The chill of the early May evening hit me as soon as I opened my front door, so I grabbed my favorite black sweater and headed out on my way to McGuire’s hoping to catch some part of my father’s first annual Cinco de Mayo celebration at the bar. Always interested in finding ways to make the business more successful, he decided that a promotion of the Mexican Independence Day would be a great way to liven up Sunset Ridge in the slow period before the Founders’ Day events and summer took over the town.
That Sunset Ridge had not even one citizen of Mexican descent hadn’t dissuaded my father from his plans, even though I’d mentioned to him more than once that our incredibly homogenous town had never celebrated the fifth of May for a reason. Forever hopeful, he’d answered me every time with his same explanation of how this country had been founded by immigrants and bringing a little of the outside world to Sunset Ridge couldn’t hurt.
I didn’t think it would hurt as much as not work. Our small town wasn’t so much insolated as just somewhat backward. The old guard who had ruled the town for what seemed like forever ensured that things rarely changed. That said, Sunset Ridge residents were good-hearted people at their cores, so I hoped his customers would join in the Cinco de Mayo celebration.
He’d asked me to man the bar for a few hours just in case the crowd became too much, but I’d begged off after a particularly long day at The Eagle. My boss, the indefatigable Howard Fleming, had hovered over me all day, trying his damnedest to find a way to make the police blotter article I wrote each week more exciting. My refusal to include salacious details of crimes and facts the Sunset Ridge police department preferred to keep quiet resulted in rather bland write-ups each week. Even I had to admit that.
Howard’s attempts to spice up my work had never succeeded, no matter how much he cajoled and pleaded. The only effect it had was exhausting me so much I could barely drag myself home after spending hours on end with him and his constant attempts to get me to change.
I wasn’t too worried that I’d left my father high and dry, though. Even his Halloween extravaganzas only resulted in little more than half the bar being filled. In Sunset Ridge, only sports on the TV brought customers into McGuire’s.
As I turned the corner onto Main Street, I saw a crowd of people coming toward me waving the brightly colored yellow and pink streamers my father had been hanging that morning. I recognized one of the partiers as Jenna Teasdale, a girl I’d hung out with in high school and one of Derek’s many ex-girlfriends in town. A pretty brunette with long straight hair and a round face, she’d always had a soft look about her. Still as bubbly as she was at Sunset Ridge High, she waved and opened her arms wide to hug me as she and her two male friends approached me.
“Poppy McGuire, your father knows how to party, girl! You missed a good time!” she squealed.
The smell of tequila came off her in waves strong enough to make my eyes tear, so I quickly did my friendly hug thing and backed away. Jenna tore the cheaply made sombrero my father had picked up from the party store from one of the men’s heads and planted it onto mine.
“Perfect! Now you can party like we did,” she said, slurring the last few words.
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourselves,” I said with a smile, genuinely happy my father’s attempt to bring some kind of culture to the town had been at least a success to Jenna and her friends. “I’ll be sure to tell my father.”
“Definitely! He rocks!” she said with a giggle.
The two men gave their stamp of approval for my father’s party-giving abilities by yelling and fist bumping, and then the three of them set off stumbling down the street. Just before they disappeared into the night, Jenna waved frantically at me again as she giggled at something one of her friends said. I couldn’t help but be thankful they weren’t driving since even now that they had walked away the smell of tequila still hung heavy in the air.
Never my favorite poison, I left the stench behind and hurried down the street toward McGuire’s to see if anyone else had attended the Cinco de Mayo party. My fears that the whole idea would never succeed were put to rest as I stepped into the bar and saw no less than forty people still enjoying the festivities. Behind the bar, my father stood pouring drinks and joking around like he always did with his customers.
I sat down at the end of the bar near the door and smiled at the sight of him having such a good time. His idea had worked. He caught a glimpse of me as he gave a very attractive woman with short dark hair and big eyes a drink and quickly headed my way.
“Poppy! I’m so glad you were able to stop over. The Cinco de Mayo event is definitely going to be a yearly thing,” he announced as he pulled me toward him for a hug.
“That’s great, Dad. I can’t believe it did so well,” I said as I looked around at all the people still there at midnight on a Monday.
“There are going to be some very sore people in the morning,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m predicting a difficult fifth of May tomorrow. Want something to drink?”
I held my hand up to stop him before he poured me anything. “No, I’m good. I can’t afford to not be on top of my game tomorrow. Howard has been a real monkey on my back lately. By the way, why didn’t you have this party on the actual day of Cinco de Mayo?”
He grinned that wide Irish smile that lit up his face and wagged his finger at me. “There’s a method to my madness. I figured the people who could come out for a Cinco de Mayo party would probably be heading down to Baltimore for it, so I thought I’d do it one night early and beat the rush. It looks like your father had a good idea this time.”
