Wrongful Termination_A Savannah Martin Novel by Jenna Bennett

Author:Jenna Bennett [Bennett, Jenna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Magpie Ink
Published: 2018-12-20T18:30:00+00:00

* * *

The discussion in the kitchen went on for a few more minutes, but Spicer and Truman had covered all the salient details. Anyone reasonable would have been satisfied.

Goins, of course, wasn’t. Neither satisfied nor reasonable. He kept pushing on our alibi, asking over and over where we’d been, when we’d gotten there, when we’d finished eating, what we’d ordered. As if chicken fried steak versus hamburger and fries made any difference at this point. Rafe kept answering the same questions over and over, with his voice becoming less and less patient as time went on.

“Listen,” he said eventually, “I ain’t gonna change my alibi if you keep pushing at me. If you have a question about it, call the café and ask’em when we came and left, and what we ate. Ain’t that many mixed race couples frequenting the place, and the waitress liked the baby. They’ll remember us.”

“We have the receipt,” I added, still from the parlor. “It probably has a time stamp on it.”

There was silence, and then some rustling. I imagined Rafe pulling out his wallet, and digging out the receipt, and handing it to Goins.

The detective grunted.

“If we’re done here,” Rafe said, “I’d like to get to the hospital to see how Malcolm’s doing.”

“Not quite yet.” Goins tried to sound like he was in charge. “Tell me again how you know the victim.”

Rafe told him again how we knew Malcolm.

“And he works at the gas station on the corner of Dresden?”

“Last I saw him,” Rafe said. “He was there when we filled up the car before we drove to Sweetwater on Thursday morning.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“For a minute,” Rafe said.

“About?”

“Good to see you, how’ya doing, thirty bucks on pump six ’cause the machine ain’t working.”

“Is that all?”

“What else would there be?”

“I thought,” Goins said silkily, or with his best attempt at achieving silky, “that maybe you’d told him you were leaving, so the coast was clear for him to cut Doug Brennan’s brake cables.”

There was a second’s silence. I imagined that Rafe was too flabbergasted to say anything. I was a bit flabbergasted myself, to be honest.

Goins continued. “He worked with cars. He’d probably know how to do it.”

“He worked behind the counter at a gas station,” Rafe said, and I could hear the anger lacing through his voice. “He had a lot more to do with ringing up candy bars and selling lottery tickets than he did cars. It ain’t a shop. Just a convenience mart.”

Goins didn’t say anything to that, and after a moment Rafe added, his voice tight, “Lemme guess. Next, you’re gonna tell me that after I talked him into cutting Brennan’s brake cables, Malcolm came to me for payment this evening, or maybe he came to tell me he was gonna rat me out to the cops, so I tried to kill him to shut him up.”

“You said it,” Goins said, “I didn’t.”

Uh-oh. I got up from the sofa and headed toward the kitchen, still holding the baby.

“My wife and I went out to dinner,” Rafe said.

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