Rescue Me (17 page)
“He obviously wasn’t raised right.” Sadie chuckled. “It was the prom night from hell.”
“Bet it wasn’t as bad as mine.” Deeann handed her the bag of clothes. “I got knocked up on prom night and made matters worse by getting married three months later. Now I run this shop, sell jewelry and real estate on the side just to support my boys and me. All because I crawled into the back of Ricky Gunderson’s truck.”
Deeann was certainly a hard worker. Sadie liked that about her. “Can I help?” She wasn’t licensed to sell real estate in Texas, but she could certainly show a home with Deeann. Give her some tips to close the deal. She was often the top-selling agent at her brokerage in Phoenix.
“You can sell prom dresses with me.”
“What?” She’d been thinking real estate. Showing houses and talking up amenities.
“It’s easy. Those girls are gonna want to try on every dress in the store. I sure could use another pair of hands.”
It had been a long time since she’d bought a prom dress or been around teenagers. The twenty-year-olds at her cousin’s wedding had been annoying enough. “I don’t know . . .”
“It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
“Hours?”
V
ince raised the sledgehammer over his head and brought it down on the counter. The sounds of splintering wood and whine of wrenching nails filled the air, and it felt good to go at something with all his force. His motto had always been, “Sometimes it is entirely appropriate to kill a fly with a sledgehammer.” The man credited with the saying was a Marine, Major Holdridge. Vince loved the jarheads. Loved the wild grit and spit of the corps.
Of course, SEALs were trained a bit differently. Trained that it was easy to kill an enemy, but much more difficult to get intel from a corpse. Vince understood and walked the line between knowing that it was often vital to the mission to take enemy combatants alive, and loving a big explosion. And sometimes there was nothing quite like a sledgehammer to deliver a message and bring the point home.
A bead of sweat slid down his temple and he wiped it away with the shoulder of his T-shirt. He hit an overhead cabinet and knocked it off the wall. He’d dreamed of Wilson again last night. This time the dream began before the firefight that took his buddy’s life. He’d dreamed he was back in the rugged mountains and limestone caves. Of him and Wilson standing next to stockpiles of RPG launchers, AK–47 magazines, Russian-made grenades, Stinger missiles, and what someone claimed to be Osama bin Laden’s very own personal copy of the Koran. Vince had always had a doubt or two about that, but it made for a good story.
The operation orders had called for the insertions of four SEALs and a seven-mile hump to the caves. Marine security covered their right and left flanks, watching for enemy snipers hiding in the cracks and crevasses. The assault took longer than expected because of the rough terrain and heat. They’d paused halfway to strip off the jackets they’d worn for the flight in, but that still left him packing water, MREs, H-gear, assorted weaponry, body armor, and ballistics helmet.
The first thing they’d noticed as they’d neared the objective was that the bombs the flyboys had dropped earlier to soften the area missed about eighty percent of their targets. The platoon patrolled up to the entrance and entered the caves like they would a house or ship. The lights on their weapons faded in the deep caverns.
“ ‘Little surprises around every corner,’ ” Wilson said as they rounded the mouth of one cave. Before anyone asked, he added, “Willy Wonka. The original movie. Not the fucked-up Johnny Depp remake.”
“Shit on rye. That’s an ass-load of Gobstoppers.” Vince shone the light from his weapon on boxes of Stingers. “Looks like someone planned on playing war with us.”
Wilson laughed. That deep staccato
ha ha ha
that always brought a smile to Vince’s face. The laugh he missed when he thought of his friend.
Vince set the sledgehammer on Luraleen’s old desk, which he decided to keep for old times’ sake, and grabbed pieces of busted-up wood and counter. Thinking about Wilson usually made him smile. Dreaming about him made him shake like a baby and run into walls.
He walked out of the office and through the back door he’d left wedged open with a brick earlier. He moved a few feet to a Dumpster and tossed the debris inside. He figured it would take a week or two to finish demolition and another three or four to renovate.
The fading evening sun lowered in the cloudless Texas sky as a red Volkswagen pulled to a stop in the back. A trickle of sweat slid down his temple and he lifted his arm and wiped at it with his shoulder. Becca cut the engine of the Bug and waved through the windshield at Vince.
