When Noel sent me a questioning glance, I shrugged. My old man hadn’t bothered with mixing; he’d mainly drunk shit straight from the bottle. But if it helped Noel assume I had any more experience than I did, I’d let him think it.
“We’ll start with the cash register,” he said.
He went over the basics and it seemed easy enough to follow, so I nodded my understanding. Then he pulled a couple of laminated posters out from under the bar. “Here are some cheat sheets for prices and how to mix the most popular drinks. Or you can just ask me.”
Letters and numbers blurred in front of me, but I bobbed my head some more. I’d probably be asking him a lot tonight.
“Dirty glasses go in this rack until they’re ready to be cleaned. When the tray’s full, they go into this sanitizing booster heater here to wash them. And...” He paused. “Hart! What the hell?” He slapped the bar top next to Asher. “We open in five. Put the goddamn laptop away and get to work already. The Taylor Swift eighties dance video can wait.”
“Oh, I’m past Taylor.” Asher grinned as he shut the laptop. “I was watching a Nat Geo documentary on squirrels, and now I totally want a pet squirrel.”
Noel blinked at him. “Are you fucking serious right now?”
“What? They’re freaking geniuses. You should see how they outsmarted this homeowner who kept trying to keep them out of his birdfeeder. I mean—”
Noel pointed. “You need to get laid. Bad.”
Hart wiggled his eyebrows. “Let me borrow your wife for an hour, and I will.”
With a frown, Noel opened mouth to reply, but Hart quickly added, “Or your sister.”
A passing Ten slapped him on the back of the head. “Dream on, fucker.”
Hart shrugged and glanced at me. He smiled briefly before clearing his throat and scratching the back of his neck. “Hey, uh, were you kept at Statesburg when you were locked up?”
I pulled back, my stomach muscles tensing from merely hearing the word. “Yeah.”
“F-House?” he asked, and was there a hint of hope in his voice.
I frowned, curious how he even knew what the prison’s roundhouse was called. “Why?”
He just kept watching me, intently. “Were you?”
I nodded once.
His shoulder dropped an inch. I’m not sure if it was relief or more anxiety I saw in his response. “Ever meet a Miller Hart there?”
I knew who he was talking about immediately, so I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. The similarities in his last name and Miller’s wasn’t lost on me. “The wife killer?”
Asher flinched, but said, “Yeah.”
I shrugged. “We didn’t run in the same circles, but I knew who he was. He got his ass kicked a lot.”
“Really?” Hart seemed momentarily surprised by that piece of information, but then his chest heaved and his lips quirked with amusement. “Good.”
“Who’s Miller Hart?” Noel asked. “Any relation?”
Asher looked him in the eye. “My dad.”
As he moved away to help Ten take chairs down from tables, Noel frowned after him. “Did he just tell us his dad killed his mom?”
I shrugged. “Sounded like it.”
“Well, fuck. That was news to me.”
“What was?” Pick asked, glancing up from his phone.
Noel shared a glance with me as if asking if he should share Asher’s little bomb of information, but then he murmured, “Nothing.”
“Mmm.” Distracted, Pick went back to typing something on his phone. After he pressed it to his ear, he muttered, “Fuck.”
“Everything okay?” Noel asked him.
“What?” Pick asked, swerving his gaze to Noel, though his thoughts were obviously elsewhere.
“Who’re you trying to get hold of so bad? You lose Eva, or what?”
“No.” Pick immediately glanced at me, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. Suspecting his urgent call had something to do with me, I narrowed my eyes. “Just trying to reach one of the waitresses,” he said, “but her phone keeps going straight to voice mail.”
He’d been hell-bent on trying to contact a certain waitress yesterday, too. I wondered if it was the same one and what the hell this waitress had to do with me. Studying him hard, I tried to figure out what he was hiding. The guy was holding way too many secrets for my taste.
“Oh, hey. Is it Felicity?” Noel asked, making me whirl to gape at him. “Because I know for a fact her phone’s been out of commission since yesterday afternoon.”