Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 143382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 717(@200wpm)___ 574(@250wpm)___ 478(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 717(@200wpm)___ 574(@250wpm)___ 478(@300wpm)
“I hear you, sister,” Daisy mumbled.
“We should get back to work,” Luna decreed.
“Don’t think you’re off the hook on this,” Raye called to her back as she left the bar.
Luna ignored her and kept motoring.
This reminded me to ask a question I hadn’t thought to ask earlier (no, not the one about why Knox was at Luna’s apartment Sunday morning, that’d have to wait until later since she plainly wasn’t feeling talkative about the subject, and equally plainly, Raye nor Harlow knew what was going on with those two either). My actual question needed to be asked, particularly to Eric, someone I couldn’t ask at that moment, because he wasn’t there.
So I asked Raye.
“These guys are expending a lot of resources on a case that isn’t theirs. What’s up with that?”
Stella made a noise.
Daisy murmured, “Mm-hmm.”
I looked to them then back to Raye when she spoke.
“Cap explained that they do this kind of thing.”
“They sure do.” Daisy was still murmuring.
“Do what kind of thing?” Harlow asked.
It was Stella who answered. “Watching your asses, so you don’t get exploded by a car bomb.”
Cripes!
She continued, “Along with working cases they lose money on so stuff the cops don’t have the time and resources to focus on can get sorted a whole lot faster so innocent people stop vanishing.” She threw out a hand and finished, “And the like.”
I ignored the car bomb mention and said to Stella, “Like pro bono avenger type stuff?”
Stella smiled. “Yes. But in this case, there’s also the fact they can’t have you girls showing them up.”
I didn’t think it was that.
I thought it would be easy just to keep an eye on us and let us do our thing without members of their team being up all night, helping us do our thing.
I thought instead they were doing it because, just like us, they didn’t want anyone else to go missing, and if they were still around to be found, they wanted to locate the ones that were already gone.
I also thought this was tremendously awesome.
“What time are we starting tonight?” I asked Raye.
“Right after work, if you two are game,” Raye answered.
Harlow and I nodded our heads.
“Cap suggested we start with swinging by the hotel to talk to Mary. She wasn’t around for very long, but she was there when someone was taken,” Raye told us.
“That’s a plan,” I confirmed.
“Luna can just get over it. Knox will be at the stakeout spot at 5:30. She can join him when we’re done,” Raye stated.
Harlow inched closer, so Raye and I inched with her, and Daisy and Stella both came up to their forearms on the bar so they could listen in too.
“What do you think that’s about?” Harlow queried.
There it was.
I was right.
Or, at least Harlow didn’t know what was going on.
“I think she’s got the hots for Knox, and Knox has the hots for her, and they won’t do anything about it because Cap and I are together, and she’s my best friend, Knox is Cap’s best friend, and they’re big, fat dorks,” Raye shared.
Time to get my question in.
“Do you know why Knox was at Luna’s Sunday morning?”
Raye shot me a baffled expression. “He’d come over to ours. Cap was going to make brunch then they were going to the shooting range.”
Oh.
That wasn’t very hot tea, or any tea at all.
Bummer.
“Knox was pretty up in her space while Mary was brandishing her knife,” Harlow noted.
“Knife?” Stella asked.
“Shh, don’t interrupt,” Daisy whispered to her.
“I saw him get close, but I didn’t see what happened when Mary whipped out that knife,” I said. “Liam had pulled me out of the way.”
“Knox put his arm around her belly and yanked her behind him,” Harlow told me. “It was really sweet. And I thought it was weird that it looked like Luna’s face would burn off, it got so red. But I figured she was ticked that he protected her when Mary wasn’t going to do anything with that knife.” Her gaze wandered to the restaurant. “Maybe it was something else.”
Oh, it was something else.
We all looked to Luna, including Daisy and Stella twisting on their stools to do it.
Luna felt it, and without turning our way, yelled across the space, “Kiss off and die!”
Daisy’s laugh sounded again.
“We probably should go back to work,” Raye said.
We probably should.
“I’ll check on your order,” I said to Daisy and Stella.
“Thanks, sugar, you’re the best,” Daisy replied.
I headed back to the kitchen.
The order was up.
I brought it out to the girls, gave them cutlery and got them both sodas.
Then, except for Stella, once she finished the toad-in-the-hole, declaring she was coming back once a week for lunch before they left, nothing else happened all shift (apart from Tito barking out laughter on occasion while he read his book, something I decided to take as a positive sign).