Her Scream in the Silence (Carly Moore #2) - Denise Grover Swank

Chapter One

“Carly! Order up!”

“You made sure to leave off the mustard and lettuce?” I asked Tiny, the ginormous cook at Max’s Tavern, smiling to soften my question. “The customer made it very clear he’d be taking it out of our tips if we get it wrong.”

Tiny placed his hand on the service counter and leveled his gaze with mine. “I can read a ticket.”

“I guess it’s not you I’m necessarily worried about.” I gave a slight nod to the woman struggling to flip a burger on the grill. Tiny had hired the new cook a few days after Bitty, who’d worked under his supervision for years, was shot and killed just outside of the tavern. She’d sold information about me to a man who’d intended to murder me, and he’d immediately turned around and double-crossed her. Despite the steep price she’d paid, Tiny and the rest of the staff saw her action as a bitter betrayal. Once you were accepted at Max’s, you were family. And family never turned on each other.

After my own father’s betrayal, I knew that was nothing but a sweet lie.

Tiny rolled his eyes. “Sugar didn’t have a thing to do with this order.”

Sugar was the nickname he’d given her, and we’d all taken to using it even though I was fairly certain that her real name was Phyllis.

Tiny plopped another plate on the counter. “But she had her hands all over this one. You can give it to Jerry.”

Jerry was a regular at the tavern, and he lived on a very fixed income. I’d learned on my first night that the staff always tried to feed him something extra on the sly, a habit I’d quickly embraced. We’d give him something he hadn’t ordered and claim it had been a kitchen screwup. But there had been dozens of actual screwups a day since Sugar had started, and Jerry had gained a good five pounds.

“I already gave him a lunch.”

“Well, see if he wants this one too.”

Sighing, I picked up both plates. “Jerry might actually put some meat on his bones if we keep this up.”

Tiny shot a glare at the woman behind the grill. If Max, the owner of the place, didn’t fire her soon, I suspected Tiny would take matters into his own hands and do it himself. Rumor had it that Max had hired her as a favor to someone, but no one seemed to know whom. If Max wasn’t careful, he just might lose the best fry cook this side of the Smoky Mountains.

I carried the plates to the dining room. We’d reached the end of the lunch rush, thank goodness, and the space was starting to empty out.

Jerry sat at the bar, and I gave him his food first, cringing as I slid the plate in front of him. “Jerry—”

“How many mistakes can that woman make?” Jerry asked in a whisper.

I made a face. “Apparently a lot of them.”

“Why doesn’t Tiny fire her?” he asked, using his fork to turn over the tortilla-wrapped object on his plate.

“You mean Max?”

He shot me an irritated look. “Everyone knows Tiny runs the kitchen and Ruth runs the dining room. Max just sits behind the bar and looks good.”

I smothered a laugh—I’d never heard Jerry say something so blunt—and Max, who had been standing behind the draft handles, popped his head up. “Somebody say something about me?”

Max Drummond was one fine-looking man and he knew it. Thick blond hair, hazel eyes, and an infectious laugh. He was the good-time guy behind the bar and, rumor had it, between the sheets. Although I hadn’t seen him with a single woman since I’d shown up in town at the beginning of November, he was supposedly something of a ladies’ man. Ruth liked to bring up all his past indiscretions and rub his nose in them, something he tolerated with good humor. He was only twenty-nine and had plenty of time before he had to worry about settling down…unless he went through the entire under-forty female demographic in the Smoky Mountain town of Drum, Tennessee, before he reached that stage. But my intuition told me that the smooth-talking charmer would still get his pick of girlfriends past.

But now he’d turned his attention to Jerry. “You talkin’ about me?”

Three weeks ago, Jerry would have likely hung his head and shied away. But he had recently taken a stand against a man who’d bullied him, and doing so had brought back some of his confidence. He put his fork down and