Chapter 10
ten
. . .
Armin
It was a team effort to get her into a seated position, and I took the opportunity to throw one of my flannel shirts over her head.
She got a sly look on her face, and I imagined she had a few words to say about me, a man who’d ordered an escort, going to great lengths to cover her up. But then she slid one leg out of bed, and her whole face went pale with the pain.
“I can’t—” She gasped and shook her head.
“Can I take a look?”
She nodded. I slid the shirt up on that side. Her skin was red with angry striations, the area around her hip bone swollen and distended.
“Oh Mia, we’ve got to get this hip back in. You can’t go on like this.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”
I helped her lay back again. It would have been better with her on her stomach, but tears were rolling down her cheeks, and I couldn’t ask her to move any more than she already had. “On three?”
“No,” she said. “Now.”
And I pulled.
The way she screamed was going to haunt me until the day I died.
I thought maybe she’d gone unconscious with the pain, but when I lifted her into my arms, she curled into my chest, her breaths still short and ragged. I wanted to ask if she was okay, but I knew she wasn’t, so I kept my mouth shut and carried her to the bathroom.
The cabin might not have been much, but this room made up for it: full walk-in shower, travertine tile, and a separate tub with massage jets in front of a picture window.
I was proud of my work, and I wished Mia was well enough to enjoy it.
Hopefully she’d feel better after a soak.
I set her down gently in the water. I’d put so much salt in there I was worried she might float up to the top.
“I, uh,” she said, holding up her still-sleeved arm for my attention. I didn’t want to risk standing her up to take my shirt off her.
She sighed when the hot water enveloped her, sinking down in and closing her eyes.
“Will you get this shirt off me?” She slurred her words. I prayed it was the whiskey and the warmth getting to her, finally pushing out the pain.
“Sure,” I said. Her eyes fluttered open, and she watched my hands as I undid the buttons on the front of the flannel and slipped it off her shoulders so she wouldn’t have to lift her arms. I reached over and turned on the jets so she’d have at least that much privacy, and I wrung out my wet shirt into the sink.
After that, I had no business being in the bathroom with my naked houseguest. I stood there awkwardly. “Well,” I said, “I guess, let me know if you—”
“Would you wash my hair? I can’t…I mean, I don’t have the…”
“Oh, um, yeah. Of course I can. I don’t have any fancy stuff for hair washing, though. Just the one soap.” She lay her head back on the rim of the tub and shut her eyes again.
She didn’t need to hear me prattling on. I pulled up the old wooden step stool and sat down, too distracted by the suggestion of her leg in the water, and squeezed out my bottle of soap-shampoo-everything-goo right onto the floor instead of into my hand.
Get a grip.
I gave it another go and massaged the soap into her scalp in small movements, as careful as I could.
I thought to point out my favorite tree to her, right outside the window, but she’d already fallen asleep. Lips slightly parted, snoring sweetly.
I sat there, my hands soapy, her hair sudsed, and listened to the burble of the tub and to the rain on the roof, and I thanked God she hadn’t been killed last night.
“What you need is a good, long rest,” I said.
“What do you think?” I pulled another old flannel shirt over her head and down as far as it would go.
If we kept going through them at this rate, we’d be out of shirts in no time.
“I’ll put you out near the fire, where it’s warmer, while I go work on the downed tree and check on your car, get your things. ”
The temperature had taken a sharp dive since the rains came back with a vengeance. I’d need to bring in some more wood for the fire. Didn’t look like we were going to get much of a reprieve today.
She nodded, her eyelids heavy. She’d slept in the bath for a good twenty minutes, and only woke because I’d dropped the rinsing cup on the floor.
I scooped her up from the bed. I still wanted her to test and see if she could put pressure on that leg, but this wasn’t the right time.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice low and breathy in a way that pulled hard on my heart.
She lay her cheek and her hand on my chest and sighed heavily.
Oh Mia.
Her eyes were practically rolling back into her head. Too much to drink, too much trauma in the past 24 hours. Not enough food or bona fide sleep. I’d have to get down off the mountain and get something of substance for her to eat instead of this sorry bachelor’s charcuterie I kept feeding her.
I lay her on the sofa, minding her tender shoulder and hip, and I covered her with my best wooly blanket.
“I’ll leave some water and snacks here near the couch for you, in case you wake up hungry and thirsty. Hopefully I won’t be gone too long.”
“Thanks, Armin,” she said. She took my hand in hers, and held it, and looked deep into my eyes. “I mean it. Thank you.”
I hadn’t heard my real name in decades. It drummed an old memory loose in me, of who I was before becoming a sheriff, before the army, back when I was just a hungry kid, desperate to eat more than once a day. I pushed it out of my head, and I focused on her.
“It’s um…it’s nothing.”
“No it isn’t,” she said. She let my hand go. “It’s not nothing.”
I threw another couple of logs on the fire and stoked them into place so that it would roar up good and keep her warm.
