Tried & True (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 5) by Jerusha Jones Page A

completely carefree and giddy munchkin on our hands.”
    But I knew Emmie could have a lighthearted side when she was free from worry. I just needed to stop giving her reasons to worry. The weight of the world—on my little girl.
    Josh tapped my knee. It was time.
    “Call you later,” I told Clarice and hung up.
    Now things could get dicey. We’d just passed Josh’s optimistic estimate of a couple hours free of FBI awareness and observation. But no other vehicles had pulled into the park’s parking lot during our late lunch break, so if they were watching us, it was from a distance.
    I could only hope that three p.m. in a tavern would be quiet and conducive to a quickly-obtained mutual understanding.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER 10
     
    Emeryville still shows evidence of a major culture clash. It’s between Berkeley and Oakland, and the two don’t meet cleanly in the middle. There’s a lot of gentrification and quiet, tree-lined streets full of the well-kept houses owned by university professors and technology company executives. There are also gritty strip malls and the depressing ruins of old warehouses and other industrial relics of the city’s meat packing and railway boom eras which had also been accompanied by gambling halls and bordellos. Rough-and-tumble versus genteel.
    So why wouldn’t it also be the headquarters for an outlaw motorcycle group? I supposed it was like hiding in plain sight for Tank Ebersole.
    Josh’s chosen route through town was definitely more on the seedy side. I gave up counting the number of taverns we passed, most of which already appeared to be open for business. Union halls, tattoo parlors, massage parlors, pawnshops, check-cashing places, convenience stores with bars on the windows and doors, teenaged kids standing in small groups on street corners, cupping their hands around cigarettes and lighting up, blankly watching us drive by. I wasn’t getting terrific vibes.
    There were several good reasons why I’d failed to tell Matt about my appointment with Tank Ebersole. One was to hide my motives and to give myself a shot at free movement. I had a strong suspicion that if the FBI knew about my plans, they would have absolutely forbid me from following through and maybe would have locked me up to guarantee that I didn’t meet with him.
    Another reason was to protect Ebersole. Which seriously went against my better judgment. He was the last man to actually need protection, in my opinion, and I certainly had no sympathy for him. But if he was going to cooperate with my proposal, then I owed him some space in which to operate. And that meant not betraying him to his own followers as well as to the FBI—just yet.
    If anyone in the Mongrels’ ranks got the idea that their president was in cahoots with the feds—or any branch of law enforcement—his life would immediately be at stake. His talking to the wife of a known criminal wouldn’t raise nearly as many eyebrows. And I needed him alive—for the time being—and available to me instead of on the run or in hiding.
    Besides, I was incredibly curious about why Ebersole was afraid of my husband. That by itself would have been reason enough to meet with him, no matter how unsavory the prospect was.
    Josh pulled the Kia to a stop near the curb in a two-hour parking zone and in front of a vehicle that appeared not to have moved in several years, mainly because it was jacked up on cinder blocks and didn’t have rear wheels. What did remain of the car was pockmarked and rusted, and the windshield glass had a cobwebbed crater on the passenger side. I got the impression the friendly neighborhood parking enforcement officer was nonexistent, or on the take.
    “That’s it.” Josh pointed over his shoulder toward the opposite side of the street.
    A faded marquee over the single, heavy wooden door in an otherwise blank stucco wall said “The Ponderosa” in a font that resembled loops in a lariat rope.