“Seth.”Shit. Shit, shit, shit.“You’re driving a tow truck? I thought—” Well, no, that probably wasn’t a conversation they needed to be having. “You weren’t at the funeral?” Probably another unnecessary question, but just what the hell was he supposed to be saying?
“I was there,” Seth growled.“Had to get changed at the garage and come out here to help some poor stranded motorist. And it turns out to beyou? You’ve got some fucking nerve showing your face around here! And today isnotthe fucking day for any of your shit. You need to get back in that car—”
“I’d be happy to,” Liam said quickly. “But it won’t start. Seriously, I didn’t come up to cause trouble. I just—well, that doesn’tmatter. The point is, I want to get out of here, andyouwant me out of here, so if you can just give me a hand with this, we can both get what we want.”
“I should leave you out here to rot.”
Okay, that was taking it a bit far. Yeah, Liam had screwed up, but it had been a decade and a half ago. Seth needed to get over it. “Well, obviously I wouldn’t just sit down and wait for decomposition tobegin. I’d walk into town, probably, and have to hang around for a bit waiting for someoneelseto come deal with the car. I assume you’d agree it would be a good thing if Ididn’twalk into town and didn’t hang around?”
“What are you doing up here anyway?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I’d like to get home as soon as possible. If you could just take a quick peek at the ignition?”
Seth stilllooked murderous, but at least he took the last few steps to get to the car. He lifted the key fob out of Liam’s hand, careful not to touch any skin, and then slid behind the wheel. A few clicks, a few grunts, and then, “It’s broken.”
“No shit?”
Seth extracted himself awkwardly from the car. “I can’t fix it, not out here. I need to plug it into the computer, run diagnostics—a good old-fashionedcar, I could fix on the spot. But this? This car is toofancyfor that. And the garage is closed until morning.”
“So—” Damn, it was a miserable thought, but what were the options? “You can tow me back to the city, right?” Two and a half hours trapped in the cab of a tow truck with the angriest man in the state. Excellent.
Seth didn’t look any more enthusiastic about the idea than Liam. “It’salready past five. I need to be home for dinner.”
“So, somebody else from the garage can do it. Whoever’s on the night shift.”
“We have one tow truck for the whole town. The whole area. Rissa isn’t going to send it off to the city, taking it out of commission for, what, five or six hours, round-trip? And we don’t have a damnnight shift, we just have whatever poor sucker has to haul his assout of bed to go help people if they get in trouble in the middle of the night. Which he wouldn’t be able to do if someone else fucked off to the city with our only tow truck.”
“A rental, then. You’ll tow the car to town, I’ll pick up a rental….” He stopped talking when he saw the expression on Seth’s face. And, okay, sure, fifteen years ago there hadn’t been anyone renting cars in North Falls,but surely in the intervening years… no. Apparently no one had set up business. He forced himself to smile. “You’ll tow me to the closest town that has a car rental company. You can leave meandthe car there, and I’ll take care of things after that.”
“There’s a 24/7 Hertz outlet in Monticello,” Seth admitted almost reluctantly. “I could take you down there.” He frowned. “But we’re not towingthis car. You need a flatbed for this—you should have told the dispatcher to send a flatbed, not a tow truck.”
“Do youhavea flatbed? And why do we need one?”
“Towing’s bad for cars. If you have a shitty car, it doesn’t matter. But this one? You need a flatbed. And, yeah, we’ve got one.” He shrugged. “It’s got Marv Archart’s stock car on it, though. In pieces.”
“Okay,” Liam said, and he raisedhis hands. Not in surrender, just in dismissal. He could feel the tears threatening again, just as bewildering and foreign as they’d been earlier, and he would absolutelynotbreak down crying in front of Seth Gilbert. “Thanks for your time. I’ll call for a car to come pick me up, I’ll have my garage arrange a flatbed, and everything will be solved. It won’t hurt me to spend a few hours in thecar waiting. I promise not to walk into town.”
Seth’s scowl made it clear he wasn’t pleased with the plan, but also that he had no better option in mind. “You need to—” he started, but he was distracted by something over Liam’s shoulder. “Shit. Shit, shit—”
Liam turned.
Shit.
It was Ben himself, only fifty or sixty feet away, and closing fast.
