Rock Chick (Rock Chick #1)(120)

By the look of him, I was assuming something happened to someone I loved. Seeing as I was a cop’s daughter, this moment was always in the back of my mind. For me, especially coming from Eddie, it could be anyone, Lee, Dad, Malcolm, Hank or dozens of other guys who were friends of mine or Dad’s.

I opened my mouth to answer and I heard then saw the Ducati. It stopped in front of the store, Lee pushed down the stand and swung his leg off. He came inside.

His mouth was tight, his eyes were blank, his expression was grim.

He looked at me, then at Eddie, then back to me.

“You okay?” he asked.

“What the f**k is going on!” I shouted.

“She needs caffeine.” Tex said, handing me my latte.

Lee came closer to me, both he and Eddie were less than a foot away, crowding me in. Tex was still beside me and Duke had wandered over, feeling the vibe, and was standing close behind me.

Bad news was coming.

“Cherry Blackwell’s car exploded this morning,” Lee said.

I stared at him.

What the f**k?

“Jeez-us. She the loopy-loo you scrapped with last night?” Tex asked me.

I ignored Tex and said, “Please tell me she wasn’t in it.”

“She wasn’t in it,” Lee said.

I let out a breath and then took a sip of latte. Even in that tense situation, I noticed that the latte was divine.

“What happened?” I asked.

Eddie answered, “We don’t know. Car’s still too hot to get near it. They’re guessin’ she was four, five feet away when it went. She got hit with flying debris and she was burned by the fireball. She’s at Swedish Medical Center.”

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“No update yet,” Eddie said.

Jeez, I didn’t like Cherry. In fact, I hated her, but I also didn’t like the idea of her getting hit with flying debris from a car explosion. The only person I’d want that to happen to was Osama bin Laden but I would prefer for him to be in the car.

I looked at Lee, he was still looking grim. I realized that they may have parted badly but she had still been his girlfriend. Twice. I slipped my hand in his.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at me funny.

“She doesn’t understand,” Eddie said.

“Understand what?” I asked.

Then it hit me. Last night, I was rolling around in fried rice with Cherry, today she’d almost been blown up.

I looked at Eddie. “I have an alibi. Actually, I have two! And I don’t know anything about explosives.”

This wasn’t exactly true. Ally and I had famously set off a couple dozen bottle rockets in Nina Evans’s front yard after Nina had started a nasty rumor that Ally had herpes.

Still, bottle rockets and car bombs didn’t exactly compare.

“Yeah, she spent most of the night with me and the cats, eatin’ chips and drinkin’ moonshine. She wasn’t out of my sight until you came and got her,” Tex threw in, looking at Lee.

Eddie stared at Tex, some of the intensity going out of his eyes at the thought of me, Tex and the cats eating chips and drinking hooch.

“Darius told me that one of his guys was at a strip club last night and heard Coxy’s boy Gary talkin’ about your cat fight with Cherry,” Lee said.

This wasn’t interesting news. I figured I’d been a prime topic of conversation on police band for at least a week. I probably had my own code by now, Indy-666 or something.

Anyone could listen to police band.

“And?” I asked.

“And Coxy’s already gone out of his way to eliminate what he might consider your problems.”

I dropped Lee’s hand and took a step back. “You think Wilcox tried to kill Cherry… for me?”

Eddie answered again. “Too early to know. Cherry didn’t have a lot of friends but crisping her seems harsh retribution for bein’ a bitch.”

“This isn’t happening,” I said.

I was reeling. I didn’t know what to do, what to think.

“You guys want coffee?” Tex asked Lee and Eddie.

“Sure, triple shot cappuccino,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, Americano, black,” Lee said.

Tex ambled off to the espresso counter while I continued my silent meltdown searching the depths of my fried brain for Denial Zone.

Then Duke asked, his Sam Elliott voice low and serious, “Could we not talk about f**kin’ coffee and maybe talk about how you two badass motherf*ckers are gonna protect Indy from this crazy f**k?”

I turned to look at him and noticed immediately that he was pissed.

Duke looked at Lee. “Isn’t it about f**kin’ time you quit f**kin’ around and took care of this f**kin’ guy?”

Uh-oh.

Duke wasn’t afraid to use the F-word but he only dosed his vocabulary liberally with it when he was close to losing it.

Lee looked at him. “I’m workin’ on it.”

Duke took a step forward. “Work harder.”

This was not good.

I knew, because I saw, that Lee could kick ass. Duke was no slouch. He might be an old guy but he also knew how to handle himself through a f**kload of practice.

I wasn’t sure how Lee would take an accusation of “f*ckin’ around” and I didn’t want two people I loved to go head-to-head in my bookstore.