Chapter Two
The space between a good decision and a bad one was, according to Rose’s late grandmother, only as long as the finger that wags.
“People sure aren’t as self-aware as they should be,” she’d told a younger Rose once.
“Most don’t know they’re doing wrong until someone is yelling it at them.
You know, wagging that finger in their faces.
Especially us Little women. We’re so dang confident in ourselves that we need a good person to tut at us from time to time.
To show us we might have made a choice we shouldn’t have.
Or, we’re barreling toward one we should avoid. ”
Grandma Little had then lovingly looked at her husband, sleeping next to her hospital bed, and smiled.
“Just make sure the finger wagging at you belongs to someone worth listening to or else it’s just some silly nilly wasting your time judging you.”
Rose was staring at James Keller’s coveralls, smelling car oil and sweat off him and the garage around them, and knew she didn’t have the time to wonder whether or not he was someone worth letting judge her choices.
Mainly because of the bomb strapped beneath the man’s hide.
“I’m going to have to ask you to elaborate on that don’t move command,” James said through a terse line of his mouth. To his credit, he moved very little while delivering the request.
Rose was careful not to move too much herself, worried that he might subconsciously mimic her, but there was no easy way to answer.
So she didn’t mince her words.
“I think there might be an explosive under the seat. One you just triggered by sitting down. That was the click I heard and, I’m guessing you felt something beneath you too?”
He didn’t nod but he did confirm.
“I felt something like a click.”
Rose looked down.
There was no easy way for her to look under the seat, even with the door open.
Not without the man moving for her. Even while sitting, James was undeniably a big man.
Tall, tall and taller with legs that matched his stature inch for inch.
His knees almost touched the dash and, had he not sat down at an angle, there wouldn’t be any space between at all.
Despite Rose being the very opposite in size, she couldn’t see a way for her to get around them to look beneath the seat. At least, not without moving him.
And if she was right, that could spell a big ol’ boom for both of them.
“A bomb,” James said flatly. “You’re saying I’m sitting on a bomb.”
Rose tore her eyes up from his legs and the floorboard. He kept his gaze forward, his head not moving at all.
“I can’t get a good look from here,” she said. “I’m going to try and look under the back of the seat. Hold on.”
Rose wasn’t going to let a second slip by without some kind of action tied to it, so she did as she said and opened the back door behind him as gently as possible. James’s voice carried easily to her despite his lack of movement while speaking.
“I know you’re law enforcement and all, but how familiar are you with explosives? Is that even in your list of skills?”
Rose wasn’t about to fault the man for doubting her abilities. Mainly because he wasn’t exactly wrong to be skeptical. She stepped back, kneeled outside of the car and then angled her hands and head into the empty floorboard with more care than she had ever put into peeking at anything before.
She didn’t respond until after the top of her head was lifted off the floor mat once her peeking was done.
She went back to standing next to the stationary mechanic a few seconds later, hand hovering near her back pocket where her phone was currently residing.
“I’ve just done some cursory training but, no, I’m nowhere near an expert in explosives. But I think we should probably stop talking and not move until I call in some backup to see what they say.”
“Is there something really there? A bomb under the seat?”
Again, it wasn’t like Rose could fault the man for asking.
She pulled her phone out and brought up the sheriff’s number directly beneath her finger.
If the mechanic had been someone else, someone showing a lot more fear than he was, Rose would have put on her gentler verbal gloves. But there was something sturdy-feeling about this James Keller. Rose trusted in his sense of self-preservation.
So she stayed blunt.
“I’m about ninety percent certain it’s an explosive with a pressure plate.
One you triggered, and are keeping from going off by sitting on it.
Shift your weight too much and it’ll detonate.
But I can’t see enough of it to be absolutely sure about any of that.
So I’m going to call in the right people who do have the skills to figure it all out. ”
The line of his jaw got mighty tight at that. For a second Rose worried he would nod. Instead, James Keller gave her a terse one-word.
“Understood.”
Her finger hovered over the call button but her mind was sticking to the why of it all. If there was an explosive beneath the seat, why? Who did it? Why the passenger’s side and not the driver’s?
The call started, the ringing loud enough that it echoed slightly in the garage around them.
It would have carried more had the bay they were in not had a door wide open to the outside.
No sooner did she have the thought they were lucky to be alone in the shop than dirt kicked up in the distance at the road.
A beige truck was driving into the lot. The windows were tinted enough that she couldn’t see who was inside.
“Someone’s pulling up,” Rose said, already taking a step back. “I’m going to tell them to leave and be right back. Is that okay?”
Rose’s priorities had stacked in an easy order the second she heard the click beneath James.
Keep the civilian safe.
Remove James and the bomb without anything and anyone taking damage.
Two simply stated goals.
Now they shifted to make room for another.
Keep civilians from getting into danger.
Then the other two priorities on repeat.
If James had his own list, he showed that they at least synced up on this want. James Keller was nothing if not impressive. He gave her another one-word answer.
“Go.”
Rose hurried out of the bay while the call continued to ring. Her mind went on dual trains of thought as she decided to call the sheriff’s department directly next, while also thinking of what she should say to get the mechanic shop’s customers out of danger without causing a town-wide panic.
She had never been a nifty talker like other people in her department—Deputy Collins could talk someone into oblivion yet seemingly manage to never annoy said person—but Rose believed tact might be needed here.
If only a little. Dealing with this situation, whatever it may be, would be a lot easier if all of Seven Roads didn’t drive up after the news undoubtedly spread like wildfire.
