The Beasts of Juarez, R.B. Schow [books to read for self improvement .txt] 📗

“When exactly was that?” he asked, not sure of his timeline because he’d been pretty bombed these last few months.

“About two weeks ago?” she said, almost like she was guessing, too. “Scotty, right?”

He closed his eyes and turned around.

To her friend, the attractive blonde said, “This guy Bart pissed all over the place and the dude next to me”—she tapped him on the shoulder getting his attention—“what’s your last name again?”

“It’s just Scotty,” he said.

Back to her friend, she said, “Yeah, so Scotty here was like a freaking Hoover vacuum the way he went after this huge line. He snorted it like it was fairy dust.” She turned to him again and said, “You were depressed, right?”

“What you’re doing right now is depressing.”

To her friend, a hot brunette who was looking at him with overdone eyes, she said, “He got screwed by a client or something.” She turned back to him again. “You’re like a private detective, right?”

“I’m not really sure how to react to you right now,” he said, resigned to feeling like a total schmuck.

“So his client totally screws him after he found out the guy’s wife was like, doing bathroom porn or something.”

“Bathroom porn?” her friend asked.

“You know, taking videos of your kitty and putting them on TikTok. Anyway, his client’s wife is a teacher and the kid filming, he’s one of her students, and then it all went wrong. His wife was fired and brought up on statutory rape charges and then the client goes and completely beats the piss out of the kid, landing himself in jail.”

“So did he get paid?” the ever-inquisitive brunette asked.

“No,” Scotty said, leaning her way. “Three months of work and nothing more than a two-thousand-dollar retainer. You can stand at a corner and ask for change and make more money than that.”

“Yeah,” the blonde said, “so this sob story wraps up with him wasted out of his mind and crying over some lady named Carly.”

“Carly is my wife.”

“Does she know that?” the brunette snickered.

“Does she know her name or does she know that we’re married?” Scotty asked, his voice sounding a bit too saucy to be conversing with regular people.

“Both?” the brunette asked with an annoying college giggle. On the Scotty Chase hotness scale, she just dropped a peg or two, not that she’d care.

Shaking his head, he went back to his beer and thought about Alabama. How the hell was he supposed to find her? He was out of leads, Wentworth was now second-guessing his dedication to the case, and he couldn’t even pay his lead investigator because he blew through his safety net a while back.

If Wentworth ever called again, should Scotty come clean? Should he ask for an up-front fee or exaggerate the expenses he expected to incur? That was not their arrangement in the past but that didn’t mean things had to stay the same. COVID was the big game-changer. It threw everything into a tailspin.

But the retainer…

Frowning, waving at the bartender again, he realized he was on his last few grand and he’d be waiting another week for his stimulus check, which he’d also blow through in no time.

“Hey, buddy, why don’t you move down so I can sit with my friends,” a college kid said as he tapped Scotty on the shoulder.

Scotty glanced back and saw this kid who looked like a jock with muscles and some snappy teenage snark. He didn’t like him already. Turning back to the bartender, who was still on the other side of the bar, he tried once again to get her attention.

“Yo, pal,” the kid said. “I’m talking to you.”

He turned around and looked the kid over with bleary eyes. Things were sort of spinning, but he didn’t let that stop him from conversing.

“You go to ASU?” Scotty asked him.

“You don’t need to know that in order to move, so seriously, go grab that barstool on the end and let me sit with my friends.”

The two girls looked at Scotty like he was being rude, and then Scotty looked at the guy who was being rude and thought about smashing his face on the edge of the bar just to watch his face break open and bleed.

Finally, he stood and said, “I’m a lover not a fighter; no need to hassle an old man.”

“Good, thanks, hurry up,” the kid said, not an ounce of gratitude to be found.

“You drive the yellow mustang, don’t you kid?” he asked. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you around.”

“I don’t drive a yellow Mustang.”

“Look, man, nothing to be embarrassed about—”

“I drive a Blazer, thank you very much,” he said. “But seriously, bro, you’re salting my game here.”

Scotty held up his hands and moved on. He was headed to the open barstool when some other guy slid in and took it. “I give up,” he muttered. Leaning against the bar, he laid down his last four twenties and told the bartender to keep the change.

“You’re leaving already?” she asked as she collected the money.

“Yeah,” he said. “I might be getting diarrhea.”

“You need me to call you a cab?” she asked. He ignored her as he made his way through a small crowd of middle-aged men talking sports or women or whatever.

When he walked outside, he saw his car and stopped. He let out a pained sigh and said, “Well ain’t that just the biggest kick in the nuts.”

Every single window was broken out, the panels were dented, and there was some message spray-painted along the driver’s door.

TWO DAYS.

“What the hell does that mean?” he wondered.

He was suddenly taken to the ground and hit with a flurry of punches, most of which were to his ribs and back. Through all of this, some guy was saying they wanted their money.

“What money?” he asked, still not sure who was throttling him.

The