Free Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers by J. F. Penn, Cheryl Bradshaw, Diane Capri, J. Carson Black, Aaron Patterson, Vincent Zandri, M A Comley, Carol Davis Luce, Joshua Graham, Michele Scott, Allan Leverone, Linda S Prather Page A

be able to find you, wherever you are. You understand?”
    “Mary needs to close up,” Leach continued. “She’s already late for her boy. She’ll feel better if we wait for her. So you two run along now.”
    “Sure, no problem,” Gaspar said, hostility apparent. He gestured for Kim to precede him. They exited the diner, made it to the Traverse through the ceaseless rain. Gaspar unlocked the doors and settled behind the wheel and started the ignition. Kim bent inside the vehicle, reached into her bag and pulled out her camera. She ignored the deluge to snap pictures of the GHP cruiser, its plate, and both Officer Leaches. The burly brothers were braced side by side, facing the parking lot, watching through the windows. Mary stood dwarfed between them.
    Before Kim entered the Traverse, she opened the hatch and pulled out her laptop case. She stowed it on the front floor, then climbed into the navigator’s seat.
    “What the hell do you suppose all of that was about?” Gaspar spoke first, after he flipped on the heat, and pointed the Traverse’s nose toward the exit.
    “You’re asking me?” she said, teeth chattering with cold and receding adrenaline. “I’m thinking this entire day is a crazy nightmare caused by too much schnapps.”
    “Yeah, well, easy for you to say. You’re not out a hundred bucks.”
    “Plus the eight dollars change from my twenty, that’s the best tip Mary’s had this week, I’m sure.”
    He scowled at her. At the driveway’s exit, he asked, “Which way, Ace? Margrave or Atlanta?”
    “I’m pretty tired of Margrave right at the moment. How about you?”
    “I was hoping you’d say that.” He turned the Traverse north and headed for the Interstate. Their wet clothes coupled with the Traverse’s blasting heat put fog on every inside window. Gaspar reached over to flip on the defroster. Cold air blew hard across the windshield and Kim started to shiver again.
    “You could have asked for your hundred back, you know,” she told him, huddled into her wet jacket as far away from the blasting defroster as she could move.
    “Oh, I’ll get my hundred back. Don’t you worry. Cubans are not as harmless as we look.”
    #
    “Drugs,” Gaspar said, after they’d put ten minutes of pavement behind them. “Meth, most likely. Black must have been dealing, at least. Maybe cooking, too.”
    Kim took her phone out to check she’d terminated the recording application, and remembered her aborted internet search.
    Gaspar said, “They’ve had a couple of big drug busts around here. I told you I’d been to Margrave before. I was on two busts that took down some Mexican cartel cocaine. Meth is a big problem in rural areas, too. More likely to be Meth.”
    “Makes sense.” Kim pulled out her laptop. She didn’t need a secure connection now. Just normal service would do it. She opened a search engine, typed in “Beverly Roscoe,” and waited.
    “Am I boring you?”
    “Germans can do two things at once, Agent Gaspar,” she said. He laughed and some of the tension in her shoulders melted. “Drugs; meth; cooking; dealing. See? I was listening.”
    “The place was too empty. Roscoe said Black had lived there twenty-five years. Even the most diligent minimalist would accumulate more stuff than that place had in it over that length of time.”
    “You’re thinking someone ripped him off? Took everything out of the house before we got there?” The signal was weak and intermittent at first. She lost the connection a couple of times before one caught and held.
    Gaspar continued, almost as if he was thinking aloud. “The guy who beat the crap out of that mailbox was having some fit of rage. Could have been a meth head. Hard to work up that level of frenzy otherwise.”
    “True.” The search engine returned a surprisingly long list of articles containing Roscoe’s name. Several pages. Each page had to load individually, and the loading was slow.
    After a while, Gaspar said, “And Mrs.