Under Cold Stone A Constable Molly Smith Mystery (6 page)

“No,” Paul replied.

Despite the horrible start, it turned into a lovely day. The hike invigorated them both and, to Lucky’s extreme delight, on the drive down the mountain they spotted a group of elk at the side of the road. Paul slowed the car, and Lucky leaned out the window to take pictures. They both knew better than to get out of the car. Mother elk could be as protective of their young as any other species.

They had dinner in the German-style pub on the lower level of their hotel. Then it was back to the room where Paul watched a hockey game on TV and Lucky settled into her novel. The lights were switched off and they were curled up together by ten o’clock.

Chapter Eleven

TRAFALGAR CITY POLICE STATION. TRAFALGAR, BRITISH COLUMBIA. SATURDAY EVENING.

“Still here?” Six o’clock and Molly Smith was beginning Saturday afternoon shift.

Sergeant John Winters swung his legs off his desk. “Catching up on some reports.”

“You having Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow or Monday?”

“Neither. Eliza’s gone to Saskatoon to visit her mother. She bought a roast chicken from the supermarket, so I’ll have to make do with that. Won’t be the first time.”

Smith hesitated. He could read the thoughts crossing her mind. She felt sorry for him, alone on the holiday. She should invite him to her house. To the house she shared with Adam Tocek, where they were having a proper festive dinner. She didn’t really want him there—they were co-workers, not friends and he was her superior. But still, she should be polite and ask.

“Would you like to have dinner at our place tomorrow night?”

He considered saying yes, just to see the expression on her face. “No, but thanks for the offer, Molly.”

Relief.

Chapter Twelve

GLOBAL CAR RENTAL. BANFF, ALBERTA. SATURDAY EVENING.

Tom Dunning left Tracey to lock up the office. Jody was waiting for him at her place. She’d have pizza and beer on hand. He could probably talk her into leaving the food until later. Tell her some romantic drivel about how he’d been thinking of her all night and just couldn’t wait. Girls like that sort of stuff.

He had been thinking of her. But not because he particularly wanted to gaze into her dark eyes or hear all about her day. When he’d phoned and told her to pick up pizza and a movie, she’d started to grumble. She wanted to go out. Alistair’s band was playing at a bar and everyone said they were good. And that new movie, that romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston, would be gone by the end of the week.

He considered telling her to shut the fuck up and do what she was told, but Jody wasn’t that much of a pushover. She’d only let him go so far. Not that he cared for her one way or the other, but he wasn’t ready to move on quite yet.

After he screwed her and she was feeling all soft and romantic, he’d promise to take her to the bar tomorrow night. And then make up some excuse when the time came.

Tom hated live music. Jody was always whining about wanting to go to bars or shows. He’d let her take him to hear some long-haired chick play her guitar and wail about damage to Mother Earth. That hadn’t been so bad, but he still wouldn’t go out to hear rock. Tom liked rock music as much as the next guy. He just couldn’t stand to see it being performed.

He’d had enough of that when he was a kid. His dad, Mad Mike Dunning, had played guitar in a band. Tom and his sister had grown up on the road, touring every little dump of a town—and there are a lot of dumpy towns among the wheat of the Canadian Prairie or the rocks, trees, and lakes of Northern Ontario. A childhood of lousy motels, greasy food, Mom trying to keep up their education. Then the band hit it big and for a couple of years the hotels were a lot better, and they traveled in planes and tour buses rather than a twenty-year-old Kombi. The groupies got better too, younger, thinner, sexier. Tom’s mom pretended not to notice.

Over all those years, the good times and the bad, the one thing Tom remembered the most was his dad shouting at him to play. He’d been given a guitar and told to play, Goddamnit!

But Tom had a problem. He had no musical ability whatsoever. He was completely tone-deaf. He couldn’t identify one note from another or remember how to create a particular sound if his life depended on it. No matter how much his dad yelled at him and called him a slacker, he couldn’t read the music or make the notes sound like they should.

