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Don’t start with me, bitch. You have no idea what I’m dealing with this week.
“Sorry, that’s not how this works,” she sashays her head.
“Mark, is this true?” I turn to him.
Mark looks like he is afraid he’s going to get dragged into a catfight at any moment and is none too pleased about it.
“Yeah, sorry. Those are the rules,” he confirms.
Salty tire bitch gloats at me as the fourth tire is loaded onto their rack to be wheeled away. All these stupid rules, who comes up with this garbage?
“Fine,” I squint at Tire Bitch, and I pull my cell phone out of my pocket.
The other Concordia people have started wheeling the tires away, but I jog after them and start taking photos as I chase them. I’m just aiming my phone in the general direction of the damaged tire and holding the shutter down.
“You can’t do that,” Tire Bitch argues.
“Mark,” I yell back to the mechanics. “Is there a rule about me taking photos?” I run backward.
“Not that I know of,” he bellows.
“Ha!” I sneer at Tire Bitch, who rolls her eyes at me and instructs the other three Concordia reps to pick up their pace.
I chase after them like a crazy person until I have taken what feels like a hundred photos. Hopefully one or two will be useful.
Then I make my way back to Dante’s wrecked car, which is being wheeled into the garage bay now. First, I check the ground where it was lowered off the truck, and damn, no rubber chunks are lying around.
I wonder if I can get some off the track later, but no, those efficient German marshals have long since swept up all the debris.
Damn it.
I want the materials data from Olivier.
I check the television monitors and my computer again. Cole has come in for a pit stop while I was chasing manufacturer reps around like a nut, but everything looks good for him.
I look over at Dante’s car, the carbon fiber pods are smashed and splintered, the front wing is dangling off, the floor of the vehicle is bent up at an unnatural angle. According to the data, he hit the wall at 93 miles per ho
ur, and the impact was nearly 14g. A couple more and the g-force sensor in the car would have tripped, and Dante would be taken to a medical center for a mandatory check.
If Dante had been in a normal road car, he’d be dead several times over.
This could have been Cole.
By the time the race has ended, I’ve chewed my cuticle enough that it’s bleeding. I barely knew what place Cole finished in because I was overwhelmed with him just coming back in one piece.
No matter what has happened between Cole and me, I don’t think I could handle it if he got killed out here. I know the dangers, obviously. I’ve always known but seeing it creates a pit in my stomach.
I want to slap him and shake him and ask him a thousand questions about how he could have done what did to me, but I don’t want him dead.
I wonder if this is how Mom feels being married to a military husband, though Dad has long since even gone up in a plane, much less been deployed.
I’m probably blowing things out of proportion. Dante is fine. I have no idea where Cole is, but he’s also fine.
Breathe.
The only thing I can do is do what I do best. Put my head down and figure out what is going on with these tires. Even if they’re not faulty, there has to be some reason the team can’t get them to work right.
And if they’re not working right, for any reason, they aren’t safe.