“Sweet baby Jesus save me.” For some inexplicable reason, she still stopped by on her way home a few times a week. He’d never done anything to encourage the “friendship.”
“Hi, Vince,” she called out as she walked toward him.
“Hey, Becca.” He turned toward the building, then stopped and looked back. “You cut your hair.”
“One of the girls did it at school.”
He pointed to the left side. “It looks longer on one side.”
“It’s supposed to.” She ran her fingers through it. “Do you like it?”
He supposed he could lie, but that just might encourage her to stick around. “No.”
Instead of getting all upset and leaving, she smiled. “That’s what I like about you, Vince. You don’t sugarcoat things.”
There was a reason. Sugarcoating encouraged relationships he didn’t want. “You’re not pissed about that hair?” The women he’d known would have freaked.
“No. I’ll get it fixed tomorrow. Do you need your hair cut? I’m getting pretty good with the clippers.”
Pretty good?
“That’s okay. I don’t want my head lopsided.”
Again she laughed. “I’d use a number two on you ’cause you look like you like it high and tight.”
He thought of Sadie, and not for the first time since he’d left her house. He’d thought of her several times a day since then. If there’d been anything going on beyond mindless demo work, he might be worried about how much he thought about her.
“I need your advice on something.”
“Me? Why?” He’d given his sister advice but she’d never listened to him. Becca wasn’t even related, so why should he suffer?
She put her hand on his forearm. “Because I care about you, and I think you care about me. I trust you.”
Oh no. A bad feeling pinched the back of his neck. This was one of those times that called for finesse and a precision extraction. “Becca, I’m thirty-six.” Much too old for her.
“Oh, I thought you were older.”
Older? What? He didn’t look old.
“And if my dad was still alive, I think he’d listen to me like you do. I think he’d give me good advice like you do.”
“You think of me like your . . .
dad
?” What the hell?
She looked at him and her eyes rounded. “No. No, Vince. More like an older brother. Yeah, an older brother.”
Sure. The only time he felt old was when the cold settled in his bones and cramped his hands. There’d been a time when the cold hadn’t bothered him much, but he certainly wasn’t
old
.
Behind Becca’s Bug, Sadie’s Saab rolled to a stop, and he forgot about being Becca’s dad. Her running lights shut off and the door swung open. The orange sun shot golden sparks off her sunglasses and hair. She was all golden and shiny and beautiful.
“I stopped to get some super unleaded. What’s up?” she asked.
“I’m closed for a while.”
She shut the car door and moved toward him, the smooth walk she’d learned in charm school with a slight bounce to her step and breasts. A smile tilting the corners of her mouth. The mouth she’d used on him a few nights ago. A hot, wet mouth he wouldn’t mind her using again. She wore a white dress he’d seen on her before. One he wouldn’t mind taking off her.
“Hi, Becca.”
“Hey, Sadie Jo.”
The two gave each other hugs like the true Texans that they were. “Your hair looks good,” Becca said as she pulled back.
“Thanks. I just got the roots touched up today.” Sadie ran her gaze over Becca’s hair. “Your hair is . . . darling.” She glanced at Vince. “Short and long at the same time. Very clever.”
“Thanks. I’m in beauty school and we practice on each other. When I get better, you should let me color your hair.”
Since Sadie wouldn’t be around when that happened she said, “Fabulous.”
Becca dug her keys out of her pocket and looked at Vince. “I’ll stop by tomorrow and say hey.”
“Fabulous.”
Sadie turned and watched Becca scoot into her Volkswagen and drive away. “How often does she stop by to say ‘hey’?”
“A couple times a week on her way home from school.”
“Well, that haircut is just tragic.” She looked up at Vince through her sunglasses. “I think Becca has a crush on you.”
“No. She doesn’t.”
“Yes. She does.”
“No, really. Just take it from me.”
“As we say in Texas, ‘She’s sweet on you.’ ”
He shook his head. “She looks at me like I’m her . . .” He paused as if he couldn’t bring himself to finish.
“Brother?”
“Dad.”
“Seriously?” For several stunned seconds she simply stared at him, then her laughter started as a low chuckle. “That is hysterical.” As if to prove the point, her chuckle turned into a full-blown laugh fest.
