“I think you drove all this way because you wanted to order me to come with you.” I say, enunciating each word, “and you violated your parole to follow me, and you put two threatening notes on my property, and you just told me you'd cut my boyfriend’s truck's brakes. And I think that's the last time you will ever frighten me, Shawn. You're just loud.”
For one second, pure amazement. It’s glorious. Nobody has read him like this in years.
Then his hand snaps out and closes around my wrist, and he yanks me toward his car.
A shape peels out of the treeline at a fast run, boots crunching on gravel. Then a hand the size of a dinner plate closes on Shawn's forearm, and the grip on my wrist lets go. I stumble back into the headlights. Wrench puts himself between us and shoves Shawn back easily with one flat palm to the chest.
“Evening,” Wrench says.
Shawn finds his feet, and I know what happens next and it makes me flinch. His face does the thing, the flush and that mean twist, the look that used to send me looking for the exits. But it has no effect on Wrench whatsoever.
“This him?” Shawn's laugh comes out ragged as he looks up. “This is what you're telling me no for? Some greasy…”
“Careful,” Wrench says, mildly.
Shawn swings.
Wrench moves his head six inches with all the urgency of a man avoiding a low doorway, and then he hits him. It's one short hook into Shawn's ribs that folds him in half over a sound I've never heard a grown man make, and as he buckles, Wrench takes a fistful of his collar and holds him up half off the gravel, his weight in one hand, and leans down.
I can't say I'm sorry to see Shawn flinch now.
He turns him so their eyes have to meet. “Here's the only mercy you get. I won’t kill you this time. But you ever come back to this valley, you try to get near her and nothing is going to save you from what I do about it. Look at me. You know I'm not lying.”
Shawn, wheezing, looks back at him. Whatever he sees puts fear on his face.
Wrench straightens him up, turns him, and sets him against his car, face-first, with one arm folded up behind his back.
From the dark above the pullout comes a cheerful voice. “I don’t think you need my help but I’ve got it all on camera…” Savage strolls down off the trail, almost skipping.
“Lila.” Wrench doesn't take his eyes off Shawn, and his voice, for me, is gentle. “You okay?”
“You followed me?” It comes out wobbly.
“I did.”
“Even after I told you those terrible things?”
“Yep.”
And that's when the headlights come. Two bikes, out of the south, riding in off the highway. Savage straightens up off the guardrail like a kid when the teacher walks in.
“No way,” he says.
The first rider pulls off his helmet and he's all black hair streaked with silver, huge and intimidating. The second is leaner, muscular, road-dusty. Wrench inclines his head.
“Prez.”
“We saw the lights." Prez takes in the pullout: the man folded against the car and the rest of us silhouetted by my high beams. “Starting to feel like home already.” His eyes come to me, shrewd and not unkind. “Looks like you’ve got this under control.”
The lean one is already studying Shawn with a diagnostic eye. “Name?”
“Shawn Jebson,” Wrench says. “Aggravated assault, out on parole two states east. Protection order back there too, different woman. Tonight we've got him crossing state lines, written threats, stalking, and hands on Lila, on camera.”
Doc looks at me for a long moment, and then at Shawn. He turns to Prez. “I'll have it on his parole officer's desk. He'll finish the whole stretch inside, plus other charges.”
“Just like that?” I ask.
“I have connections.” Doc's mouth twitches. “And I enjoy paperwork.”
