Losing David to Gracie would leave him alone with Jo Beth and her matching sweater sets. He didn’t want a minivan or a sweater set. He was starting to admit to himself that maybe he really didn’t want Jo Beth either. He wanted Gracie, but it was too late for that.
He wanted his best friend to stay his best friend.
“I was starting to think you weren’t going to show.”
Cal turned to see David standing next to the side of the trailer. He was wearing ripped jeans and a t-shirt that would have been better off as a grease rag. His nose was swollen to three times its usual size and both his eyes were black. He had a pry bar hanging loosely in his left hand. Cal wondered briefly if David meant to use the pry bar on him.
“I damn near didn’t,” Cal admitted after a moment’s hesitation. “How did you get my truck off the side of the road?”
“I drove it,” David said. The fight and Gracie hung in the air between them like a brick wall.
“What?” Cal frowned at him.
“Truck cranked right up this morning,” David said.
“Son of a bitch,” Cal glared at the Chevy.
“Agreed. This thing is an SOB. You should sell it.”
“You’re the third person to say that in less than 24 hours. I’m starting to notice a theme.”
“Jo Beth’s opinion doesn’t count. Who else told you to sell it?”
“Mom. She offered to co-sign on a new truck for me when she saw your truck in the driveway this morning.”
“You should do that.” David leaned against the hood of the Chevy and tapped the side with the pry bar. “I really don’t have the slightest fucking clue what’s wrong with this truck. I can’t promise you it ain’t going to strand you again because I can’t find anything else to fix.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Cal tried to play it cool and failed. “Look man, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just a truck.” David shrugged his shoulders and made a big show out of brushing dirt off the toe of one of his boots. Cal noticed the steel was poking out of the steel toe.
“I’m not talking about the truck,” Cal clarified even though he knew he didn’t have to. “If you and Gracie are happy together, I’ll deal with it. Okay? I don’t like it but I’ll live with it. I’m sorry for kicking your ass last night. I was drunk. Very drunk.”
“I know you were drunk. I realized it around the same time I realized I could have hit you upside the head with a truck axle and you still wouldn’t have felt anything. Besides, you only kicked my ass because I let you kick my ass,” David lied. He brushed off the apology like it didn’t matter. He acted like he’d never doubted that Cal was still his friend.
“I don’t want to talk about you and Gracie,” Cal clarified his point. “I’ll deal with it. That’s all.”
“We don’t have time to talk about Gracie. Not that you would listen to a word I tried to tell you. You’d just as soon shoot me as look at me. I can see it in your eyes.”
“You’re sleeping with Gracie.” Cal tried and failed to keep the furious hurt from his voice.
“I tried to explain to you last night,” David started. “There isn’t anything between-.”
“Stop. Just stop. I don’t want to hear your explanation.” Cal gritted his teeth. “I said I would deal with you and Gracie being together if that’s what makes y’all happy. I never said I would like it or that it didn’t make me want to throw up every single fucking time I think about it. I don’t care if you were about to have sex or just checking her for ticks. Doesn’t make a difference. You and Gracie were alone together without your clothes. End of story. I may be dealing with it without breaking any more of your bones but that doesn’t mean I want details.”
“Fine. We won’t talk about it. Not right now, anyways. I wasn’t lying to you last night when I said I needed your help today.” David hesitated for a moment before continuing. “We’ve got a hell of a lot bigger problems than your truck.”
Cal forced himself to meet his best friend’s eyes. He was expecting to see anger in David’s face. He half expected David to smack him upside the head with the pry bar. The worry and fear he saw in David’s expression both surprised and unnerved him. He hadn’t expected David to be scared.
“What’s wrong?” Cal was suddenly very aware of the smell of fire coming from the back yard. David never lit the burn barrel this early in the morning. His clothes were covered in automotive grease but that was wrong too. David said he hadn’t found anything to fix on the Chevy. He didn’t repair customer cars at the house any more.
