Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
She was taking this seriously, and he noted, after a cursory walk-through, she went right to the closet, where the door wasn’t open, but it was ajar.
Sean was close, and she asked him to open it for her, which he did.
She went in with Sean and came out to call, “They didn’t take my jewelry.”
“Please keep looking, Nadia,” Harry returned.
She nodded and looked.
After a while, and that buzzing in his head coming back when he saw how pale she became when she got a closer look at the back door, she stopped on the outside beside the kitchen island. Once there, she put her hands to her hips.
Harry and Riggs approached.
When they got close, Nadia shared, “I don’t see anything missing. I don’t even see anything that’s been touched, outside the obvious, the back door.”
“You’re sure?” Harry pressed.
She nodded while doing a sweep with her eyes.
It was when she looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen that he noticed her body jerk.
“What?” Riggs asked.
Her head whipped around to him, and her eyes were big.
“What, honey?” he pushed.
“Riggs, that wine from your friend is gone.”
Riggs stood completely still.
Except his lips.
Those he used to growl, “Motherfucking Bubbles.”
SIXTEEN
It Takes One to Know One
Riggs
Riggs’d had a shitty afternoon.
Part of it was, he was, right then, standing outside Bubbles’s hospital room with Harry after hearing the doctor say that they’d brought Bubbles out of the coma, but he hadn’t regained consciousness yet.
Before that, he’d gone with Harry to The Hole to have a look in the storeroom, and he was able to report that the other bottles of wine he’d seen in the locked cabinet were gone. Though he couldn’t say exactly the number that had been there, or report if anything else was missing, because he hadn’t paid that close of attention.
He’d also given Harry Bubbles’s story about tasting it in Sonoma a couple of years ago and buying a case. However, he didn’t share his suspicions that his friend had been lying about where he got that wine. Mostly because he didn’t have to, Harry figured that out on his own.
And he felt like a dick, and a snitch (but not too much of one since Nadia had been dragged into this crap), when he shared that Bubbles had mentioned women named Candy and Barbie. Two women Riggs didn’t know, nor did Harry, and between the two of them, Riggs reckoned they knew five sixths of the population of Misted Pines, though a bit less of the entirety of Fret County.
He’d gone to the hospital with Harry to interrogate Bubbles if he’d regained consciousness, not only because he wanted to hear what that fucker had to say, but also because he could tell Harry if the man was lying.
Unfortunately, they didn’t get to do that part.
In the midst of this, Harry reported to Riggs that Rus and Karen Wilkins, another FC deputy, had been looking around outside Nadia’s cabin while they were inside, and apparently whoever this was didn’t take the time to cover their tracks like the “ghosts” did.
Therefore, with all the rain from the day before making the dirt wet, they had tons of tracks leading from the road to and all around the cabin, including Nadia’s back door, and back to the road, where they also found tire tracks that suggested a truck or an SUV had pulled off to the side and parked.
They were canvassing the people who lived on the road to see if they’d noted a vehicle parked there, and Harry had asked Riggs to call Nadia to ask the same.
She hadn’t.
The canvass wasn’t done. With Bubbles’s security system at the bar being out of action, so no camera footage, and nothing pinging so far with prints and blood and other samples they collected from the bar, except Bubbles’s own blood and prints, and prints of staff (although they’d identified some blood from another source, they just had yet to identify that source), until Bubbles woke up, they had nothing.
Except now they had the fact that someone really wanted to get that wine back.
If it cost five hundred bucks a pop, times twelve (if there had been a case of it), Riggs could almost see that.
But to expend that effort for one of twelve bottles, when they’d already recovered ten, it was clear something else was up.
Harry felt the same. And since it was Riggs who bought two bottles, and whoever was behind it knew Nadia was going to get one of them (something only Bubbles could tell them, which gave indication of what he gave up during his beating), and they only recovered one, this meant his house could be on their radar. Therefore, Harry had parked a deputy in his driveway after Riggs left Nadia there.
His mom was picking Ledger up from school and taking him home, which was where Riggs wanted to be, because he’d had a bottled smoothie for breakfast, no lunch, he was fucking hungry, and he wanted to see his kid…and Nadia.