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I nod to them. “There they are. We need a plan. Something… coincidental. Okay, I’ll casually bring up a pasta recipe, and you can—”
“I’m not talking to them about pasta.” Lawton slows the truck in front of the dog kennel beside the chicken coop, but it’s really just a fenced-in patch of dirt where the dogs are free to run.
He glances through the windshield at Bobbi and Arch, and a valley forms between his brows. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I already don’t like that look.
“I got this,” he says. “Let me land this plane.”
“I wouldn’t trust you to land a piece of tissue in a trash can.”
“That sounds like a bet, Chastain.” He revs the engine.
Lawton looks at the Dogs Will Eat Chickens! sign, then at our targets watching us from the porch. Before I know what he’s doing, he throws a protective arm across my chest, floors the gas, and rams the truck straight through the fence line, setting the dogs free. They lunge for the chickens with bloodthirsty eyes.
Of all the reckless, stupid, impulsive ideas.
I grab the gun from my tote and aim it at his groin, so our new friends won’t see, then grit out, “Brakes. Now, Montoya. I’m not bluffing.”
His eyes pop when he looks down.
And then the truck comes to a screeching halt.
9Sabrina
Messes, I hate them.
And if there’s one thing my mom drilled into me (while drilling into a body, ironically), it’s that the only way to fight the unknown is to plan for chaos. So when all hell breaks loose in chicken-squawking galore, I simply pull out the air horn I packed in my purse, open the truck door, and blow.
Lawton winces, and then plugs his ears as he curses everyone from me to his mother, looking murderous.
Fantastic.
The feeling’s mutual.
This is just so typical of him, never thinking things through, always acting on impulse. His “instincts” once got him tied to a chair in Bora-Bora, which is basically the same as being tortured at The Ritz, but still—torture’s torture. I had to reschedule my hot stone massage (after I had just dumped a body in the South Pacific) to go bail him out because, in a not-so-shocking twist of events, we got called for the same job.
This is what I hate most about him, the utter lack of consideration for anyone but himself.
“Do you ever think things through?” I spit out as he tries to hold the two thrashing dogs by the collar while I shoo the chickens back into the coop.
“Yeah,” he grunts, glaring at me. “I thought long and hard about whether I wanted a burrito or a quesadilla for lunch last Friday. I ended up going with the quesadilla ’cause it was a two-for-one special.”
Done. I’m done.
“What were you even thinking?” I say under my breath, watching Bobbi and Arch run to us in the distance.
“I was thinking we could ‘accidentally’ run into the fence, let the dogs loose, then save the chickens and look like small-town heroes.”
He thought… what? “And then the entire town would burst into applause as the sun sets over the hazy ridge, and we’d get a bench named after us?”
He blinks.
“Pull your head out of your ass, Montoya. This is real life.” I step over a wayward piece of wood from the broken fence, locking up the chickens in their coop.
“If it were up to you, we would’ve spent two hours in the truck, planning out every worst-case scenario,” he fires back. “And I have to take a piss.”
I pinch my eyes closed and inhale deeply. “How did you think crashing a truck into their fence was a good idea?”
He shrugs, forearm veins straining as he wrestles back the barking dogs, but I swear the tips of his ears turn red. “I don’t know, it was the first thing that came to mind, and then I just did it, but you don’t need to get that eye twitch. It’ll give me and Arch something to bond over. I’ll help him fix it, and—”
