Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1) by Jim Heskett Page B

grabbed me by the shirt collar and pulled me up, then was about to smack me in the face when a loud crack behind him made his face go blank.
    I looked past his shoulder at the bartender, who was holding a cricket bat. A cricket bat? Where did he even get such a thing?
    “Alright, Tommy, that’s enough. Let this guy go. If anything gets broken, I am going to be seriously pissed off.”
    “I’m very sorry, Tommy,” I said. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble. It’s just that the walking part of being a human has completely escaped me tonight.”
    He released my collar and I steadied myself as well as I could, under the circumstances. The world still spun around me. With all the excitement, I now noticed my throat had gone dry.
    “Bartender, I need one more rum and diet, please.”
    The bartender laughed and slid the cricket bat back behind the counter. “You’ve got to me kidding me. Get out of here, and don’t come back. You’ve lost your privileges at Ernie’s.”
    Now I realized what a terrible thing I had done. If I couldn’t come back, how was I supposed to find Kareem? This was the only place I knew, as slim a chance as it was.
    “Please, don’t do this to me,” I said, an inch away from begging. “If I don’t find him, then the hazmat guys and the hiking and the blood on the tile will be for nothing, and even then, it might not get me my wife back. Have some pity on me, please?”
    The bartender sighed and lifted the cricket bat again. “You’re starting to get on my nerves. We run a quiet bar here, and you’re causing a disturbance.”
    I threw up my hands. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”
    I strutted out of the bar, only bumping into one chair on the way out. They were all staring at me, but I didn’t care about that.
    When I found my car, it took me a few tries to get my key into the ignition. I reclined the seat, closed my eyes, and everything went black in less than two seconds.
     
    ***
     
    When I opened my eyes, the sky had grown fully dark. The neon glow of Ernie’s lights blurred my vision, but I could see nothing else around them. The front windshield was dirty, dotted with streaks of brown.
    I slipped my phone from my pocket and checked the time. Almost ten. I looked left and right, saw only a handful of cars still in the parking lot. A couple of stars blinked in the night sky.
    “Oh, Candle, what the hell have you done to yourself?” I said. “Getting drunk on a school night like some frat pledge?”
    I stretched, yawned, and felt the cut on my back pulse with my heartbeat. Since it had been a long time since I’d had an injury, I’d forgotten how the pain fades and comes back, always reminding you that it hasn’t gone away.
    I didn’t find Kareem. Had my kidnappers—Thomason and the unnamed driver—not mentioned him that morning, I might have thought he was a ghost or a figment of my imagination. But the man who had set all of this chaos in motion was nowhere to be found, and was the only person who might be able to provide me with answers.
    The person who had set all this in motion.
    What if Kareem was behind all that was going on? Maybe all that supposed-magic in the parking lot was some reverse psychology voodoo to get me to fall into some trap that he’d set out. Get me to go to Texas so he could kidnap Grace.
    Despite being suspicious, I’d bought into his sales pitch, that’s for sure.
    However, the end result seemed the same. My boss Alison would have sent me to Dallas with or without Kareem’s warning so I couldn’t figure out what he might stand to gain from my cross-country trip. No, much more likely that someone else had engineered all of this.
    My tongue was like sandpaper against the roof of my mouth. I tasted something sour, as if I’d maybe puked in my mouth a little while I was napping. Or passed out, or whatever you want to call it.
    I felt sober enough to drive, or something close to it, so I slipped the keys into the ignition. Maybe a little buzzed