Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68400 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68400 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
She smiled.
“Sir,” I heard. “Step aside.”
I looked behind me to see a man dressed in a mechanic’s uniform standing behind me.
Volunteer meant people coming from their jobs, or wherever they happened to be, heading straight here. This man had come from one of the two mechanics shops in town.
I’d be making note of that, too.
“The door is stuck, and her foot is pinned between the gas pedal and the floorboard,” I explained as I stepped back to allow him to look.
He tried the door as if he didn’t trust my words.
I wouldn’t blame him for that. I would’ve checked that, too.
“Gonna need the jaws, Larry!” I heard him call from peering into the vehicle. “This one is good. Just needs cut out.”
“Can’t say the same for this one,” I heard ‘Jerry’ say. “He needs an ambulance.”
“Stay with me,” Dutch pleaded when she saw me turn away and glance at the man who’d been responsible for the accident.
I glanced at her. “I will.”
She smiled. “And don’t kill anyone today.”
Now that, I couldn’t promise.
Especially not after the hell I just went through watching her car get hit head-on…
If she’d been going any faster… if she’d had time to accelerate after she’d turned out of the parking lot, I might not be staring at my wife, whole and alive.
“Back away, sir,” I heard.
I glanced at Dutch to make sure she was okay, then said, “Cover your ears, darlin’. This’ll get loud.”
And it did seconds later when they used the Jaws of Life to get her out.
I stepped farther away from the truck that Dutch was in, only to step closer to the moron on the ground.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He made me. I’m sorry,” was all I heard from the man that’d been driving the Hummer. “He didn’t give me a choice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He made me. I’m sorry.”
I wanted to fuckin’ punch him just to shut him up.
My hand fisted in the urge to do just that, but before I could, Kobe was there, stilling my hand. “Let him talk.”
I turned away, my eyes once again on the woman that was being cut out of the truck behind me.
She’d wanted me to stay, but I’d just been in the way of the firefighters doing their job.
Why did it feel like I’d just broken a promise to her?
“Calm your tits,” I heard Davis say. “You look like you’re about to murder everyone.”
“He is.” Kobe laughed. “First, his wife was nearly attacked in an alley. Now she was hit head-on by an armored Hummer. That’s not a fuckin’ coincidence. Also, I’m fairly sure I saw that Hummer in the impound lot yesterday at the sheriff’s office.”
Rage burned in my belly. Rage so all-encompassing that I knew that today, I might just end up back in jail by the end of it.
CHAPTER 31
No alcohol for me. Just drugs.
-Dutch to a nurse
DUTCH
It took me a few seconds to see the Hummer blowing the light, but when I did, there was nothing I could do.
The weight of the RV was too heavy for me to stop on a dime. And by the time my foot was hitting the brake, I was already feeling the first of the impact of the big vehicle plowing into mine.
I kept replaying those last few moments before the crash in my mind, over and over again.
A smug voice sounded from behind the curtain that was pulled around me for privacy, and then there he was, the sheriff.
I saw more than heard Wake stand up from his seat at my bedside, and tensed, knowing this was about to get ugly, fast.
It took me two seconds to swing my legs over the side, and one second to stand, using the IV pole that I luckily wasn’t using at the corner of the bed. I’d just taken the first step on my bad leg—that luckily wasn’t broken—when the sheriff started to speak.
“Looks like you ran into some trouble, son,” he said, his eyes gleaming. “That’s a shame that it happened. You could’ve been really hurt.”
It wasn’t the words he said, but how he said it.
The tone of his voice, as if he’d done us a favor in not killing me.
And we all knew—the sheriff himself, Wake, me, and all of the men in Wake’s makeshift MC that he refused to call a MC—that the sheriff had something to do with this.
There was just too much of a coincidence after overhearing the sheriff and his sister in the alley, and then I have a car wreck with a Hummer that was confirmed impounded, and stolen from the sheriff’s impound lot.
“Get out,” Wake said through clenched teeth. “Get out right now, and I’ll gladly allow you to walk, because I really don’t want to have to go back to jail. But, you stay, I can’t promise that you won’t get your fuckin’ ass kicked.”