He felt empty as he pulled away from Katie’s arms, and sprinted across the dance floor to the back of the bar where he’d seen the woman who looked just like his sister. His heart pumped as he moved and the sudden burst of adrenaline made his head a little woozy.
“Hey, you can’t be back here.” the bartender said, reaching across the bar in an attempt to get his attention.
“I’m a cop.”
“And I’m Tinkerbelle,” the bartender said in a droll voice.
Caleb pulled his badge out of his wallet flashed it at the bartender. He hated the delay this was causing him. If that really was Julie, he needed to get to her quickly before she disappeared.
But just as fast as he flashed his badge, the bartender lifted his hands as if in surrender. “Gotcha,” the bartender said. “They went somewhere back there.”
As he was pushing through the swinging door, Caleb heard the bartender say, “Jerome is not going to be happy about you being back there.”
Caleb didn’t know who Jerome was and he didn’t care. He’d deal with Jerome when the time came. He quickly looked around the kitchen. Several people working at food stations, making sandwiches and burgers. He saw one person with two identical plates that looked like what he and Katie had ordered. Suddenly Caleb wasn’t hungry and didn’t care about it.
“Did you see a woman and man run through here?” he asked the cook.
A young kid standing at the dishwasher looked up at him as if bewildered and the man with a knife in his hand used it to point to a hallway leading to the back. “They went out back. But you won’t get too far if you go down there. Jerome doesn’t like—”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Caleb ran down the small hallway with a set of closed doors. Two of them were marked restroom, which he surmised were for people that worked there. Another door was partially open. Caleb took a chance and knocked on the door.
There was a heavyset man sitting behind a beat-up metal desk that had seen better days leaning back in his chair with one foot propped up on the edge of the desk as he talked on the phone. His eyes widened as he saw Caleb breach the sanctity of the office.
“I’ll call you back,” he said to whoever he was talking with, and then hung up the phone quickly. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in the back of my honky-tonk?”
“I’m a police officer,” Caleb said, flashing the badge he still held in his hand.
The man scrutinized the badge and then Caleb’s face. “Good for you. That don’t explain what you’re doing in my kitchen or my office.”
“A girl just ran through the kitchen, and then came back here. Do you know where I can find her?”
“Crystal?” The man’s bushy eyebrows narrowed, and then he muttered what sounded like a curse under his breath. “Is she doing drugs or something? Because I can’t have any of that happening in my honky-tonk, dammit.”
“I just need to talk to her.”
“Crystal!” he hollered from his chair behind the desk. His voice boomed in the room. “Where is that girl?” he complained, as he finally lifted himself from his chair, making it squeak from his weight. He adjusted his pants and then hollered again. “You out there, Crystal?”
“What, Jerome?”
Caleb heard the woman’s voice from outside the hallway. A few seconds later, a woman appeared in the doorway.
“I could hear you yelling all the way out in the parking lot,” the woman said. It was the woman he’d seen. Her hair was the same color as Julie’s, and she was about the same height and build. But it wasn’t his sister.
Her eyes flashed with anger at Jerome and then turned and looked at him suspiciously.
“What were you doing out there when you should have been out delivering food to the customer?” Jerome asked.
“It was my break. I had a smoke.”
“Are you in some sort of trouble?” Jerome asked. He glanced at Caleb, and then back at her. “You got a cop here asking about you.”
The woman’s eyes widened with panic. “Hey, are you trying to get me fired? I don’t know who you are or who you’ve been talking to, but I didn’t do anything wrong to bring cops after me.”
“It’s okay,” Caleb said, trying to fix his mess up before it escalated into something explosive. “It’s a mistake.”
“A mistake?” Jerome asked, his eyes narrowing.
“She looks like someone I have been looking for. I apologize.”
She shook her head. “You should be surer of yourself before ruining someone’s reputation. I didn’t do anything, Jerome.”
“Get back to work,” Jerome said, waving her off.
Crystal scowled. “I’m going.”
Caleb sighed. “I’m sorry for the confusion. I’d better get back to the bar. My food is probably done.”
Jerome grunted. “I don’t like trouble in my honky-tonk. It makes the customers twitchy.”
Caleb walked through the kitchen feeling like an idiot. He’d left Katie all alone on the dance floor. He’d just left her after he’d told her he’d wanted to dance and hold her in his arms. What kind of idiot does that?
* * *
It had been days since he’d talked with Katie. Ever since he’d run off on her while they’d been dancing—holding each other—he’d felt like a jerk, embarrassed by his reaction to seeing that girl. What kind of man let’s go of a beautiful woman like Katie Dobbs and runs after another woman? He’d spun all kinds of lines in his mind of what Katie probably said and thought about him for what he’d done.
Medical bills had come in the mail, and while he knew his insurance would cover most everything, Katie had said she wanted to know about anything that hadn’t been covered. Plus, she wanted a running total of expenses for her insurance company. He took a quick photocopy of the bills on his home printer and then took the original paperwork to put in his file cabinet
