Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

One

Damon

I didn’t seethe kid at first. He was standing behind a rack of magazines, and he was turned toward the glass door of the soda fridge, as if the bottles of Dr. Pepper were fascinating. I had to give him credit: until I saw the top of his head in the fisheye mirror in the corner above the gas station clerk, I had no idea he was there.

I usually had better instincts than that. Then again, my instincts weren’t what they used to be.

“Thirteen bucks,” the woman behind the counter said. She was sixtyish, her gray hair scraped back into a ponytail that looked painful, her polyester shirt hanging loosely on her bony frame.

I rifled through my wallet, glancing at the kid in the mirror reflection again. He hadn’t moved. “Add a pack of smokes,” I said, taking out another bill.

The lady slapped the pack onto the counter. “You should quit,” she said. “I got lung cancer twice. It’s a sonofabitch.”

“Yeah?” I said, pushing the money across the counter. She had the raspy voice of a longtime smoker. “Did you quit?”

She made a disgusted sound and took my money.

“I didn’t think so.” I looked at the reflection of the kid again. How old was he? Thirteen, fourteen? What fourteen-year-old kid hung out in a gas station in the middle of Wherever the Fuck, Colorado?

Then I saw why. While the lady was busy with my change, the kid silently opened the soda fridge and slid a bottle into his jacket. Then, just as deftly, he did the same thing with a bag of chips. He sidled along the aisle toward the door.

Oh, hell. This was just what I needed. Now I could either be an accessory to a petty shoplifting crime, or I could be the asshole who snitches on a kid.

This should be an easy question. I had just spent eight years as a cop—though a federal one. Shoplifting hadn’t been my area of expertise. If the kid had been carrying cocaine or meth, I would know exactly what to do. As it was, I watched in the mirror as he walked out the door with his illicit snack, the digital bell pinging as the door closed behind him.

I pulled an extra five from my wallet and gave it to the lady behind the counter. “Take this.”

She frowned. “What’s this for?”

“To pay for the chips and drink that kid just stole from your store.”

I thought it was a pretty good compromise. The store gets paid, the kid doesn’t get hurt. Everybody wins except my wallet.

I was wrong. The woman snatched my five, but she also flew into action. “That little shit. I’ve seen him in here before.” She came out from behind the counter and sprinted for the door, making the digital bell go off again. “You little fucker!” she shouted, surprisingly loud for a woman with bad lungs. “See how you like that bottle when it’s shoved up your ass!”

I could see the kid sprinting through the parking lot toward a waiting car, probably driven by one of his friends. The woman sprinted after him, still shouting. The kid sped up in terror and jumped into the car, which sped away.

I let the door shut behind me as I watched the scene. As the woman caught her breath and turned to come back, I pulled one of the cigarettes from the pack and lit it.

“Nice try,” I said as she approached. “You got close.”

“Thanks for the help, asshole,” she barked.

I shrugged. My days fighting the bad guys—even when the bad guys were kids—were over. “Want one?” I held the pack out to her.

She looked at the cigarettes, then glared at me. She wanted one, all right. Badly. “Go fuck yourself,” she said.

“You sure? They’re delicious.”

“Fuck off and die.” She walked past me and went into the store. She had a pretty good swearing vocabulary for an older lady. Maybe she had grandkids to teach her.

I stood in front of the gas station, smoking my cigarette and wondering for the hundredth time if I should turn around and go back. The question was, go back where? I had no home to go, no place that called to me. In my years in the DEA, I’d moved from place to place—Florida, New Mexico, California for a while. None of them were supposed to be home, so I hadn’t treated them like home. They were places to stay while I completed an investigation, and when the investigation was over, I’d move on to the next one.

Until I’d been shot twice, and I wasn’t going to do any investigations again.

The only direction to go now was forward, to the job that was waiting for me in this place I’d never been to before. The air was crisp with spring and the breeze tossed clouds past the mountains in the distance. I was alone in this parking lot, with nothing but myself and silence.

“Welcome to Colorado,” I said out loud.

Then I dropped my cigarette, ground it out, and went back to my car.

* * *

The radio dialwas packed with country music, because of course it was. This was the cowboy part of the country, at least according to Hollywood. What it would be like in real life, I had no idea.

I was driving through the town of Salt Springs, just outside of Denver. It was a good-sized town, with local art galleries and stores selling handmade crafts. I saw young people hanging around, and I remembered from my Google searches that there was a community college nearby. It seemed lively on a sunny spring day. What puzzled me was why Terry, my old acquaintance, had said that he ran a bar here. A bar apparently big enough to need a guy like me to head up security. I’d immediately pictured a strip club or a multi-level nightclub in a dank downtown somewhere, not this clean-cut place. What kind of bar had Terry been talking about?

