“Turn your ass around—”

“I got to go. I’ll be back in a couple days.”

“Goddammit!”

The connection went dead.

He called Spud back, but there was no answer.

Reed wanted to reach through the phone and grab Spud by the throat. How dare he? Who did he think he was? Reed’s pulse thumped hard inside of his ears. He wanted to smash beer mugs and liquor bottles until his rage subsided, but instead, he eased the phone back into his jacket pocket and took a couple deep breaths.

He’d known that this might happen, but he truthfully hadn’t believed that Spud had the spine. What if Spud stayed in St. Paul longer than a few days? Reed would have to call in sick. And how would that look? This wasn’t the plan, goddammit.

Reed took another breath and let it out slowly. He needed to get it together—keep up the act. He forced a smile onto his face and turned around to find a guy waving an empty Grain Belt bottle at him. He wanted to hit the man for no good reason.

Instead, he gave the man a new beer. Don’t let them see that anything’s wrong.

CHAPTER 28

Max paid for his beer and returned to his table, elated by what he’d seen. Reed had been playing cards earlier on a cell that he kept in the back pocket of his jeans. The call he’d just taken had been on a phone he pulled from the breast pocket of his jacket. Reed had a burner! And the simplest answer for why he had a burner—the one that fit Max’s puzzle perfectly—was that Reed was talking to his accomplice.

Max needed to look at that phone, but how? He could wait to see if Reed took his jacket off at some point, but no, Reed would keep the jacket on to keep the phone close to him. If he was going to get a look at that phone, Max would need to force Reed to take it off, which seemed impossible. And if he stole the phone, Reed would know that someone was onto him.

Max’s own burner buzzed. He looked at the text, a single word: Done. Max sent a reply, also a single word: Wait. All Max needed was a few seconds with Reed’s phone.

He looked around the restaurant. The waitstaff were all women, including the manager. There were probably male cooks in the back, but as far as Max could determine, Reed was the only male employee around.

He stood and nonchalantly walked to the men’s room: two urinals and a single stall with a toilet. Max entered the stall and went to work. He was no plumber, but basic toilet technology hadn’t changed in over four hundred years. Sure, there have been tweaks and upgrades, but most guys believe that fixing a toilet is within their genetic ken. Max was willing to bet that Reed Harris would rise to the challenge.

He lifted the lid off the tank and took a quick inventory. Pushing the handle lifted a flapper, the seal that held the water in the tank back from the bowl. Once enough water passed into the bowl to complete the flush, the flapper dropped and the tank filled again. What stopped the tank from overflowing was the float. The water lifted the float until a valve shut off the water.