CHAPTER 11
2050 is as far away as 1990.
-Zach to Crockett
ZACH
“You are sure that she’ll be okay?” Six asked, rubbing her stomach warily.
Six was pregnant with her first child, and she was always doing that whole touching the stomach absently thing that all pregnant women did.
Only, when she got caught, she stopped doing it because she didn’t want to appear anything other than the badass she was.
Today, however, she didn’t even pretend. She was worried for her friend.
“She’ll be fine,” I said as I bent over Crockett’s hand and started the IV.
Once I had the catheter in place, I hooked the fluids up and sat back on my heels.
“I’m impressed,” Wyett, Six’s best friend and Hunt’s wife, said. “I haven’t seen a doctor start an IV in forever.”
I rolled my eyes. “I used to be the guy everyone called when they needed IVs on difficult patients. I could do it with my eyes closed at this point.”
“Well, try that on someone that’s not me,” Crockett croaked.
I grinned down to see that she was staring at me, a little color having returned to her cheeks.
I winked at her and touched the tip of her nose with my pointer finger. “I’ll try it out on my next patient.”
She rolled over so that her body was lying more comfortably on the couch.
“I thought when I heard you say office that it would be an actual office with hospital-grade stuff. Not a really nice pool house with a comfortable couch that I’d like to move in to,” she murmured, her eyes taking in the room beyond her.
I looked around, too.
The pool house that Lynn had declared would be our ‘medical’ room was nicely decorated.
There wasn’t much to give it away as a medical anything, other than the medical equipment that was stuffed into the overly large closet.
“We’re working on getting more stuff,” Lynn said. “I have a big-ass hospital bed coming next week. And an X-ray machine as well as a gurney. You can have the couch if you want. I was about to get rid of it anyway once the equipment started arriving.”
Crockett blinked. “I’ll take it.”
Lynn nodded. “I’ll have one of the boys drop it by.”
Crockett shook her head and tried to sit up, but the moment she did, she moaned and clutched her head.
“Wow, my head really hurts,” she admitted, pressing her palms into the skin on either side of her eyes.
I helped her get back into place, then started explaining to the others what happened.
“Just go ahead and tell them the rest,” she said when I skirted around her family issues.
I hesitated, not wanting to share that, so Six did it for me.
By the time that Six was done, I’d learned even more things that her family had done to her, which only pissed me off more.
“I thought we had bad parents,” Wyett looked at Six with wide eyes.
“Your family tried to kill you,” Crockett told them. “Mine, on the other hand, are just selfish assholes. There’s a big difference.”
“Hey,” Hunt spoke up from his spot at the bar. “There seems to be a man that’s hanging around Crockett’s place. He’s looked in her window twice in the last five minutes.”
Crockett didn’t miss a beat. “My stalker is still making his rounds.”
The way she said it so casually, at first, appeared as if she was joking.
But then, she went on to say, “I’ve been seeing flashes of movement at my house and at the store, and I’m pretty sure that he’s harmless. But it’s only gotten worse since he first started.”
Irrational anger rose inside of me at her nonchalance.
“You really do have a stalker?” Six asked, looking alarmed.
“He’s just always at the store.” She shrugged. “Watching.”
“You’re not concerned with this?” Wyett asked, her voice raised slightly.
Worried.
Just like I was.
“I mean…” She paused. “He never comes close enough for me to ask why he’s there.”
I gritted my teeth and looked at Hunt. “Can you identify him?”
That night, I’d gone to confront the fucker, he’d been gone when I’d finally made my way back outside.
I’d thought that he’d taken the hint seeing as Crockett had never mentioned it again—which I thought she would if he’d continued.
Guess I’d been wrong.
“How are you even seeing him?” Crockett asked in confusion, her eyes going heavy. “I don’t have a security system.”
“I’m in your parents’,” he answered. “And if he’ll turn toward the camera and stop only staring at her house, sure. I can do that. I have plenty of facial recognition software. But he hasn’t taken his eyes off her house since I plugged into their cameras.”
“What about any old feed?” Lynn asked. “You could go back and see if it…”
Hunt was already shaking his head. “I had to turn this camera her house’s way. It was set on their back yard. I highly doubt that it would’ve caught anything.”
Lynn sighed. “What about turning on a motion sensor light in their back yard?”
“What about,” Bruno said from the spot all the way across the room, “someone just goes over there and confronts his ass, and doesn’t bother with stupid electronics to do a real person’s job?”
Laric stood up, clapping his hands. “Well let’s go.”
Bruno stood up and they both disappeared, making Crockett frown in confusion. “I don’t understand what the big deal is.”
“If Beckham had a stalker,” Trouper supplied from his perch across the room on the bar’s countertop. “And she was so cavalier about it, I would spank her ass.”
“You could try,” Beckham countered as she walked the floors with her baby, who was seconds away from falling asleep if the look in his eyes was anything to go by.
“I would accomplish,” Trouper countered.
She snorted loudly, making the baby’s eyes open wider, then droop once again.
“Same with Swayze,” Trick murmured. “I wouldn’t be very happy if she wasn’t a little more concerned about having someone that’s always there. I would be pissed as hell, to be honest.”
Crockett’s eyes turned from Trouper to Trick, who was leaning up against the counter, his back to the kitchen and his eyes to her.
Crockett sighed. “I’m not sure what, exactly, I’m supposed to do about it, though. It’s just… weird.”
“How about you let us take care of it,” Trick suggested. “You don’t worry about anything.”
“I…” Crockett trailed off when Hunt snorted in laughter.
“Damn, they got there fast as fuck,” Hunt drawled. “They had to have raced.”
Bruno and Laric had done that quite a few times since I’d been around, and didn’t really show any signs of stopping.
For this one instance, though, I wasn’t going to be concerned about their lack of care for themselves.