“We have a car to get rid of. It’s hot.” David confirmed all of Cal’s fears as he gestured for him to follow him to the back of the property.
“How hot?” Cal walked behind the trailer and out into the field that separated David’s property from a creek and a 20,000-acre chunk of government owned wildlife management area. He stopped short when he caught sight of the half-disassembled heap of metal next to the shed. The emblems on the ground pegged it as a BMW. The dashboard had been tossed casually out in the grass. Two large five-gallon buckets were positioned on either side of what had once been the front clip. Cal could see the water pump, a door handle, and part of the window motor sticking up from a nest of stray bolts and stripped electrical wires.
“Hot.” David gestured at the mess. “We need to dispose of the whole thing. Can’t risk leaving a single bolt behind.”
“Dammit David.” Cal was pissed. “You can’t be serious?”
“Do I look serious?” David wedged the pry bar into the back fender and began to peel the metal away from the body of the car. “Car needs to be straight scrap metal, Cal. We need it gone before the sun goes down.”
“What happened to you only dealing in American made, easy to dispose of stolen cars?” Cal wanted to play tough but he was having a hard time doing it when David had two black eyes and a broken nose.
“I didn’t pick this one,” David explained without explaining a damn thing.
“It didn’t just turn up here on its own,” Cal pointed out.
“You going to help me or not?” David picked up the cutting torch and held it out to Cal. It made for a lousy peace offering but Cal took it anyway.
“Yeah. I’ll help. You owe me for this.”
“You have no fucking idea.”
*
“Why do you always break the promises you make me?” Cal glared at David over the flatbed of the wrecker. A large pile of miscellaneous car parts was stacked in between them. Gracie could see bits and pieces of what had once been Austin’s beautiful BMW. The luxury sedan had been disassembled until it was little more than a collection of scrap parts. David had disguised the contents of the load further by mixing in a wide assortment of junk metal that had no relationship at all to the car. Gracie could see the bed off an old Chevrolet, the busted rear axle from Addison’s Ford, a dozen mismatched rims and a handful of radiators.
Cal and David had been arguing for the last five minutes about whether or not they should put the transmission that was lying directly in front of the porch on the load. David thought it would help further disguise the true nature of what he was hauling. Cal didn’t want to pick the damn thing up.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David said as he tossed another stray rim onto the flatbed.
“Sure you do,” Cal’s face was flushed red and the back of his t-shirt was already soaked through with sweat. “It took us nearly a year to get rid of all those cars your Dad stole and hid in the backyard. We spent every weekend for ten months straight playing extreme makeover: junkyard edition. You remember what you promised me when we got done?”
“I promised that we’d never have to cut up another stolen car as long as we lived,” he grumbled. “I guess you’re right. I guess I lied. Sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better, I’m not having fun.”
“No, it doesn’t. And don’t even think about it,” Cal had caught David eyeballing the transmission a
gain. It was still connected to the transfer case and easily weighed more than David and Cal did put together. “We’re not loading that.”
“Fine. Whatever you want. We’ve got enough on the truck that no one is going to be able to see that damned car.” David shrugged his shoulders. He grabbed a ratchet strap out of the cab of the truck and started running it across the load, securing everything in place and making sure nothing would be able to fall of the bed of the truck.
“What car?” Cal rolled his eyes as he grabbed a second strap and started going through the same motions David was already performing on the opposite side of the truck. “I think this is the most thorough chop job I’ve ever seen you do, and that’s saying something.”
“Can’t be too careful these days. Especially not with Twitchy Eddie wandering around with a badge pinned to his diapers.”
“Twitchy Eddie is going to throw your ass in jail for 20 years if you keep this kind of shit up,” Cal jerked his head towards the load on the wrecker. “You need to clean your act up, Breedlove.” There was hostility in Cal’s voice that Gracie had never heard there before. It was clear that he wasn’t just talking about the BMW.