Slaps to the side of the head and screamed insults did nothing to help.

His younger sister could play. She was good, very good. But she was a girl, and as far as Mad Mike was concerned, major rock bands didn’t have girl guitarists. Their dad might have forgiven her if she could sing, but in that she was also a disappointment.

Tom inherited his lack of musical ability from his mother, and as the band began sliding down the charts, Mad Mike Dunning took out his frustration on his wife. Tom’s mom died in a car accident when Tom was twenty-one, working construction in Toronto. His sister had married a musician and they played country music in the same sort of dives and dingy bars where their dad had started out.

Tom went to his mom’s funeral, didn’t speak to his dad, and left town the next day. His sister had been on tour and couldn’t make the funeral.

Over the years, Tom saw pictures of his dad occasionally, heard a couple of times that the band was planning a big reunion concert.

It wouldn’t happen. The singer, the only truly talented one of the bunch, had died of an overdose, and Mad Mike himself now weighed about three hundred pounds and had a nose that belonged on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

It gave Tom a not-inconsiderable degree of satisfaction the time he saw a picture of his dad on an online gossip site, passed out and being loaded into the back of a cruiser, his pants so far down he was mooning the camera. The headline read: “How Low Can He Go?”

Still, Tom couldn’t bear to listen to live rock music.

It was time he moved in with Jody. He was doing okay with his cut of the take from the car repairs and the other stuff that was going on at Global, but he didn’t like wasting money. He rarely spent any time at the apartment he shared with three other guys. He was sick of being surrounded by Alistair’s equipment and the posters of rock bands he insisted on sticking to the walls. Tom spent most nights at Jody’s, so why not move in? Her roommate, a stuck-up bitch from Vancouver, wasn’t a bad piece. Get her alone one night when Jody was out, and he could show her what she was missing.

Might even be able to talk them into a three-way.

It wouldn’t be for long, anyway. One thing he’d learned from good old dad was to know when it was time to move on. Barry was starting to complain that he deserved a bigger cut. Complain to the wrong people and someone, someday, might squeal to the cops on Global Car Rental. Tom Dunning intended to be nowhere around when that happened.

Before he left, he might even do the squealing himself.

Chapter Thirteen

REDS WINE BAR. BANFF, ALBERTA. SATURDAY NIGHT.

Tracey regarded Reds Wine Bar with a mixture of bitter hatred and yearning envy. She detested the place, but hoped one day it would be the sort of bar where she could hang out without feeling awkward and out of place.

Tonight, she perched on a stool at the far end of the bar. She sipped her wine; to her dismay the glass was emptying too fast. The place was filling up and she’d have to leave as soon as she finished her drink. She couldn’t take a seat that could be used by a tipping customer. Matt wouldn’t like that.

She watched him while he worked. Handsome in a white shirt and black tie, pouring drinks, taking money, joking with customers and the other staff. She’d phoned him after finishing at the restaurant, while changing to go to the car rental job, to check he was okay after the encounter earlier with his dad. By the time she’d taken the orders of the four construction workers into the kitchen and brought out their coffee, Matt had left the restaurant. They’d been busier than usual for the rest of her shift and Tracey had been almost run off her feet. She got some good tips, though, so that made it okay.

Matt had sneered at her on the phone, dismissive of her concern. He had a few bad things to say about his dad, and hoped they wouldn’t run into each other again. But Tracey had seen the look on his face this morning, and she knew it was nothing but bluster. Her heart ached for him.

A group of women swung into the bar, all sporting expensively cut and colored hair, short tight dresses, high heels, makeup, and bright red nail polish. With much tossing of heads and giggling, drawing all eyes to them, they pulled stools into a circle. They found themselves one short. They eyed Tracey, taking in the cheap shiny blue dress, the plastic jewelry, the shoes that hadn’t been new even when they were new to her. But mostly taking in the fact that she, Tracey, was
alone
.

