The man wore a hoodie with High Tide Pub written across it, his hands shoved into the front pocket. I tilted my head, something about his face familiar.

“We were just leaving,” Stone snapped.

He stood, only inches from the man, towering over him. I slid myself up the wall, still using it for balance, not ready to trust myself.

The man scowled up at Stone, and I realized immediately where I knew him from.

When I glanced around the room at Calvin and our friends, there had been one person. Behind them, cleaning off the counter and carrying the empty glasses away, it was the same man, the same scowl plastered to his face.

16. Stone

16

STONE

“I’m sorry you got nothing from my memory of the night,” Len said, sitting on the couch.

I’d waited until she was stable enough to walk and then helped her back to my rental. She was still shaking by the time I helped her to the couch, and my stomach sank knowing I was the reason why. I never should’ve pushed her.

“That’s not true,” I said.

“It is. I panicked, and I cut us short. I should’ve pushed harder.”

“That would have done neither of us any good, Lenny,” I assured her. I needed to diffuse the situation, fast. I’d learned basics of diffusing a bomb, talking down a gunman from pulling the trigger, working through hostage negotiations, but no book or instruction manual ever told me how to solve this.

“Len, you gave us more information than we had. No one knew the Coastal Killer was using drugs to subdue their victims.”

“Wouldn’t the morgue have found that in their assessments?” Len said, glancing up with her big brown eyes.

God, I loved the way she looked at me. So intuitive; she really would make a great agent. Maybe I wasn’t entirely messing things up.

“Exactly, which tells us…” I pushed.

“That it was a substance not detectable in the normal toxicology screen?” she asked, catching on quickly.

“Yes, which gives us more information than the FBI or sheriff had three years ago. That is not nothing,” I promised.

Her entire body still trembled, adrenaline and painful memories still rushing through her. I sat down beside her, hoping to find a way to stop it. This wasn’t like my field assignments; I couldn’t apply any of that knowledge to this.

I had to improvise.

The last time I improvised, someone was killed. 

This wasn’t that, not even close. I took a deep breath. What calmed me when I felt like losing control? For a while, that was alcohol and drugs to numb the pain, but eventually, I’d stopped. I turned to books. When I felt the world crumbling around me, life no longer making sense, I threw myself into books and learned everything I possibly could.