Hold On (Page 133)

Not even a little bit.

I packed my bags. I packed Ethan’s. I disconnected the Xbox. I packed some groceries. I grabbed a skillet. I loaded this all in my car. I went to the station, got the keys, and stole a quick, distracted kiss from my man who was on the phone the entire time I was there.

While there, I also got a lot of greetings from a lot of friends, all of whom were busy, so I didn’t dally.

I took our shit to Merry’s and put things away as best I could.

His extra room was a junk room, not a guest room.

I’d deal with that tomorrow.

I went out to go to the grocery store to add to the seriously meager supplies Merry had in his kitchen, something I needed to do before I went to go get my kid from school.

And I left the Xbox on the floor in front of the TV.

* * * * *

Garrett

“Nothin’ here but girl shit,” Jake muttered.

Garrett and Mike stood across the table in the basement were Jake did some of his work. Scattered on it were Wendy Derian’s purse, the contents of the same, and the contents of her car.

“Yeah, except there’s no cell,” Garrett replied.

Jake looked up to him. “Nope.”

“We went through the room she was stayin’ in at her sister’s. Not one there either,” Mike noted.

Garrett looked to Mike. “Twenty-eight-year-old woman’s gonna have a cell phone.”

Mike looked to the table. “Shit.”

Woman in a hurry to get where she’s going.

Cell gone.

Not good.

“Got stuff to process, guys. You need anything else?” Jake asked.

“No, man, thanks,” Garrett answered.

They moved out of the room, but they didn’t move to the stairs to go back to their desks. They moved to the stairs to exit the building in order to do legwork. They had a list of friends and family to hit.

But Garrett knew where they were gonna start.

“Cutler’s?” he asked as he pushed the door out to the back parking lot.

Mike nodded.

They moved to the unmarked sedan they used on the job and didn’t speak, not even to discuss who drove.

They’d been partners a while. They had that down.

They took turns.

Today was Mike’s turn.

Garrett folded into the passenger side.

Mike set them on their way.

Cher’s house was quiet, her Chevy not in the driveway, when they hit her street and parked outside Cutler’s.

They got out. They went to the house. They knocked.

No answer and his truck was not in the drive or on the street.

“We’ll come back,” Mike said.

Garrett nodded and they took off. They went down the list and hit what they could—Wendy Derian’s employer and then her friends at home, some at work, ending with going back to the family.

Most were home. They’d gotten the news and news like that translated to an instant personal day.

But they got the same from everyone, which was the same as what they’d gotten from her sister.

Wendy was well-liked. She was funny. She was sweet. She was a decent worker (she wouldn’t win awards, but she showed and got the job done).

But she was stupid. Picked the wrong men. Never learned. Kept doing it.

No one liked Cutler. Friends were wary of him. Family detested him.

Even with that, there was a lot of shock. She might’ve picked the wrong men, but however bad they were for her, no one thought she’d end up shot three times because of it. Maybe banged up. Even beat to shit.

Not dead.

This read that whatever the men she picked did—whatever Cutler did—she wasn’t involved.

She went to work. She spent time with her friends. She did not exit her life for her man or to cover up whatever he was wound up in or the fact she was tied up in it too. She didn’t seem to be hiding anything or retreating from life, work, friends, or family.

She just kept getting mixed up with the wrong guys.

Mixed up so much with Cutler, the only thing friends and family did get was her demeanor during the time after their breakup to her death.

She was cut up by it. Told everyone who would listen that he was “the one,” the breakup came out of the blue, to her they’d been happy, and Cutler didn’t give her even a hint of a clue why he ended things.

That’s all they got. Including them coming up empty with the fact that she’d told no one where she was going the night before. No family member, friend, coworker, not a soul. The only person she’d mentioned it to was Marscha when she left, but she gave no detail.

At five fifteen that night when they went back to Cutler’s and found no truck with no response to their knock, they had dick. No witnesses to what went down in the cul-de-sac. No one liking Cutler enough to spend too much time with him to know anything about the other side of his life that he couldn’t show them with Wendy. And Jake coming up with nothing outside Cutler’s prints in the car, which were expected since she’d been living with him.

“Not got a good feelin’ about this,” Mike murmured as he headed them back to the station.

“Nope,” Garrett agreed.

“We got dick,” Mike told him, something they knew.

“I wanna hit that house again later when he might be home,” Garrett replied.

“We can hit her hangouts in the meantime,” Mike said. “I’ll tell Dusty it’s gonna be a late one.”

They hit her hangouts, which were not surprisingly the perfect places to pick up the wrong guy.

This meant that no one said jack outside expressing their shock and sadness at the death of a sweet gal that everyone knew but no one knew who might want to kill her.