Jo patted Josie’s shoulder before weaving through the crowd to the lone man sitting by the window. Last time she saw him he was cooperating enough to keep Luke and Wyatt from being booked. She pulled the chair opposite him across the wooden floor with a scrape loud enough to catch the attention of several tables around them.
His eyes shot to her from where he had them pinned against the window.
“Jesus. Little warning there, Officer.”
“It’s Sheriff.”
He didn’t bother correcting himself.
“I thought I told you to avoid River Bend and especially this establishment if you drove through again.”
He picked up his whiskey, which looked more like melted ice at this point, and looked beyond her for a second.
“She’s not serving you again,” Jo told him.
He went ahead and finished his melted ice and slapped the glass on the table. He paused for a second. “Saw that news program.”
Jo went still.
“Which one? The news vans have been all over town.”
He glanced back out the window. “Couple of them. Glad you found that little girl.”
Jo did a little mental Rolodex search. The man’s name was Buddy . . . strange last name she didn’t remember. Friends called him Big. For obvious reasons. Unlike the lawyers and the doctors in the bar, this man owned a beard he’d been growing most of his life. Kept it fairly trimmed, but you could see the yellow cigarette stains that took plenty of packs to create. On the top, complete chrome dome. Priors were assault, armed robbery, a few catch and release on drugs. He was either working his way up the chain gang or deciding it might be better to live on the outside of barbed wire fencing.
“We all are.”
He twirled the rest of the ice in his glass. “People shouldn’t fuck with kids, man. That shit’s off-limits.”
Honor among thieves. “Too bad not everyone gets that memo, Buddy.”
He seemed surprised she’d called him by his first name.
She did what she always did, and waited for him to talk. It was obvious from the fact he hadn’t left that he had something to say.
And Jo wanted to hear it.
“I have a kid.”
“Oh?”
“Twelve. Her ol’ lady won’t let me see her. Can’t say as I blame her.”
Jo felt some of the tension in her body relax. “Hard to explain jail time to a child.”
Buddy nodded, looked into the melting ice.
“Saw the news . . . heard the name of this town. Crazy . . . I’ve never been through here before . . . what’s the chances of hearing it twice in a week?”
A little too coincidental for Jo’s world.
He glanced out the window of the bar. “I—I ah, saw that guy.”
The hair on Jo’s arms stood on end. “Which guy?”
“The brown-haired surfer-looking guy . . . the one we roughed up.”
Jo felt the air go out of her lungs. She wanted to hear Mr. Lewis’s name so desperately she could scream. “You mean Wyatt?”
Buddy shrugged. “Is he the little girl’s dad?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Saw the mom on the news. She was clinging to him.” He sucked down the rest of the melted ice, crunched on what was left.
It wasn’t like her to share with someone she didn’t know, but there was something driving this conversation that had yet to appear, so Jo went ahead and told the man what everyone in River Bend already knew. “Wyatt’s dating the mom.”
Buddy started to tap the edge of his glass. His somewhat easy expression hardened on the edges.
“I don’t like it when people fuck with kids,” he said again.
“No one does.”
“I mean . . . a grown man, he can have enemies. Done wrong by someone else. But a kid . . . shit’s just not right.”
Patience was such a hard line to stand on.
“Couple more hours and she would have been dead . . . that’s what that American Fugitive guy said. Is that true?”
Jo offered a slow nod.
“Still looking for the guy who pushed her?”
“We’ll find him.”
“Good. Bastard should fry.”
On that, they both agreed.
“Do you think he was working alone?”
Again, gooseflesh pimpled on her skin in the warm bar. “What makes you ask?”
He shrugged, looked out the window again.
“Buddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Who you expecting?”
“No one.” Which was a lie and they both knew it.
They sat for another solid minute in silence before Jo moved to stand. “Well, Buddy. I need to get back to that little girl.” Since children were his hot button, she pressed it hard. “Someone out there wants her dead, and until we find him, she needs all the protection she can get.”
She actually turned around and took a step before he spoke. “I was paid.”
“Paid?” she asked over her shoulder.
“The boyfriend. We were paid to rough him up.”
What the—? She kept her expression stoic as she turned. “Paid to fight Wyatt . . . by who?”
“Don’t know. Ty set it up, saw D-Man and knew he’d help. It was an easy grand.”
Ty was one of the other guys with him the night of the bar fight.
“Someone paid you and Ty to fight Wyatt Gibson here . . . and you don’t know who, or why?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t really care. Couple punches, make sure the cops were called. Don’t press charges. Just like Ty said, we all left.”