Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Four

Damon

What the hellwas the matter with this town?

The first apartment I looked at was being sublet by a guy who was—he was very frank about it—going into rehab. “It isn’t fair, man,” he said to me, shaking his head. “My ex-wife says I have to get clean if I want to see the kids again. I just want to live my life, you know?”

I nodded as if this made sense to me, and then I went and looked at a different place. This one was the guest house on a huge property that also contained a house, a barn, and such a large crop of weed that the smell wafted over us on the breeze. “You steal weed, I’ll kick you out,” the woman renting the place warned me. “That’s my only condition.”

I nodded and kept looking. Maybe I was a jaded ex-DEA agent, but that place looked like an excellent spot to hide a body. And I had no objection to weed, but I didn’t need to smell it in my sleep.

The third place I looked at was on the second floor of an old duplex. The man living on the first floor was the owner, and he was definitely over eighty, though he was wiry and tough. “You a cop?” he asked me, staring at me with narrowed eyes as we stood in the empty apartment.

He had a good eye, I’d give him that. “I was.”

“You don’t look like a beat cop,” he said. “A detective, more like.”

“Fed,” I corrected him, shrugging. I may as well tell the truth. “Former DEA.”

That made his eyes go wide, and then he looked shifty. “I don’t do drugs,” he said, just a shade too loud.

I nodded. “Sure. Sure you don’t.”

“I mean it. Okay, I’ll admit—I did in my younger days. Maybe quite a bit. Shrooms, acid. Not the hard stuff. Hell, I was young. It was a different time.”

This wasn’t an unusual reaction. When people I met heard I was with the DEA, they tended to volunteer their entire drug history without me asking. It always ended with the same sentence: But not now. I don’t do any of that now. Like clockwork. No one ever did anything now.

I didn’t actually care about anyone’s drug history, and I definitely didn’t care that this guy did shrooms fifty years ago. But people always assumed.

“Okay,” I said.

“I smoke some weed every once in a while to take the edge off,” the guy went on as if I was cracking down on him in the interview room. “Hell, I’m eighty-two and it’s legal. Are we going to have a problem?”

“No, we’re not going to have a problem.” I was getting impatient. I needed somewhere to sleep. “I’m not with the DEA anymore, and even if I was, I wouldn’t care. I just want an apartment. Do you want me to rent it or not?”

The man narrowed his eyes at me. “You got first and last months’ rent?”

“Yes.” The rent in Salt Springs was cheap, at least compared to everywhere else I’d lived.

“Damage deposit?”

“Sure.”

“Fine then. You can rent it. Don’t stomp too hard on the floorboards, because I can hear you. I go to bed at nine, so I don’t want any noise after that. I listen to the Road Kings on my stereo sometimes because they’re my favorite band. I saw them live seven times before they broke up.” He held out a bony hand. “My name’s Carl. Go write me a check.”

I moved in.

Salt Springs seemed to be full of eccentrics and former hippies, various wanderers and misfits. It was perfect for me, except for the drugs. Aside from the fact that I’d been DEA, I didn’t do drugs and I didn’t grow them. I didn’t buy or sell them. I didn’t even drink. I might be the soberest guy in town.

I didn’t own any furniture, so I was happy that the apartment came with a bed, a rickety kitchen table, and an old sofa. The spring wind whistled in the edges of the windows. When I stepped out the back door, I found a small deck that overlooked an incredible view of the mountains in the distance. There was no scent of weed. For the first time I thought that a few weeks in Colorado might actually be healthy for me.

Then I smoked a cigarette.

I took a shower, crawled into the bed, and fell immediately into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

Andie English didn’t callme. I spent the next morning doing what I should have done in the first place: sitting at my laptop, looking up Terry, this town, and a bar called the Wild Wild West.

This town was definitely weird, known for its artsy shops and its population of hippies of all ages. It was also a college town, and the hippies and the college kids didn’t mix. The crime rate was average, leaning heavily toward charges of drunkenness by the college kids and possession of the substances that were still illegal by everyone else. It all seemed like good, clean fun, but my years in the DEA had put my senses on alert.

I found Terry easily on his Facebook page. I wasn’t on social media myself, but I had an alias I used on Facebook when I needed to research someone for work. I had ways of using subterfuge to get information, but I didn’t need to do that for Terry. His page was public and he had posted pictures of him and his new girlfriend—who was much younger than him, of course—in Key West. The girlfriend had a tiny bathing suit on, because Terry was the kind of guy who would post pictures of his girlfriend in a tiny bathing suit on a public Facebook page. In one picture, she was waterskiing and laughing while Terry drove a boat, like they were taking stock photos.

“What a knob,” I said out loud, scrolling through the page. He had left Andie and his own kid for this? What was wrong with him? Andie was a lot better-looking, with her dark curls and her killer figure. Even her scowl, which she’d directed at me the entire time I talked to her, was sexy.

Not that I would act on anything I was thinking. Andie gave out a “fuck off” vibe, and I didn’t blame her. She’d been married to Terry the Knob, and then she’d been dumped by him. Any woman would be done with men after that.

I reached back in my memory, trying to remember Terry when I’d briefly worked with him. It had been on an op in New Mexico. He did good work, but he was smug and pretty sure of himself. I remembered a night after it was over when everyone went out to celebrate at a bar. I’d done my usual thing on nights like that, which was to go for the first hour only and drink soda water, bailing when people started to get drunk. That way I avoided temptation, but I also avoided the inevitable drunk questions: “You mean you don’t drink at all?” To which I would have no choice but to answer, “Yes, fuckwad, that’s what being an addict in recovery means.”

Terry, I remembered, drank harder than anyone that night. When I left, he was talking to a woman at the bar, the two of them deep in conversation. I’d assumed he’d gone home with her, and I hadn’t cared, because I’d had no idea he was married. He’d never worn a ring.

Now I knew. Jesus, what a knob he was. I scrubbed my hand over my face, realizing I’d been working with a cheater. We weren’t buddies, or even close, which again made me wonder why Terry had emailed me, offering me this job.

There was no way to avoid what my gut was telling me: Terry had an angle.

I didn’t know what it was yet, but I would. I opened my email and shot a quick note to Terry. Hey man, I got here, all is good. Your wife is hiring me at the bar. I hit Send without any more detail than that, which would reel him in.

As for the Wild Wild West bar, it had an outdated website advertising Friday night ladies’ nights with two-dollar shots. Further searching told me that most people called it the Wild, the college kids mostly avoided it, and it was known as a place you could pick up someone or maybe score something illegal if you knew who to ask. In other words, it was shady.

I didn’t like the idea of Andie running a place like that. She wasn’t a shady woman. She probably didn’t know half of what went on at the Wild, which made her vulnerable to danger.

She needed me. I only hoped she was smart enough to figure that out.