Page 97 of Tied Over

“They’re not wrinkled that way,” I informed him.

“Okay,” he said, smiling.

“Hey, get my sling too, will ya? My arm’s gettin’ tired.”

“Yessir,” he agreed and left me.

Instantly, I pulled my phone from my back pocket, checked it, and saw I had no bars. Thinking that Brodie might turn off the jammer since he seemed to be trusting me, I sent a No Lights text to Bodhi, then flipped off the vibration function and put the phone in the refrigerator in the butter compartment. I was in the pantry when Brodie came back with a T-shirt and my sling.

I reached for the shirt. “Thank you.”

“I’ll help you,” he said like I was stupid and of course he would.

Gently, he put it over my head and helped me thread the brace through the hole and then get my arm through the other. He was careful when he did all the Velcro straps on the sling.

“Tell me what happened,” he prodded me.

“It was in the paper,” I said with a yawn. “Are you hungry at all? Do you want me to make something, or we could have something delivered. You want pizza?”

He nodded. “Pizza would be good.”

“You’ll have to order it with your phone. I cannot find mine anywhere, and now I’m worried I left it in the cab from the airport.”

“You don’t have your phone?” He sounded excited over that possibility.

I shook my head. “Try and call it.”

He got up and turned away, reaching into his pocket for the jammer I knew he had, and then once it was off, only then turning back to face me as he called.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said after a moment, looking and sounding, relieved. “It’s just going straight to voicemail.”

“Well, that’s fuckin’ great,” I said with a heavy sigh. “And my watch is dead, so yeah…order us some food, will ya?”

He smiled. “I appreciated you always being nice to me, Jed.”

“Your brain isn’t working,” I teased him, taking a seat on my couch. “I gave you a lot of shit, man, especially about your paperwork. Don’t you remember that?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like Kage or Doyle. You were never out to get me. You never tried to hurt me or embarrass me.”

“Of course not,” I agreed.

“See? Yeah. Of course not.”

I turned on the TV to check baseball scores, ignoring him, and Chickie sat beside me, looking like a statue, not relaxed in the least.

After a few minutes of silence, Brodie said, “Did you ever read the reports about how Craig Hartley shot that dog?”

“Craig Hartley didn’t shoot the dog,” I corrected him, my focus still on the TV. “He saved the dog.”

“Is that right?” He pulled his Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster. “The serial killer saved Ian’s dog?”

Ian’s dog. The words were spoken so flat and cold.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked him, scowling. “Put the gun away in my house.”

“Make him go with me to the backyard.”

“For what?”