Page 27 of Defenseless
“Are you going to tell me what happened at the diner?”
He was leaving his cousin hanging, he knew that. But he wasn’t ready to. “I’m going to head out on that camping trip tomorrow for a few days. I’ll be back Sunday and I’ll fill you in then. In the meantime, I think it’s better for everyone if she and I are not in each other’s company unless we have to be.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Long enough that he could now see a faint glow, either from the interior light of Sabina’s Jeep or maybe her phone.
Finally, Ethan spoke. “I wish you’d give me more than that, but I understand you don’t want to right now. Get her tire changed, go camping. We’ll talk Sunday.”
And that, right there, was one of the reasons he was glad to be home. His family was nosy and pushy and embodied every aspect of the cliché big family. But when the chips were down, they knew when to back off and how to be there for one another.
“Deal. I can see her car. I need to hang up now as it’s a bit of a climb to the road. And if you make an old man joke right now you will not live to see tomorrow.”
Ethan snorted. “Right, old man, what are you gonna do about it? You’re going camping.”
Despite himself, Chad smiled. “Asshole,” he groused before hanging up and starting up the hill.
“Sabina?” he called, pausing a few yards off the trail. He wasn’t sure what she was doing, but the sound of her moving around stopped.
“Chad?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”Unfortunately, he almost added.
“Where are you?” At least she sounded confused and not worried.
“Down the hill. Ethan called me, but I didn’t want to just walk up and startle you.”
A few seconds later, he saw her form appear at the lip of the shoulder. She swept a flashlight down the hill until the beam landed in front of his feet. “What are you doing out here?”
“I was hiking. Like I said, Ethan called me after you called him. I was only fifteen minutes away, so he thought it would be faster to ask me than to come himself.” She kept the light pointed on the ground in front of him.
“I would have called you, but you seemed like, well…when you left the diner, you didn’t seem very happy.”
There was no way he was touching that comment with a ten-foot pole. “Can I come up and help?”
She paused then quickly gestured him up. “Of course. Do you need a hand?”
He declined and started making his way up the steep slope. As Sabina usually did, she filled the silence.
“I’m capable of changing a tire, and normally I wouldn’t have called Ethan, but the problem is, there are two flats.”
He paused and looked up. “Two?”
“Yeah, weird. But yes, two.”
The hairs on his neck started to come to attention. Having one run-flat tire bunk out completely was unusual enough. But having two go out at the same time and so completely was almost unheard of. Unless she’d driven across something that would have torn them completely apart. If that had been the case, though, it would have impacted all four.
“Well, let’s see what we can do,” he said, starting up the hill again. He reached her a few minutes later and assessed the damage to the back tire closest to the shoulder. Sure enough, it looked shredded. Only it was shredded on the tire wall, not the tread.
“You have any enemies?” he asked, keeping his voice light, wanting to downplay the oddity of what he was seeing. The second the words were out, he regretted them, though. “Forget I said that,” he said before she could answer. “What about the other one?”
“The other rear tire,” she answered. “And again, yes, I know this is weird. Of course, it’s less weird when you consider both tires look slashed.” She paused, then clarified. “What I meant is that it’s not weird that if someone was going to slash my tires, they’d slash two. But it’s still weird that someone would slash my tires in the first place.”
He’d walked around the car as she chatted and sure enough, the other back tire looked exactly like the first one. He thought about everything she hadn’t told him and wondered if it had anything to do with the vandalism. It was hard to make a guess on that, or at least an educated one, since he had no idea what skeletons she had in her closet.
“Why two?” Sabina asked, bringing him back from his musings.
“What?” he asked, turning to face her.
“Why two?” she repeated. “Why two tires and not four? Or three?”
