She screamed the last part and that’s when Quinn Colson stood up and told Lovemaiden and his special investigator to wait for him back in the office. Lovemaiden groaned, making a big show out of placing two meaty hands on the table, and pulling his fat ass out of the spinning chair.

“Me and you ain’t done, missy,” Lovemaiden said. “Not by a gosh-dang long shot.”

“Y’all wait in my office,” Quinn said. “I need to speak to Miss Byrd in private.”

*   *   *

Chester Pratt parked out back of the chain-link fence behind what used to be the Cobb Lumber Mill before old Larry Cobb cornholed himself by keeping payoff records between him and Johnny Stagg and half the damn county supervisors. Cobb was still sitting in federal prison over in Louisiana while Johnny Stagg was probably working on his second piece of pecan pie à la mode at the Rebel right about now. Just didn’t seem fair, Pratt thought, watching the steam come off the massive piles of cut timber, bright lights shining into the big expanse of the lumberyard, trucks still coming and going from the front gates even though it was nearly midnight.

Pratt took a sip of some whiskey in his Yeti cup, leaning back into the heated leather seat, wanting to close his eyes for a few minutes. Just what in the hell had he gotten himself into? All he’d wanted to do was get that damn liquor license and set himself up in a business that he could control. That had been the trouble with everything he’d ever tried to do, someone coming along and fucking up the situation. Like that steak house in Oxford. How the hell was he supposed to know two assholes had the same idea in mind and opened up their steak houses not two weeks after him? And what about the time he’d bought into that fine menswear shop in New Albany just in time for a damn recession? Any other time, he’d been outfitting half the town for blue blazers for Sunday service and selling to all those frat boys who came down by the truckload from Ole Miss because that’s what their daddy had done before them. He’d been in cattle, timber, food, clothes, and now liquor. Liquor was the thing that he knew was going to make him a success, a respected member of the Jericho community, maybe a slot on the Chamber of Commerce, perhaps even a time that he might run for Board of Aldermen or get on the sugar tit of being a county supervisor.

He’d done everything right. Only to get himself screwed. Again. Like the old blues song said, if it weren’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all.