Reaching up, I rubbed at the spot between my brows where I felt a headache coming to life.
“I take it from that constipated look on your face, that info doesn’t help you one damn bit.”
“I just don’t get it,” I told him, dropping my arms onto the desk. “I checked the account I set up for her before I enlisted just the other day. It’s empty. If she didn’t use that money for school, then where the fuck did it go? I mean, you should see where they’re living. Place is only a couple steps up from a complete shithole, and only because she’s done the best she could to take care of it.”
“You thinkin’ she’s got some problems? Drugs or booze? Maybe gambling?”
I shook my head. “No,” I insisted fiercely. “Not Shane. She’s not like that, never was. And she’s all about our boy. She wouldn’t do anything that would take money away that she could use on him.”
“So what is it you’re thinkin’? ’Cause that’s a lotta fucking cake to burn through with nothing to show for it.”
I looked at the clock on the top of my computer screen. Shane’s shifts at the bar could be scattered because of Brantley, but for the most part she stayed consistent, so I knew she was working tonight. Unless there was an emergency, she wouldn’t miss the tips she could make with the Friday night crowd. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll be hitting up Bad Alibi later.”
“Count me in,” Laeth announce with a grin. “Been needing to get my dick wet for a while now.”
I looked up at him and arched a brow. “You just hooked up with that little blonde number last weekend.”
He looked at me like I’d just grown horns as he rose to his feet and stressed, “That was days ago, man. I’ll go let Gage know we’re hitting up the bar for drinks.”
He turned on his boots and bolted out the door before I could tell him I didn’t need backup, especially the kind that would be wasted and on the hunt for pussy within the first hour of arriving.
Just like that, the throb in my forehead got worse.
Shane
The bar was packed. Nearly every table and barstool had an ass on it. The jukebox was cranking out one tune after another that kept the patrons pumped and Farah and me on our toes.
It was barely after ten. I still had hours left on my shift, yet I was already dragging. I lived in a perpetual state of exhaustion, but this was different. I’d grown so accustomed to being tired all the time it had become second nature. I could handle it, no problem. But tonight my limbs felt heavy, my head was fuzzy, and no amount of caffeine or sucking it the hell up was working. I couldn’t shake it off. The kind of tired I was currently dealing with had seeped down into my bones. I had no energy whatsoever, and if I closed my eyes for even a second, I was sure I’d fall asleep standing up.
A whoop carried over the din of the bar, so loud almost everyone was able to hear it. Letting out a beleaguered sigh I turned toward the noise, already knowing what to expect. I’d been on alert from the moment she’d walked in earlier, just waiting for something unpleasant to go down.
Sure enough, when I looked over at my section, Rina was on her feet, arms in the air while giving her hips an enthusiastic shimmy. A second later, she climbed on top of the table and laid out flat on her back, sticking a lime wedge between her teeth and a shot glass between her cleavage so one of the guys at the table could do a body shot.
“Fuck me. Swear to God, every time that girl walks in here my asshole puckers.”
I looked away from the chaos taking place across the room to find Buck, Darla’s old man and the co-owner of Bad Alibi, with his palms pressed to the bar, leaning in to glower in the direction I was just looking.
A snort worked its way up my throat as my eyes bulged out. “Wow, Buck. That was . . . colorful. And way too damn much. I didn’t need that visual.”
He looked to me and winked. “You know what I mean.”
I knew exactly what he meant. I hadn’t thought it possible for Rina to spiral any further out of control than she had back in the day, but apparently I’d been wrong. Every time I saw her, she was even worse off than the time before.
Tonight she was wearing a pair of ripped up fishnets—and not purposely ripped up either, they were trashed from not being taken care of—underneath a pair of denim shorts so short a good few inches of ass cheek were hanging out from beneath the hem, and the strip of fabric she was wearing as a top was barely wide enough to stretch across her boobs, leaving everything else uncovered and absolutely nothing to the imagination.
Her long dark hair was streaked with brassy orangish highlights that looked like a bleach job gone horribly wrong, and the thick black liner around her eyes was smudged. She looked emaciated, at least a good twenty pounds underweight. I could only assume the weight loss was due to the drugs she’d started doing shortly before our senior year and never stopped.
She wasn’t a mess; she was a freaking disaster. And she liked it just fine that way. To say our relationship had never recovered after high school would have been putting it mildly. She hated the ground I walked on, and I pitied the hell out of her for what she’d turned into.
It was a shame, really, because her mom was the sweetest, most soft-spoken woman I’d ever known, and when Rina had spun out of control, it had broken the woman’s heart. Now, word around town was that Sissy Martin was really sick, and her daughter couldn’t be bothered to give up her wild, partying ways to help her out.
I let my eyes drift over the group she was hanging with, spotting the patches on several leather jackets and vests.
“When the hell did she start hanging with the Riders?”
The Iron Riders was a motorcycle club in the neighboring town. They didn’t come to Bad Alibi on a weekly basis or anything, but seeing as this was a biker bar in a biker town, and they were most definitely bikers, it wasn’t unusual for them to pop in every once in a while. They had a reputation that made me more than a little leery, but they’d never caused any problems whenever they’d come in, so I tried not to listen to the gossip. Still, it didn’t fill me with warm fuzzies that Rina had hitched herself to them.
“No clue,” Buck replied on a grumble. “But can’t say I’m surprised. That girl’s a fuckin’ wreck. Always goes lookin’ for trouble if it doesn’t find her first.”
Farah sidled up to the bar a second later, pulling my attention from the rowdy table. “Just a heads-up, honey, you have a new table.” I looked in the direction she’d tipped her head and spotted Jensen and his friends at a high-top table near the bar. In my section. “You want me to cover them for you?” she asked, chewing nervously on her bottom lip.
Thankful for her concern, I looked to Farah and offered up a wan grin. It was all I could muster in my current exhausted state. “No, it’s okay. I’m trying this new thing where I don’t bolt out of a room every time he enters it. We’re attempting to be civil to each other.”
Her lips trembled as she fought back a laugh. “You’ll have to tell me how that goes,” she teased before glancing toward the pool tables. I knew exactly what she was looking at. That was where her man, Cannon, always hung whenever he came in, which was pretty much any time Farah was working. But he wasn’t there alone.