The Abandon Series | Book 3 | These Times of Cessation Read online

  Gator obliged her. He wanted to be a gentleman at least once…so he looked down at Trixie’s boobs instead. She didn’t seem shy about anything. Not even all the bruising she wore on her arms like tattoos.

  Last night, when he asked Trixie if there was anything else he could do for her before bed, she said, “Maybe not punch me when I’m asleep.”

  Of course, being the savior-type, he said, “I’ll do my best.”

  He heard her snort out a little laugh, and then a few minutes later, he listened as she drifted off into a deep sleep. Gator lay there a long time, thinking about women, but more specifically, Trixie.

  Now he gave her another look—a ‘morning-after’ look. Yeah, he didn’t want her to go. That was a good sign, so far.

  But did he want a woman in his life? It had been such a freaking nightmare—the last one. But not all girls were alike, the same way not all guys were alike. So, maybe she might be different?

  “What are you guys talking about?” Chandra asked.

  “Going shopping,” Gator said.

  “Oh, good,” Trixie said, perking up. “I need some tampons.” She said this as she warmed her hands over the fire. No one said anything, which caused her to look up. “What?”

  Chandra swallowed and said, “I have one in my backpack.”

  Trixie smiled, looked around, then said, “So, are we eating or just playing ‘get to know each other?’”

  “Half of us have already eaten, and now we’re talking about shopping,” Hudson said. “Leighton, do you and Buck want to help me clean up from breakfast?”

  Leighton smiled, then said, “So long as next time I want to volunteer you for something in front of everyone, you have to do it.”

  “If you want to volunteer me for a quick nap before we go kick ass, you could do that and I’ll get it over with.”

  Leighton made a funny face at Hudson, then she and Buck rustled up a meal for Trixie, who was both embarrassed and grateful at the same time.

  “How old are you, Buck?” Gator asked. The kid looked up at him, then shrugged his shoulders. “I think you’re probably about five, is that about right?”

  Again, Buck shrugged his shoulders.

  “What grade were you in?” Gator asked.

  “My dad schooled me at home.”

  “Really?” Leighton asked.

  He fixed his mouth into a frown and said, “He wasn’t very good.”

  “When is your birthday?” Gator pressed.

  “I only had one.”

  “On what day was that?”

  “The day I came out of my mom’s belly,” he said. “I was only born once.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Gator said. “How’d you like to share a birthday with me?”

  Buck smiled really big for the first time since Gator had seen him. Then he nodded his head, which made Leighton smile.

  “Today, you get to decide how old you are,” Gator continued. “Do you want to be five, or four?”

  Buck said, “Six!”

  Gator put out his big hand and said, “High fives!” Buck smacked it, then he put out his thumb out and said, “Plus one makes six.”

  The kid bumped thumbs, then broke into an even bigger smile.

  “Six years old!” Buck screamed, uncharacteristically skipping into the house. “I’m six years old!”

  Leighton looked at him and said, “How did you do that?”

  Grinning, he said, “Just mixing a little kick ass with a lot of ‘gator sauce.”

  Leighton couldn’t help but laugh. “And this is why I love you.”

  Leighton didn’t see it, but Trixie slowly looked over her shoulder when Leighton said this. Gator didn’t care. He was just happy that the girl was home and safe.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sheriff Lance Garrity

  Garrity worked all day yesterday, then Marilyn took him home late. Sitting alone in the dark, he drank a few bottles of warm beer while having a candlelight dinner of stale corn chips and a bottle of salsa that was easily three weeks past its expiration date.

  When he was done eating, when he was thoroughly ashamed of himself, he lay down on the couch and slept fourteen hours off and on. During an hour of that off and on sleeping, he found himself out back frantically digging a hole. Sometime during the night, he got a rather serious case of diarrhea, which he remedied outside while freezing his giblets off.

  His stomach quit flipping bitch just before dawn and he managed to get a few good hours of sleep.