Cal hadn’t so much as cast a single glance in Gracie’s direction since he’d pulled up in David’s Toyota nearly three hours ago. He’d kept his back turned towards her most of the time. When he did have to turn in her direction, he made sure he wasn’t looking straight at her. Being ignored by him hurt even worse than being screamed at would have. She was used to looking for him first whenever she walked into a room. She had always been able to count on the open appreciation and affection in his eyes when he first caught sight of her across the school hallway, church parking lot, football field, crowded bar, or wherever the heck it was they had happened to be at the time. He’d been her rock since before she could even walk.
Gracie desperately wanted to go to Cal, throw her arms around him, and tell him everything that had happened in the last 24 hours. She wanted him to know how sorry she was about how everything had gone last March. She wanted him to know the BMW was the result of her bad decisions. It was unfair to make David take the blame when he was already taking on so much of the responsibility for her mistakes.
A loud popping sound came from the driver’s side of the wrecker. The noise startled Gracie out of her own thoughts and back into the present, where David was holding up a broken metal hook that had previously been attached to the ratchet strap.
“Dammit,” David glared at the broken strap. “Is it just me or is nothing going right?”
“Nothing is going right,” Cal confirmed with a snarl as he limped over to the toolbox of his own truck and snatched another ratchet strap out of it. He grabbed the strap and slung it over the wrecker with entirely more force than necessary. David cringed as he ducked to avoid being hit in the head with the ratcheting end.
Gracie swallowed the lump in her throat as she looked back toward Cal. He ignored her and focused all his attention on the wrecker. He was checking the winch on the front of the flatbed with deft gestures that spoke of a practiced competence. They had used the winch to pull the heaviest pieces of the car up to the front of the flat bed. It saved on hard labor, when the winch worked.
“I’m just hoping this blasted winch survives the day,” Cal muttered. His dark brows were drawn together and he was scowling at the spooled metal cable. “I can’t just keep duct taping and zip tying this thing back together,” he informed David.
“I know. I know.” David finished checking the straps and walked back around the front of the truck. “Look, if you can keep it working until we get rid of this damned car, I’ll buy a brand new one, okay?”
“Really?” The surprise in Cal’s expression was understandable. David was a notorious cheapskate. He tended to wait to replace things until they literally disintegrated in his hands.
“Swear to God,” David crossed himself.
“Let’s get moving,” Cal smiled for the first time all day. And then he caught sight of Gracie standing a few steps behind David and his facial expression turned cold.
She knew how bad she must look, standing in the middle of the yard wearing a Breedlove Automotive shirt and a pair of David’s ratty old work jeans. She’d washed her bra and underwear in the sink. They were cold and clammy against her skin when she put them back on. She prayed fervently that the dark color of the shirt hid whatever moisture might have soaked into the fabric from her wet bra.
“Cal,” she was barely aware she’d spoken his name out loud. “Please, if you’ll just listen?”
“I don’t care,” he told her flatly as he brushed her away. “I don’t want to hear whatever excuses you want to tell me to make yourself feel better.”
David sighed in irritation. “We don’t have time for this,” he repeated. He turned to Cal. “We need to get moving.”
“I’m waiting on you,” Cal was limping noticeably as he started to walk around to the passenger’s side of the wrecker. He paused near the front of the cab. “Tell me she’s not going with us,” he said as he jerked his chin at Gracie.
“She stays,” David yanked his cellphone out of his pocket and tossed it to Gracie. “If I call you from Cal’s phone, answer it. Otherwise, don’t touch it.”
“I have my phone.” Gracie pointed out. She was fighting a fresh batch of tears that kept threatening to spill out of her eyes and down her cheeks. She couldn’t afford to cry right now. David had already been very clear about how important it was to get rid of all evidence that Austin had ever existed before anyone even realized he was missing.
“Yeah, don’t answer yours either,” David said as he opened the driver’s side door of the tow truck. “Not until I think of something to tell people. In the meantime, stay put.”
