Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 73192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
The way he’d said it made me think that he had something planned and that something wasn’t going to be good—whatever it was.
Dusty had never been called dumb. He was a schemer and always seemed to get himself into and out of, trouble. Granted, most of those times it was his father pulling him out of the fire, but he always came out whole on the other side and that was one of the things that sucked about him.
He didn’t have any failures under his belt because nobody ever told him no—nobody but me.
Which was likely why he became so fixated on me. Why he was doing the things he’d done or was about to do.
“What did you do?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.
“Call your man,” he ordered.
A thick slice of fear started to crawl down my throat.
The phone was in my hand almost before I had a chance to think about it.
I was dialing Tyler’s number moments later and placing the phone to my ear.
He answered within two rings, but he sounded out of breath.
“Hey, baby,” Tyler said into the phone. “I’m not going to be able to talk right now. There’s a suspicious package in the middle of town and since it’s so close to the daycare, as well as the rest home, we’re a little concerned.”
I felt something inside of me drop like a deflated balloon. “Okay, Tyler. Be careful, okay?”
“Yeah, baby. Love you.”
Then he was gone, making tears clog the back of my throat.
“A bomb,” I whispered, my eyes on Dusty’s contemplative brown ones.
I used to think they were beautiful. Now I thought they were the color of shit.
“It’s a real one, too,” he murmured.
I didn’t doubt it.
“How do they know to treat it as a bomb?” I asked, not thinking I wanted to know the answer.
“Because I called in a tip,” Dusty said.
He sounded so proud, as if he’d done a favor for a friend or something when he was the one who’d freakin’ set it up!
“It has an hour before it blows.” He paused. “Unless what you say right now changes that.”
Tears of frustration finally met my eyes.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Tyler would be the one to handle that bomb. Morally and ethically, he’d be unable to send anyone else in and that would likely cost him his life.
I looked down at my bare wrist, wishing that I’d not made the decision to leave my watch at home today.
On days that I didn’t plan on working, I left it there because it caused a funky tan line and I didn’t want it to look weird when I left it off—like right now.
By making that decision, I’d also taken away my covert dialing of 9-1-1, too.
My stomach soured.
“I want you to do a few things.” He sounded chipper. I wanted to punch him in the esophagus. Watch him choke as he tried to draw in air. “First, you need to get in the car with me.”
I wanted to refuse and he saw that, too.
Pulling up his phone, he pressed a few buttons and I felt my heart start to pound.
Moments later, he turned it toward me and I was looking at Tyler standing about twenty feet away, along with a few other officers. Tyler was pointing wildly, his mouth moving a hundred miles a minute.
“We’re going here,” he said. “So, he can see that I have you.”
I felt my heart start to race.
That was the one thing that I did not want to do—distract him. I didn’t want him to know that Dusty was anywhere near me, because if he did, he’d freak the fuck out.
And on top of that, he had a bomb to deal with.
No. I did not want to do that.
“Once he sees that you’re with me, I’ll set the bomb back an hour.” He paused. “That’ll give them roughly an hour and forty-one minutes to figure out what they’re going to do with it.”
“Then what?” I forced myself to ask.
“Then, we ride off into the sunset,” he replied like I was dumb.
“They’ll look for us,” I reminded him of the facts.
“They’ll try,” he admitted. “But they won’t succeed.” He leaned over and extracted a few IDs from his front pocket. “I got us everything we’ll need. And the first stop we’re making is Vegas so you’ll have my name, in real life and in fake.”
No.
No, no, no, no.
“The longer you take to decide, the less time they’ll have to defuse the bomb. And let me just tell you something, where I put it is the place likely to do the most harm. It’s big enough, too, to take half the town with it.”
I didn’t doubt it for a second.
“Let’s go.”
***
Tyler
“You’re saying that it’s rigged to blow the moment that we tamper with the doors?” Johnny asked.