  When he woke, he took a piss out back, washed his hair in the toilet bowl, then scooped some water from the toilet tank with which to make instant oatmeal. Cold, flecked oatmeal just didn’t have that same nourishing taste you’d get out of a piping hot bowl, but whatever—it was better than old chips and expired salsa any day.

  When he was ready, he sat down and ate his breakfast. It was the quietest, saddest day of his life. There was something about having noise in the house to chase away the solitude. Be it Spotify on the receiver, some sort of television on, even the dishwasher running…something was better to hide his loneliness than nothing!

  Now he was swimming in seclusion and it felt like he was in deep space with no one for hundreds of miles around. To make matters worse, suffering such grievous injuries alone and in such silence was like having a spotlight on his pain. He couldn’t stop seeing it, feeling it, biting down on it. This had him thinking about the woman in the silver Honda Pilot. Was she still at the high school? He didn’t know. But the second he got the chance, he was going to head there and find out.

  Not looking like this you won’t, the voice in his head said.

  He walked into the bathroom, studied his face in the mirror, then frowned. Yeah, he’d need to wait a few weeks to see if he was a permanent human horror show or if he could find a way back to looking like himself.

  Later that morning, he returned to the Sheriff’s Office riding an ATV the team had confiscated in a drug bust earlier that year.

  The front doors to the office were locked, so he let himself in through the back door. It was dark, but he found his way to the front of the building, partly by bumping into a few things here and there, but mostly by following the sounds of his team working things out in the armory.

  Marilyn was passing out guns, then arguing with Derek as to why she needed one particular weapon over another.

  “Marilyn, do you have the list?” Garrity asked.

  “It’s on your desk,” Laura said. “We both worked on it in case Marilyn tries to take all the credit.”

  “You’re just mad because I’m keeping the 870,” Marilyn teased, referring to the Remington shotgun, of which they only had one. It was Marilyn’s go-to weapon. The racking sound was almost better than firing off a load. No one died, but everyone got the point.

  Garrity went to his desk and started looking over the handwritten names on the list Laura and Marilyn had cultivated.

  He heard Marilyn go out the back door; Derek and Laura were finally able to sort out the guns with some civility. But then Marilyn flew back inside, hustled through the back like she had night vision, and said, “There are people coming, Sheriff!”

  “Don’t act like ‘people coming’ is such a big deal,” Garrity said, his burns itching and his mood extra sour from the beer and bad salsa hangover.

  His stomach started gurgling again.

  Not good, Lance.

  Laura walked out of the armory in time to see Marilyn peeking through parted blinds like some kind of tweaker waiting for the cops.

  “You don’t look so good,” Laura said when she saw Garrity.

  He felt a little green in the face, to be honest. “I spent the better part of the night with salsa-induced explosive diarrhea, which had me thinking of my grandmother.”

  Laura started laughing. “How did your grandmother get in this picture?”

  “When I was a kid, she started calling the squirts the ‘Sloppy Joe Hot Shots.’ One day I ate something bad—I don’t
remember what it was, it was that long ago—but apparently I got all clammy and my stomach started to rumble, kind of like what’s going on with me now. So I got up and went to use her bathroom, but I was already having issues. The bathroom was only a few feet away from her rocker and my ass was like a sputtering trumpet.”

  Laura started to both curl her nose and snicker at the same time.

  “I absolutely blew ass. Even worse, it burned so bad, I mewled like a freaking cat while watching my shins sweat. Not to get too graphic here, but I could see every single bead of sweat popping out of my shins. They were the size of crocodile tears, for God’s sake. Like actual moisture was being squeezed from my bones.”

  “I don’t think I can listen to this any more,” Laura said, fighting a grin.

  “No, no, that’s the bad part,” he said. “I’m circling around to the meaning here.”

  “I’m one foot out the door, Sheriff…”

  “So after I showed that toilet who was boss, I washed my hands and face, soaping twice because I couldn’t hardly face her right away, not after what I’d just done to her bathroom. But I did it. I dragged up all my courage, held my little head high, and walked out into the living room, refusing to make eye contact because I knew that would make it real.”

