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hands
now?”
    “ Play nice, Sara,” Dagger
said.
    Sara slipped the gun back into her purse.
    “ Need to ask you a few questions.”
Dagger moved to the end of the bar, out of ear shot of the other
patrons. Sara and Casey followed. “Anyone come in here recently
asking about me?”
    The big man’s eyes grew and a small teletype
appeared to play back in his head. It looked as though he were
weighing his options – lie and save his skin or tell the truth and
walk away with just a few broken bones. Seeing that Sara had
slipped her hand back into her purse, he opted for truth.
    “ Yeah, couple days ago. Looked like an
insurance salesman, but a dangerous insurance salesman. Something
about his eyes. You just happened to be picking up your cleaning
down the street. I pointed out your car,” he said, looking
nervously at Sara’s purse, “and told him he could probably catch
you there if he hurried. Did he?”
    Dagger shook his head. Demko probably
followed him home and decided on a surprise visit rather than
approaching him in public. Which means he probably was using
Connors’ rental car before disposing of the car with Connors’
decomposing body in the trunk.
    Dagger smiled at the nervous giant. “Guess
you can live another day.” He led Sara out of the bar whispering,
“That thing loaded?”
    Sara winced. “Forgot.”

    CHAPTER 6

    The gun metal gray binoculars were a
Christmas gift from his wife. Padre had complained that the damn
things cost $600 and a $25 pair would have done just as well. But
he was wrong. These were so powerful he could see an ant crawling
up a tree trunk two hundred yards away. Before it got too dark he
needed to search out the quarry Dagger had mentioned. Sure it was
far-fetched and Dagger could be pulling his leg. But with all the
weird cases he had seen Dagger work, there was just something in
the amusement Dagger had shown when telling the story that told
Padre if Dagger were involved, expect the unexpected.
    The closed quarry dominated the southeast
side of town. Padre had been crouched in the weeds searching the
area to make sure he was alone. The gravel roads into the property
were grown over. So far he hadn’t seen any bird watchers or bikers
or teens engaged in nefarious activities.
    He moved closer to the fence, then trained
the binoculars on the floor of the quarry. Small pebbles appeared
as huge boulders through the lens. Small bones sprang in front of
the lens of the binoculars. Padre figured they were the remains of
rabbits and other small animals who had inadvertently fallen into
the quarry. A crow cawed from a branch overhead, sending a chill
down Padre’s spine. He didn’t care too much for being out in the
woods even in daylight. Ever since the bizarre Friday the
Thirteenth case he worked with Dagger he hadn’t been able to go
into the forest at night without an entire arsenal on him. Back
then, even an arsenal hadn’t helped.
    The sun slowly crept across the sky. Padre
returned his attention to the floor of the quarry. If Dagger’s
humor contained one ounce of truth, a body tossed into the quarry
would be close to the edge. He swept the floor below him, seeing
more small bones, bird wings, a few beer cans. Padre had grown up
several miles from the quarry and as a kid remembered his mother
yelling every time they dynamite-blasted the rock. All of her
knickknacks would fall off the glass shelves.
    The lens skimmed the area across from where
he sat. Still nothing that looked like a body. There were tires,
charred remains of what looked like a car, scrap metal of some
type, more bones, shoes…wait. Padre zipped the binoculars back to
the bones. He lowered the binoculars to view the area with the
naked eye, then back to the binoculars. The bones were fragments
but looked larger than rodent bones. Slowly he returned to the
shoes, adjusted the focus. The shoes still had socks in them…and
feet.

    “ Tell me again what I’m doing here at
eight o’clock at night with my