Free Every Precious Thing by Brett Battles

paying him that much attention.”
    She started to move off.
    “Wait,” Logan said. “Did he show the picture around? Maybe piss someone off? Anything like that?”
    “Like I said, I wasn’t paying attention to him,” she said, shrugging. “Enjoy your beer, and have a nice night.”

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
     
    T HE FLIGHT ARRIVED in Los Angeles at 11:44 p.m. Though it was on time, Dr. Erica Paskota glanced at her watch, annoyed. By the time she retrieved her rental car—with the special package that had hopefully been slipped into the trunk—waited for her two men who weren’t scheduled to arrive for another thirty minutes, then drove the three-plus hours to Braden, she wouldn’t arrive until after four a.m. at best.
    Her man on the scene had been watching the woman for four weeks, but there had been no sign she’d had any contact with the target. Erica had begun to assume it was a dead end, but had left her watcher in place because caution was the best course.
    Then there’d been the beating the previous night. The watcher had not seen the actual fight, but he had seen the man in the bar not long before he was attacked. That, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to draw the doctor’s interest, but the picture the injured man had been showing around was.
    Someone else was looking for the same person she was. Why? Who was he? And the woman bartender they’d been watching—did she actually know something?
    Whatever the answers, this needed to end now . It had been going onway too long. Though she had other matters that required her attention, she could no longer trust this issue to anyone else. She had decided to fly out herself and lead the search. It was the only way she could be sure of a satisfactory ending.
    She glanced at her watch again, even more agitated than before. She was sure the ending she craved lay to the East, but she wasn’t getting there any faster as her plane endlessly taxied through LAX.

C HAPTER F OURTEEN
     
    F OUR MORE BARS and Logan found himself no better off than he’d been when he left The Hideaway. It was almost midnight when he walked into the fifth, a place called the Sunshine Room. It was in a low-slung building connected to the Sand Castle Motel just off the main drag.
    The Sunshine Room did not live up to its name. The interior was almost as dark as the desert night outside. Whereas The Hideaway had elevated itself above dive-bar status, the Sunshine Room seemed to embrace its seediness.
    It was only large enough for four tables and the bar. A handwritten sign on the wall read: R ESTROOM OUTSIDE AROUND BACK . The toilet’s location didn’t seem to help eliminate the stale odor of piss and beer that hovered in the room.
    Logan walked over to the laminated bar, where a tired old man stationed on the other side looked annoyed by the fact he had a new customer.
    Instead of asking Logan what he wanted, he merely looked at him, waiting.
    Logan used his now familiar opening line. “What do you have on tap?”
    “Beer.” The man’s voice was scratchy.
    “Okay. Sounds good.” It was Logan’s seventh beer that night, but beside the first one, he’d only taken a sip or two of the others so he didn’t really care what the man brought.
    The bartender filled a glass with something that almost looked like water, and set it on the bar. “Four fifty.”
    Logan pulled out a ten.
    When the bartender returned with his change, Logan pulled out his phone and turned it so the man could see the screen. “Did a guy come around last night and show you this picture?”
    The bartender glanced at Sara’s photo, then looked at Logan through narrow eyes. “You a cop?”
    “No.”
    “You kind of look like one.”
    “Army,” Logan said. “Once.”
    “That could be it, I guess.” The man jutted his chin at the phone. “So what’s the deal?”
    “My friend got beat up last night near The Hideaway. I think it was because of this.”
    The man shook his head, said, “I don’t know