“Okay,” Gracie was shaking so hard she had to stuff the phone into her pocket in order to avoid dropping it. It wasn’t lost on her that David and Cal were risking everything to protect her. They were putting their own lives and futures on the line to fix a mess she had created. David knew the chance he was taking, but Cal wouldn’t even let them explain. He was risking everything because David had asked him to. He didn’t even know why.
“Let’s go before Twitchy Eddie does a drive-by and decides to ask questions,” Cal snapped at David.
“That’s the last damn thing we need,” David flicked up his middle finger in the direction of the highway at an imaginary Sheriffs’ office patrol car and climbed into the cab of the wrecker. “Behave yourself, Gracie. Make sure to keep that phone where you can hear it.”
“I will,” she promised as he put the big diesel in gear and headed down the dirt driveway with the evidence of the very worse of Gracie’s sins on display for all the world to see.
*
“Ten bucks says they never even score.” Alex Alyssa dangled the bill over the cheap plastic table, directly in front of Addison’s nose.
“Keep it. I’ve got fifty saying they’ll win.” Addison was stretched back in a plastic chair. He had his muddy, beat-up boots kicked up onto the table. He was smoking a cigarette directly underneath the No Smoking sign that had been taped to the concrete block wall behind him.
Eddie scooted his own plastic chair as far away from Addison as he could get without actually leaving the table. He was tired, sweaty, and his asthma couldn’t handle Addison’s nicotine addiction. Addison Malone chain-smoked. Easily two packs a day. The gray Ford truck he’d been issued by the state smelled like an ashtray.
Eddie had spent the first half of the morning dealing with Reggie Gunther and his furious wife. The second half of the morning had been spent sitting in his squad car, sucking on his inhaler. Of all the problems Eddie had anticipated struggling with when he became a police officer; his cigarette smoke allergy hadn’t been at the top of his list. Unfortunately, it was rapidly becoming a real issue. He was either going to have to convince Sheriff Hall to follow the state laws that banned smoking in public buildings, or he was going to have to go back to th
e doctor and request a stronger prescription for his inhaler. His bet was on the prescription.
Richard Perkins, senior officer for the Coastal County Sheriff’s Office, let out a loud snort as he settled himself on the opposite end of the table from Addison and Alex. Perkins was somewhere in his 50s, balding, severely overweight and waiting out his retirement. His uniform stretching to the limits over his bulging gut as he sat down. “Giving money away again, Addison?”
“No, I just have faith in Coach Sanford.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette and turned his head directly to the left so the smoke he exhaled went directly into Eddie’s face. Eddie tried not to breathe and hoped he wouldn’t have to bolt to his car for his inhaler before the end of his first official staff meeting.
“You’re an idiot then.” Perkins laughed. He cast a sideways glance at Alex. “Let’s take him up on his bet. I’ll put in 25 in if you will.”
“Deal.” Alex grinned and titled back in his seat so that he could shake Perkins’ hand. “I’m all for easy money.”
Addison shook his head and tried to look insulted. Eddie sighed under his breath. Gambling in the Sheriff’s office. Just another sign of the professionalism that characterized the Coastal County Sheriff’s Department. Addison puffed another cloud of smoke at Eddie. Eddie lost his battle against the cough that had been building up inside his chest. He was hacking up a lung when the Sheriff walked into the room.
“You going to make it, Eddie?” Wally Hall was a shorter, fatter version of his nephew. He had the same bright turquoise-colored eyes that his sister had passed on to Addison. Sheriff Hall had enough sense to keep his graying curls cut in a military buzz. His black cowboy hat was battered, beaten, and easily 10 years older than Eddie was. The hat hadn’t done a very good job at protecting the Sheriff’s skin from the sun. The man looked like beef jerky stuffed in a button down Columbia fishing shirt and Wranglers.
Feeding Gators: Book 1 in the Shiner's Bayou Series Page 12
