LITMIR.BIZ

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pointed a knobby finger at a line of trees bent low by the wind. “Gonna be a bitch of a night.”

      Soaked to the skin, with his dark hair dripping in his eyes and rainwater running down his neck, Eli climbed back inside and started the truck’s engine. “You think?” But he grinned as he spoke, and flicked a hand at the thermos. “I’m surprised that tea of yours hasn’t eaten through the aluminum casing by now.”

      “You sound like my great-grandson.”

      “I am your great-grandson.”

      “I mean the other one. The one who’s wearing a police chief’s badge and sporting a big dose of attitude over in the Hollow.”

      “Only a town of fools would give a badge to someone who prefers carrot juice to whiskey.” Eli squinted through the streaming windshield. “Self-denial that unswerving upsets the balance of the universe.”

      “Spoken like a cop after my own heart. And while we’re on the subject of badges and balances, did you know your carrot-loving cousin’s not gonna be putting a wedding ring on Sadie Bellam’s finger?”

      “Heard about it.” Eli kept his tone casual and swept his gaze across the mud-slick road. “I also heard it was Sadie who ended the engagement.”

      Rooney’s expression grew canny. “You got awful good hearing for a man who spends most of his time hunting down killers in New York City.”

      “It’s not so far from there to here. As the raven flies.”

      The old man chortled and offered him another cup of “tea.” “I won’t say you’re a jackass, Elijah, only that among other more valuable things—and for ‘things,’ read ‘Sadie’—the badge on Ty’s chest could’ve been yours if you’d wanted it.”

      “And an executive position at the New York Times could’ve been Sadie’s if she’d wanted it. We do what we do, Rooney, and live with the consequences.”

      His great-grandfather made a rude sound. “You’re as stubborn as twenty mules, the pair of you. You knew each other as kids, connection was already there. Life’ll take you down different paths because that’s how it goes sometimes. But it goes in circles other times, and you and Sadie came to the end of a doozy when you met up last April in Boston.”

      “Rooney—” Eli began.

      “I was there, Eli. I saw you. And let me tell you, there wasn’t a soul at that wedding reception who even noticed the bride and groom with the fireworks you two set off. Suddenly, next thing I know, Sadie’s back at the Chronicle, and you’re tracking a serial killer through the underbelly of Manhattan. Me, the universe and pretty much everyone at the reception are still scratching our heads over that turn of events.”

      Eli sighed. “You, the universe and pretty much everyone at the reception read too much into a time-and-place chemical reaction. Sadie was engaged in April.”

      “Only until she got back from Boston. Two days later, your cousin Ty was drowning his sorrows in goat milk and a double dose of wheat germ.”

      “Sadie’s not ready to be married, and my life’s good the way it is. Cops and relationships don’t mix.”

      Rooney snorted. “If you expect me to buy that load of bull, you’re no kind of cop. And no kin of mine.”

      “In that case, happy hundred and first in advance, and I’ll be heading back to New York right after I drop you off at Joe’s bar.”

      “I need a favor before you go.”

      “Yeah?” Eli raised a mildly amused brow. “I could say I don’t do favors for people who claim to have disowned me.”

      “But that would make you unworthy of any badge, and we both know that’s as far from the truth as it gets.”

      The vague humor lingered despite the fact that Eli could no longer see either the road or the dense woods next to it that stretched from the Cove to the Hollow and beyond. The rain fell in blinding sheets now. “What do you need?”

      “Ty’s on duty tonight. I want you to go by his office in the Hollow. He’s got a bulldog there named Chopper. Family in town’s heading south and can’t take him, so I said I’d think about it.”

      “You want a dog?”

      “Don’t give me that look, Eli. If I die before Chopper does, I’ll leave him to you.”

      “Still a cop here. I can’t have pets.”

      “No pets, no women. You’re not a cop, you’re a monk.”

      “Who said anything about no women?”

      “No women of consequence, then. Now, you take my last serious relationship versus the last woman I had sex with.”

      “Jesus, Rooney.”

      The old man drank from his thermos before offering back a mostly toothless smile. “You think because I’m old I don’t have sex?”

      “Yes—no. Dammit, I don’t think about it one way or the other.” Ever.

      “Why not? I’m human.”

      “You’re also my great-grandfather, and I do my level best to keep thoughts of sex, parents and grandparents out of my head.”

      “You’re a prude, Elijah. Doesn’t bother me to picture you with a woman.”

      The first bolt of lightning shot down deep in the hollow. “Are we actually having this conversation?”

      “I am.” Rooney peered into his thermos. “Seems to me you’re doing more avoiding than conversing.”

      Eli swerved around a barely visible pothole. “What I’m doing is trying to figure out how anybody’s sex life, mine included, relates to me checking out a bulldog.”

      “So you’ll do it?”

      “What, have sex or check out the dog?”

      “In a perfect world, both, but I’ll settle for the dog and enjoy thinking about you and Ty firing daggers at each other while you picture, but deliberately don’t talk about, the lovely Sadie Bellam.”

      “You have a wide streak of mean in you, old man.” But a slow grin removed the sting of Eli’s remark. In any case, glaring down his resentful cousin would be hell-and-gone preferable to visualizing Rooney naked with a woman.

      As the wind picked up, and the truck began to buck, even his garrulous great-grandfather stopped talking. The road, such as it was, became a river, complete with currents, broken branches and sinkholes that could rip out the undercarriage should Eli happen to hit one. That he didn’t was more of a miracle in his opinion than a testament to his driving skills.

      Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside his second cousin’s shabby dockside bar, Two Toes Joe’s. He saw Rooney safely through the door, turned down a mug of coppery green beer—old Joe really should have his lines changed—and jogged back to his still-running truck.

      The dashboard clock read 9:30, which surprised him since it seemed to have been dark for hours. If he’d believed in omens, as at least three-quarters of his relatives in the area did, he’d check out the dog—couldn’t not do that—then say screw an early arrival for Rooney’s birthday and return to New York. Return to sanity, and more important, the safety of a no-Sadie zone.

      What had flared between them last April had been unexpected and intense. Sadie had been a kid the last time he’d seen her. Seven years old and shocked speechless over the murder of her cousin Laura, who’d also happened to be his stepsister.

      Although the residents of both Raven’s Cove and Raven’s Hollow had been horrified, few had been as badly shaken as he and Sadie. How could anyone who’d never had the misfortune to do so possibly understand what it felt like to discover the body of someone you loved? And not merely discover, but, in Sadie’s case,

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