Page 22 of Nomad

“Don’t youBudme!”

He smirked. “Thatisyour name. Right?”

“Yes. It is.Sugar.”

His smirk grew. If that was supposed to be a dig, it had the opposite effect. He kind of liked it when she called him ‘sugar’. He kind of liked it when she called him ‘Johns’, too.

They rode in silence for a while without even the middle of the night fire and brimstone preachers to distract each of them from their private thoughts.

“There’s a little more coffee,” Bud said quietly. “You want it?”

He nodded.

When she handed him the thermos lid that doubled as a cup, he took it gratefully. Bringing it to his lips, he felt the steam rise and settle on his face. An involuntary sigh caused his chest to rise and fall.

Bud wasn’t going to offer condolences. She sensed he’d take it as empty words, hollowed out all the more by all the time that had passed. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel the pain in his voice. It didn’t mean that she wasn’t sympathetic. She couldn’t imagine having that kind of happiness, people to love who love you back, and having it destroyed so suddenly and in such a grotesque manner.

The fact that he was sure it was a murder meant for him made the whole of it simply unbearable. And she marveled that he’d held himself together at all.

No, she wasn’t going to tell him she was sorry, because that wasn’t what he needed from her, but she hoped that somehow he knew it.

“Are you sure it wasn’t some kind of freak accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure it was meant for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you uh… find out who did it?”

He turned his head away for a second, glancing out the driver’s side window at the darkness. When he looked at the road again, he said, “No.”

It was one of the shortest, most concise words in the English language, but it was infused with so much feeling, mostly bitter resentment, that it conveyed paragraphs of information.

“Have you thought about what you’d do if you found out?”

He hesitated for just a second before saying, “Every damn second of every damn day.” He pulled out the phone Brant had given him. “You know how to use the flashlight app on this phone?”

She took the phone. “Of course. I didn’t just crawl out from under a rock.”

He let that go. “All right. I need you to help us find the place. Look right there on top in the console and get that paper. Then read me what it says. I think we’re gettin’ close to the turn off.”

“You can’t put it in GPS?”

“There’s no addresses out here, sugar.”

“Oh.”

CHAPTER Five

“Stayin’ at the club tonight,” Brant told Garland.

“Why?” she asked.

“We might be gettin’ a visit from the Texas Rangers. If we do, I need to be here to control the message.”

She laughed. “You mean you don’t trust Burn to be spokesperson for the club?”

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