However, if she wasn’t wrong? If someone had planted an explosive in her car—thecar—then that changed everything.
It gave her a bad guy with bad intentions.
A bad guy who probably wouldn’t just lurk in the shadows if their handiwork found its way to a mechanic’s shop, of all places.
A bad guy who might bring backup.
Still, Rose stopped walking and gave the two vehicles a look of reproach.
Maybe they were simply friends or from the samefamily, coming to the mechanic’s shop for oil changes or tire rotations at the same time. Maybe they weren’t getting out yet because they were on their phones or not even paying attention to the woman standing a few yards away, phone in hand and staring.
Maybe—
The beep of the sheriff’s voicemail stopped her from going down the question rabbit hole.
Instead she let her gut talk.
“I’m at Keller Auto and I think we’re about to have a big problem.”
The truck’s driver’s-side door swung open.
It was a good thing she was already running.
The gun that aimed her way sure didn’t give her much time to do anything else.
* * *
THE DAY HADtaken a turn. There were no ifs, ands or buts about that. James had gone from a quick workday and right into an unbelievable nightmare.
Was he really sitting on a bomb?
Who even did that anymore?
At least in some place as tiny and mild as Seven Roads, Georgia?
But you’re in Wildcard’s car, he reminded himself no sooner than he’d questioned the why of it all.
Wildcard Rose wasn’t some tiny little name in a tiny little town anymore. At least, she hadn’t been in the past several months. She was the deputy who had made national news with a viral video of rescue that had been movie-worthy.
Not all attention would be wholly good, right?
But that also didn’t mean her getting targeted withan explosive beneath her car seat was the next, logical step. Her passenger seat to boot.
Maybe it wasn’t a bomb. Maybe it was a prank or something else that reminded her of the same kind of explosives that were in movies likeSpeedandLethal Weapon.
Maybe we’re just overreacting and this will be one heck of a story to tell Dad and Mr. Donahue later.
James mentally nodded his head to himself—he wasn’t chancing movement just in case, regardless of how impossible it seemed to be sitting on a pressure plate was—and decided this would just be an inconvenience. One he would have to endure a little longer.
It was a weirdly calming thought.
One he held on to with great effort as a gunshot tore through the air behind him.
The sound was an explosion all its own and, having involuntarily reacted by jumping slightly, James thought for a moment thathehad been the one who had exploded. His hands had moved up in front of his chest, like he was ready to fight the sound, but as far as he could tell, nothing else around his personal area had changed. Explosion or otherwise.
He registered the fact that it must be a gunshot a second after.
James wasn’t a stranger to the sound, but he couldn’t understand why he’d heard it here of all places.
