For You (The 'Burg #1)(31)

“Jesus.”

“Get her ass in my house tomorrow night and sleep with one f**kin’ eye open tonight.”

“Don’t think I’ll be sleepin’ at all, son.”

“I wouldn’t either.”

“They gonna catch this f**ker?”

“They’ll catch him but only because they think he won’t stop until he gets caught.”

“She don’t have that many enemies, Colt. Hell, she’s only really got one and he’s already dead.”

“He’ll make them up.”

“Jesus.”

Colt decided to finish it. “I know what you think this is, Jack, and it’s not that. It’s just me keepin’ my family safe.”

Jack turned fully to him and looked him straight in the eye. “Listen to what you say, son. What you just said tells me this is exactly what I think it is.”

He gave Colt no chance to reply before he walked away and Colt found himself at the end of a bar that now both Jack and Feb were avoiding and he needed another beer.

Five minutes later, Darryl hefted up the hinged portion of bar and slid through.

“Get me a beer, will you, Darryl?”

“You got it, boss,” Darryl replied, pulling out a beer, setting it in front of Colt and moving off without snapping off the non-twist cap.

Colt watched Darryl move away thinking they really should get rid of that guy. Two and two did not make anywhere near four for Darryl.

He reached over the bar, twisted to use the bottle opener underneath it and when he sat back down he saw Amy Harris making her way to him.

This sent a chill up his spine.

He’d known Amy for thirty years; she was between him and Feb in school.

She was very pretty and petite but had always been painfully shy. She got out of high school and got a job as a teller in the bank across the street from J&J’s. She’d been in that job ever since, never moving up, never moving on. Even as pretty as she was, she’d never had a boyfriend that Colt knew of, not that he paid much attention to Amy. In fact, he rarely saw her, even though he’d lived in the same town as her for three decades. He’d see her at the grocery store, the post office, driving down the street but not often.

He’d never seen her in J&J’s.

She swung her head around and looked down the bar and Colt followed her eyes.

She was looking at February who was talking to a biker while she poured him a draft.

That chill slid round to cover his entire torso and locked in.

When he looked back at Amy, she was close.

“Anyone, um… sitting here, Colt?” she waved at the stool beside him which was good because she was speaking so quietly he could barely hear her.

“Take a seat,” he invited and she hesitated before she did so.

Her eyes skittered back to February before she put her purse on the bar and folded her hands on it like if she didn’t position them properly she was scared of what they’d do.

“How’s things, Amy?”

He watched her body tense at his question and she turned her neck slowly to look at him.

“Not good,” she said, again talking so quietly Colt barely heard her.

“Why’s that?”

Her head jerked slightly and she closed her eyes before she opened them and whispered something he didn’t catch.

“Come again?”

She cleared her throat and said louder, “Angie.”

“Angie. Yeah,” Colt replied, keeping his eyes on her, hers had moved to stare at her purse.

“I figured people would stay away,” she said then lifted her hand and it fluttered weirdly in the air like a wounded bird before she dropped it to her purse again, wounded bird down, “from here.” She glanced around the bar and her eyes moved to his again before she dropped them back to her bag and finished. “Guess I was wrong.”

“Why’d you think they’d stay away?”

“Dunno. Just did. Angie.”

“You know Angie?”

She shrugged and then her gaze moved to his chest. “She had an account at our bank. She always came to my station, every Friday after work.” She shrugged again and looked back at her purse. “I was nice to her, others could be…”

Her voice trailed away, the words left unspoken didn’t need to be said.

Her body jumped suddenly and she said slightly more loudly, “Anyway, I thought I’d show Morrie and Feb my support, come to their bar, have a drink. But I guess everyone thought the same thing.”

“This is what it’s like every Friday.”

Her eyes came to his and she didn’t try to hide her surprise or inexperience. “Really?”

Colt couldn’t help it. She was a harmless, shy hermit who wanted to do the right thing and it probably took everything she had to leave her cocoon of a world and come out to do it.

So he grinned at her and said, “Really.”

Her eyes shot away from his face, they caught on something else and he watched her grow pale.

He followed her gaze and saw Feb halfway down the bar staring at the both of them looking like her body had been encased in ice.

But the expression on her face was raw, so raw it was difficult to witness.

“I shouldn’t have come,” Amy whispered, sounding urgent and hurried now, even scared, and Colt’s head jerked to her.