Free Blast from the Past (A Mac Faraday Mystery) by Lauren Carr

hand, Gnarly cocked his head.
    “No, you’re not getting my coffee.”
    Gnarly hung his head and cried.
    “You don’t drink coffee.”
    He whined again—louder this time. Pleadingly, he placed a paw on Mac’s foot.
    “It’ll stunt your growth,” he argued.
    Gnarly lifted his head and let out a long whine that ended in a bark.
    “No.”
    Seeing that begging wasn’t working, Gnarly stood up and barked out a demand that Mac turn over his coffee to him.
    “Stop it.”
    When Mac refused to share his coffee, Gnarly tagged him forcefully in the chest with his front paws to knock the cup out of Mac’s hand and onto the ground.
    “You’re not spoiled, are you?”
    Gnarly was lapping up the coffee to wash down his croissant when Mac spotted a woman in a black running suit jogging from the hotel across the street. Her dark sunglasses concealed most of her face. On her way down from the sidewalk up by Spencer’s main drag, she stumbled off the curb and almost fell to the ground before regaining her balance. She pushed her sunglasses back up onto her face before breaking into a run for the café door.
    “Nora,” a male voice called out, “wait up.”
    Mac looked across the parking lot in the direction of the call while the woman hurried toward the door.
    “Where have you been?” the man asked.
    “I went running,” she answered from over her shoulder before the door shut behind her.
    “But I thought we were going to spend every minute together.” In contrast to the anxiety in his tone, the man was walking at a leisurely pace. While the majority of the residents and tourists of the resort town dressed down in casual fare, the stick-like man was dressed in an ill-fitting gray suit and white shirt with no tie. His clothes hung from his bony frame. As he approached the café, his appearance became even more bizarre.
    While Mac and Gnarly watched, the man in the gray suit stuck his finger up his beak-shaped nose. After taking his finger out of his nose, he smiled a good morning to them. His rotten teeth were the same color as his suit.
    Mac nodded a “how do you do?” before catching a whiff of an unpleasant odor that announced the approach of someone in dire need of a long hot shower with plenty of soap. Mac let out a cough while fighting the turn in his stomach that threatened to result in becoming sick.
    Seemingly puzzled by the ill expression on Mac’s face, the bird-nosed man smirked before going inside.
    The Blue Jay baseball fan held open the door for the bird-nosed man to enter the caf é . Carrying his cup of coffee, Blue Jay fan touched the bill of his cap before heading back across the parking lot in the direction of the bridge to the other side of the lake.
    “Are you ready to go?” Mac asked Gnarly, who was licking his chops.
    He took up the leash and then stopped when he saw a white van parked directly across the street. David’s black cruiser pulled into the hotel parking lot and stopped in the space alongside it. The SUV was a few seconds ahead of the black limousine that was stopped at the corner by the red light.
    “We need to go, Gnarly,” Mac said. “We need to go now.”
    With that, the two of them ran across the parking lot, and hurtled the barrier between the café’s parking lot and the real estate office next door. They ran down the street to the next traffic light to cross the intersection and jogged back up the other side toward David’s cruiser.
    Mac ducked behind the SUV in time to see the limousine pull into the parking lot for the Dockside Café.

Chapter Nine

    “I take it things are happening,” Mac said when the back of the white van opened to invite him and Gnarly to join the party hosted by two men whom he had never met.
    In the van, crowded with audio surveillance equipment, one of the men was having a soft conversation with David, who was in his police chief’s uniform.
    “Who’s watching Archie?” Mac asked Randi Finnegan.
    “Bogie and half of the Spencer police