Birthright

machine.
    “What’s your interest in a kidnapping in 1974?”
    “Back off, Graystone.”
    “Cullen.” He simply kept her hand firm in his, continued to read. “Jay and Suzanne Cullen. Suzanne Cullen—something familiar about that name. ‘Three-month-old Jessica Lynn Cullen was taken from her stroller at the Hagerstown Mall yesterday,’ ” he read. “Christ, people suck, don’t they? They ever find her?”
    “I don’t want to talk to you.”
    “Too bad, because you know I’m not going to let upuntil you tell me why this business has you so upset. You’re on the verge of tears here, Callie, and you don’t cry easy.”
    “I’m just tired.” She rubbed at her eyes like a child. “I’m just so fucking tired.”
    “Okay.” He laid his hands on her shoulders, kneaded at the tension. He wouldn’t have to make her angry, he realized. Good thing, as he didn’t have the heart for it.
    If she was fighting tears, she was as open as she’d ever be. And still, he didn’t have the heart to exploit the weakness.
    “I’ll take you back to the motel. You can get some sack time.”
    “I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to go there yet. God. God. I need a drink.”
    “Fine. We’ll dump your car back at the motel, then we’ll go find a drink.”
    “Why do you want to be nice to me, Graystone? We don’t even like each other.”
    “One question at a time, babe. Come on. We’ll go find us a bar.”

Six
    T he Blue Mountain Hideaway was a spruced-up roadhouse tucked back from the road several miles outside of the town proper. It served what the laminated single-sheet menu called EATS along with DRINKS.
    There were three booths ranged down one wall like soldiers, and a half dozen tables with folding chairs were grouped in the center of the room as if someone had shoved them there, then forgotten about it.
    The bar was black with age, and the floor a beige linoleum speckled with gray. The lone waitress was young and bird-thin. Travis Tritt was singing on the juke.
    Some men Callie took to be locals sat at the bar having an after-work brew. From the work boots, gimme caps and sweaty T-shirts, she pegged them as laborers. Maybe part of Dolan’s construction crew.
    Their heads swiveled around when Callie and Jake walked in, and she noted they weren’t particularly subtle in sizing up the female.
    She slid into a booth and immediately wondered why she’d come. She’d be better off flat out on the motel room bed, shooting for oblivion.
    “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She looked at Jake, really looked. But she couldn’t read him. That had been one of the problems, she thought. She’d never been quite sure what he was thinking. “What the hell is this?”
    “Food and drink.” He pushed the menu across the table. “And right up your alley.”
    She glanced down. If it wasn’t fried, it wasn’t E ATS , she decided. “Just a beer.”
    “Never known you to turn down food, especially when it’s covered with grease.” He laid a finger on the menu, inched it back as the waitress came over. “A couple of burgers, well, with fries, and two of whatever you’ve got on draft.”
    Callie started to protest, then just shrugged and went back to brooding.
    And that worried him. If she wasn’t up to flaying his ass for making a decision— any decision—for her, she was in bad shape.
    She didn’t just look tired, he’d seen her look tired before. She looked worn. He wanted to take her hand, close it in his and tell her that whatever was wrong, they’d find a way to fix it.
    And that was a surefire way to get his hand chopped off at the wrist.
    Instead he leaned toward her. “This place remind you of anything?”
    She stirred herself enough to glance around. Travis Tritt had moved on to Faith Hill. The guys at the bar were sucking down beers and shooting over belligerent stares. The air smelled like the bottom of a deep-fat fryer when the oil hadn’t been changed in recent memory.
    “No.”
    “Come on. That dive in Spain, when we were working the El Aculadero dig.”
    “What, are you stupid? This place is nothing like that. That had some weird-ass music going, and there were black flies all over the damn place. The waiter was a three-hundred-pound guy with hair down to his butt and no front teeth.”
    “Yeah, but we had a beer there. Just like this.”
    She shot him a dry look. “Where didn’t we have a beer?”
    “We had wine in Veneto, which is entirely