Page 29 of Pocketful of Us

A solid education and countless hours of my youth spent reading crime novels and thrillers led me to assume that Seth Dillon had an agenda. He was here for a reason. He'd found us for a reason. And frustratingly, he refused to speak about those reasons with anyone but Sketch.

It was a pickle and I was beginning to loathe pickles.

"I don’t trust him," I muttered under my breath. "Not one bit."

"Hmm," was Lucky's non-committal response.

"Why the hell is he still sticking around – and how the hell did he know where to find us in the first place?" I continued to rant, but when Lucky started to sing along to the music, I realized that, for him, the conversation was over.

Left in a semi-state of silence to mull over my thoughts, I allowed myself to brood over the catastrophic predicament I had somehow found myself in.

The way I saw it, I had two horses in this dastardly race of life or death.

Sketch and Romi.

One was AWOL.

The other had dropped off the face of the earth.

Everyone else could go to hell.

Big dick Dillon, as pretty as he was, didn’t come into the equation, because you know, bros before hoe-bros and all that jazz.

"Roll down the window, Cowboy," Lucky instructed, cutting his drunken rendition of Frozen'sLove is an Open Doorshort and dragging me from my thoughts.

"What?" Confused, I cast a sideways glance his way. "Why?"

"Just do what you're told and roll the fucking window down," he repeated calmly, reaching for something under his shirt with one hand as he lowered the volume on the stereo with the other. "Please."

Morbidly curious, I did as he asked. "Are you feeling sick or something? Because if you need to throw up some of the poison you drank tonight then I can pull the car over –"

BANG!

"Jesus fucking Christ!" I roared, both startled and deafened by the sudden explosion in my ears. Slamming on the brakes, the truck skidded from one side of the ice-ridden mountainous road to the other before coming to halt in the pitch dark. "What the hell wasthat?"

"That was me assuring that I'm around to enjoy morning sex with my woman tomorrow," he replied calmly before climbing out of the truck – still humming along to the freakingsongas he walked.

Wide eyed and bewildered, I switched off the stereo and unfastened my seatbelt before quickly scrambling out after him. "Love is most definitelynotan open door, Lucky Casarazzi, and neither is your right to use firearms that have both the noise level and ability to give me a heart attack!"

"Two things –" Pausing, he sparked up a cigarette and took a deep drag before continuing, "First, you need to calm down. And second, it was either he went home to his woman, or I went home to mine," Lucky added, stopping at the steep embankment at the side of the road. "I know what I'm choosing, kid. Every single time."

"His?Oh, holy fuck." My stomach churned violently when I reached where he was standing and saw for myselfwhohe was referring to. "That's a dead man, Lucky."

"You're sharp, cowboy."

"With a bullet in his throat."

"Again, a-plus for observation."

"I thought you were drunk."

"I am."

"But you shot that man in the throat." I shook my head in disbelief. "In the dark of night. From a moving car!"

"I know."

"A drunk man shouldn’t have that deadly an aim." I looked up at him, waiting for an explanation.

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