Page 147 of The Best Shot

Darryl nodded. “You two are good to go. I’ll stay until the tow gets here and make sure he doesn’t decide to get creative.”

“I’ll ride with Hale,” Annie said.

“Figured.”

He pointed toward her wrist. “Ice it when you get home. If it swells or you can’t move your fingers, get it checked.”

“Yes, Officer.”

“And call Pop Pop.”

Her expression softened again. “I will.”

We climbed into the Chevelle.

The doors had barely shut before Annie sank into the passenger seat. “I can’t believe I got away with that.”

I turned the key. “Did you, though?”

She grimaced.

I glanced over at her. “Pop Pop.”

“Shut up.”

“You’ve got a Pop Pop.”

“It’s Texas. Don’t act brand-new.”

I pulled out onto the county road, leaving the lights of the bar behind us.

42

“IT’S ABOUT AS BAD AS IT SOUNDS.”

HALE

Ihad my half of it worked out before I hit the county line.

Yasmine would come in hot. She’d tell me I was reckless, and she’d be right, so I’d let her get all the way to the end without interrupting.

I ran it three or four different ways on that road and had an answer for every version of it I could think up, but it all boiled down to the one thing that mattered.

I’d do it again tomorrow.

Dolores was on the porch rail when I pulled in. She’d given up on the coop back in the spring and taken to sleeping out there like she had appointments. She watched me climb the steps.

“Don’t start,” I told her.

Inside, I ran cold water over my right hand. The skin was split across the middle two knuckles, gravel ground into the cuts, but it was nothing that wouldn’t close on its own.

I wasn’t sorry.

My daddy raised me a certain way. A man puts his hands on a woman in front of me, I put my hands on him. It was simple math. He taught it to me in a driveway when I was nine years old, and it stuck.

I ran the water until my knuckles went numb, then a while past that.

The front door opened, then shut again softly.