The Beast on Her Leash novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Man at the Dock

Willa shakes the killer's hand and keeps her face still while Lyle jokes about his brother's trainer; Bram refuses to shake, and Lyle sets the price.

Lyle Crowe walked down the dock with his hand already out.

He was forty-one, tall and tanned, with silver at his temples and a gold ring on his little finger that had a flat black stone.

He looked like a man on a campaign poster, and in a few weeks he would be one.

"Miss McCabe," he said. "Lyle. Everybody calls me Lyle."

I stood up from the porch swing.

For eleven years I had pictured those hands on a steering wheel.

I put my hand in his, and it was warm, dry, and ordinary.

It was only a hand.

"Mr. Crowe," I said.

"Lyle. Please."

"I'll try."

He laughed and held on one second longer than he needed to.

"My aunt tells me you've already put him through his paces."

"A delivery driver, mostly."

"Did he bite?"

"He said thank you."

"A miracle." Lyle turned to his brother with a warm, wide grin. "Buddy. Look at you. Dressed and everything."

Bram stood at the porch rail with his hands in his pockets.

He did not answer.

A woman got out of the SUV's other door.

She had a sleek ash-brown bob, a charcoal suit, and a tablet held against her chest.

"Pauline Ward," she said, and did not offer her hand. "I run his calendar and clean up his mistakes."

"That's a full-time job," Fern said.

"It is, Fern."

Pauline's eyes went over me, my jacket, my glasses, the dog hair on my sleeve, and I felt myself being filed.

"I brought a present for the trainer," Lyle said.

He reached into the SUV and came out with a paper bag tied with a red ribbon.

He held it out to me with both hands.

Inside was a pound of dog treats shaped like little bones.

Fern sucked in her breath.

Bram took a step off the porch, and I felt him move before I saw it.

"Isn't it perfect?" Lyle said, to the dock at large. "Reward for good behavior. He likes the chicken ones."

Nobody laughed.

Pauline looked at her tablet.

I thought about the girl in the funeral photo, who had stood perfectly still because she did not know what else to do.

I took the bag.

"Thank you," I said. "Moose has earned these."

I tore the ribbon off, knelt, and gave Moose a bone.

He took it with great dignity and crunched it right at Lyle's shoe.

Fern made a noise that might have been a cough.

Lyle's grin held, but his eyes did a small, quick thing that I noticed.

"Well," he said. "Good. Humor is good. Let's talk business, Bram."

"No," said Bram.

"Haven't said it yet."

"Don't need to."

Lyle sighed, the sigh of a patient man being tried.

"December twelfth," he said. "The Carlisle. You stand next to me, you shake the county executive's hand, and you say thank you, like a person."

"No."

"I've kept your record clean for three years, chief. Two assaults, and nobody in the county has read a word of it."

"Lyle," said Fern.

"I'm only reminding him, Auntie. Favors run both ways."

I watched Bram's face, and I saw that it was not anger.

He looked like a man at the bottom of a well.

Lyle held out his hand again, loose and friendly, for a handshake.

Bram looked at it.

Then he put his own hands back in his pockets.

"Still sulking," Lyle said fondly.

"Mr. Crowe," I said.

Everybody turned.

"I'd like to start with one rule," I said. "Nobody trains a man by embarrassing him in front of his aunt."

Fern clapped her hands once, softly.

Lyle laughed again, big and delighted, and gave me a long look.

"I like her," he told Pauline. "Where did you find her?"

"An ad," said Pauline.

"I've got a feeling about her."

"You have a feeling about everyone."

"That's why I win."

He kissed Fern on the cheek and promised to send a ham.

He thumped his brother's arm, and Bram let his arm be thumped.

At the SUV door, Lyle stopped and looked at me over the top of it.

His head tilted a little.

"You remind me of someone, Miss McCabe," he said.

My heart did one slow, hard beat.

"I get that a lot," I said. "I have a plain face."

"No," he said. "That's not it."

He smiled, climbed in, and the SUV went up the hill with Pauline's pale face turned toward me in the window.

I did not breathe until the sound of the engine was gone.

A hand closed around my wrist.

It was Bram.

He had crossed the porch without a sound, and he was holding me hard enough to feel.

"Quit tonight," he said. His voice was rough. "Take the week's pay and leave. Go home and never come back here."

"Let go of my wrist, please."

He let go at once.

He looked at his own hand.

"I'm sorry," he said, very low. "That was wrong. I don't do that."

"I know you don't," I said. "You did it once, and you stopped when I asked. That's a different thing."

He stared at me.

"Quit," he said again, quieter. "Please."

"Why?"

He did not answer.

His eyes went to the road where the SUV had been.

"No," I said.

"Willa."

It was the first time he had said my name.

I felt it all the way down my back.

"No," I said. "See you at eight tomorrow."

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