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More than anything else in his life, Jackson’s love—whether either of them had said the words or not—gave Wyatt something he’d been missing in his life since Mom died. It gave him security, confidence, and hope. Three things he desperately needed to keep hold of, because right now everything was up for grabs.
Ramie’s car was in the driveway, which surprised him because she had a closing shift tonight. Worried his surrogate big sister was sick, he left his doggie bag on the front seat and sprinted across the small front lawn. Burst through the unlocked front door and froze about three steps inside the house, unsure what he was seeing at first.
Ramie sat on the couch facing the TV, ramrod straight with both hands in her lap, staring ahead at nothing in particular. She didn’t move when he walked in. The second thing he noticed was some dude with shaggy brown hair, a goatee and a bored glare sitting in the chair catty-corner to the couch, mostly facing the door. The third thing was the black object in the stranger’s hand, and its aim shifted from Ramie to Wyatt.
Gun. That’s a gun. Why does this guy have a fucking gun?
“Should I come back later?” It was the first thing that slipped out of Wyatt’s stunned mouth.
“No, please join us,” the stranger said. He waved the gun at the other end of the couch. “Put your cell phone on the floor and kick it over to me.”
Unsure what the hell was going on and pretty positive that gun was real, Wyatt did as told, perching on the edge of the far cushion. He hated kicking his phone because the screen had enough cracks, but he’d deal with that later. Ramie barely moved, her face expressing nothing except mild boredom. If she was afraid of whatever this was, she hid it well. Wyatt, meanwhile, was pretty sure he was thirty seconds away from wetting himself.
He glanced at Ramie. “Friend of yours?”
“Nope,” she snapped without looking at him. “You?”
“No.”
“No, none of us have ever met,” the stranger said. “We never should have met like this, but I need my property back, and I wasn’t having any luck hiring locals.”
“What? What property?” Fear was overriding his good sense, and Wyatt couldn’t help blurting out to Ramie, “Why are you even home?”
“I needed a tampon,” she replied.
“There isn’t a machine in the bathroom?”
“It’s a dive bar, not a convenience store.”
“Okay, ladies, that’s enough,” the stranger said with a sharper bite to his voice. He also had an odd accent, something like West Texas by way of Brooklyn, and it made him less menacing and more comical. Not that Wyatt dared laugh. “Wyatt, you are in possession of something I need back.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not in possession of anything of yours.” Maybe back-talking a guy with a gun was a stupid move, but Wyatt wasn’t used to having one pointed at him and it was fucking with his sense of self-preservation. Everything he’d brought with him from home had been his—except the car. “Shit, man, Jared said he bought the car from a legit dealer. It wasn’t stolen, was it?”
“No, this isn’t about the car specifically, it’s about something Jared was holding for me in the car. The car you left town with two days earlier than he expected, so he was unable to retrieve my property beforehand.”
What in the holy blue hell was this guy—The roadside kit. The one Jared had bugged him about a few weeks ago and insisted Wyatt mail back. “You came all this way for a roadside kit? He said it was a sentimental gift from his grandmother.”
The stranger sighed. “Jared was my mistake, and he’s learned his lesson about disappointing me.”
A chill zinged down his spine. “What did you do to him?” He hated the tremor in his voice, but Wyatt had seen way too many cop movies not to immediately jump to the visual of Jared’s body being dumped in a dry gulch somewhere.
“He’s gonna have a limp, but he’ll live.”
That did not make Wyatt feel any better, because he still didn’t understand what the stranger wanted from him. Granted, Jared could have stashed anything from drugs to a money roll in the kit and Wyatt wouldn’t have known. He hadn’t gone through the thing when he left or looked inside it since he got here. Not even when he boxed it up last week and stashed it in the car for whenever he managed to get to the post office.
Uh-oh. Oh shit.
“Wait a minute, did you try breaking into my car trunk a few weeks ago?” Wyatt asked.
“Like hell. But it’s amazing the idiot teens you can find online and pay fifty bucks to go get something for you. He thought he was playing a harmless prank by stealing it for me, but we all know he fucked that up. For two hundred, I paid a man to break in here and find my shit.”
“Someone was in my house last week?” Ramie asked, a flash of fury in her voice and eyes.
The stranger smirked. “Yes. He sent pictures to prove he’d poked around, and he was worth the price, since you obviously never noticed he broke into the place.” He frowned at Wyatt. “But you had apparently put it someplace else. Where is it?”
“Um...at the, uh, post office,” Wyatt said.
“You mailed it?”