The truck stopped a few yards off, almost where she had stopped to talk to James when first arriving, when another vehicle drove up behind them and into the lot.
It was a lot smoother than the first, older truck with its dents and rust. This one was an upkept black 4Runner with dark tint that matched the first.
Rose slowed her gait. The call went to voicemail in her hand. She didn’t hang up. The 4Runner stopped next to the old truck.
Sheriff Weaver’s voice was low as his to-the-point, prerecorded message asked the person calling to leave their details. He promised to call them back after.
Rose watched as neither driver exited their vehicles.
If the thing beneath the passenger’s seat wasn’t a bomb, that would be a great—and embarrassing—misunderstanding.
She would hear about it for days, weeks, probably the occasional comment through the years.
The sheriff wouldn’t say much—he was a quiet guy, like their only detective, Darius, was—but Price and the few other deputies in the department?
They would use the incident in good humor as long as the situation had an opening for it, like older brothers teasing a sister.
It would be annoying for Rose.
However, if she wasn’t wrong? If someone had planted an explosive in her car—the car—then that changed everything.
It gave her a bad guy with bad intentions.
A bad guy who probably wouldn’t just lurk in the shadows if their handiwork found its way to a mechanic’s shop, of all places.
A bad guy who might bring backup.
Still, Rose stopped walking and gave the two vehicles a look of reproach.
Maybe they were simply friends or from the same family, coming to the mechanic’s shop for oil changes or tire rotations at the same time.
Maybe they weren’t getting out yet because they were on their phones or not even paying attention to the woman standing a few yards away, phone in hand and staring.
Maybe—
The beep of the sheriff’s voicemail stopped her from going down the question rabbit hole.
Instead she let her gut talk.
“I’m at Keller Auto and I think we’re about to have a big problem.”
The truck’s driver’s-side door swung open.
It was a good thing she was already running.
The gun that aimed her way sure didn’t give her much time to do anything else.
* * *
THE DAY HAD taken a turn. There were no ifs, ands or buts about that. James had gone from a quick workday and right into an unbelievable nightmare.
Was he really sitting on a bomb?
Who even did that anymore?
At least in some place as tiny and mild as Seven Roads, Georgia?
But you’re in Wildcard’s car, he reminded himself no sooner than he’d questioned the why of it all.
Wildcard Rose wasn’t some tiny little name in a tiny little town anymore. At least, she hadn’t been in the past several months. She was the deputy who had made national news with a viral video of rescue that had been movie-worthy.
Not all attention would be wholly good, right?
But that also didn’t mean her getting targeted with an explosive beneath her car seat was the next, logical step. Her passenger seat to boot.
Maybe it wasn’t a bomb. Maybe it was a prank or something else that reminded her of the same kind of explosives that were in movies like Speed and Lethal Weapon.
Maybe we’re just overreacting and this will be one heck of a story to tell Dad and Mr. Donahue later.
James mentally nodded his head to himself—he wasn’t chancing movement just in case, regardless of how impossible it seemed to be sitting on a pressure plate was—and decided this would just be an inconvenience. One he would have to endure a little longer.
It was a weirdly calming thought.
One he held on to with great effort as a gunshot tore through the air behind him.
The sound was an explosion all its own and, having involuntarily reacted by jumping slightly, James thought for a moment that he had been the one who had exploded.
His hands had moved up in front of his chest, like he was ready to fight the sound, but as far as he could tell, nothing else around his personal area had changed. Explosion or otherwise.
He registered the fact that it must be a gunshot a second after.
James wasn’t a stranger to the sound, but he couldn’t understand why he’d heard it here of all places.
It only made sense that Rose had been the one to fire the shot.
A breath later and the woman in question was at his side again. However, there was no gun in her hands.
“How do you shut the bay door?” she asked. Her breath came out in a pant but there was power behind the words. It pulled an answer from James before a question.
“There’s a chain on the left side next to it. Yank it and it’ll fall.”
She was gone before he finished.
“Don’t move!” Her warning came only a few seconds before the familiar clank of the chain James had pulled slowly and with caution over the last several years sounded. He braced himself for what he assumed came next.
James couldn’t see it, but he sure heard and felt the metal garage door slam into the concrete floor beneath it.
“Does it lock?” Rose yelled out to him.
Again, he answered without wasting a moment.
“A latch in the middle! The bar secures into the ground!”
James could only see the back wall of the shop.
Pegboards with tools, a workstation that doubled as a counter that ran the length of the wall, and the only door and its one way to access the never-used traditional front of the shop.
The door that led into the office was to his left, out of sight, and to his right was the only other engine bay with its track clear and pit matching the one Rose’s car was sitting over now.
Which meant he had no idea what had gotten the woman more stressed out than the potential bomb beneath his seat.
It must have been enough to have her feel more comfortable locking herself in with a bomb.
After he heard a quick movement somewhere behind the car, James finally had to do what any normal person might in this situation.
He finally asked some questions.
“What’s going on? Did you just shoot at someone, or did they shoot at you?”
He could hear Rose talking but realized it wasn’t at him. The urge to turn in his seat was so intense his muscles tightened to resist. He was about to ask again when the small woman managed to fill the entire space next to him in the doorway.
She was empty-handed still.
But she wasn’t panting anymore.
In fact, Rose Little looked frustratingly calm.
Which made what she said next even more wild.
“I have some good news and some bad news.”