That reminded me. I needed to tell Natalie about Rex’s visit in the parking lot earlier this afternoon. That could wait until later, though.
“Well, yes, but not just that.” She checked again for Hawke before returning to me. “I heard him talking to someone on the phone about your last job.”
“You mean at the car dealership in Rapid?”
“Yeah. So I followed him when he left Wednesday, and he didn’t go to work. He drove down to Rapid and met up with your old boss.”
She’d followed Hawke all of the way to Rapid City? Wait, that shouldn’t be a surprise. Natalie had once tracked the Bitch from Hell, aka my sister, all of the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, because she’d stolen my favorite purple boots. When Natalie locked her jaws onto something, there was no shaking her until she was good and ready to let go.
If only Susan had stuck to swiping my material items and kept her hands off of my identity, which she’d used to marry me off to a now-dead rich guy. Gahhh! But that was a headache to deal with some other time. Hawke was enough of a migraine for now. Wait, that was too nice of a description for him. He was more like a swollen, burning hemorrhoid.
“So, Hawke met with that sleaze ball?”
I wondered if my ex-boss tried to grab Hawke’s ass like he had mine several times. Probably not. Hawke dressed in 1970s drab plaid suits, looking like a regular on the Barney Miller sitcom my grandpa loved to watch. My old boss had been more into curvy new mothers hard up enough on cash that they were willing to put up with a squeeze here and there for that weekly paycheck.
“Yep, and I’ll bet your purple boots they were talking about you.”
“No betting my boots. Doc likes them too much.”
“And then last evening,” she continued without taking my boots off the table, “I followed him to the Golden Sluice and Jeff Wymonds showed up. They shared a booth and a couple of beers.”
Jeff Wymonds was a past client of mine who’d been stolen away from me by Tiffany Sugarbell, Doc’s gorgeous ex. Tiffany was the opposite of me in just about every way, including straight red hair, tiny hips, and a set of hooters so pert I could hang my laundry from them and they still wouldn’t droop.
“So you went inside the bar after Hawke? I’m surprised he didn’t catch you watching him.”
“No, I parked across the street in my black spy van and listened to them with a high-tech microphone that can pick up the sound of voices through several walls,” she said in a smartass tone, which inspired an ear flick from me. She knocked my hand away. “Of course I went inside. Only I used the back door in the kitchen so they wouldn’t see me.”
“You just waltzed through the kitchen without anyone asking you why you were there?”
“I know the owner and the cook.”
Of course she did. Natalie knew everyone in Deadwood and Lead.
“But I couldn’t hear what Hawke and Jeff were saying because there was a new jukebox in the back of the bar cranking out classic rock and roll tunes.”
“Damn.”
“When Hawke finished with Jeff, he went back to the apartment, and I heard him talking to someone else about you on the phone.”
“Let me guess. He thinks I’m a witch.”
“That’s old news. This is worse.”
“Worse how? I’m a warlock now?”
“No, this time it was about Coop and you.”
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks that you two are working together. He told whoever was on the phone that he’s going to start watching Coop closer now, too. He plans to try to build a case against him, showing he’s been aiding and abetting you in these unsolved cases.”
I held up my fist, imagining popping him in his big square jaw. “That lousy son of a bitch.”
“He’s getting desperate, Vi. There’s no telling what he’ll do next.”
“You need to tell Cooper this.”
“Yeah.” She sniffed. “Probably.”
“There’s no probably about it. Cooper needs to know that Hawke is determined to link him to me and take us both down together.”
“I know, it’s just …” she trailed off, peering over the dashboard.
“It’s just what?”
“Never mind.” She ducked a little, but kept watching out the windshield. “There he is.”
We waited for Detective Hawke to climb into his pickup and head out of the lot before returning topside. Then Natalie started her truck and followed him into the dark evening, keeping at what I hoped was an inconspicuous distance.
Hawke led us away from Deadwood and past the hospital toward Lead. Before he came to the US-385 turnoff, he pulled into the parking lot set aside for Mickelson Trail users that was across from the power station in Pluma. Bighorn Billy’s Diner, where my coworkers and I met regularly for lunch meetings, was just a bend in the road away.
Natalie drove on past the small lot with me slinked down in the seat. She made a left on Pluma Hill Road. A short distance up the hillside, she turned her pickup around, pulled off on a wide shoulder, and killed her lights. She’d parked so that we could watch Hawke from the shadows under a stand of pines without leaving the warmth of her truck cab.
“Nice parking. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you’ve been up here before spying on someone else.”
“Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. Some secrets I can’t share, not even with my best friend.”
Chuckling, I sat forward, trying to see better. “What’s he doing down there?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s still sitting in his pickup. Let’s take a closer look.” She pulled out two pairs of binoculars, handing me one. “Freesia let me borrow hers.”
Freesia was the owner of Galena House. She also happened to be one of my clients, since she wanted to sell the old boarding-house-turned-apartments and
