Slider released a frustrated breath that was almost a growl. “Davis has been a thorn in the side of the club for as long as I can remember. Him coming here about your statement I could almost buy, but the way he talked to you . . . something doesn’t add up.”
“I can’t lie. It felt odd to me, too,” she said. It worried Cora all over again as she thought about it. Talking to him had made her want to take a shower afterward. Nothing concrete, just . . . a feeling. A bad feeling.
His hands landed on her shoulders, and his expression was filled with so much emotion. For her. “Why didn’t you call me right away? I would’ve come home.”
“I know you would’ve, and I thought about it. I promise. But I wanted you to have time with the boys. And Davis wasn’t even here for fifteen minutes.” Cora put her arms around her man, because she could claim him now, right out in the open for everyone to see. And she adored that. “If I’d have really been upset, I promise I would’ve called.”
Slider nodded. “I don’t want to be overbearing, Cora, but I care. Some asshole gets up in your face, even an asshole in a uniform, and I want to know.”
“Okay,” she said, pushing up onto tiptoes to kiss him. “It’s nice getting to do this without worrying about getting caught.”
“Aw, damn, does that mean no more sex against your car?” he asked with a grin so sexy she wanted to go find her car right now.
She chuckled. “I sure as hell hope not, Slider.”
He heaved a deep breath, the smile slipping off his face. “I don’t like this thing with Davis. He comes again, don’t let him in. You aren’t even obligated to answer the door.”
“I can do that.”
“Good. Because the more I think about it, the more this all feels wrong,” Slider said. “But I promise you, Cora, that I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
Chapter 20
After lunch at the clubhouse on Sunday afternoon, Slider and his brothers met up in Dare’s office to talk about Davis. The evening before, Slider had texted everyone what Cora had said about Davis’s visit, and the wrongness of it had been like shrapnel under his skin ever since.
“I have some news from Marz that’s pertinent to this Davis thing,” Dare said, sitting behind his desk.
Slider hadn’t been around to get to know the Hard Ink guys, but he sure as hell appreciated their expertise and assistance now. Because thinking about Davis being inside his house hassling Cora was making him crazy. Last night, the only thing that made him feel any better was slipping over to Cora’s room to sleep. Bosco had lifted his head long enough to grunt an acknowledgment, and then gone back to sleep on her floor. Next to the dog bed. Go figure.
Maverick sighed and dropped into the chair in front of Dare’s desk. “Let’s hear it.”
Dare opened an e-mail on his desktop computer. “I talked to Marz for a long time yesterday. The guys at Hard Ink are opening a security firm of their own, and they’ve gotten some new toys that he was only too happy to try out on our behalf. He said he’d dig into both of our situations, and then first thing this morning, he sent me this.” He turned the monitor so that they could all get a better look.
Two pictures, side by side. One of them Slider recognized from Cora’s phone.
“What’s the other picture?” Slider asked.
“Traffic camera about two blocks away from the grocery store. Gives us a nice side view of the vehicle,” Dare said. “No good image of the passengers, though.”
Slider leaned in. His brother was right. The sun glare on the window obscured the interior. “Is that a Datsun? Late eighties, maybe.”
“Yup,” Dare said, reading a note on his desk. “A 1985 Datsun 720 4x4 Truck King Cab with a white bed cap.”
“I think Datsun might’ve been practicing some wishful thinking when they used the word king,” Phoenix said, staring at the old truck’s image on the screen.
“All right, Dare, what else you got?” Caine folded his arms, a scowl on his face.
Dare nodded. “It’s an older vehicle. Unique enough to stand out on traffic cameras if you know what to look for. According to Marz, that makes it useful if you have software which can analyze and compare footage from different cameras and aggregate all the times it hits on a particular image. Which their new company now has.”
“Tell me it picked up this truck,” Mav said.
“Hell, yeah, it did,” Dare said. One by one, he scrolled through the images that Marz snagged off the camera footage. Most of them were from nighttime.
“A bunch of those are from the same intersection. Over off of the Golden Mile,” Caine said, referring to the big commercial strip that projected out from the center of town. Slider had noticed that, too, and something about it was bugging him.