Thankfully, Neely Kate wasn’t one to hold a grudge. “So you think Mason’s gonna lose his job?” she asked after I told her about his strange behavior.

“I don’t know, but something’s definitely going on with him.”

“You know,” she said, more reserved than usual. “I think you might be right.”

This was one instance I wished I wasn’t. Was there something she wasn’t telling me?

Twenty-five minutes later, we were pulling in front of the diner, the side lot full of big tractor-trailers.

“Truckers like to eat here,” Neely Kate said as she opened the door. “Billy Jack said he’d find us inside. Come on. I’m starving.”

The hostess seated us at a table by the window, and the waitress came by to take our orders.

I glanced out the window. “Is Billy Jack running on West Coast time or something? Because he’s fifteen minutes late.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He insisted he’d be here. He said he’d find us.” The waitress dropped off a basket of rolls, and Neely Kate practically pounced on it. “Besides, it’s not like coming to this place was hardly a waste. They have the best dinner rolls this side of the Mississippi.”

Our food came, and by the time we’d finished eating, Billy Jack was still a no-show.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“Let’s go check out Nikko’s place. Then maybe we can swing by Billy Jack’s on the way back to town.”

“Sounds good.”

It took us twenty minutes to get to Sugar Branch. I drove into the small downtown and turned to look at my best friend. “How do we go about finding Nikko once we get there? Do you have any idea where he lives?”

“Nope. But we need to find the local hair salon.”

“Now doesn’t seem like a good time for a haircut, Neely Kate.”

She grinned. “Everybody knows the best place to get gossip is the hair salon or the barbershop.”

“Oh.” Seeing as how I hadn’t spent much time in hair salons, I supposed I wouldn’t know.

After we drove through the commercial center of the small town—a bunch of small businesses including a gas station—we turned on a side street and found the Cut and Curl. I considered it a good sign that there were a couple of cars in the parking lot.

Neely Kate reached for the door handle as soon as I parked the truck. “Come on.”

We entered the four-sink salon and found two hairdressers working on clients, one of them an older woman getting her already poufy hair teased, and the other a younger woman with a head covered in tin foil strips.

“Howdy,” the hairdresser working on the older woman said as she picked up a can of hairspray. “What can we do for ya?”

“Hi.” Neely Kate put her hand on her hip. “I’m lookin’ for Nikko. Do any of y’all know where I might find him?”

The younger woman in the chair sat up straighter, lifting her chin with a bit of attitude. “And who’s askin’?”

“I used to work with him,” Neely Kate said. “Back before he started at Gems. He never came by to pick up his last paycheck, so I figured I’d drop it off for him.”

The woman squinted at Neely Kate, suspicious. “Doesn’t his check have his address on it?”

Neely Kate dropped her arm to her side and took a step closer, lowering her voice. “It’s kind of an under-the-table payment . . . if you know what I mean.”

“Oh.” The young woman’s defenses fell, her disappointment replacing bravado. “Nikko said he was gonna stop that nonsense after he got arrested this summer. He stopped working at that garage north of Henryetta and everything.”

Neely Kate hesitated, so I jumped in. “As far as we know, he did. This is from when he was still at Weston’s.” I added the last part purely as a guess, figuring the more we seemed to know, the better. “That’s probably why he never came back to pick it up. Because he wanted out.”

Tears filled her eyes. “I told him that Daniel Crocker was no good, but does he listen to his sister? Hell no. He thinks he’s smarter because he’s eleven months older, but he’s dumber than a stump if you ask me. Otherwise why would he be missing now?”

“What happened to him?” Neely Kate asked, pretending not to know.

“I don’t know,” the woman said. “The last time I saw him was on Friday evening. He was about to go to work at that Gems place and . . . well, he never came home. He’d told me that he suspected something was goin’ on there, and I told him to quit, but he never listens to me.” She sniffled, and her hairdresser handed her a tissue.

“Do you think he got into some kind of trouble?”

“I know he did, but what am I gonna do?” she asked, wiping tears from her cheeks. “He’s not exactly friendly with the sheriff’s department, if you know what I mean, so I don’t feel like I can call them.”

I moved closer to the woman and sat in the empty chair next to her. “We’ll help you look for him,” I said. “He disappeared with a woman named Dolly Parton Parker, do you know her?”

Her back stiffened. “How do you know that?”

I pointed over my shoulder at Neely Kate. “Because Dolly’s her cousin, and she disappeared too. The same night and place as Nikko. We’re trying to find her.”