I giggled as if this was somehow hilarious. “So you’re busier at night, then?”
He nodded, and I noticed that his attitude had changed from when I first walked in. He was a lot more pleasant and laid-back. Ha! Kris wasn’t the only one who could work his wiles on people.
“Maybe you can help me with something.” I leaned forward again, crossing my arms on the bar, subtly squishing my boobs together and putting my little bit of cleavage on display. Ava probably had a better figure for this sort of thing, but the bartender gave me an appreciative look, so I pressed on. “I’ve been looking for a guy…”
He smirked. “Thought you had a boyfriend,” he drawled, leaning in closer, suddenly interested.
I laughed playfully. “It’s not like that. This guy caused me a lot of trouble.”
“What’d he do?”
“Honestly?” I decided to go for most of the truth. “He hit me with his car and put me in a coma for four months.”
“Whoa.” He cringed. “That’s awful.”
“Tell me about it.” I rolled my eyes. “So my boyfriend and I have been looking around for anyone who saw this guy that night. Maybe he picked a fight with somebody, or caused a scene. Something somebody would remember, you know? The police are completely clueless.” I rolled my eyes again, then lowered my voice. “I was hoping maybe you could help me.”
“How would I do that?” He narrowed his eyes as he leaned toward me with his elbows on his side of the bar.
I had him hooked. I had to remind myself to remain still as he closed the gap between us. His breath smelled as though he’d been passing the time by sampling some of the bottles behind the bar.
“I don’t know,” I said, batting my eyes like an idiot. “Maybe you could let me take a look at the receipts from that night?”
He looked skeptical, but I didn’t give up.
“Hey, the credit card numbers themselves aren’t actually on the receipts. It’s not like I’m stealing information. I just wanna see if anybody ran up a big tab that night, that way I’ll know who to look for.” I leaned a little closer to him and gave him a better look down my shirt.
“Well…” he trailed off.
“Come on. I won’t tell anybody how I found out,” I said with a wink. “Help a girl out.”
He frowned, but then pulled out a laptop. “We have all of the receipts scanned in here. What was the date?”
I told him, and tried not to sound too eager. It’d worked. I had to tell Kris that I was just as good at seduction as he was.
“Here,” the bartender said, swinging the laptop around on the bar to face me. “I’m gonna go wash some glasses over there. Whatever you see while I’m gone, I don’t know anything about.” True to his word, he walked away and left me alone to sift through the files.
I started tabbing through the scanned documents. Nothing raised any red flags. The bartender wasn’t lying when he said the place was busy at night. I must have gone through over two hundred receipts, and they were all starting to blur. I figured that this would end up being another dead end.
Then, a name jumped out at me. I nearly rubbed my eyes to be sure I wasn’t seeing things.
Kristian Fields.
Fuck.
I must have said it out loud because the bartender came rushing back, a concerned look on his face.
“Did you find something?”
I was at a loss for words, my eyes glued to the screen. It took me a minute to find the ability to speak. “Maybe…I might have found something. Or someone.” I turned the laptop toward him. “Do you recognize this name?”
He peered at the screen, then scowled. “Oh, him. Yeah, if you sell alcohol in this town, you know that name. He’s never been in while I’m here. A weekend customer, generally.”
“But you know the name?” I asked, my heart sinking. He nodded.
“Oh yeah. He has a reputation for trouble. Some of the customers leave when he comes in because he’s such a nasty drunk. If he didn’t drink the more expensive stuff and plenty of it, I think he would’ve made our no-admittance list.”
“And he comes in here a lot?”
“Yep. Kris Fields is in here every weekend from what I hear, and we’re not the only place he visits over the course of a night, either,” he told me. “There’s no ignoring that guy. He’s a real piece of work.”
I felt sick to my stomach. This wasn’t possible. Had it been Kris all along? Why would he try to help me if he was to blame? Unless he’d completely blacked out and forgotten all about it. From the tab, it was clear he’d had enough to drink to warrant a black out. Maybe he felt guilty?
No, I told myself, there had to be a mistake. “Are you sure these receipts are for the date I’m talking about?” I asked. I scanned the screen. Sure enough, the first Friday in November.
“Wait a minute,” the bartender said suddenly. “I remember that night. I wasn’t here, but I heard a lot about it the next day.”
“What happened?”
“Fields was in here, and he got really drunk. My buddy told me that he refused to serve him any more drinks because Fields was so wasted. So Fields threw a fit. He knocked over a few stools, cursed my buddy out. The bartender called a cab and that made him even madder. He stormed out and flew off in his car.”
I was reeling. This seemed so unlike the Kris I knew. Then again, how well did I really know him?
“Actually…” the bartender added reluctantly. I waited for him to continue. “I heard that he never drove that car again. Nobody has seen him in it since then. A red Porsche, but he’s never driven it since that night. We all guessed he crashed into something.”
“Yes. He crashed it,” I whispered. The word ‘horrified’ didn’t begin to describe how I felt.
The bartender must have seen how devastated I was, and he left me alone. I barely noticed him going.
Kris had been lying to me this entire time. If his car had been wrecked, he must have known something happened. Even if he didn’t remember what he’d done, the evidence was there, and his father clearly knew all about it.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
He’d used me, taken advantage of me. He and his father had played me like a fiddle. I didn’t know why he was pretending to help me, if it was his way of steering me to the wrong conclusions or just some sick twisted game. Either way, he’d had me completely fooled.
He didn’t want me. He never had. I wasn’t sure if I was more disgusted with him for his behavior, or me for falling for it.
I glanced at the clock above the bar. He’d be here any moment, and I had to decide what to do. I took my phone out of my purse.
