The only thing missing from the restaurant was Sophia. She was still stashed away at cooper’s house, along with Jo-Jo. I’d told the sisters to take it easy and rest up, that nothing was going to happen today. That I had Finn tracking down some leads and was formulating a plan on how best to deal with Grimes.
I didn’t tell them that I’d already worked everything out with Finn, Owen, Phillip, and Bria. I didn’t want Sophia and Jo-Jo involved in my scheme, and I didn’t want them anywhere near me, not when I was waiting for Grimes to make the first move. They’d already faced him twice, which was two times too many. I was going to handle things from here, like I’d promised Fletcher. I didn’t want Sophia and Jo-Jo to set eyes on Grimes ever again—at least, not until after I’d killed him.
I didn’t think that the sisters really believed me, but they’d reluctantly agreed to stay put, especially since neither one of them was a hundred percent. Despite the fact that cooper continued to use his magic on her, Jo-Jo was still weak, and Sophia, well, Sophia had been shot, kidnapped, and tortured. She needed some time to recover from that and from all the grievous wounds that she had on the inside, the ones that no magic could ever fix.
It made me a little melancholy, stepping into the restaurant and not seeing Sophia standing behind the counter, slicing up her homemade sourdough rolls for the day’s sandwiches, or hefting a big pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce onto a back burner to bubble away. But it was good that she wasn’t there. If she was, all I would do was worry about her, and I couldn’t afford to do that. I couldn’t afford to be distracted for a moment, not when Grimes and Hazel were coming for me.
So I did my usual sweep of the restaurant for bombs, explosive runes, and any other nasty surprises that someone might have planted on the doors, inside the storefront, or even back in the restrooms overnight. When I was satisfied that no one had been inside the restaurant who shouldn’t have been, I flipped the sign on the front door over to Open, tied a blue work apron on over my clothes, and switched on the appliances to start cooking.
The waitstaff showed up about half an hour later. A few were surprised when I told them that Sophia wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week, but nobody said anything to me about it. They were all too worried about what I might do to them as the Spider to give me any lip about working a little harder because we were a man down.
But the day passed quietly. I cooked, waited on tables, cooked some more, and even managed to read a few chapters of Dr. No by Ian Fleming, which I was reading for a spy-literature class that I was going to start over at Ashland community college in a few weeks.
People came and went, flowing in and out of the restaurant in a regular, familiar, comforting rhythm. No one entered the Pork Pit who shouldn’t have, and no one tried to kill me. All in all, it was a rather boring day.
I knew that it wouldn’t last, though. And I was looking forward to showing Grimes that I really and truly was the Spider.
Grimes’s men showed up at the Pork Pit just before noon the next day.
Oh, they tried to hide who they were by trading in their usual old-fashioned suits in favor of jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, complete with pearl-button snaps. But their clothes were obviously new, judging from the stiff, starchy look of their shirts, the sharp creases in their jeans, and the fact that there wasn’t so much as a speck of dirt on their fancy boots. Plus, one of them brought his brown fedora into the restaurant and threw it down onto the booth beside him, a hat exactly like the ones all of Grimes’s men had worn.
For all intents and purposes, the two men looked like a couple of wannabe cowboys who’d come to the restaurant in search of a good, hot, greasy meal. But their eyes tracked my every movement, and they paid more attention to me than they did to their food. Pity. The strawberry-peach pie was quite excellent that day.
Either they were there to kill me and prove what badasses they were to the rest of the Ashland underworld, or they were watching me on Grimes’s orders. Since they didn’t try to murder me in front of the cash register or lie in wait and jump me in the alley when I took out the trash, that meant that they were most likely on a reconnaissance mission.
The two guys lingered in the restaurant for more than two hours, ordering second helpings of everything, including the pie. I hoped they enjoyed their last meal.
While the men were finally, slowly, finishing up their second servings of pie, I plopped down on my stool behind the cash register, pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket, and called Finn.
“Finnegan Lane, always at your beck and call,” he answered in a cheery tone.
“It’s on for tonight.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
I opened my book to the page that I’d marked earlier with a credit-card receipt, as though my conversation with Finn was so casual that I could read a few pages and talk to him at the same time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of the men shoving a bite of pie into his mouth and staring at me.
“I’m sure. Let the others know. I’ll keep to the schedule that we worked out.”
“Roger that.”
Finn hung up, and so did I. Now all that was left to do was wait and see exactly when Grimes would strike.
The men eventually finished their meal, paid up, and left. They didn’t say anything to me, and they didn’t approach me at the cash register, instead leaving more than enough money on the table to cover what they’d ordered.
I dropped the change into the tip jar for the waitstaff to share.
But apparently, Grimes wasn’t content simply to know where I was, because not ten minutes after the first pair of fake cowboys had left the Pork Pit, another set took their place. Same starched shirts, same creased jeans, same spotless boots. Their clothes were an exact match for the ones worn by the first set, and these two followed the same routine. Ordering lots of food, lingering over everything, not paying up until two hours later.
After they finally left, a third pair came in ten minutes later, just like clockwork, to rinse and repeat the whole process yet again.
Well, Grimes was definitely thorough. I’d give him that. He’d managed to keep at least two sets of eyes on me most of the day. I wondered if he really thought that I was stupid enough to lead him to Sophia and Jo-Jo and that I hadn’t anticipated that he’d come after me in the first place.
“People sure must be hungry today,” catalina Vasquez, one of my waitresses, remarked as she grabbed a pitcher of water from the counter behind me. “Because those guys who just came in ordered a truckload of food. That’s the third table that I’ve waited on today that’s wanted practically everything on the menu.”
“Must be the heat,” I drawled. “Nothing works up people’s appetites quite like being in the great outdoors, hiking up and down mountains, digging graves, things like that.”
catalina completely missed the sarcasm in my words.
She gave me a puzzled look, like I was spouting nonsense.
Perhaps the gravedigging remark had been a little over the top. But after a moment, she shrugged and went over to refill the watchers’ water glasses.
I turned another page in my book, completely unconcerned by the sly, angry glares coming my way—and the violence that was sure to follow before the day was done.
I followed my usual routines, and the hours slipped by until it was finally time for me to close down the restaurant for the night. After catalina and the rest of the waitstaff went out the back, I locked the door behind them, then headed into the storefront to turn off all of the appliances.