Chapter Twenty-One

Wednesday, early evening

  

The man watched Harmony sitting at the bar flirting with the owner and his dog. He sure seemed interested in her.

Women were just users and teases. Harmony was youthful but nowhere near innocent. He knew because he’d been following her for the past few nights—ever since that blowup in McDonalds where she told Crome off. He felt she was someone he should get to know. So he put a tracker on her car and watched her when time allowed.

The woman had three different guys she was seeing. Or sleeping with. She was no different than any other woman he’d come across lately. Except for Maureen, who as far as the man could tell, stayed truer to Crome than he did to her. He knew the time was right after the night Crome stayed out with Ms. Harmony sitting over there and her cohort, Tess. They’d drank together first at a bar downtown, and then back at Harmony’s apartment two blocks away. Meanwhile, Maureen’s car, he knew because he’d also had a tracker on it, had been at home the whole time waiting on Crome to return. The biker was such an ass.

The man would show her he was better for her than Crome. That would put her biker boyfriend over the edge. He’d already showed her he was more faithful than Crome simply by returning every night to rub lotion on her back. Sooner or later, she’d let him do it without shackles and medication, but these things took time.

Harmony had already wreaked enough havoc with Maureen’s and Crome’s relationship. Maureen might just appreciate the gesture if something bad were to happen to the young woman.

As he finished the thought, the mutt Harmony played with on the floor jumped up, looked in his direction, and bared his teeth as if reading his mind.

Smart dog.

While he loved most animals, he hated dogs. Here was another reason why.

  

Harmony nursed a second beer, hope of the source showing up dwindling with every sip. Every time her phone chirped, she’d look at the display. Normally she liked it when her men messaged her. But now they were just false positives. She didn’t want to hear from them. She wanted to hear from the source who seemed to be playing a pathetic game.

The conversation with Brack, while deliciously playful, had turned business when he asked if she wanted him to shoot to kill. From just about anyone else, that line would be nothing but a bad joke, or at least one in poor taste. From Brack, it was serious. He took things to the edge and then jumped off.

Her instruction had been to incapacitate but not fatally wound. They still hadn’t found Maureen. A dead source or kidnapper told no tales.

The next phone chirp was Tess. Thinner by ounces, Tess had the true light blonde hair men sometimes killed for, and that glasses-wearing librarian thing going for her. The problem as Harmony saw it was that Tess was too damn smart for her own good. She had no heart, at least not one that got in the way of advancing her career. While Harmony always had at least two, or sometimes three like at present, men to toy with, Tess struggled to hold onto one. They’d be attracted to her physical beauty but most couldn’t hold an intelligent conversation to keep her attention.

Harmony’s strength, as she saw it, was reading people, seeing what they had to offer, and getting what she could from them. Tess didn’t have the patience.

The mistake Harmony knew she’d made last year, when she got in her Jeep with Tim the drug dealer and thinking it was a good idea, was pride. Crome, whom she’d been toying with, had broken protocol and asked Brack to find out from Darcy some information. Nothing wrong except that sooner or later, Harmony would have found it. But the man had gone around her. And no one went around Harmony, as far as she was concerned.

So she got shot for being a bonehead. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Brack’s wife might not appreciate Harmony using her husband as backup, but that didn’t stop him from agreeing so it must be okay, right?

Someone like Tess would dismiss the whole idea as illogical, but Harmony knew deep down that she used people. She was using Brack. After being shot, she had done a lot of self evaluation and had decided from then on to be honest with herself no matter what.

People like Brack could die helping her. She knew this. Such was life.

  

Wednesday, early evening

  

Volunteering to monitor the tracker they’d placed on Crome’s motorcycle, Tess decided, was not the most rewarding of tasks. But it had to be done. The man was out of control, but only inasmuch as he was dissing his friends and she couldn’t understand why.

With a borrowed Toyota Camry and the tablet from Harmony, Tess had done her best to keep up with the biker. It wasn’t easy. The man must have thought obeying traffic laws was a voluntary activity. The poor car gave all she had, and it was barely enough at times. Luckily the tracker made up the difference. If she lost him, and it happened quite frequently, the tracker told her by how far.

Crome must have sensed he was being followed because he doubled back several times, making extra turns. He’d almost outsmarted her on more than one occasion, and once to the point that the cover of her rolling incognito car would be blown. She’d had to pull into a gas station and duck when he’d made a quick U-turn and accelerated back toward her. Lucky for her, the sound of his straight-piped exhaust announced both his presence and departure. She’d simply waited for the rumble to lessen.

What she didn’t expect was his destination. When he turned into the parking lot of the Palmetto Pulse, she nearly followed behind him, catching herself at the last minute and accelerating away.

Parking a block down with a view of the exit of the lot, she put on a baseball cap and called Harmony. Together they’d decide if they were ready to call Blu yet.