He stuffed her belongings back into her purse. “It’s my charm.” He took the check. “Now get off my truck. We have an early day tomorrow. Meet me at the garage at eight.”
She slid off the tailgate and stepped back as he rounded the truck and climbed inside. Some men used big trucks to compensate for something lacking.
Noah was all male and physically lacked nothing.
As he pulled out of the lot without a backward glance, she felt a twinge of alarm mixed with attraction. With their history, and the fact that he was still involved with Lori, bells went off in her head. She should camp out at Brash & Brazen until the ladies returned from their training class, and let them help her.
However, recent whimpering and whining aside, she’d never been a coward and she wasn’t about to start now. The quicker she began gathering clues, the quicker she’d be free of suspicion from the detective. With Willard breathing down her neck, time was not on her side.
Confident that she could be a strong and professional woman, and solve this case with her newly minted investigator without getting personal, she walked back toward the bar with renewed energy.
She’d find the real killer and finally put this attraction to Noah to rest.
Chapter 6
Harper walked into the motel room at midnight and paused when the stuffy heat smacked her in the face. The air conditioner fizzled in and out, trying desperately to cool the space and failing miserably. The windows were nailed shut.
Complaining to the management would go nowhere. The roach motel had bigger problems.
The first minutes of occupancy were a check for bed bugs with a flyswatter and a can of Raid. Thankfully, the room was bug free. The sticky fly paper hanging from one corner of the ceiling took care of anything with wings.
After dropping her purse on the bed, she stripped and jumped into the shower for relief. With the water on its coldest teeth-chattering setting, she hoped that by the time her body temp came back up to normal, she’d be fast asleep.
Added to the unease of living in the dump, her next door neighbors were a couple who argued into the late hours, then had very loud sex. And she was pretty sure the guy on the other side of her was a criminal. She was convinced she seen him on a wanted poster at the police station.
Harper stepped out, dried off, and slid her feet into her slippers. No bare feet on that carpet. She slipped her arms into her robe.
Bang! Bang! Bang! “Got him!” a man yelled.
Harper ran to the window and peered out between the curtains. A big bellied man in a stained white T-shirt exited the room next door. A large dead rat swung by its tail from his thick fingers as he walked to the dumpster and chucked it in.
An unseen woman cheered. “Way to go Harold! That’s two!”
The curtain closed and Harper looked around the floor for furry gray bodies and took no comfort from seeing nothing moving. There would be no sleeping well tonight.
* * * *
When morning crept in with the chirp of birds soon drowned out by the sound of an arriving biker gang, she was out of sorts and headachy. Not only had thoughts of rodents the size of cats invaded her consciousness, but she’d received a string of heavy breathing calls on her cell from a blocked number
After chewing down a pair of aspirin, she got ready for the day and left her home of two days. Living in Ann Arbor while conducting the investigation had felt like a better plan than commuting every day from her closet-sized apartment in Lansing.
After all, the crime had been committed in this city.
What she saw in the parking lot as she swung open the cheap metal door shook off the last vestiges of sleep.
“Noooooo!” She stumbled over to her Mustang, her stomach souring. Sometime during the night someone had turned the shabby but wonderful classic car into a car wreck.
Tears sprang to her eyes. “My baby!”
How in the hell had she not heard someone taking what she suspected was a bat to her precious car? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t spent most of the night awake.
Was it connected to the calls? The case?
Choking back a sob, she collapsed on the curb and pulled her knees to her chest. Rocking back and forth, she tried to figure out if her life could get any worse.
Her first thought was to go back to bed and grieve. But tears wouldn’t help. Instead, she called 9-1-1 and waited for the officer to arrive and make a report.
The officer kindly commiserated about the damage to the classic car, asked her who she might have pissed off, then took a couple of pictures for his report. There wasn’t much else he could do. The motel had no security cameras.
“That wasn’t helpful,” she sniped bitterly when he pulled away. Clearly the destruction of her car was a low priority compared to pot smoking college kids and noise complaints.
When had her love for law enforcement taken a down turn? Oh, right, since her interrogation yesterday.
She called for a tow and looked up car rentals. The tow truck driver arrived first and gave a low whistle when he saw the car.
“Man, what a shame.” He hooked up to the car and loaded it up onto the flatbed. She gave him the address of her aunt’s old house and her credit card number, then texted Marty to expect the car. He lived across the street.
To keep Marty from worrying, she said a tree had fallen on it. The story seemed plausible if he didn’t look too closely at the damage.
The driver drove off as she swallowed past a lump in her throat. How could she afford to get the Mustang fixed?
With her savings account shrinking, and ten minutes of website scrolling for prices, she called Cheap-Rentals-R-Us for a replacement vehicle and waited for a pick-up. Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait long.
A shiny yellow Camaro bounced into the lot not ten minutes later, bearing a sign on the roof from a pizza delivery company offering quick delivery. She dismissed him until the guy rolled down his window and yelled, “Harper Evans?”
At her nod he waved her over with an enthusiastic hand flap. “Hop in! I’m Eldrige from Cheap Rentals.”
Every bone in her body demanded she send him off and to call another company, but she didn’t have the funds to be picky. She climbed into the car.
“Buckle up.” He chuckled. “This car is a rocket ship.”
The smell of red sauce and pepperoni assaulted her senses. At her puzzled expression, the driver, sporting a peach polyester shirt and a mustache of the nineteen seventies porn star vintage, explained. “I pick up for Cheap between pizza deliveries at my other job. I make a killing in tips.”
“I see,” she mumbled politely and slumped down in the seat to snap on her seatbelt.
“I hope you don’t mind but I have to make one quick stop. Mr. Pran gets pissed if his pizza is cold.” He took off like a shot and her head snapped back, while a handful of vertebrae jolted out of whack.
As if she had a choice?
They sped through the streets for two long and terrifying minutes before coming to a hard-braking stop at a small ranch house with a large apple tree out front. The driver leaped out, ran around the car, and retrieved a pizza warming bag from the back seat. He jogged to the front door and completed his transaction with an elderly man in suspenders.
Smiling as he returned, Eldrige climbed in, dropped the empty pizza bag in the back seat, and tucked a pair of one dollar bills into the glove compartment.