Familiar Lies Read Online Free Page B

justified reason.
    Max slept in that morning until almost eleven o’clock, rising and getting dressed by noon. He had a light lunch and prepared for the day, figuring out where to go next. Last night he’d had no luck finding club owners with any of the names listed in Josh’s letter, but he didn’t plan on letting that stop him. He had two working feet, after all, and he planned to get them stepping.
    By four o’clock Max hoped it would be close enough to opening time to get started. He didn’t have much of a game plan outside of showing up at every club he could find and simply asking questions. Not the best-laid plan, more like throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck, but at least he was doing something . And something was better than nothing at all.
    He doubted there’d be much business on a Wednesday night and maybe he could find somebody ready to talk. Worth a shot.
    Max left the house with a printed list of night clubs in a ten-mile radius. He hadn’t realized how many there would be and how much he’d have to rely on his phone’s GPS to find them. He stopped first at a dive bar called Mallon’s and encountered a short and squat man built like a fire hydrant who greeted him with squinty eyes and a pleasant demeanor. Ultimately he proved unhelpful, but it gave Max some hope that he wouldn’t run into a brick wall everywhere.
    Max visited four more bars; one with live music, another Mexican themed. A couple more had little more than bare floors and pool tables, all serving watered down mainstream brand beers and some heart-stopping junk food.
    It occurred to him as he drove away from the last bar visited that maybe he was headed in the wrong direction, chasing down the wrong kind of places.
    Maybe he needed to check the strip clubs.
    Josh wouldn’t do that , the voice in his mind countered. He was underage.
    But his underage son had had a relationship with Vanessa Simmons, a very average and very married housewife. All things considered, the strip club surely wasn’t an impossibility.
    He stopped the car and ran a search on his phone, bringing back all the strip clubs in the area. They were clustered together in the same part of town, likely zoned for that kind of activity. The politicians’ way of keeping the revenue coming while keeping the riffraff out of the high tax areas.
    Choosing the first place at random, Max pulled out and headed toward a place affectionately called The Hustle .
    * * *
    Max pulled into the gravel-lined parking lot of The Hustle , his tires crunching as he avoided potholes and searched for a spot. He found one close to the door, his suspicion that a Wednesday night would be slow proving true. He got out of the car and took a deep breath, smelling car exhaust and beer hops.
    He saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and his heart lodged in his throat. Out of his peripheral, he caught a glimpse of a figure walking behind a car, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt like Josh used to wear, with light-blue jeans and white tennis shoes. Feeling a chill run over his body, Max headed after the figure, but when he got there he found nothing but a parked car. No sign of anyone.
    For a moment his mind had been convinced that he’d seen his dead son. Impossible, his better sense reminded him, but his eyes had been fooled. Max wondered if the mind could literally project images onto the retina, should it want to see something badly enough. How else could he have seen such a thing?
    Still shaken, he headed toward the door of the club, unsure of his next move. So far, he’d been winging it, but he wasn’t sure if planning things out would have made a difference. He was learning that things like this tended to take their own direction, regardless of anyone’s plan.
    Things like this , he thought. As if there was a precedent set that he could follow anyway.
    He made it to the door and encountered a bouncer sitting on a stool. A tall house of a man with a grim, pockmarked