Page 74 of Putting Out
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She was leaving the gated community. Just like his guardian angel said she would. If he watched long enough, waited patiently enough, eventually she would come out. It seemed like years since he’d been waiting, but in reality it had only been weeks.
She was in a car, a big jeep, and the side windows were dark, but through the front windshield he could see her. Her blond ponytail was visible over her right shoulder, but a baseball cap hid most of her face.
He hated baseball caps.
For a while he wasn’t sure what he should do. He’d been sent to Savannah by the guardian angel and had known the joy of being only a few miles from where she ate, where she slept, where she existed.
A gate had stopped him from getting any closer, but that was okay. He didn’t need to be with her in the same room. That might be too much. Just to be close was special. Only now she was outside the gate, and she had passed him by mere feet.
There were others with her. They were bad. The angel had told him so. It’s why they kept her locked away behind the gate. His mission was to find a way to free her from them. To bring her to the light of the angel.
He should follow her now. The angel had meant for this moment to happen. This moment where she was free of the gate and he could get closer to her than a mile.
But not too close. Too close was too much.
* * *
Forty days and counting.For Reilly the number was significant. As a fall-away Catholic, much to her Pop’s chagrin, she could understand there had to be forty days of suffering before the main event. It was the first week in March and the American was now only forty days away.
She liked to count Monday through Wednesday as training days, but Odie had declared the event officially on as of the first practice round.
So really she only had thirty-seven days left. Thirty-seven days wasn’t nearly so Catholic as forty.
“Why am I nervous?” she asked rhetorically.
“Because you haven’t hit a ball in weeks and all the physical training and swing tweaking might have decreased your distance and your accuracy rather than improved them,” Kenny answered regardless.
Odie whacked him across the head from the backseat.
“Boy! Do you not have the sense God gave a grasshopper? Why would you say a thing like that for?”
“I believe in speaking the truth.”
“No, he believes it’s his duty as my older brother to torture me,” Reilly said over her shoulder. This morning, out of the blue, Odie had decreed it was time to put tech-nah-logy to the test.
He’d already prefaced the day’s events with the warning three weeks was nowhere near enough time to work on extending Reilly’s distance, but with the Ides of March upon them, it was time to move on to phase two: iron shots.
At this point, Reilly could see ridges in her abdomen where there hadn’t been any before. When she was locked into the Iron Maiden as she liked to call his apparatus, she no longer touched the plastic strips indicating her swing was as pure as it was ever going to be.
Odie never let her see the computer’s simulated numbers. Not that a computer could be completely accurate, anyway. Wind, surface, the quality of the ball, all of those things had to be factored in as well.
The only way to know how far she could hit it was to hit it.
Kenny drove them to a golf course on the island that wasn’t normally open during the week in winter. Luke, who was once again on the road, had called in a favor of the greens manager and had made arrangements for Reilly to work out on the driving range. Reilly wouldn’t have minded playing a round, but Odie was insistent she follow the very structured schedule he had in place. There were shots he was going to have to re-teach her and he didn’t want her natural game style interfering with that.
Kenny pulled into the lot and saw someone waiting for them at the entrance gate. He parked close and got out to fetch Reilly’s bag.
“You Pete?”
An older man in a heavy sweatshirt lifted his hand to them in acknowledgement. “Yep. Luke said to give you as much time as you needed.”
Reilly walked over with her hand outstretched and the man gave it a quick shake. “I appreciate this.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I have to tell you, though, I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference. I mean call me crazy, but thinking you can play with the men…well, that’s just… crazy.”
Reilly smiled, not offended by the man’s remarks considering that despite his objections to her playing, he was still willing to help her out.
