Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
“Yeah. I hear you.”
I squinted at him. “The hell happened to your nose?”
“I walked into a door,” he lied easily.
Knowing that Ian had broken it, testing to see what he would say, I wondered who had set it for him. There was tape there, and both his eyes were bruised from the break. “It looks bad.”
“I’ve looked worse,” he said, grinning at me, “as you know.”
He and Rodriguez had been with me and Bodhi when we’d apprehended a fugitive biker. Getting out of the bar, once some of the guy’s “brothers” from his club wanted to help him get away, had been far more than we’d counted on.
Knowing that asking any more questions about his nose would be stupid, I went another way. “Man, I wish you hadn’t been let go,” I muttered. “Guess who I got stuck babysittin’ for the past few months?”
His furtive, watchful expression changed then, calmed, and he walked over to the couch and flopped down. What was strange was that Chickie remained glued to my side in the kitchen instead of joining him. “Tell me.”
“Fuckin’ Pazzi,” I groaned. “He gets out of rehab, and you just knew Kage was going to stick me with him. Like I’m a goddamn babysitter.”
He chuckled. “Kage doesn’t care about careers. He just wants to destroy people. It’s the same thing he did to Mills.”
I leaned back on the counter. “Who?”
“Darren Mills. He was the supervisory deputy before Becker. He got demoted down to the Warrants Division when we both transferred in.”
I’d heard the name but didn’t have a face to go with it. That was before my time. The thing was, though, it should have been before Brodie’s as well.
It was so weird to see him with a beard and mustache, his hair still short, but not like it had been. He used to wear it in a fade, neat and perfect. Now it looked hacked and uneven, like he’d cut it himself. And we were trying to talk like we had, but it was clear he was out of practice from how stilted and awkward his responses were.
“You don’t remember Mills at all?” Brodie pressed.
“I don’t, and how the hell do you?”
“After I was let go, I looked him up. He’s a good guy, he’s the one who set my nose.”
I didn’t ask why he’d looked him up, that would give me away, and he knew it would from the way he glanced at me, as if daring me to delve. “That was nice of him.”
“What?”
I pointed at his face. “That he fixed up your nose.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
He seemed out of it. “I gotta put on a shirt,” I told him, and turned to go to my bedroom.
“I’ll get it for you,” he rushed out.
“Oh, thanks, man,” I said, smiling. “They’re all hanging in the closet.”
He got up, walked around my coffee table, then stopped. “Your T-shirts are on hangers? What’s that about?”
Just that little bit was the flicker of the old Brodie.
“They’re not wrinkled that way,” I informed him.
“Okay,” he said, smiling.
“Hey, get my sling too, will ya? My arm’s gettin’ tired.”
“Yessir,” he agreed and left me.
Instantly, I pulled my phone from my back pocket, checked it, and saw I had no bars. Thinking that Brodie might turn off the jammer since he seemed to be trusting me, I sent a No Lights text to Bodhi, then flipped off the vibration function and put the phone in the refrigerator in the butter compartment. I was in the pantry when Brodie came back with a T-shirt and my sling.
I reached for the shirt. “Thank you.”
“I’ll help you,” he said like I was stupid and of course he would.
Gently, he put it over my head and helped me thread the brace through the hole and then get my arm through the other. He was careful when he did all the Velcro straps on the sling.
“Tell me what happened,” he prodded me.
“It was in the paper,” I said with a yawn. “Are you hungry at all? Do you want me to make something, or we could have something delivered. You want pizza?”
He nodded. “Pizza would be good.”
“You’ll have to order it with your phone. I cannot find mine anywhere, and now I’m worried I left it in the cab from the airport.”
“You don’t have your phone?” He sounded excited over that possibility.
I shook my head. “Try and call it.”
He got up and turned away, reaching into his pocket for the jammer I knew he had, and then once it was off, only then turning back to face me as he called.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said after a moment, looking and sounding, relieved. “It’s just going straight to voicemail.”
“Well, that’s fuckin’ great,” I said with a heavy sigh. “And my watch is dead, so yeah…order us some food, will ya?”
He smiled. “I appreciated you always being nice to me, Jed.”