That got his attention. “Run a plate? Seriously? When did you guys join the neighborhood watch?”
“Since we saw some slick fucker hassling Roxy this morning,” Kenny said.
Dobie proffered a wrinkled sheet of notepaper bearing the Gas ‘n Go logo. “He stopped to fuel up this afternoon, so I wrote down the details. I don’t have a name, ‘cause he paid cash, but this is the car he was driving.”
West noted a late model red, Ford Mustang convertible—the certified ride of douchebags everywhere—but this one had Tennessee plates in a Music City Pawn & Loan frame. His gut tensed. Maybe it was coincidence that the guy happened to come from the same place he suspected to be Roxy’s prior semi-permanent address. “Hassling Roxy in what way?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Kenny and I went to the alley behind the diner to meet Roxy for a…uh…” He looked away and squinted, clearly searching for something plausible.
“For a smoke,” West surmised and swallowed a sigh.
“She was so freaking nervous, West.” Kenny rushed to her defense. “All tense and jittery. She nearly spilled a pot of coffee all over us when Pinkerton’s junker backfired out front. Addy worried she was overdoing and told her to take ten. If she didn’t look better after, Addy planned to send her home.”
“Right or wrong, a cigarette really takes the edge off,” Dobie justified, “so I offered her one. By the time we paid the bill and made it ‘round back to join her, this dude”—he pointed to the paper West held—“had his face in hers, and she looked seriously sketched.”
“When we rolled up, the guy split. Rox brushed it off as some jerk bent out of shape about making a wrong turn on his way to Nashville. But first off, who gets that kind of lost anymore? If the jerk can afford a fancy car, I figure the jerk can afford a phone to direct his jerky ass to wherever it wants to go. Next, if he was rushing to Nashville, why was he still here in Bluelick hours later, gassing up?”
“I don’t know,” West admitted and slipped the paper into his shirt pocket, “but I’ll look into it.”
“Figured you’d want to,” Kenny said. “The whole thing just…” He trailed off and shrugged. “It feels wrong. You know?”
“I know.” It had felt far from right the second he’d learned the man had been hassling Roxy. After getting a slightly better description of the driver than “slick fucker” from Dobie and Kenny, he told them to contact him if they saw the guy again. On his way to Cranston’s house, he called Roxy but got voicemail. Then he remembered she had a meeting with Roger that afternoon regarding the song deal.
After “investigating” Cranston’s garbage bin bandits, picking up the mess, and dragging the bins to the curb, he returned to the station and ran the plates. The car turned out to be registered to Music City Pawn and Loan, owned by one William T. Boudreaux of Nashville, Tennessee. Driver’s license photo and data did not match the description supplied by Kenny and Dobie. William T. Boudreaux was fifty-five years old, six feet five inches tall, tipped the scales at 313 pounds, and had enough facial hair to join the Duck Dynasty. He got no hits on a stolen vehicle report, but that didn’t mean the car hadn’t been boosted. Could be big Willy didn’t know his ride had gone across state lines or didn’t care to involve the police in the matter.
Nashville was not a small town by any stretch, but given Boudreaux’s line of business and overall presentation, West suspected the local law enforcement would be familiar with him. Unfortunately, he had zero contacts in the Nashville PD, but as luck would have it, Shaun did. After a ten-minute telephone discussion with Shaun’s guy, Lieutenant Tran, West knew William “Uncle Billy” Boudreaux allegedly supplemented his pawn business with a sideline in unsecured loans bearing the kind of default penalties likely to land the recipient in the hospital…or the morgue. But whatever methods Boudreaux employed, he employed them with calculated discretion. In his long and storied career, the man had only two arrests, no convictions, and reputedly a sizable cache of favors owed by some of Nashville’s most distinguished families. The driver of the Mustang, on the other hand, was likely Randy Boudreaux—only son of Billy’s youngest sister—who the Lieutenant considered a con man masquerading as a music agent, possessing nowhere near the brains, balls, or connections to follow in Uncle Billy’s footsteps.
West couldn’t paint a detailed picture yet, but he could do a decent job of connecting the dots leading a crooked music agent from Nashville to Bluelick to hassle Roxy right about the time she got an offer from a legitimate music producer with five-figure interest in one of her songs. After securing authorization from Shaun to take a drive to Nashville tomorrow to pay a visit to William T. Boudreaux, he tossed all the reports in a folder, went 10-7, and headed out.
He ran into Roger—almost literally—on the sidewalk in front of the station. Despite the heat, the lawyer looked like he’d stepped off a magazine cover, save for his somber expression. “Hey, Roger. How’s it going?”
“It’s going,” Roger replied. He offered nothing additional but made no move to continue on his way. Something about the way he loitered said, Ask me more.
Attorneys adhered to a professional code of ethics, and West considered Roger as ethical as they came, which meant whatever message he wanted to convey, he intended to do it without breaching any professional responsibility. West would try to play along, but he could think of only one reason Roger would seek him out for a non-conversation. “Um…did you meet with Roxy this afternoon about the PlayHard contract?”
“I did. I outlined the legal and monetary aspects of the deal. I can’t discuss the details due to attorney-client privilege,
