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He was getting ready to call it a day when his phone went off again. Not a call but a text.
It was from Ivy.
She’d heard. She was scared. She wanted to know if he was okay.
Not rapid-fire texts. Just one text. She could have called, but she didn’t. She sent a text and he was happy about that.
If he’d been meeting with someone he wouldn’t have been able to take her call and she might get upset over that.
There was part of him that didn’t want to reply back right away either to the text. She had to understand he wasn’t always able to.
But he didn’t hesitate to call her. She’d texted him during the day before and if he didn’t reply right away she’d never said a word about it.
“Are you okay?” she asked the minute she answered the phone.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”
“That depends on if what I heard was true or not.”
He liked that she was asking rather than assuming as his mother had.
“What did you hear?”
“That the guy was huge, had a rifle he was flashing around, and that you charged and tackled him face first.”
“Well,” he said. “He wasn’t that big.”
“Brooks!”
“He wasn’t,” he argued. “He had a rifle and he was flashing it around, but it was loaded with blanks.”
“How do you know? Did it go off?” she screeched.
He wanted to lie but figured she’d find out the truth.
“It did. But I tackled him from behind. Got him in the kidneys with my shoulder. I knocked him to the ground, punched him in the face to daze him once he was struggling. Almost knocked him out in one hit.”
“Now you’re bragging,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
He wanted to relax her and hoped it was working. “I dazed him enough to push the rifle away. It had gone off when it was pointed at the ceiling, but again, full of blanks and no one got hurt other than him.”
He told her the rest of what happened.
“Are you going to get in trouble for doing that? I know how much you try to do everything by the book and how much your job means to you.”
She got that at least.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. At least he was more positive about that now than he was earlier.
“Do you have to work late?” she asked. “I’d like to see you with my own eyes.”
“I’m getting out in a few minutes. I thought you were working late today.”
“I am,” she said.
She was in the store until eight tonight trying to rearrange things. She went in later, he knew because she’d texted him earlier. She hadn’t been in yet when he was going to the bank.
“Are you going to take a dinner break or did you?”