He really was too cute. The woman he’d served before coming down to speak to me was giving him the sexy eyes, so I leaned in toward him and said in his ear, “You’ve got an admirer, Dad. You should go down and talk to that lady. She’s very pretty.”
My father shook his head and looked down the bar at her. Flashing her one of his smiles, he turned back to face me. “So what can I get my daughter to drink tonight? Feel like your usual, or do you feel like getting in the spirit of the night and trying some tequila?”
“Let’s stick to a ginger ale tonight. I’m not much of a tequila girl.”
“No whisky?” he asked as he moved to get my glass of soda.
“Not tonight, Dad.”
He set the drink down in front of me and shook his head. “Soda at a party. You’ve been drinking the good stuff since you and Alex got together, and now this,” he teased. “By the way, where is he tonight?”
I took a sip of soda and smiled. “At work, as usual. I’m going to start calling him the hardest working guy in Sunset Ridge, right behind you, of course.”
“He’s a good man, Poppy, and there’s nothing wrong with Alex being a hard worker.”
Whenever my father got the slightest sense that there could be anything wrong between Alex and me, he always defended him. Not that he had to. Nobody knew more than I did how great Alex Montero was. I just wished life in Sunset Ridge could be a little more exciting so we could work together more often.
It had been nearly a month since anything more than some neighbor parking in the wrong spot had been the highlight of the police blotter. Howard truly believed I’d been holding out the good stuff on him and The Eagle’s readership, but in reality, there hadn’t been any real crime in town in what seemed like ages.
As a result, while Alex and I certainly spent a lot of time together, mostly at my house or his, we hadn’t worked on a case in far too long for my taste. Not that I was hoping for a murder or anything like that, but a nice robbery could be good chance for us to get back to solving crimes together.
My father worried about us, so I quickly moved to reassure him. “I know, Dad. I just wish life in this town hadn’t suddenly become so picture perfect.”
“You should be happy we live in a safe place, Poppy,” he scolded me.
The notes of some song from the eighties boomed out of the jukebox suddenly, so I just smiled at his rebuke. Safe, I liked. Boring, not so much.
As if the sound of the song made some people realize how late it was, customers began to slowly leave the bar until only a handful of my father’s customers remained. Without all those bodies to absorb the song blaring out of the jukebox, it quickly became impossible to talk at all over the noise, so my father hurried over to the machine to turn it down before it chased every last person out the door.
Walking On Sunshine wasn’t a bad song, but that loud it was almost unbearable. By the time he got it to where it wasn’t making people’s ears practically bleed, it was too late, though. Most of the partiers had headed out into the night, leaving just my father, a few of his regulars who were probably happy to see all the Cinco de Mayo fun finally over, and me.
“Note to self. Make sure to pay attention to the jukebox,” he joked as he came around the end of the bar.
I pointed to the empty barstool where the pretty woman had been sitting. “You chased her away, Dad.”
He rolled his eyes and grabbed a cloth to wipe down the bar. “Yeah, yeah. That’s how it goes.”
From outside, a blood-curdling scream stopped everyone from talking, and I turned to see a young woman with wavy blond hair run through the door with a look of terror in her eyes.
“Call the cops! Someone’s dead!” she yelled before racing back outside.
A look of horror crossed my father’s face. “Dead? Where?”
Jumping off my barstool, I said, “I’ll go check it out, Dad. You call the station.”
I ran outside and saw a crowd of people standing around a silver luxury car parked on the street in front of the bar. People spoke in hushed tones and pointed at the car. Pushing my way through them, I got to it and saw a person lying across the front seat. A thin man about six foot tall with short hair, he looked average in virtually every way, except for the fact that he wasn’t moving.
“Did someone check to see if he’s just passed out?” I asked the people standing around me, searching the group for the answer.
One heavy-set bald man nodded. “I did. He’s gone.”
“Okay, don’t touch a thing. We’ve called the police, so let’s just back away from the car and they’ll be here in a minute. Does anyone know his name?”
Nobody answered, and instead of walking away as I’d suggested, people began to inch closer to press their faces to the car’s windows, each one asking the same question.
What happened to this guy that killed him?
I saw no blood anywhere around him, and I had to admit it looked like he was merely sleeping. I didn’t want to speculate on what had happened to this poor soul, though. Alex and Darren, the other cop on duty that night, would be there soon, so I’d leave the wondering about who and what had killed him until then.
The police cruiser pulled up to the scene, causing most of the crowd to scatter, and I smiled as Alex approached me. Dressed in his uniform, he looked sharp and in control of the situation. And very sexy. His fellow officer, Darren Harlson, an older officer who had been on the force since Derek joined years ago, followed him. Portly, he always looked a little sweaty whenever I saw him.
