When I arrived, it was to find Stratton pacing back and forth along the forecourt, looking worried.
“Fuckin’ shit, girl,” he said when he first saw me. “I called Marta and she said you left over an hour ago. I started to get really freakin’ worried.”
I held up two sandwiches. “I bought us sandwiches.”
He blew out a breath and looked at the sky with exasperation written all over his face.
“Fuck me.” He shook his head. “You’re lucky.”
I shrugged.
“How’s your brother?” he asked.
I had a feeling he knew exactly how my brother was. He talked to Marta more than he talked to me sometimes.
I had a feeling that there was something there, yet neither one of them really did anything to act on it.
Needless to say, since they both avoided the topic like the plague, I did, too.
Also, I wasn’t happy when they expressed their input in my love life, so I wasn’t going to do the same to them.
“He’s doing good,” I said, ignoring the fact that he didn’t look surprised. “He’s bruised up pretty bad, but otherwise, nothing too critical. They’re keeping him overnight for observation just in case. They’ll be releasing him in the morning if he’s in the clear.”
Stratton nodded, then jerked his head to the food. “What kind of sandwiches?”
My lips twitched.
“Boomer’s,” I answered.
His favorite.
Stratton grinned. “Aces.”
I rolled my eyes at his word.
“Have you been watching Disney Channel again?” I wondered.
He shrugged. “They got some good shows.”
“They have some good shows aimed at kids. When you watch them, it makes you seem like a perv,” I explained.
He shrugged. “Maybe I am?”
I snorted loudly.
“Whatever,” I said as I placed the sandwiches on the desk. “Is there anything you want to drink?”
“My usual,” he answered as he dug out both of the sandwiches.
I walked to the Coke machine, the same machine that’d been there since the beginning of time, and fished out two quarters.
The machine was so old that the drinks inside the machine only cost a quarter a piece.
The machine dispensed two Pepsis—ice cold because Stratton had figured out how to work on the machine when they’d stopped coming to fill it—and handed one over.
“Thanks, darlin’,” he said. “Why’d you go to Boomer’s?”
I pursed my lips.
“I was in need of some comfort food,” I admitted. “Something that was going to stick to my ribs.”
“It’ll also stick to your ass if you’re not careful,” he challenged.
I rolled my eyes.
“Whatever,” I snorted.
But he was right.
I’d turned twenty-five this year, and it was like some sort of invisible switch had been flipped, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t eat like a fifteen-year-old anymore. Things that I used to be able to get away with I couldn’t any longer.
Like eating an entire large-sized pizza.
That was the fastest way to send me to the bathroom and give me a raging case of heartburn.
Thinking of heartburn, I was still feeling the effects of the man earlier pressing me up against the building.
“Hey, Stratton,” I called out before I took a bite of my sandwich. “Have you ever seen a big blond Adonis with muscles on top of muscles with tattoos on his arms before? He’s a hottie.”
“Big blond Adonis doesn’t really explain anything to me,” he said. “Got a name?”
I shook my head.
Then went about explaining what had happened.
Then I cursed up a blue streak.
“His chair!” I cried. “Fuck!”
I dropped my sandwich before I’d so much as taken a bite and was about to sprint the two blocks back to the intersection where it’d all gone down, but I didn’t so much as get out of the building.
Why?
Because the Adonis was walking away, and my brother’s chair was sitting right beside the open door.
It was very, very clear that he’d heard everything I said.
Shit. Damn. Hell.
“No,” Stratton said as he took a bite of his sandwich. “Never seen him before. But he looks like someone I wouldn’t fuck with. I suggest you stay away from him.”
I rolled my eyes.
Like that would be a problem.Chapter 3
Some of y’all weren’t grabbed by the arm and spanked in a circle and it shows.
-Justice’s secret thoughts
Justice
“There are times when I think I’m close,” I said to the room at large. “But then shit like today happens, and I realize that I don’t know the motherfucker at all. He’s a loose cannon and I don’t ever know what he’s going to do from any given day.”
The Chief of Police, Luke Roberts, grunted in affirmation.
“Which is why we needed you undercover,” he muttered. “Kid’s gonna light the entire street on fire one of these days, and everybody on the street will just watch him do it.”
The ‘kid’ in question was actually Marcus Gomez. He was a thirty-one-year-old wannabe gangster that had some mental health issues.
Which was proved today when the motherfucker saw a guy in a wheelchair talking to one of his girls, asking her if she wanted to go inside and cool off because she’d looked ready to pass out. Marcus had heard, ‘do you want to leave’ and he’d taken everything out of context. He’d then proceeded to beat the shit out of the man in front of half a dozen businesses, and not one of them had come out to investigate.