CHAPTER THREE

Nervous? No shit she was nervous.

Carl Price was facing away from Tammy when she came through the door of the diner and she was glad of that. She didn’t want to see him in the first place, but it was necessary.

How long had it been since they’d parted company? A little over four years this time around. Four years since she’d packed up and left while he was at work. Not that hard, really. She’d never moved all the way into his house, so making a clean getaway wasn’t really a challenge.

He looked the same from behind. Broad shoulders straining his shirt. His posture relaxed but ready. Was there gray in his hair? Hard to say. He was out in the sun so much it might have just been a little sun bleaching. She hoped it was gray, it would serve him right.

And then the man turned and looked in her direction and she froze, and all the thoughts she had been working over in her head went out the window. How the hell could any man look so angry all the time?

Carl froze, a scowl on his face. Not an angry expression really, just thoughtful, cautious. And then it was gone. The puzzled expression that bordered on looking like he was ticked off dropped away, replaced by cold, unmoving stone. The only part of his face that showed anything was his eyes and those were, well, those showed all the anger and hurt she’d have expected from him.

“How are you, Carl?”

Carl’s eyes didn’t move from her face. His muscular arms were spread apart, one leaning against the counter where he sat, the other near his hip and the service pistol he sported all the time. Did his fingers twitch near the grip? Best not to think about that too much.

Carl waved his hand, the one resting on the counter. “Becky? Hon, I’m gonna need that breakfast to go. Can you do that for me?” There had been a time when they were in bed together, after what could only be called a marathon weekend of sex, when they shared secrets and observations as only lovers do and only after just that sort of encounter. When they were in that afterglow, still wired, but too wiped out to do much more than talk Tammy told Carl that she could always tell when he was getting seriously angry, because those were the times when he seemed the calmest. His face was calm, his posture was relaxed, and his voice? Well, his voice got all soft and quiet, like Clint Eastwood before everything went to hell in one of his old spaghetti westerns.

He’d found that funny, but she was deadly serious.

Just then, when she came into the diner and Carl was ready for breakfast? Good old calm Carl was about ready to break shit into little bitty pieces. She felt the hairs on her neck rise in warning of the absolute danger of the moment.

Not that she had anything to worry about. Carl had done a lot of things in their relationship that had left her worried, but he had never once raised so much as a finger to her.

Not that it mattered. Too many miles, too much left unsaid the last time.

“Carl? Can we talk?” She walked a few steps toward him, but carefully.

His face was still stone. His eyes flickered, looked her over from head to toe. Finally he nodded, a barely perceptible twitch of his head. “Talk if you want to.”

Damn that voice was just above a whisper, really. She had to strain to hear him. “I was thinking, maybe at your office?”

The waitress slid a Styrofoam tray with built-in cover to Carl and he nodded a thanks and dished a ten spot from his pocket. He placed the ten on the counter and picked up the food without ever taking his eyes off of Tammy.

He slid away from his seat with that fluid grace he reserved for when he was about to get extremely hostile — she’d seen him crack more than one head in their years of off and on romance — and moved toward Tammy. His eyes finally broke from hers as he walked past.

“You know where the office is,” he said, then he was out the door and heading toward his truck.

She stood where she was and watched him climb in and drive away. And then, finally, she exhaled, not even aware until that moment that she’d been holding her breath.

* * *

Carl drove calmly away from the diner, his hands clenching the steering wheel in a death grip. His teeth ground together in his jaw and the muscles in his skull clenched a vice around his temples. The food from the diner sat in its little foam tray and he knew even then that it would go cold and go to waste. His appetite was gone.

“Gotta be fucking kidding me.” He felt his lips forming words but they weren’t important. Instead, he forced himself under control as best he could.

Hadn’t seen that one coming, had he? But then he never did with her. Every damned time he thought he knew where he stood with Tammy she did something to prove him wrong, like disappear from his life without warning, or run off to have an encounter with some asshole she used to know, or just show up out of the goddamned blue when he thought he was finally over her.

“Every fucking time. Every fucking time.” His knuckles popped as he shifted his grip on the steering wheel. He could feel himself falling. All it took was seeing her. What the hell kind of way was that for a man to live?

The phone rang and he grabbed it off the car seat like a drowning man grabbing a lifeline. “Price.”

“Carl? It’s Vince.” Vince Carlson was the poor bastard currently stuck with desk duty. That was Carl’s way of handling a deputy with a medical reason for not driving these days. Vince had dislocated his shoulder in a car wreck. He wanted to work. Carl made it happen.

“What’s going on, Vince?”

“Got two things going on. First, we just got a call from Corey Phillips. His little girl, Amber, is missing. She went to bed at nine last night and when they checked on her a few minutes ago her bed was empty and the window in her bedroom was open.”

Corey Phillips. He knew the name, but it wasn’t clicking. “Who is Corey Phillips?”

“Says he lives in your neighborhood, over on Euclid Street.” That brought everything into focus. Phillips owned a little photography studio in Wellman. Mostly he did weddings and the like, but he also took family portraits, did a lot of the school pictures for the locals. Good business and a nice enough man.

“How old is his daughter?” It was always possible the girl had run away. It would hardly be a first in the area.

“Eleven.”

Too young to fall into the runaway category easily, but it was still a possibility. “I’ll head his way in a few minutes. I’ll need the proper address. What else were you calling about?”

“Well, when he went outside to look for his little girl he realized his truck was gone. Looks like someone stole his Ford F-150.” Carl pulled to the side of the road and shook his head. Of course someone stole the man’s truck. He thought back to the night before, to the face in the back of the truck, and the screamed, unintelligible words, the hand that slapped the back window. The face, the hand, they could have belonged to a little girl. It was hard to say for certain, but if he had to bet, Carl would have placed a few dollars on being right.

“Give me that address.” Vince called out the street address and Carl jotted it on an envelope sitting in the passenger’s seat. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Meanwhile, I want everyone looking for that goddamn truck. Everyone. Got me?”

“Yessir.”

Carl spun the wheel on the truck after checking both ways, and headed back toward the other side of Wellman. There was good news in this at least. Tammy wouldn’t be able to follow him to a crime scene. If he played it the right way maybe he could avoid the bitch for a few days. Or just maybe forever.

Of course his mind was not agreeing with him. Even as he drove away from her, away from the very thought of being near her, he felt the memories of her in his arms rising in the back of his head like bubbles escaping the mouth of a drowning man. “Every fucking time I’m almost over her. It’s like she plans it.”