She lifted her head and stuck out her chin. She wasn’t alone. She was with her boyfriend. He might be working, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t
alone
like a loser who didn’t have a date on a Saturday night.

Some people had to work for a living. Her mother, on one of the few occasions she’d been sober and employed, had told Tracey to be proud she was working class. Proud to work hard, to earn a decent living, not a rich bitch mooch like these girls. She’d tried to be proud. That hadn’t lasted long.

Matt laid cocktail napkins in front of the new arrivals, giving them a huge grin of welcome. The smile he rarely had for Tracey. He told them tonight’s specials were listed on the blackboard behind the bar or they could see the menu offering wines by the bottle or glass. The women smiled and preened. One of them was so thin you could, Tracey thought, use her hips for clothes hangers and her tits to measure walnuts. Tracey glanced at the woman’s face, and upped her estimate of her age. Lines radiated out from the corners of her eyes and mouth, and the skin on her throat was as wrinkled as the right sleeve of her ivory blouse, which the iron had missed.

A long-haired, long-legged, bleached blonde leaned over, giving Matt a good view of her more- than-ample breasts, and asked him breathlessly what he’d recommend. Her lips were as red as her sharp fingernails and Tracey imagined those nails turning into claws, reaching across the bar and grabbing Matt by the front of his shirt.

He grinned and glanced down the scooped neck of the woman’s dress, not long enough to be offensive, briefly enough to let her know he liked what he saw. He never looked at Tracey like that. Not that Tracey had boobs like that in any event. Fake probably.

Matt rattled off the names of a couple of bottles. The blonde waved her hand in the air, her talons glistening, and said, without asking the price, that they’d have a bottle of Chardonnay from the Okanagan Valley to start. Tracey, because she had no one to talk to, had spent her time reading the wine list. That was one of the more expensive whites.

“A good choice.” Matt pitched his voice pitched slow and sexy.

Tracey swallowed a hefty mouthful of her wine. Only a dribble remained.

She counted up the tips she’d made today, balanced that against her share of the rent due at the end of the month. Perhaps she could treat herself to another drink.

Matt brought glasses and the Chardonnay and made a big deal out of uncorking the bottle. Tracey didn’t know why they bothered. Screw caps were so much easier. He poured a mouthful of wine into the blonde’s glass. She swirled it around, sniffed it, sipped it, never taking her eyes off Matt.

He didn’t take his eyes off her either.

“Very nice,” the blonde purred, and Matt poured for them all.

What the hell was Tracey doing here? She had nothing to offer a guy like Matt. He was good-looking, older, from a middle-class family. Tracey’s father had run off before she was born, and her mother drank too much and couldn’t hold down a job. She worked two jobs and could barely pay the rent on a couch in someone’s living room. That bottle of wine these women were throwing back without tasting it cost more than Tracey earned in a shift at the car rental company.

Acid stirred in her gut and she felt tears behind her eyes. One of the girls glanced at her, and didn’t bother to cover her sneer. She waved to Matt. “Could we possibly get another stool? My poor feet are simply aching after all the shopping we did today.”

Matt glanced at Tracey. She lifted her glass and thrust out her chin. “I’ll have another.”

Surprise crossed his face, but he only said, “Let me see what I can do.”

“You are
such
a dear,” the girl cooed. Her friends giggled. Tracey was beginning to hate that giggle.

Prompted by Matt, a man brought over a stool and the girl wiggled her amble rump onto it. She shouldn’t be wearing that dress—not with
that
butt.

Matt handed Tracey her drink. He started to say something, but one of the waitresses called for him.

The bar was filling up. It was a small space, meant to be intimate. The lights were low, the tables illuminated by candles, the music soft jazz. Rich people with good teeth, good hair, nice clothes, drank wine and beer, nibbled on canapés, and laughed and chatted. Tracey was starving. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but she couldn’t afford anything they served here. It was all small bites, meant to be shared. Small bites but big prices. She’d go to McDonald’s later, grab a burger and a pop.