Ren sat at a back table in an old, dark, down–at-the-heels music club called Acoustics, on the Tennessee side of State Street in Bristol, Tennessee, nursing a beer and munching on a basket of Buffalo wings wondering what the hell he was doing here.
His deliberately bored expression and casual pose was a direct contradiction to the tension that coiled inside him, tension that had not left him for the last month, ever since he’d fled Texas with a price on his head and El Espectro’s minions looking for him.
Ren had fled San Antonio knowing the devil was on his tail, taking back roads and not breathing easy until he had put two states and twelve hundred miles behind him.
He had been hiding out for the last month with his mother’s people deep in the Appalachian mountains of Eastern Kentucky. He’d spent the entire month ruing the day that he ever let his old friend Detective Sawyer Ellison talk him into going undercover with known drug dealers in a mariachi band and wondering how long it would be before he could go home to his life in San Antonio.
Yet here he was again, about to do the same damn thing for the second time. Only this time he was on the DEA’s payroll, and he was supposed to investigate, of all things, a bluegrass and folk music club in Bristol, the tiny town that straddled the Tennessee-Virginia state line, and the Barstow family that owned it.
“Somebody at Acoustics is as guilty as the Saucedas were,” Sawyer, now officially on loan to the DEA, had wheedled the day before yesterday over his aunt’s secure landline. “One of those Barstows is dirty. I want you to go in there and find out who, and identify their source.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Ren had argued.
“Same way you did before. Your Granny Campbell taught you to make their kind of music. Go make music with them.”
“And why do I want to?”
“Come on, Ren. You’re good at this. If your cousin and his girlfriend hadn’t blundered into the setup, you’d have fingered El Espectro for us. And you need something to do. You can’t come back to San Antonio anyway, at least not until we catch up with El Espectro.”
Well, hell. Why not? It beat sitting idle underneath his aunt and uncle’s feet for months on end.
Once he’d agreed, Sawyer had filled him in, and now he was about to go and get himself hired as replacement guitar for Tommy Richards, whose murder last year outside a sex shop had been made to look random. The DEA suspected his death was anything but.
There was a pattern of drug distribution that followed the musicians’ travel schedule and a spike in use locally, but they had recently determined that Tommy’s widow, Kylie Barstow Richards, had an unexplained source of money feeding faithfully into an offshore bank account, money that she was in turn using to keep Acoustics in the black. The DEA wanted Ren to work at the club and join the band, and identify the dealer or dealers gathering the same kind of evidence as he had in San Antonio.
So here he sat, his fingertips sore from the two days he’d spent brushing up his skills on Granny Campbell’s old mountain dulcimer and his Granddaddy Campbell’s mandolin. The old mountain tunes, learned as a child on long summer evenings on the front porch of his grandparents’ mountain cabin, had never faded completely from his memory. And, after a month in Appalachia, the mountain cadence in his speech had come back too.
The DEA provided him with new ID under the name Reynolds Joshua Campbell and the subtle highlights that took his light brown hair to a dark blond eliminated any hint of his Hispanic heritage. Newly minted, he was ready for tonight’s nine o’clock interview and audition.
In the meantime, Kylie Richards was due to take the stage for a forty-five minute set on her mountain dulcimer before the bluegrass music began, and he wanted to hear her. According to articles and pictures he’d perused, Kylie was beautiful, and one of the most talented mountain dulcimer players in the United States. A big fish in a small pond.
If Sawyer was to be believed, she was also a skilled smuggler and drug dealer. Ren’s curiosity burned. Why would a woman of her talent get involved in the drug trade? And how could he go about smoking her out?
The lights dimmed and the audience quieted. There was an expectant atmosphere in the room, and then a burst of applause as Kylie, taller and finer-boned than Ren had expected her to be, stepped onto the stage and over to a spotlighted barstool with a double microphone in front of it. She wore a simple, blue, ankle-length dress and carried an hourglass-shaped mountain dulcimer, and as she turned to the audience with a shy, sweet smile Ren felt the breath catch in his throat.
The Internet pictures had not done her justice. In person, her beauty was almost ethereal, with straight, white-blond hair parted simply in the middle and hanging to her waist, the face of a Botticelli angel and the bluest eyes he’d ever seen. He stared, mesmerized, as she hopped up on the stool and strapped on the dulcimer and, without greeting or introduction, launched into the haunting melody “Midnight on the Water,” the fingers of her left hand flying over the dulcimer fret board as her right strummed the rhythm. The rich tones of the small instrument filled the room as she held her audience captive with her magic.
She finished the number and the audience erupted into applause. Smiling shyly, she again, without introduction, began playing, this time “Wild Mountain Flowers for Mary.” Ren shivered as her vibrant, bell-like soprano filled the room as she sang of devoted love denied. In the luxury of the dark bar, he studied her; the thin, delicate arms and fingers that played so beautifully, the voice that came down from Heaven, the face of an angel, and he had to wonder.
Was Kylie Richards dealing drugs out of her nightclub?
Had Kylie Richards ordered the murder of her husband?
Was Kylie Richards a cold-blooded killer?