“I mean,” I said. “I guess that’ll be me in three months. Am I not allowed to still work with that?”
Hades rolled her eyes. “Whatever. They probably wouldn’t know, right?”
“Or care,” Keene came into the room. “Okay, let’s go over tonight’s show really quickly. Zip…”
He trailed off and gave everyone their assignments, what they were to do during their time off tonight, and spoke about the final show where I would be throwing a flashy hula hoop around instead of being in the air like the rest of them.
Though it wasn’t as cool or flashy, it was still mesmerizing with the lights.
All of us knew how to do the hula hoop act because it was the easiest one to do when we weren’t feeling ourselves.
“Y’all listen to this.” Zip barged into the room with her phone on speaker. “Folsom, start from the beginning.”
“Hey, y’all!” Folsom called. “Thought I’d call with an update on the sheriff.”
I groaned right along with my sisters.
“What about the toad?” Zip asked.
“So I looked up the hospital camera today just to take a peek, and it was in a flurry,” she explained.
“A flurry?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“A flutter,” her husband, Kobe, who also happened to be a private detective, came over the line. “Everything was all a flutter. Sheriff escaped his detail.”
That alarmed me on so many levels it was startling. But the worst of all those alarm bells was—what the hell will Coffey do about all of this? Because I knew he’d barely been able to contain himself when we’d left the hospital. I remembered when we’d passed the sheriff’s room—that had a deputy standing outside of it to make sure he didn’t get slippery and leave.
I’d seen the slight moment of hesitation. The way he’d had to take a few long, deep breaths was as if he’d been trying to fight his gut reaction to reach out and smack down whatever was hurting me.
“He had a detail?” Tony parroted my thoughts.
It was like that sometimes when you spent as much time with your family as I did.
“Oh yeah,” Kobe added. “From what Folsom was able to discover and all the hospital footage I’ve been watching over the last few days, they have him under lockdown. Or did. But then the dumb young one had to go take a thirty-minute shit, and while he was gone, Sheriff Bright chose to break himself out of the hospital. He took the deputies’ vehicle, and the others were still trying to figure out how he got the keys to it and left. They haven’t been able to locate said vehicle because Bright deactivated the GPS on it.”
“How long ago was this?” Keene asked, sounding miffed.
When I turned to look at him, I realized “miffed” wasn’t the correct word. Outraged. Livid. Incensed.
Whatever word you used for intense rage, he was feeling it.
“An hour,” Folsom answered, sounding annoyed. “I called to talk to them. Not you.”
“Sorry, dear.” Kobe chuckled. “Bye, ladies. Keene.”
Then he was gone, leaving us with Folsom only.
“Now that he’s gone…” Folsom waited a few dramatic moments. “When the hell were you going to tell me that you were pregnant?”
“If you read her medical file, you’d know that she had amnesia for almost twenty-four hours,” Val drawled. “Right?”
“Right,” Folsom sighed. “Jesus Christ. I can’t believe you fell into bed with a…”
I left before she could go into any more detail about the man that I was quickly falling in love with. Or hell, I’d already fallen in love with. There was no doubt in my mind that he was my “one.”
I mean, what kind of man that wasn’t the “one” did all the things he’d done? I mean, the man had bought not only an RV today but also a freakin’ truck to pull it and had followed that up with ice cream on the way home.
The man didn’t even like ice cream.
“That might be his only flaw,” I admitted to myself.
“What was that?”
I squeaked and twisted, my eyes wide, as the man I was just thinking about suddenly appeared.
I was halfway between his food trailer and our bus and had been heading for him.
Seems like we’d both had the same idea.
“Shit, Coffey.” I placed a hand over my heart. “The sheriff broke out and is probably heading straight for us, and you scare me half to death?”
His face lost its amusement as he said, “Repeat that?”
I gave him everything that Folsom had just shared with me.
“Fuck.” He narrowed his eyes. “So are we going off the fact that he’s in the sheriff’s vehicle or a different one?”
I shook my head as I said, “I don’t know.”
“Let’s go,” he caught my hand and led me back to the bus. “Maybe she’s still on the phone.”
She was.
And she was talking about things that Coffey hadn’t shared with me yet.
“…has an excellent 401(k), has about seven mil in the bank, and just because he’s a contract killer, doesn’t make him sensitive, okay?” Folsom was heard saying.
I froze, my eyes wide.
The man holding my hand paused, then turned and said, “I can explain everything.”
I waved him away. “Time for that is later. I know you have a past, Coffey. I’m more than aware you did some not-very-savory things. But that’s also not going to color my opinion of the man that I know now.”
He sighed and pressed his hand into his forehead. “I was going to tell you.”
“I know,” I said.
“It’s just not something that I talk about easily. I truly hate that part of me, and it’s not something that I want to revisit ever.” He paused. “I heard there was a file on me.”
I nodded.
“If you ask Folsom for it again…will you read it?” he asked, sounding, for once, very unsure.
I blinked at him, feeling my stomach drop out. If he couldn’t even talk about it…how bad was it?
“At this point, it sounds like that might be the easier situation,” he let go of my hand to press his hand against his chest and rub. As if there was a physical ache there at the remembrance of what he’d once done. “I’ll answer any and all questions you have... if you have any.”
I nodded. “I can do that.”
If it was what he wanted, I could do anything.
“I can get you a new one,” Folsom called.
I blinked and turned to find them once again, all standing there, listening to every word we said.
“When you do that,” Coffey said. “Send me everything you have on Sheriff Bright. I want to know where he went to school in elementary.”
Folsom snickered. “It’s very nice to finally meet you, Coffey.”
“I’d say it’s nice to meet you,” Coffey said. “But I’m not quite sure if it is.”
Folsom laughed.
“I would also like to know what everyone is tracking Bright on,” I said. “Does he have his phone? What about the LoJack on the company cruiser? Do we know if he stole a vehicle? Does he have access to his bank account? Logically, I know that the man probably knows what not to do and what to do to get tracked. So if he’s working on all brainpower, he’s not just going to announce that he’s headed this way.”