49. Antonio

49

Antonio

I was ready to give up.

It’s not easy, searching for a place when all you have to go on is its mascot. I didn’t even know if I was looking for a bar or a restaurant or a goddamn bowling alley. I just knew it was in Texas...and Texas is a big place.

I didn’t even know if this was a genuine lead or a wild goose chase. For all I knew, that napkin had been dropped by a nurse. Or Tessa may have passed through Texas but barely stopped there and she was in fucking Brazil by now. But it was all I had to go on. Every other avenue I’d tried had gone nowhere.

But I’d spent days Googling and hadn’t found a damn thing. Now I was slumped in front of my laptop, glowering at the screen, half-drunk on Scotch. The bearded prospector grinned at me from the napkin I’d pinned to the wall. I’d nearly torn the thing to shreds more than once. He was just so fucking annoying—

On a whim, I typed bar annoying prospector into Google.

Immediately, a photo taken in a bar appeared. Grinning, drunken faces...and, beside them, a puppet version of the prospector. The text below griped about how annoying the thing was.

It was so unexpected, after days of failure, that I just stared at it in shock. Then I saw that they’d tagged the bar’s Facebook page. I grabbed the mouse and clicked.

Lucky Pete’s. Gold Lake, Texas.