82. Chapter 82
Overheating a mile from Saul’s Easy Out Autobody seemed as fortuitous and improbable as running out of gas a stone’s throw from the Pederson farm, until a tall man with white hair and a moustache to match burst out of the shop, waving his arms like an inflatable tube man, hollering for them to leave.
Dizzy from pushing the tired wagon the last couple hundred feet to the garage after Nadine clunked out in another cloud of smoke, Jase worked his tongue around his mouth to drum up a few drops of saliva and croaked, “We can’t.”
“Out of here, now,” the tube man bellowed. “We’re closed.”
“No, I mean, we can’t,” Jase forced out. He used the dirty, balled-up T-shirt that protected his palms from the Squire’s molten metal to swipe the sweat off his face and tossed it through the open driver’s window. “We barely made it here.”
“Not my problem,” the man said. “Keep pushing that hunk of junk down the road.”
“You’re kidding,” Graham said from the back fender. “We’ll actually die.”
“You’re going to get yourselves killed if you stick around here,” the man said.
“What’s he talking about?” Lindsey whispered breathlessly. She clutched Jase’s waistband and dropped her sweaty forehead to his sweaty back.
“We need help,” Jase insisted. “Some water at least.”
“Please,” Helen urged from the front passenger door.
The lanky man’s furry brows were furrowed, his eyes trained on the horizon as he backed toward the shop door.
“Too late now,” he said.
“What’s too late?” Jase asked. He followed the man’s wide-eyed gaze to the streak of red plowing through the heat ripples up the road.
“Get in,” the man said, waving those long arms to usher them inside. “Now.”
Jase grabbed Lindsey around the waist and carried her away from the Squire. Graham, towing Helen, followed close behind.
The tall man locked the bolt on the shop door and pulled a wooden beam across the front, testing its integrity with a couple shakes, then pushed the pins at the bottom of the big garage door to secure it to iron clips on the floor.
“Get back, get underneath something,” the man directed. “Just get down.”
“What do you mean?” Graham asked. “What’s going on?”
“Down, now.”
Jase’s instincts kicked in with the first pops of gunfire hitting the garage door. Hunching his shoulders, he put one hand on Lindsey’s head and the other on her shoulder and rushed her deeper into the garage.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Graham hollered, hitting the floor with Helen and crawling behind a car with a raised hood.
Jase shoved Lindsey under a metal desk and curled up next to her, boxing her in.
His muscles twitched as if getting hit with every pop and ting of bullets on metal.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been caught in the crosshairs, but this was nothing like the bar in North Dakota the night a couple of pissed-up ranch hands got into it and one of them pulled a gun and managed to pop off a couple of shots before the rest of their crew took him down.
This was heavy fire. And they were too exposed.
Glass shattered and the tall man moaned, “Aw, heck.”
Jase peered around the edge of the desk and saw him squatting beneath the broken window on the small shop door.
“You good, man?” Jase hollered.
Blood seeped through his fingers where the man clutched his arm. “Never better.”
There was screaming coming from…somewhere. Helen? Jase needed to get to his brother and find an exit not hailing lead. He started climbing out from underneath the desk and Lindsey grabbed his shirt.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“If they get in here, we’re dead,” he said.
The bullets stopped and the tall man crawled on one arm and both knees to the strip of wall between the garage and shop doors. Outside, a man’s voice called out, “Saul, I know you’re in there. Come out and face me like a man.”
“A man, eh?” the tall man, who must’ve been Saul, shouted back. “Says the guy with the gun.”
“Then face me like the no-good, low-life homewrecker you are.”
“Pass.”
“I know you were with her,” came the shriek. “Don’t even try to deny it.”
“Who?”
Saul was grinning. The hole in his arm was steadily dripping blood on the cement floor, and he was fucking grinning.
“Don’t jerk me around. I can mow down your door any time.”
“Then quit talking and do it already.”
“Are you fucking nuts?” Jase asked the grinning man, who was definitely fucking nuts.
Saul answered Jase with a wink.
“We’re going to die here,” he murmured.
Lindsey tipped her head up to him. He shouldn’t have said it, even if it was true.
“I’m not going to let anyone hurt you,” Jase said, and he meant it as much as an unarmed man could against a lunatic with a loaded weapon.
The terror on her face did something funny then. Her eyes moved down his face to his mouth and she licked her lips. It took a beat to recognize the look. It said: talking wasn’t what I had in mind.
