“You don’t have time?” She sounded erratic. She looked erratic, he noted as he spared her a glance. Her coppery coils atop her head looked as though she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket. Her eyes were wild, her face as gaunt as he’d ever seen it. When was the last time she’d slept, he wondered. He could probably review all her unrequited phone calls and text messages and find the answer to be not in the past week.

“You don’t have time?” She laughed. “You don’t have time? Ladies and gentlemen, the ever evasive—”

“What do you want?”

She charged him, backing him up against the wall as Kole had done on Saturday. It was Thursday now, New Year’s Eve. “I want to know what the hell is going on. First off, your brother? Tobias Shannon? Hades? Are you effing kidding me?”

“I wish I was.”

“And you and Kole, working together in some sort of good ol’ boys thing, what the hell is that about?”

“I honestly don’t know what that’s about.”

“Come on, Ryan. I’m not a baby cop. People have seen you and Kole gettin’ cozy more than once this past week.”

Did nobody keep their eyes on their own paper? He knew the police department was a breeding ground for gossip, but until recently, he’d never been the subject of it. To his knowledge, anyway. “He’s helping me with the Reynolds investigation. It’s a lot bigger than we thought, Joey.”

“Try me.”

So, he did. He tried her with the fact that they’d just about replaced Hades as the suspect in Garrison’s death with Christopher Reynolds. He told her about Ronald Muntz giving a false statement to Wesson PD’s Detective Kasper, the dirt under his nails that pegged him as a mechanic and linked him to the body in Clive’s drowned Porsche. He saved the snake for last.

When he was finished, she stared at him like he’d just relayed the whole thing in tongues. She knit her brow and spoke three words. “Who are you?”

Hudson set his jaw. Who was he? He was Brix Garrison’s best friend. He was the brother of Hades, Black Harbor’s most notorious drug dealer. He was the widower of Nandalie, his beautiful wife who lay beneath ten feet of snow and frozen earth. And he was perhaps the only person who had a shot at rescuing Morgan from an ending as torturous as her beginning.

He grabbed his jacket and shouldered past her. “Someone with a cold case to solve.”

41 MORGAN