Chapter 16
Kris
I watched Preslee walk off toward the bar and couldn’t help admiring the view in those tight jeans. She was so small that I’d worried at first about hurting her, but she gave as good as she got, which was just one of the things that I loved about her.
My smile faded as she walked away, my stomach twisting with guilt. I knew the clock was ticking. I needed to tell her the truth, but I felt as though I was stuck in a vicious cycle. Every day that passed – hell, every minute – without her knowing who I was only made things worse. Confessing was becoming more impossible by the day. I was certain that she would hate me for lying. The closer we got, the more unbearable it felt to live without her. I was in too deep.
Maybe if I’d come clean sooner, I could have gotten away with it, explained and asked for forgiveness. But I’d lost that chance.
I had to tell her tonight, no matter what. I had to man up and accept the consequences. I winced as I thought of how she’d react. Maybe if I got her some answers, it would help smooth things over. I headed for the bank, determined not to take no for an answer. I asked to speak to the bank manager, and was advised to sit by the door and wait. This was strange for me. I was accustomed to waiting to speak to bank presidents, not managers. Normally, we met in a boardroom or on a golf course, not in a random strip mall. It seemed I was learning a lot of new things from Preslee.
The manager of the bank finally came out to greet me, and led me to his office. He was a large guy with a protruding potbelly that strained against his tucked in Oxford shirt. His meaty jowls jiggled when he talked, but his smile was genuinely kind.
“My friend and I have been investigating events which took place last November,” I explained. “See, she was in an accident a few miles down the road – the victim of a hit-and-run. The police haven’t been able to find much information on the person who caused the crash, and I was hoping we could do better.”
“I see,” the manager said slowly in a strong Southern accent. “I’m not sure how I can help, son.”
“I was wondering if it would be possible to find out whether anyone had withdrawn money from your ATM that evening, or if we could somehow access the recordings from the ATM camera in case the person walked past the machine. My theory is that maybe they were at the bar down the way and drove from there to cause the accident. Of course, it’s just a theory, but I thought it might be worth a shot. We’re looking for any help we can get.”
“This is a little out of the ordinary, surely you can understand my reluctance,” the manager told me. I looked at the plaque on his desk. His name was Bob.
“Bob, I realize this is sort of unique, but if you knew this girl and everything she’s been through, you’d know how important it is. She’s lucky to be alive.” I tried for the sympathy card. “She was comatose for four months. Her long-term memory was wiped out and still hasn’t returned. She lost her job, her apartment., missed out on months of college. Her medical bills haven’t come in yet, but I’m sure you can imagine how outrageous they’re going to be. I mean, four months of treatment…” I whistled.
Bob’s brow furrowed. “Yes,” he agreed. “I can see how that would be quite the burden.”
“So you see,” I told him, “if she could find the person who did this, at least, she could get some justice. She might be able to get a settlement to at least cover medical costs. She has nothing else to fall back on. We’re trying hard to find what the police are unwilling or able to figure out.”
Bob gave this some thought. I could tell I was wearing him down.
“I don’t think it’s illegal, is it? To review the recordings?”
“No,” Bob admitted. “I doubt that it is. It’s a little bit of trouble…but nothin’ compared to the trouble this poor girl has been through. I don’t see a problem. I’ll have to send out for the recordings, but that shouldn’t take long.”
I wrote down the date in question on the back of my business card, and left it for Bob to get in touch with me.
I hoped that Preslee would be as happy with this development as I was. Maybe enough to give me a shot at proving myself to her after I told her the truth. If Preslee rejected me completely, I wasn’t sure what I’d do.
I walked into the bar, feeling fairly positive. Maybe this day hadn’t been a total waste.
It was a pretty dark and quiet place, dusty, with a faint sour smell.
Preslee was seated at the bar, staring at her hands, and I took a moment to admire her before heading her way.
“Hey,” I said, sliding onto a stool beside her. “The guy at the bank said that he might be able to get the ATM video for us. Great, right?”
She stared into her iced tea glass. “Yeah. That’s cool.”
Cool? I didn’t think I’d ever heard her use the word ‘cool’ before. Warning bells went off. “Are you okay? Did something happen while I was gone?”
“What could possibly have happened in the last fifteen minutes?” she snapped.
Yeah, there was definitely something wrong here.
“Did you talk to the bartender about that night?” I asked her, noting how she hugged her body tight as if she were cold. What the hell happened? Where did my smiling, flirty girl disappear to? And whose ass did I have to kick for it?
“Yeah, I did,” she mumbled. “He wasn’t working that night.”
“How does he even remember that, off the top of his head?”
She inspected her hands again. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know, Kris. How do you expect anybody to remember something that happened four months ago off the top of their head? Yet somehow you expected the people we talked to today to remember what happened that night. Like it was special to them or something. This didn’t happen to them, it happened to me.”
Ahhh. That was it. I put an arm around her shoulders, and she tensed. “Pres,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. We pushed really hard today, maybe it’s time to call it a day. We can always come back to it later.”
She nodded, but none of the tension left her. “Yeah, sure. I’d like to hang out for a bit and finish my iced tea, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Of course not,” I told her. “Take your time.”
Just then the door swung open and both Preslee and I turned toward the sound. It was two uniformed police officers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Preslee motion to them to get their attention. I frowned. What was going on?
“Kris Fields?” one of the cops asked, and before I knew it, my hands were being forced behind my back. “You’re under arrest.”
“For what? What’s happening here? Preslee!” But Preslee had gotten up and backed away from where I was now bent over the bar with my hands cuffed behind me.
“You’re under arrest for the assault of Preslee Keats, Mr. Fields.” The cop behind me yanked harder than necessary on the cuffs. “And for whatever else we can get you for.”