Free American Blood by Ben Sanders

said the only other people in there were these three guys having a sit-down and a coffee. In there about fifteen minutes or whatever and then they just up and left. Anyway. He thought they were being kind of quiet, but didn’t really make anything of it, so he pays and goes outside to the lot and two of the guys are laid out in the gravel, and the other one’s gone.”
    Her files and news clippings and printouts spread on chairs, the coffee table, everywhere. She sat sidesaddle on the arm of the sofa. “What do you mean, laid out. Like dead?”
    “No, not dead, just beat up. He reckoned one of the guys was on his back with a broken nose, blood everywhere, and the other guy was on his side and then sort of got up on all fours when the guy helped him. Wheezing away like he’d been kicked in the balls or kicked in the guts or something.”
    “Anybody say what happened?”
    “No, but I mean, pretty clear the third guy nailed the other two and then hightailed it.”
    “Deal gone bad, maybe.”
    “That’s what the truck driver thought. State police didn’t think it was much of a trafficking area, but the descriptions this guy gave sounded like Troy Rojas and Cyrus Bolt. The beat-up guys, I mean. So they ended up calling the marshals because there’s a BOLO on Bolt, and the feds put them through to our missing persons guys, because apparently there’s some angle where they’re connected to a missing girl. Anyway, then they called us just as a courtesy thing, too.”
    She said, “Quite the phone tree.”
    “Yeah.”
    The kettle clicked. She headed back to the kitchen. “So who was the third guy?”
    “Umm, hang on. Yeah. Tall, well-built blond guy. Early to mid-thirties. Probably six-three, the guy reckoned, maybe two hundred.”
    She paused, midstride. “Huh. Shit.”
    “What?”
    She kept walking. “Nothing.”
    “You know him or something?”
    She laughed. “No. I doubt it.”
    He didn’t answer. She rolled open a drawer and found a spoon and took a mug from a shelf and rinsed out the dust. “What did the staff think?”
    “Couple of cooks out the back, didn’t see a thing. Mexican waitress not too great with English. Cruiser went out but I mean, shit. Nothing to see, other than a bit of blood here and there.”
    “Truck driver still around?”
    “Yeah. He’s got a place here. Missing persons went out this morning, and I was going to have a word too, but I don’t really have the time.”
    She tilted her head to hold the phone against her shoulder, spooned instant coffee into the mug. “So you thought…?”
    He laughed. “Yeah. So I thought if you felt up to it there’s nothing says you can’t just call round and see a truck driver for a chat. If you want to.”
    “Yeah. Okay.”
    “You want to?”
    She watched water in the mug swirl as she poured. “Yeah. I’ll go see him. What’re his details?”
    “Got a pen?”
    She did. That marker for the whiteboard by the fridge they’d used to schedule out their week. She bit her lip a second. “Yeah. Go.”
    “Guy’s name’s Alvin Lemar.”
    He gave her a phone number and address. She scrawled in huge letters, trying to fill the space. Martinez thanked her and they traded some tail-off small talk, and then the good-byes, and then it was just her in the quiet house.
    She set the phone on the cradle, resisted the urge to check the front door. It was locked when she went to bed, and she hadn’t touched it since. No need to confirm. The windows were secure.
    She sipped coffee, concentrated on staying still. The alarm had been useless during the break-in, so she’d left it unrepaired. To an extent, that felt empowering, as if the system was unneeded, but in practice she’d struggled. For weeks, unexplained sounds meant a check of all entries, and only in the past few days had she started to relax. She no longer carried the gun in the house, and daytime noises could sometimes be ignored. Nighttime was a different story, but she was getting