Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
“I’m up for a road trip,” Dixon said, shrugging.
“Alright. But I want you to take your brother. Need York and Velle here, holding down the fort.”
“Noa’s gonna want to go along for the ride,” Dixon said.
“Yeah, good. She’s got a level head. She’ll keep you two in check.”
We worked out the kinks of where and when they would go before Dixon took off to pack a bag. It wasn’t a long trip up to that part of Georgia, but knowing the Cider brothers, they’d probably dilly-dally on their way back, stopping to see some sights and shit.
Provided they didn’t find bodies.
I honestly didn’t think they would. A toilet tank lid was hard, but I doubted Runa had the strength with her sore ribs to really swing that with enough force to kill someone.
I just wanted to cross my Ts and dot my Is, so nothing legally came back to haunt her.
Once that was settled, I’d deal with the less than legal stuff. Because no one was going to hurt my kid. Or hurt her emotionally through hurting her mom. That was not gonna happen. I didn’t care if I had to go knock on the doors of my old mob contacts to get information.
Whatever it was gonna take.
“How’s she handling things?”
“Better now that she has somewhere safe to be. And after telling me all the shit. I want to get her a gun,” I told Huck.
“Yeah, it’s done. Take what you need.”
Then all I needed was to get my ass to a store with some good gun safes. Grab a pocket knife. And any other self-defense tools I came across. It never hurt to be overkill with that sort of thing. She could stash them around the apartment, her car, in her bag. The most important thing when it came to weapons was access. So the more, the better.
“So, she’s never gotten video or images of these fucks?” Velle asked.
“In the towns where the police even took a report, she didn’t get lucky with cameras. And I think she was too worried about getting away to think to take pictures.”
“No cameras at her places?”
“She did at the beginning but as they kept jumping places, there wasn’t money for it. She was struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. You should see the shoes she’s walking around in.”
“Sounds like maybe you need to add a couple more stores to your outing tomorrow,” Velle said with a shrug.
He was right.
I was kind of pissed at myself that I hadn’t considered that before. Of course she would need some new clothes and shoes. She seemed to have her collection of National Park shirts still, but not much else.
She might balk at a new wardrobe. I think she only accepted the apartment and all the things inside it because she saw them as things for Denali. She couldn’t make that argument about new clothes for herself. But maybe if I sprinkled in some new clothes for Denali too, I could get away with it without upsetting her.
As I brought another drink with me back out to the pool, I tried to convince myself that getting her some new things was just a way of paying her back for taking good care of our daughter on her own for so long.
But some part of me knew it was more than that. That there was still a spark between us, whether she wanted there to be or not. And that the more time I spent with her, the more I liked her as a person.
I just wanted her to have something nice, just for herself, for no reason other than she would feel good about it.
And luckily for me, she’d left a bag at the clubhouse with a change of clothes for both of them for the next time they came over for a pool day, so I had her sizes.
Now I just had to find a way to get them out of the apartment so I could put the clothes in her closet.
I made a plan to meet them in Miami to go to an indoor trampoline park, then made my way to their apartment building. Once I saw them leave the complex, I texted her saying I would be fifteen minutes late, then hauled ass upstairs to put all the clothes away, along with a surprise toy for Denali, before locking back up and driving one of Che’s cars into Miami.
“How’s she settling in?” I asked as Runa and I stood back to watch Denali as she jumped around, laughing, squealing, and making a fast friend to play with.
“You’d think we’ve always been in that apartment. She has all her toys organized. Has a bunch of her art on the fridge and taped to the back of her bedroom door. She made a friend in the complex. He has one of these neat Ezyroller things that you move side-to-side to make it move. They took turns using it.”