Excerpt of Racing The Devil by Jaden Terrell

Even in the dim light of the bar, I could see the bruises.

Beginning just below one eye, they spread down the side of her face and neck, tinged the blue rose tattoo above the swell of her left breast, and seeped beneath the plunging neckline of her scarlet halter.

She paused inside the door, hugging herself. Her gaze swept the room, lit brie?y on one face, then another. Looking for something, or someone. Or maybe for someone's absence.

I looked away before she could catch me staring, and when I glanced up again, she had squeezed onto a slick red stool between two beefy bikers whose low-slung jeans revealed the top third of their buttocks.

One of the bikers tilted his head toward her. Murmured something I couldn't hear.

She ?inched away from him and drew in a ragged breath. Said something that made him scowl and turn back to his drink. Then Dani, the bartender, brought her an amber liquid over ice, and she hunched over the laminated bar, stirring her drink with one ?nger. The ?ngertips of her other hand rubbed gingerly at her cheek. She ?icked her tongue across a split in her lower lip and blinked hard.

Not my problem, I told myself, even as my hand tightened around my glass. There were a thousand reasons why a woman might come to a bar with bruises on her cheeks and tears in her eyes. Not all of them involved some jerk with a sour temper and heavy ?sts.

I tore my gaze away and told myself again: Not my problem.

It was a sweltering June night, and I was sweating my cojones off at a corner table of the First Edition Bar and Grill and trying to forget that Maria, my wife of thirteen years, was spending her ?rst anniversary with a man who wasn't me. We'd married young, two weeks after my twenty-first birthday, and while my mind understood what had gone wrong, the rest of me still felt like someone had thrown a bag over my head and scraped me raw with a cheese grater.

She'd waited a decent year before remarrying, but it wasn't long enough to keep my heart from aching like a broken tooth whenever I imagined D.W.'s hands on her, his mouth against hers . . .

A quavering voice interrupted my darkening fantasies. "Hey, Cowboy. Buy a girl a beer?"

I looked up to see the woman in the scarlet halter top, and the ?rst thing I thought was, Cowboy. . . Maria called me that.

The second thing I thought was, Why the hell not?

"Sure." I gestured to the empty seat across from me, and she squeezed past a lanky man in leather and slid into the chair. "What's your brand?"

"Bud Lite." She gave me a watery smile and patted her stomach, which was as ?at as a whippet's. "Got to watch the weight."

I edged through the crowd to the L-shaped bar and ordered the Bud and another Jack and Coke from Dani. She pushed a stray curl behind one ear and slid two glasses toward me with a nod toward the table I'd just left. "Looking to get lucky?"

"I don't know. She seems a little . . . fragile."

"Afraid she'll glom on?"

"Plenty to be afraid of before it gets to that."

"The boyfriend's out of the picture, if that matters. Or so she says."

"So she says."

"Seemed to me like she could use a little comfort."

"Maybe. But why me?"

"You gotta be kidding." A smile ?itted across her face as she reached across the bar and smoothed the front of my shirt with her palm. "Believe me, honey, you're the pick of the litter."

I gave her a goofy grin, stammered a thanks, and stuffed a couple of dollars into the beer mug she'd set out for tips. Then I wended my way through the sweat-sour crush of bodies and the cigarette haze back to my table, where a burly guy who looked like someone had Super-glued a tumbleweed to his face was putting the moves on my new acquaintance.

He was about five-ten to my six feet, built like a barrel and reeking of cigar smoke. When he saw me, he rocked back on his heels and glared at me through slitted eyes, maybe gauging if he could take me. I was pretty sure he couldn't.

The muscles in my shoulders tensed, and we stared each other down for a long moment. Then he dropped his gaze, adjusted his crotch with one massive hand, and mumbled to my tablemate, "Aw, he ain't man enough for you." He ambled toward the pool table, throwing a gap-toothed, tobacco-tinged grin back over his shoulder. "You want a real man, give me a holler."

I set the lady's beer in front of her and slid into the seat across the table from her. She scooted her chair closer so I could hear her over the din. "Cockroaches. If there's one in the room, he'll ?nd me. You come here often?"

I smiled at the cliché. "I stop by for a beer and a burger most Friday nights."

"No beer tonight." She nodded toward my glass.

"Nope." I thought of Maria, and a bitter taste came into my mouth. "Tonight called for something stronger."

She glanced at my left hand. "You're not married."

"Divorced."

"Kids?"

"One." I tugged my wallet out of my hip pocket, flipped to my son's school picture. I handed it over, watching her face as she studied it.

The corners of her mouth twitched up. No pity. No revulsion. "He's cute," she said.

"He has Down Syndrome."

"I have a cousin with Downs," she said. "Sweet kid."

Something in my gut relaxed. She handed back the wallet and said, "I've never been here before. Seems pretty rough."

I glanced around the room. The First Edition was originally conceived as a retreat for journalists and reporters—cozy and intimate, with a clientele who wore tweed jackets with suede patches on the elbows. It had changed hands several times since then and had ?nally evolved into a cramped sports bar catering primarily to good ol' boys and bikers, but the decor retained vestiges of its past. Ancient printing presses and yellowing early editions of The Tennessean and The Nashville Banner shared shelf space with NASCAR photos and neon Bud Lite signs. A Jeff Gordon ball cap hung from the half-empty potato chip rack, a rubber arm jutting from beneath it.

Beside the bar, a bulletin board labeled "Wall of Shame" was covered with candid photographs—a grinning man in a neon pink construction helmet, a shot of someone mooning the photographer, a bearded man at the pool table shooting the cue ball into the V of a young woman's spread legs.

No pictures of yours truly.

The lettering on the front window read, First Edition Bar and Grill. Bikers Welcome.

"It's not as rough as it looks," I said, pointing to a sign beside the Wall of Shame. It said, No vulgar language. "They don't even allow cussing in here."