Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 65225 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65225 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
“Can you help me get there?” I wondered.
Mostly because it was really far away and there were stairs, and fuck stairs.
“Yes.” She paused. “I used to care for my ailing grandfather before he passed away from colon cancer. Trust me when I say, I may be smaller than you, but I can manhandle you like a six-foot-six guy if I have to.”
Her words turned out to be true.
Ten minutes later, I was sitting on my bed and she was kneeling down at my feet, pulling off my tactical boots.
“You know,” she murmured as she dealt with the laces. “These are just ridiculous.”
I would’ve laughed had everything not hurt.
“How about while I unlace all of these.” She gestured toward the other one. “You tell me what the hell happened. Computer whizzes don’t get fucked up like this.”
I did laugh at that.
Which made bright and shiny stars dance in my vision as I closed my eyes to breathe through my nose.
“It’s not even the cut,” I admitted. “It’s the ribs. Fairly sure at least four of them are broken.”
I then went on to explain my day.
“We served a no-knock warrant on a couple of pedophiles. I was there because my company was hired to get into their computers. Warrant was served. We got into this guy’s place and we found his computers. I’m pulling up everything, pictures of little three-year-olds dressed in their Halloween costumes—or half-dressed at that—when all of a sudden I’m taken out by a man that appears out of fuckin’ nowhere from the floor. I go down with about three hundred pounds of man on top of me. Broke my ribs, I think then. He slashes me with a knife just as the men I served the warrant with realize I’m no longer alone. I’m not sure how I got the bullet burn on the back of my neck from, though. I’m hoping it was the bad guys, but I’m not altogether convinced that it was.”
“Are you trying to tell me you think that one of the good guys, the cops, was the one to shoot you? In the back?”
Her outrage had me grinning despite the severity of the conversation.
“I’m telling you that I have a suspicion, and it was just too convenient that the two of them were in the room at the same time, and both guns went off at the same time. And due to the angle the man was standing…” I didn’t finish. “I might or might not have a man in that particular police department that hates my guts.”
Because if I finished, I had to decide a few things.
One, whether I was going to do anything about it.
Two, whether or not I told my brother.
Because, in the grand scheme of things, my brother would go apoplectic.
He’d always been damn protective of me.
That was why, when we were kids, I didn’t tell him that my mom was kind of, sort of, a piece of shit.
He would blame himself.
And in this case, it would be partially warranted since Troup had been the one to introduce me to Sareen.
Sareen, the woman that I’d dated for all of a month and a half, and saw just how crazy town she really was.
“I’m trying to comprehend that some man…”
“Actually, I should have specified that it was a woman,” I corrected her.
Her eyes flared. “Some woman? Let me guess. This ‘woman’ was, at one point, in your bed?”
I winced. “That sounds really, really bad when you say it like that, but yes. At one point, and only one, she was in my bed. That’s when I finally decided that I couldn’t deal with crazy. I’m just not cut out for it.”
Banger helped clean me up as I told her the story of Sareen.
“Sareen and I met through my brother. She was a friend, and a cop, which when you meet him you’ll find hilarious because he’s very anti-cop, especially after a few things that went completely wrong for him and ended his military career.” I shook my head. “I digress. Anyway, so I met Sareen about a year and a half ago. Started dating her. But goddamn, is she crazy.”
“Crazy how?” she pushed as she help lead me to the shower.
“Crazy as in when we went out on our first date, she ended it with telling me ‘I love you.’” I flicked off the first finger, then raised the second. “She purposefully scratched me on our second date when she thought I was looking at the waitress. Which I was. And to ‘make it better,’ she sucked the cut into her mouth. Or tried to. When I told her no, that was weird, she ran out of the parking lot and sat in the middle of the street in the rain.” I flicked up a third finger. “On what would be our third date, I’d had a really bad day, and I decided to cancel. Instead, I went to Whataburger and went inside to eat. She texted me ten minutes later saying ‘I see you eating that burger’ and then nothing else for the rest of the night.”