a bunch of stuff but I don’t want to talk about it over the phone, Kyle, you know. Can’t you come over? I’m scared.”
And this time when she said it, she did sound scared and he didn’t want to hear the rest of it over the phone, anyway, he wanted to look into her eyes and hear it.
“I’ll be over in an hour,” he told her. “Just be calm, baby. I’m coming over.” These goddamn women can get so emotional.
On the drive over there he’d let his own head start cranking. Body parts. That’s bullshit. There’s no way Richards or some P.I. went out in the middle of the goddamn Glades and found body parts. Shit, the gators out there would have taken care of that long ago. Sure, somebody might have found a corpse or part of one out there. Fucking mopes were dumping dopers or bad business partners out there all the time. Shit, that asshole who beat up his old lady and killed his own kid went and dumped the body in one of the canals at a boat ramp out there just last summer and a fisherman came up with part of the body. But that was stupid, in close, where people hang out.
So they might have found something, but why come and ask Marci about it? Marci didn’t know shit unless they were trying to manufacture a case and were going to use her to set somebody up just to clear the case. That would be so typical of the detective bureau, use some poor innocent girl to make a case for them.
He’d parked at the shopping center on the other side and then walked over to Kim’s. Don’t be in such a hurry, he told himself. You draw attention to yourself. Why the hell did you bring the squad, anyway? That wasn’t too bright, somebody sees you coming into the place in broad daylight. Jesus, Kyle. What happened to careful?
Inside there was that group of magazine smart-asses at one end of the bar and the Schnapps guy in the middle. He went to the end and then around the corner, under the TV, instead of in his usual spot. Marci waited a minute or so before she came down and pulled a