“Be right back.” I grabbed my jacket, my hat, and my work gloves, and took one more look at the shape of Mia, under my blanket, on my couch by the fireplace.
I imagined kissing the top of her head, my lips on those wet ringlets.
I hurried out the front door, grabbed my axe from off the top of the woodpile on the side of the cabin, and hustled to my truck.
The rain eased a bit on the drive, and it wasn’t long before I pulled up to the downed tree. I parked on the right side of the road, where the cell reception usually lit up best.
Best to get this over with first. My stomach clenched. I paged down to the lone call on last night’s call log and hit it.
“Club’s still closed,” the gravelly voice said. This was their regular greeting these days. Same as last night, anyway.
“Yeah, this is, uh, Jim. Again. I hired an escort last night for a gala. I’m gonna need another night. Two nights, actually.”
My face heated with the shame of it. Paying for a woman I loved by giving money to the man I hated most in this world.
“Yeah boss, sure thing. You’ve got our Venmo. You keep sending us the daily rate and you won’t hear shit from me. She’s a nice piece, huh? I bet you’re riding her hard and putting her away wet.”
I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle that trash to death. I’d be happy to do time if it meant Mia and all of Washington County would be free of these monsters who sold women.
I hung up the phone and sent the money, enough for the week.
I had no right to interfere. I needed to remind myself, I wasn’t even a sheriff anymore. This was her job, her livelihood, the way she kept a roof over her head and food on her table.
You could give her all that.
I could; I could do it now, today. If only she’d let me. Of course I would, no questions asked, no strings attached. It would be worth it to know she was safe.
Harvey, he was the real scumbag at hand, not this lackey who handled the phone calls. Only career criminal in East Greenwich, since we put his brother Marv away.
Are you so different from him?
I was using my money to force a woman to spend time with me when otherwise she wouldn’t have given me the time of day.
Mia wasn’t my date or my girlfriend. She was my escort, a sex worker I’d fallen in love with while I was rescuing her.
I’d lost my whole heart to her at the goddamned sight and smell of her.
While she couldn’t care about me any fucking less.
I saved her life that day at the club, and she still didn’t know who the hell I was.
And that’s exactly who I was, a guy nobody remembered.
I slammed the axe into the felled tree, over and over, until my shoulders were ready to come apart at the seams.
The rain started up again, cold and driving, while I was hacking away and pitying myself, and soon I was soaked through.
I kept going.
I finally cleaved the old tree in two, but the halves were too big to move by myself. I’d have to bring the chains and hook it up to the truck to drag it. Could be a whole lot easier if I ran up the road and knocked on Pete’s door to get an extra pair of hands.
On to the next errand.
I got back in my truck and headed for Mia’s car, to collect her things.
That awful little deathtrap SUV of hers wasn’t much different from how I’d left it last night, except overnight the storm had claimed it as its own.
It had a whole tree branch sticking up out of the window I’d broken to free her.
I lifted out the branch, tossed it aside, and peered down into the tipped vehicle.
A solid foot of muck was piled up on the passenger-side-turned-floor.
There was no way this car was going to start again, let alone run.
I’d get her a new one. Something safer. Rugged but classy. Fine-looking. Like her.
I went and grabbed my shovel out of the back of my truck to dig around and find her stuff.
I opened the door, pushed it upward and climbed in, my guts twisting inside me when I saw how close Mia had been to death.
If I hadn’t come after her when I did, she could have suffocated in a matter of minutes.
Her phone was lodged between the dash and the windshield, clean and protected.
Might even work. I slipped it into my pocket and continued the search.
It took a little more mucking about with the shovel to find her purse, buried down deep.
I plucked it out of the mud and banged off the stuck clumps of earth with the shovel.
A flash of purple caught my eye.
I wasn’t about to go through her purse. I didn’t want to invade her privacy. She didn’t owe me any info about her life, and I sure as hell wasn’t trying to extract any. My investigation and interrogation days were over, thank God.
Still, once it was slung over my side so I could climb up and out of the Trooper with both hands, I couldn’t stop the purse from flopping open. Full of mud.
And the cutest little purple-handled handgun.
I jumped from the wreck and stumbled to the ground, the split second of freefall sending adrenaline shooting through me, my eyes fixated on the gun. My heart knocked hard against my ribs.
Did Harvey put her up to this?
The woods around me slid out of focus.
Did he know it was me, ordering her services? I’d used a fake name and my cabin up in the woods instead of my town address.
But Harvey had eyes everywhere, and this was a tiny town. Belonged to him more than it had ever belonged to me. He’d started pursuing crime way before I started fighting for justice.
And he’d outlasted me too. My easy money had pulled me out of the game.
Or had it?
Maybe you couldn’t retire out of a vendetta with East Greenwich’s crime kingpin. Maybe he’d kill you whenever, wherever, no matter what.
He’d even send the woman you loved to shoot you dead.