There was never a worst time for a boner.
They could actually die there.
“You’d better have bullets for all of us,” Saul called to the man outside. “And one heck of an alibi. The fuzz might not kick up a fuss for little old me, but they’ll start a manhunt for the misguided fool who kills a famous musician.”
There was a pause, then, “Bullshit.”
“You see the wagon out there? The Country Squire? I hope you didn’t shoot it up too much.
That relic belongs to a member of Aerosmith.
I’m not going to tell you which one. You can look it up, but good luck getting service out here.
” Another pause and Saul went on. “Or you can take your chances, if you like living on the edge.”
This was crazy. Saul was crazy. And Jase was downright nuts, because he was starting to smile himself. He looked away from Lindsey, who was breathing a little slower and deeper, to catch Saul’s second wink.
“What’s it gonna be, son?” Saul hollered.
Ten seconds later, the man outside said, “If you don’t keep your hands off Jacinda, you won’t be so lucky the next time you see me. I don’t care whose fancy ass is hiding behind your door. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” Saul said. “Tell Jacinda to stop wearing that skirt—she’ll know the one—and we won’t have any problems.”
Jase ducked behind the desk again as the man outside let out a stream of cuss words and another round of bullets. His forehead met Lindsey’s, and she closed her eyes. Last night he should’ve jumped across the back seat and kissed her. This was the wrong fucking time.
The only fucking time. What good was a pile of money if he was dead?
The bullets stopped and he heard the car speed away. Jase squeezed his fist in the damp curls at the back of her head and let his lips close the small space between them. A relieved breath from her throat was hot on his tongue, their lips nearly touching—
Something slammed into the metal desk and jarred them apart.
“You kids all right?”
Saul was leaning over the top of the desk with a delirious smile. Blood from his arm dripped down the back of Jase’s shirt.
“Yeah, you’re all right,” he said.
Jase untangled his fingers from Lindsey’s hair and shimmied out from underneath the desk. He reached for Lindsey’s hand and helped her stand.
“You took a hit?” Jase asked.
Saul pulled a rag from his back pocket, wrapped it around his bleeding arm, and stuck one end in his mouth to tie it up.
“Flesh wound,” he mumbled around the rag.
“Flesh wound,” Jase repeated, watching Saul flex the fingers on his injured limb with only a slight wince.
“What about you?” Saul asked Graham and Helen. “You look like you’re about to have a heart attack.”
One of Graham’s arms was hooked around Helen, the other bent and pressing into his chest.
“Are you kidding?” Graham wheezed.
Helen’s normally pink cheeks were bleached white. “Bathroom.”
Saul motioned with his good arm to the front corner of the shop with a unisex sign.
She covered her mouth and bolted.
“Helen?” Graham called after her, wincing.
“It happens to the best of us,” Saul said, nodding sagely. “I threw up my first time.”
“First time?” Jase asked. There was a story, he was sure, but Saul didn’t offer it. Jase wiped sweat from his face with one hand, realizing he was still holding Lindsey’s with the other.
“Graham, are you—” she started to ask.
He was hunched over and wheezing as if he was sucking air through a straw.
“No, I’m not okay,” he managed. “We’re not okay.”
“Are you hit, son?” Saul asked. “I don’t see any blood.”
Graham looked down his body as if he really didn’t know whether he’d taken a bullet or not.
“No, I’m not shot—”
“This is a good door.” Saul slapped his bloody hand on the large garage door and lifted the wooden bar on the smaller door with the shattered window. “I’ll check the damage.”
Graham wasted whatever breath he had on cussing and set his hands on the trunk of the Plymouth he’d used for cover. It wasn’t the first time his brother fought to stay upright, and Jase wondered if there was something wrong that Graham wasn’t telling him. A heart condition or asthma or…
All thoughts of his brother’s health withered and died with the look in Lindsey’s eyes, the tilt of her head suggesting she was thinking about how close their mouths had been a few seconds earlier.
And she’d be happy to continue if he dragged her to a shady shop corner.
Jase jerked her a step closer. Her gaze, hungry and distracting, landed on something over his shoulder.
“Oh my God,” she said on a long exhale.
Her fingers fell from his grip, and she stepped around him.
“What is it?” he asked, turning, his dick practically reaching for her.
She was staring at a collage of photographs on the wall.
“It’s your dad.”