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“You sure? That means an hour back here.”
“I’m sure. Let me call the tow in, and we’ll get to work on moving the trailer.”
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~oOo~
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The plan Duncan had sketched out in his head when he’d had the idea to offer her a ride home was to back his truck up, then get the horse off the trailer and push the empty trailer backward so he could pull his F150 in front of it, and then hitch it up and load the horse again. Phoebe laughed when he suggested he could move an empty trailer on his own, insisting that it weighed about as much as a car.
As usual, getting laughed at made him even more stubborn about it.
How heavy could an empty trailer be? As much as a car? Come on. It wasn’t one of those fancy deals with air conditioning and rooms in front for gear, and it wasn’t like he meant to pick the thing up; he simply needed to lift the coupler a little, then push and pull it—on wheels—ten feet or so.
As it turned out, a horse trailer might actually weigh as much as a small car. However, Duncan was strong, especially when he had cred on the line, and he only had to move it a few feet, so he got it done. It had helped that he had a gravity buff: they were on a slight incline, headed downward in the correct direction; once he’d got it moving, the hard part had been getting it to stop before it crashed into his truck.
He was going to ache for a few days, but he got the fucker hitched up and was rewarded with a look of total shock and a little awe on Phoebe’s pretty face.
“Told ya,” he said with a grin.
Phoebe grinned back. “Okay. I’m impressed.”
Smoky thought getting back into that trailer was a spectacularly horrible idea, and he thought Duncan was possibly Satan himself, so Phoebe had to coax him back in on her own. While she did, talking quietly to the horse, she explained that she ran a large-animal rescue called Ragamuffin Ranch, and that she’d just rescued Smoky from a bad neglect situation, and she suspected abuse as well.
“The guy I rescued him from was a real piece of work. Horses aren’t very smart, but they are self-protective. I think he’s learned that men are dangerous.”
“That really sucks,” Duncan said, standing on the shoulder, out of the horse’s sightline. “I hate people sometimes.”
“Same,” she cooed, stroking Smoky’s nose as she urged him to take one more step onto the ramp. “But then there are strangers who stop and offer to give themselves a hernia and also drive us two hours out of their way, so I don’t hate everybody all the time.”
Well, that felt pretty good. Before Duncan could think of a good way to reply, he saw the wrecker coming and hurried toward it, meaning to wave it over before it got too close and freaked the horse out all over again.
Mason Spellman, the club’s new prospect (and also Simon’s kid and Sam’s brother), saw Duncan and understood what he was being asked to do. He pulled over and stopped well behind the trailer. Duncan walked over as the driver’s door opened.
Mason jumped down, looking like a guy who’d been pulled from sleep to do a crappy job in the cold. He was the only prospect at the moment, and he lived on his folks’ farm, out in the boonies west of Tulsa, so he’d taken to staying at the clubhouse most nights, just to be closer if and when he got a call like the one he’d gotten tonight.
“Hey, Dunc.” Mason shoved his hands in his jeans as a blast of cold wind hit them.
“Hey, Mace.” Duncan almost apologized for dragging him out here, but patches did not apologize to prospects for giving them work. “The Sierra up there threw a rod. It’s not a repair, just getting it off the road until she can figure out what to do with the corpse.”
“Okay. So should I take it to the station, then?”
“Yeah. Just drop it at the back of the lot. I’ll be in tomorrow, and I’ll deal with it then.”
“Is this a paid job?”
“No.” When Mason’s face took on a fretful scrunch, Duncan added, “I’ll text my dad and let him know. You won’t get heat for not writing up a ticket.”
Relief rolled visibly through Mason’s body. He’d been a prospect for only a couple months, but he already understood how the role stung. “Okay, that’s good. Thanks.”
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~oOo~
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Once Phoebe got Smoky into the trailer, she went back to the Sierra and packed up her personal shit. Then Duncan and Mason got the dead truck hooked to the wrecker, and Mason headed off to the next ramp, so he could turn back to the city.