Stopping in front of me, Alex smiled. “How did I know I’d see you first thing? I thought you were staying home tonight.”
“I decided to see how my father’s Cinco de Mayo event went over. Someone found this man. He’s dead,” I said somberly.
As Darren joined the two of us, he asked, “Did anyone see anything?”
I shook my head. “No. I was inside the bar when the woman came running in screaming about some man being dead outside, so I came out to look as my father called you guys.”
He nodded. “I’m going to find out what everyone knows. Which woman found him, Poppy?”
Searching the people who hadn’t moved away, I saw the wavy haired blonde standing alone on the steps to McGuire’s. “That’s her,” I said as I pointed in her direction. “She’s the one near the door. She looks pretty shaken up.”
“Got it.”
He walked away to ask her his questions as Alex peered in through the car’s passenger side window. “Do you know this guy? I don’t recognize him.”
Standing next to him, I studied the face of the dead man. Thin and expressionless, he didn’t look familiar. “I don’t think so. He doesn’t look like anyone I’ve ever met.”
Alex turned his head to look at me and grinned. “I think you’re slipping, Poppy. When we first met, you knew everything about everyone in town.”
I rolled my eyes at his teasing. Anytime I didn’t know the complete history of anyone involved in one of our cases, he said the same thing. Usually I reminded him that detecting was part of being a detective, but tonight I thought I’d go a different route.
“You know, I think you’ve lived in Sunset Ridge long enough to know something about your fellow citizens, Alex. We don’t want my vast knowledge of our neighbors to become a crutch for you.”
“No, we don’t,” he said with a chuckle. “Well, since neither of us seem to know who this poor soul is, what do you say we do some investigating?”
He moved around the front of the car to the driver’s side as I followed, each of us slipping on a pair of gloves before we touched anything. Alex opened the door and a sweet smell like from a flowery air freshener hit my nose, making me take a step back. Lifting his flashlight, he shined it along the full length of the man’s body to examine him for a cause of death, but nothing obvious jumped out. No blood, no gunshot wound, not even a bruise on the man’s head indicated what may have killed him.
“What do you think?” I asked after taking a deep breath and leaning back in to look.
Alex shrugged. “I can’t see any evidence of him being shot or stabbed or even hit on the head. There’s no obvious signs of a struggle either, and I see no evidence of strangulation. Something killed him, but I think for this one we’re going to have to leave it to Donny to find out what.”
At that moment, as if on cue, the coroner’s van pulled up next to the car and Donny jumped out. Dressed in his usual black dress pants and white dress shirt that begged for a tie he never wore, he walked over to where we stood.
“I was in the middle of something, so I hope this guy appreciates this,” he joked in that gallows humor way he did sometimes.
Alex raised one eyebrow and leveled his gaze on the coroner. “You don’t have to come on every case, Donny. If I remember correctly, you have assistants in that office of yours.”
Donny’s eyebrows shot up, making the deep furrows in his forehead even deeper. “Kids who don’t know enough who’d call me in anyway halfway through their examination. I might as well be there at the start to make sure the job gets done right.”
The kids he referred to had to be at least my age or even older, but since Donny looked to be close to sixty, I guessed someone in their early thirties might seem like a kid to him. The truth of the matter was he loved his job to the point of being a workaholic, so he didn’t really need his assistants and their supposed inadequacies to make him come out to a crime scene, even if it was in the middle of the night.
Alex searched the dead man’s pockets for identification and then stepped back away from the car as Donny leaned in to begin his examination, mumbling, “So what do we have here?”
Flipping open the brown leather wallet he’d taken from the man’s coat, Alex slipped his driver’s license out from behind the clear plastic slot and read the name. “Marcus Tyne, thirty-one. He would have turned thirty-two right after Thanksgiving.”
I leaned in and saw Marcus Tyne’s license picture of him wearing a big smile. Poor guy. He looked happy. Reading his address, I saw he lived in Millville, an even smaller town than Sunset Ridge a few miles away.
“That’s why I didn’t recognize him. He’s not from here.”
Alex closed the wallet and looked down at me with a skeptical expression. “I still say you’re slipping, Miss McGuire.”
“And I say you’re slacking off on this whole detective thing, Officer Montero.”
He chuckled like he always did when I teased him right back. I liked when we could be lighthearted like that. Some people might think it tactless since a man lay dead just a few feet away, but like Donny’s gallows humor, our joking around was just our way of keeping our sanity on cases like this.
But I saw the smile slide from his face and before I could ask what was wrong, Alex said, “I need to know if Marcus Tyne was at McGuire’s tonight, so we need to talk to your father.”
