Ride the Wreck (Stonewall Investigations Blue Creek 2)

So I didn’t. We lay there, soaking in the quiet and syncing our heartbeats.

As we were cuddling in bed, trying to catch our breaths and float back down to earth, Ryan’s phone buzzed and lit up the room, clattering across the nightstand. Ryan went to silence it but looked at the screen instead, sitting up.

“Huh,” he said, reading over whatever message he’d just gotten.

“What?” I asked, unable to stop my nosey side from showing. I continued to play with his chest hair but waited with bated breath.

“It’s Anya, Stonewall’s tech expert. She said she was able to track down the lipstick purchase to a store called Solar Beauty, here in Blue Creek. She has a date range, too.”

“Yeah, I know that store. I used to work there, actually.”

Ryan set his phone back on the nightstand, taking me back in his arms. “I’ll pay a visit tomorrow, see what records they can pull up for me.”

“We’ll go visit tomorrow. I know a few people who still work there—I probably have more pull on them than you’d have.”

Ryan arched a brow and appeared ready to shoot my idea down, but I stopped him with a kiss. One with plenty of tongue and touching. I climbed back onto his lap and rested my head against his chest, our naked bodies fitting together perfectly. The rise and fall of his chest put me in a trance, and whatever Ryan was about to say before I kissed him was soon lost to the sound of gentle snoring.

He had fallen asleep, and I didn’t take long to follow, my dreams as full of Ryan as I had been only moments before.

21

Ryan Diaz

The cashier clerk at Solar Beauty—his metallic orange name tag read Lars— looked fresh out of high school with the laissez-faire attitude to prove it. He moved at the pace of a drugged-up slug and wasn’t very inclined to help us out. Elijah’s connections only extended so far, and this new hire didn’t seem to care that Elijah used to be standing in his exact same spot.

“Cameras? I don’t know if we even have any,” he asked, the fluorescent lights above us making his expressions even harsher.

“Can you ask?” I said, trying not to let my frustration levels rise any higher.

“Is Cindy in? She used to be the manager when I worked here.”

“Yeah, I know you worked here,” Lars answered.

I shot a glance at Elijah, who looked like he was about to take off his imaginary earrings and launch over the makeup-cluttered counter. I knew I should have handled this by myself, but I wasn’t exactly in the right state of mind when he asked me to come. No, last night, my mind had been completely blown, all the circuits fried and the wiring melted.

“Let me go check.” Lars tapped something on his computer screen and walked around the circular cashier area, disappearing through a door for a few moments before returning by himself.

“Nope. She’s not in.”

I leaned on the counter. “Then who’s the manager on shift? We just need to look at the surveillance footage for a two-week time span. That’s all.”

Lars crossed his arms and raised his plucked brows. “Oh my fuck, is this about the Unicorn copycat killer going around Blue Creek? Let me tell you, that shit has me scared. Like, bad. Is it?”

Even mentioning the serial killer made the temperature in the store plummet about twenty-five degrees. Zane was still in town working around the clock with the Pegasus team. We had weekly meetings at Stonewall to discuss the case, and all of us had our eyes open for anything that could point us in the direction of the killer.

So far, nothing. No one had been able to make much progress, and still the Pegasus ran loose, terrorizing the small town like nothing had before. Attendance at the handful of bars and restaurants on the main strip dropped to near zero, and the streets emptied by eight. It couldn’t even be called a ghost town—not even ghosts could be spotted wandering around once it got dark.

“This isn’t about the Pegasus,” I reassured Lars.

He gave an audible sigh of relief. “Fine. Let me go get Cindy.”

“What? She was here all along?” Elijah asked, voice going up a pitch louder than the pop songstress who was singing through the store speakers.

“Sorry,” Lars said with a shrug. “I forgot.”

Elijah gave an eye roll that would have snapped an innocent bystander’s neck if they were too close to him. I held a laugh under my breath as Lars lazily shuffled back to the door.

“I don’t know who he thinks he is, giving me attitude like that. Girl, you better go back to Party City where you belong.” Elijah crossed his arms with a huff. I had to admit, seeing him heated like this was kinda hot. His face got all stern and the tips of his ears pink, the same color he’d flushed when I was balls-deep inside him last night.