“It’s not that funny.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants. “I’m only thirty-six. Hardly old enough to have a twenty-one-year-old daughter.”
She clapped a hand to her chest and took a deep breath. “Technically it’s possible, old man,” she managed before she burst out all over again.
“You about done?”
She shook her head.
He frowned to keep from smiling and gave her his dagger stare. The one used to incite fear in the hearts and heads of hardened jihadists. It didn’t work so he kissed her to shut her up. A press of his smiling lips to quiet her laughter.
“Come in and have a beer with me,” he said against her mouth.
“You bored?”
“Not now.”
S
adie shoved her sunglasses to the top of her head and followed a few feet behind Vince as he moved down the hall past a lighted office, and toward the front of the Gas and Go. Her gaze slid from his wide shoulders in his brown T-shirt, down his back to the waistband of his khaki cargo pants riding low on his hips. He looked kind of sweaty. Hot and sweaty and totally doable.
“Are those brown T-shirts and cargo pants some sort of uniform?”
“Nope. Just easy to keep clean in a sandstorm.”
She supposed that made sense if a guy lived in a desert prone to sandstorms. “How long are you closed?” she asked as they walked into the store. The lights were out and the space was filled with shadow and the steady hum of the refrigeration units. The shelves of perishables were mostly empty but coolers were still well stocked.
“Unless I run into some unknowables, two months. Out here I’m going to paint, retile the floors, and put in new counters.” He opened the door to the big cooler. “A lot of the equipment is fairly new. He grabbed a pair of Coronas. “Except the wiener roller. That thing has to go. Luraleen calls it ‘seasoned.’ ” He shut the door and screwed off the bottle tops. “I call it a lawsuit waiting to be filed.”
The convenience store certainly needed work. It pretty much looked the same as it had for twenty years. “Who’s doing your renovations?” She took the bottle he held toward her. “I can’t tell you who to hire, but I can tell you who works on Miller time.”
“You’re looking at the guy doing the renovations.”
“You?”
“Yeah, me. I’m going to hire some buddies to come down and help me lay tiles.”
She was close enough to inhale the scent of him. He smelled like man and clean sweat. The grayish light in the store darkened his five o’clock shadow to at least nine-thirty.
In college she’d taken a mosaics class. “Are you good at laying tiles?”
He grinned, his teeth a white flash in the variegated light, and raised the bottle to his lips. “Among other things.”
They probably shouldn’t talk about the other things he was good at laying. “What’s Luraleen up to these days?”
He took a drink and swallowed. “Right now she’s in Vegas spending the money I paid her for this place.” He lowered the beer. “One nickel slot and cheap shot of whiskey at a time.”
“Not a high roller?”
“The velvet sofa in her house is from the seventies and all her music is on cassette tapes.”
Sadie laughed. “Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn?”
“Yeah.” He took her hand in his, warm and hard and rough. “Right now, I’m taking care of her house for her, but I’m going to need a place to live once she gets back. If I have to hear one more ‘cheatin’ song’ while she and Alvin get it on in her bedroom, I’m going to stab my head.” He pulled her behind him down the hall and into the office. Nails and a few splinters of wood were scattered about on the floor and the paint on the walls was a different color where there had once been cabinets hanging on the walls. An olive-colored countertop, an old chipped sink, and one more cabinet still occupied the room. A pair of clear safety glasses sat on an old wooden desk; a sledgehammer rested against the leg.
“Alvin Bandy?” She stopped in the middle of the room and her hand fell from his. “I know him. Short guy with a big mustache and ears?”
“That’s him.”
“Oh my God. He worked at the JH for a while when I was growing up.” She took a drink of beer and swallowed. “He’s not that old. Probably in his forties and Luraleen is what?”
“I think she’s sixty-eight.”
And Lily Darlington worried that
she
was a cougar. “Holy moly. I know women can be desperate.” She shook her head and thought of Sarah Louise Baynard-Conseco. “But I didn’t know men were really desperate, too. Dang, that’s just nasty.” She stopped short. “Oh. I’m sorry. Luraleen is your aunt.”
He raised one dark brow up his forehead. “He isn’t her only boyfriend.”
Sadie gasped.