We headed into the bar and found my father sitting alone staring up at the baseball game playing on the TV. He wore a worried expression and sighed when he saw us come through the door.
“Hi, Joe,” Alex said as he sat down and took his notebook and pen out of his shirt pocket.
My father turned on his barstool and forced a smile. “Hi, Alex. I can’t believe something like this could happen right outside my bar. Do we know who the man was?”
“Marcus Tyne. He was from Millville. Did you know him?”
Shaking his head, my father sighed again. “The name doesn’t ring a bell. To be honest, I only really know the names of my regulars, so if he wasn’t in here a lot, I probably wouldn’t know his name. What did he look like?”
Alex handed him Tyne’s driver’s license. “Do you recognize him as someone who was in here tonight?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “He might have been in once or twice before too.”
As Alex jotted down notes on my father’s answers, I said, “Just tell us whatever you can remember, Dad.”
He pressed his lips together and took a deep breath before he let it out slowly. “I want to say he came in around ten. Let me see. What was he drinking?” After a few more moments, he continued, “Bourbon. I got this new bottle of Gold Label the other day and he saw it on the wall behind the bar and specifically asked for it.”
Looking up from his notes, Alex asked, “Was it just you behind the bar tonight?”
My father smiled at me and nodded. “Yes. My go-to girl was busy, so I had to man the bar alone.”
“Okay. How many drinks do you remember serving him?”
“Two, and now that you mention it, he seemed to get drunk pretty fast on just two bourbons. I mean, he was a skinny guy, but two drinks doesn’t usually level a grown man of any size. I poured him a cup of coffee, but I don’t think he drank much of it before he left.”
“What time was that?” Alex asked as he wrote down two drinks and coffee.
“I can’t be sure, but I want to say before eleven.”
Looking up, Alex stopped writing. “Why before eleven?”
“I had a big crowd come in right around that time, and I don’t think he was still here by then.”
“Okay. Did anyone talk to him or buy him anything to drink?”
My father thought for a few seconds and shook his head. “I don’t remember him spending time with anyone while he was here, but I didn’t see him leave. I can’t be sure because it was so busy, but he only had those two drinks and a few sips of coffee. That I know.”
Alex looked up and down the bar and then returned his attention to my father. “I’m guessing the coffee cup has already been washed?”
Nodding, my father said, “Yeah. After he left, someone else sat down where he’d been, so I cleared away the cup.”
“I’ll take it anyway. There might be some evidence left behind that can tell us what killed Mr. Tyne.”
I held up my hand to stop my father from getting up. “It’s okay, Dad. I got it. I’m wearing gloves, so I’ll bag it.”
Heading around the bar, I saw a single coffee cup sitting alongside the sink. Alex handed me a plastic evidence baggie and I gingerly dropped it in before handing the bag back to him.
He looked around me toward the shelves of bottles on the back wall and pointed at the Gold Label bourbon. “I’m going to have to take the bottle too.”
Satisfied he’d gotten all he could from my father, at least for the moment, Alex stood and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, Joe. I’ll be in contact if I need anything more.”
I followed my partner outside and saw Donny had left with the body and Marcus Tyne’s car had been towed away. Darren stood speaking to a couple I didn’t recognize a few yards away.
Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, Alex turned around and took my hand. Giving it a gentle squeeze, he said, “Stay with your father, Poppy. We can start working on this case together tomorrow, but for now, he needs you more. I’m going to go back to the station for a little bit and see what I can find out about Marcus Tyne. I’ll let you know what I learn when I see you at The Grounds tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. I guess our plans to spend some time together after your shift are foiled again, huh?” I said, unable to hide my disappointment at us not being able to be together for a third night in a row.
He nodded, looking as unhappy at the disruption of our plans as I was. “Pretty much, but we do get to work together on a case again.”
I looked down into his deep brown eyes and wished we were alone so I could show him how much I missed us being together the past few days. Even though it wasn’t strictly allowed since he was on duty, I leaned toward him and kissed him softly on the lips.
He pulled away quickly before anyone saw, and I said, “That’s a down payment. You can collect the rest tomorrow night.”
Alex gave me one of those sexy grins that never failed to make my stomach flip and winked. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at nine.”
“Okay. I’ll be the woman at the back table waiting for her partner.”
He nodded and before he walked away, he whispered, “Love you.”
Just as he turned to leave, I mouthed those same words back to him. As I watched him walk away, I thought about how much I looked forward to us working together again. We hadn’t had too many cases since we’d finally admitted how we felt about each other, and this murder case would be different than any other we’d worked together before.
But that would have to wait until tomorrow. For now, my father needed me.