Bite Me (Woodland Creek) Read Free

authority over something, the girl behind the counter took a look at the picture. She couldn’t have been older than twenty, especially with that hoop in her nose. Her thin brows came together, and then they shot up. “Some other guy showed me a picture of this girl. Is she, like, a criminal or something?”
    “This is an old photo. She’s not suspected of anything currently,” Jake said.
    “Are you a cop?”
    “Private detective, and it’s important that I find her.” The fact this girl had said someone else was also looking for her worried the ever-loving hell out of him. “What did the man look like who showed you the last picture?”
    The girl straightened a little. Jake could sense the alarm in her, and the excitement. “He was tall, about your height, I think, but bigger. Giant scar on his face though.” She brought her hand up and made a circular motion against her right cheek, as though that would give him an impression of how bad it was.
    Jake didn’t need to hear anything else. There was only one big, tall guy he knew who would have a giant scar on his face. Still, it was better to get all the details. “Older, steel grey hair, sort of a caveman brow?”
    “Yeah, exactly,” the girl said, her eyes widening.
    This couldn’t be good.
    “Is he still here?”
    “He’s got a room here. Is he a criminal?”
    He was, but nothing had ever been able to stick for too long. Jake knew he should’ve stopped off at the sheriff’s office before coming here.
    “No, he’s just some mean competition. You know how it is,” Jake said, partially whispering as he leaned in and smiled. The girl’s cheeks turned a bright pink, and she had trouble meeting his eyes as he flattered her, making her think he thought she was smart enough to know how things actually worked.
    That was the point. Jake was good at manipulation, to the point where it was basically cheating.
    Depending on the mind, he could make people react how he wanted them to. It was like the Force, only more fun, because it was real and not from a Sci-Fi flick.
    There was rarely ever any competition between two private detectives. Not unless some guy had enough money to blow to hire two different firms and see which one produced results the fastest, or unless Jake was doing what he was doing now.
    Which was working for free so he could find Alice.
    “Don’t tell him I’m here, all right?” Jake asked. He hoped the stupid Rotty wouldn’t smell him, but that was unlikely. “Actually, if you can…” He pulled two hundred dollar bills from his wallet and handed them over, something he could barely afford to do. “One of those is for you, and the other is so you can give my scarred friend some booze. On the house, of course.”
    “Of course,” the girl said, smiling and squirming pleasantly as she took the bills, her eyes never leaving Jake’s. “Whatever you say.”
    “Good.”
    “Before you go,” his new comrade said, “just so you know, I did recognize that girl from before. She’s got a room here.”
    Something twitched and snapped inside of Jake’s brain. She was close. She was this close. She was here .
    “Did you tell my friend this?”
    The girl shook her head, and she scratched the side of her nose that had the hoop in it. “No. He gave me some weird bullshit story about her being his niece or something. I didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t have had such an old picture if she was his niece. At least you were honest.”
    He was mostly honest about it.
    Jake nodded. “See to it that he has a good time, all right? Try not to stick around him or his friends too much when they get tipsy.”
    The girl nodded. “I used to work in the strip club outside of town. I know how to handle drunks.”
    “Just stay out of their way, got it?” Jake asked, looking hard at the girl.
    He didn’t think anything would happen to her, and there was a better chance that Bobby himself wouldn’t be doing any drinking, regardless of whether or not the