Park glared at him, and the muscles in his jaw bunched as he ground his grudge between his teeth, but he wrestled his wallet out of his pocket. While he stalked over to Kenny and shoved a credit card at him, Flynn scratched the collie’s ears. It wagged its tail and stirred up the bits of paper.
Payment completed, Park snatched the keys out of Kenny’s extended hand.
“I’ll send one of the boys down to get the tractor.” He gave Flynn a black glare on his way out. “It better not be damaged.”
The collie sat for one more ear ruffle and then scrambled after its master.
“That is one angry man,” Kenny said as he tore the receipt off the machine. He absently scratched his eyebrow piercing and cocked his head. “Am I your heavy, by the way, because I’m not sure I’m up to it.”
Flynn’s palm was coated with dog hair and dirt. He wiped it on his thigh. Irritation was a sour taste in the back of his throat. He should be used to the rubbish some people came out with.
“Get back to your job, Kenny.”
Flynn got to work on a Volkswagen that needed new points and the oil changed. He was elbow deep in it when his pager went off in his hip pocket, and he left a chunk of his palm on the engine as he pushed himself from under the hood.
“Kenny, I have to go.”
He stripped out of his overalls, down to jeans and a grubby gray T-shirt with a rip in the sleeve, and checked the pager. Kenny rolled out from under the truck and propped himself up on his elbow.
“Someone hurt?” he asked.
“Accident down at Dog Crap Beach,” Flynn answered curtly, using the derogatory local nickname for the stretch of public coastline. “I’ll call if I need you to lock up.”
He grabbed his keys and jogged outside to the Land Rover. It usually took fifteen minutes to get to the beach from the outskirts of town. With the justification of an emergency call and a few rat runs through housing developments, he could make it in ten.
THE SALTwater was frigid against Flynn’s thighs as he splashed out into the tide, his balls clenched as if that would help them hide from the bite of the waves. The water hit his groin—it shocked a gasp from his gut up to his throat—and then his stomach.
The Jet Ski bobbed up and down as the sea pushed it toward the shore, the custom Union Jack paint job torn up along the side where it had cracked against the rocks at the mouth of the bay. The driver floated along in its wake, and his one-handed attempts to paddle turned his body in slow circles. Blood ribbons trailed behind him.
“Hey, heard someone took a spill,” Flynn said. He caught the guy and steadied him. “That you?”
Panic hitched the guy’s chest as he grabbed frantically at Flynn’s arm. His teeth were chattering with a mixture of panic and cold, but practice helped Flynn translate.
“Fuck. I hit the wall.” The guy stopped for a second to grab a breath, his eyes squeezed shut from pain as he breathed in. “Oh fuck, mate. I think I’m hurt.”
Flynn ran a professional eye down the man’s limply floating body.
“Yeah, you look a bit banged up there.”
The damage was bad enough to make Flynn wince in sympathy, but not bad enough to make him panic. The neoprene wet suit was torn where the guy hit the rocks. It had peeled away from his skin like a steamed shrimp shell, but it gave enough protection that he was scraped up instead of shredded. He had raw abrasions down the ribs on his left side and his thigh, and unless he started the day with his nose on his cheek that was going to take some rebuilding.
His right arm was bashed up too, probably from an attempt to protect himself from the impact. The intact neoprene made it hard to tell, but it was either broken or dislocated. Flynn would have put his money on both. That was probably the worst, depending on how much water he’d swallowed.
“Don’t worry,” Flynn reassured him. “We’ll get you out of this. What’s your name?”
He had to ask again, and it took two blinks and a hard swallow before he got an answer. That was more worrying than the scrapes and cuts.
“Mark. Mark Jameson,” the man finally got out.
Mark’s skin was pale and clammy-looking. Flynn glanced over his shoulder. The ambulance had pulled up in the parking lot at the top of the beach, blue lights flashing over the cab, and the other member of the rescue service on duty had made it into the surf. Jessie waded toward Flynn and dragged the basket stretcher along behind her.
“Okay, Mark, we’re going to get you back on land,” Flynn said. “First, though, we have to get you onto the stretcher. That’s going to hurt a bit.”
“It already hurts.”
“It’s going to hurt a bit more,” Flynn said. He’d never seen the point of lying to people.
Jessica let go of her side of the stretcher and moved around to the bottom. She had to lean into the water a bit as the tide got stronger.