Too late, it occurred to me that I could have done a little more research—or any research at all—before getting in my car and accepting Terry’s invitation to give me a job, sight unseen. I’d done it because I was at loose ends. My career with the DEA was over. My health was shot to shit, which was the reason for the career thing. I didn’t have a wife or kids or any of the other things a lot of guys have by age thirty-seven. Working undercover for years tends to guarantee you don’t make connections.

So, with that part of my life over, I’d had no idea what to do. Until Terry sent me an email, saying he’d heard through the DEA grapevine that I was free now, and he needed someone like me. Someone he trusted to take care of his bar here in Salt Springs, Colorado. He needed me to start right away, and was I interested?

It wasn’t as weird a request as it seemed. Retired agents could get pretty sweet gigs through the grapevine like this—we had skills, after all, and we knew how to use them. Some guys got jobs doing high-level secret security for corporations, or doing personal bodyguard work for rich people or celebrities. Terry had been an agent like me, though I had only worked with him once or twice. I remembered he’d left to take a job doing a private security contract for, I assumed, very good money. He must have used that good money to buy a bar.

And that, right there, was the sum of my information. I had no idea why Terry had bought—or possibly started—a bar business. I had no idea why a qualified security guy couldn’t be found in Colorado. I’d only known that I needed a job and a destination to head to, and Terry had offered me both. Frankly, I’d just wanted to get the hell out of Texas.

I had nothing against Texas, except for the fact that my brother and his soon-to-be wife, who was also his ex-wife, were there. And that situation was one I wanted to get away from.

My GPS told me that I had arrived at my destination, saving me from thinking too much about Texas.

The place was definitely a bar. It was two stories, the front styled like an old-time saloon. The cheesiness would be hard to fathom if it wasn’t right there in front of my eyes. Neon letters, not yet lit, hung across the building’s front, forming the words: THE WILD WILD WEST.

I drove around the side of the building and parked in the small lot at the back. I turned my car off and took a breath, running a hand through my hair. I had the sudden feeling that Terry wasn’t serious about his offer, that maybe he’d been pranking me. Though it would be a pretty fucking cruel prank.

There was only one way to find out. I was here now, and I had nowhere else to go, at least for tonight. The only thing for it was to go inside and face whatever was next.

I got out of the car and circled back to the front of the building. It was four in the afternoon, and the bar was open. I opened the wooden door and stepped inside.

It was dark in here, and my eyes had to adjust. It was a big place, with a huge first-floor room and an open staircase to a second level. Along one wall was a bar made to look like something from a Western, and there was a raised stage in the back corner which presumably was for a band. At this time of day there were only a few people in here, the daytime regulars and alcoholics who never missed a day. The atmosphere was tired and sleepy.

Working behind the bar was a guy of about sixty who would have scored highly in a Kenny Rogers lookalike contest. “Help you?” he asked me.

“Hey,” I said, approaching the bar. “I’m looking for Terry.”

Kenny Rogers frowned at me. “Terry ain’t here.”

“Is he around somewhere? He’s expecting me.”

Kenny frowned harder, like he’d smelled something bad. “You a friend of his?”

“More of a business acquaintance.”

“You a Fed?”

“I was,” I said. “What’s with the questions?”

Kenny wiped his hands on a towel. “What’s your name, son?”

“Damon Blake.”

“I’ll ask the boss.” He turned and went into the back room without another word.

I didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes later, Kenny came back out. Behind him was a woman.

A gorgeous woman.

She had dark hair in long curls, tied in a messy ponytail on top of her head. She was wearing an olive green tank top that showed off sleek shoulders and elegant, toned arms. When she came out from behind the bar, I could see that she was wearing jeans that fit her like a dream and ankle boots. She was fucking stunning. The problem was, she was scowling at me.

“Who are you?” the woman asked me. “What do you want?”

“Who are you?” I asked back.

“You’re in my bar, so you better answer first.”

Her bar? I thought this was Terry’s bar. “I’m an old colleague of Terry Brewster’s,” I said. “My name is Damon. He told me he needed to hire a head of security. He told me to show up and start right away.”

The hot woman still scowled at me. Behind the bar, Kenny Rogers was still scowling, too. The air was practically frigid. I had the feeling that I had somehow made a very big mistake.

“Well, I’m sorry you wasted your time, but you can get lost,” the woman said. “I’m Terry’s wife—soon to be his ex-wife. If you want to talk to Terry, you’ll have to get his new number or find him in Florida. Terry left town with his girlfriend two weeks ago. This bar is mine now. And you can go home.”