  Laura started laughing, politely at first, but then the laugh started to get away from her. He kept going because it was good to see her laugh and he didn’t mind egging her on.

  “So I sat down on the couch, just minding my own business when my grandmother spoke to me. She looked at me over her glasses, then said, ‘If you’re going to do that and leave the door wide open afterwards—like an invitation to suck down all your colon fumes—at least have the decency to turn on the fan.’”

  “What did you do?” Laura asked, half snorting, red in the face with shimmering eyes that hadn’t expressed much happiness in the better part of two years.

  “I got up and turned on the fan, hardly acknowledging the huff of disapproval she made behind me. When I turned and went back to the couch, I saw something that shook me to my core. Looking down at the brand new sofa, I saw a squishy-looking brown blotch stamped into the light tan fabric.”

  By then, Laura was laughing too hard and telling him to stop.

  “I’m not done, seriously…just wait for it. She then said, ‘Yeah, I saw that, too. Looks like you made yourself a sloppy joe, hot shot.’ From then on, they became known as the Sloppy Joe Hot Shots, which was what I had last night and might have again. Expired salsa and warm beer is the food equivalent of mixing gas with fire. And maybe a little mud.”

  Laura turned and hobbled off, still shaking with laughter, but waving him off like she couldn’t take it anymore.

  “I think they’re stopping, Sheriff!” Marilyn called out. “Looks like a bunch of goons.”

  He got up, worried about his stomach, then joined Marilyn where she was peeking through the blinds. He bent down beside her, spreading the blinds as well. Out front, he saw an old-as-dirt pickup truck and an even older chrome and yellow Harley carrying two riders.

  “It’s okay, Marilyn,” Garrity said, his stomach settling once more. “I know these folks.”

  Leighton McDaniel got off the back of the flashy hog while Gator held the bike steady like a gentleman. Hudson climbed out of the passenger side of the truck, giving a conciliatory nod to the driver, a chubby-looking cowboy kid behind the wheel with an odd but entertaining smile on his face.

  Garrity walked out front in time to see Leighton pull a gun from the back of her pants. She handed it to the chubby kid and said, “A deal’s a deal.”

  The kid checked the mag, then nodded and said, “Are you sure you and Death don’t want to come with me?”

  Leighton laughed then said, “As long as you left directions with Chandra, we can head down there if we change our minds.”

  He smiled and said, “I did.”

  “Thanks for the ride, Pork Chop,” Hudson said. “It was good meeting you.”

  “Giddy up,” the kid replied.

  “Oh, and don’t say stupid things like that to the wrong people,” Leighton called out. “Someone bad is likely to smoke your ass for that.”

  “Yeah, someone like you,” he said both stern and serious, but with a halfway-hint of a grin in between.

  “Morning, Garrity,” Gator said.

  “Morning.”

  Leighton gave the cowboy kid a wave, then watched him drive off. When she turned around, she looked a bit sad at first, but then she saw his face and her expression changed completely.

  “What the balls, Sheriff Garrity?”

  “I know, I’ve seen better days,” he said. He was aware of the blistered skin, his singed hair, the bruising on and around his face, and the slight limp he seemed to have from someone kicking him in the side of the knee yesterday. Or maybe it was from getting out of the church.

  “I’ll say,” she replied.

  “Well, you’re no peach yourself, little Miss Sunshine.”

  She laughed and said, “Oh, these old things?” drawing her fingers across all the cuts and bruising on her own face.

  He gave her a hug and said, “I’m so happy you made it back.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Can we please quit yanking each other’s dicks like they’re pull starts?” Hudson asked. “We’ve got shit to do and we’re wasting daylight.”

  “That’s Hudson,” Gator said. “He’s extra anxious to see some action.”

  “The alligator’s right,” Hudson said. “I start getting depressed by everything if I have too much time to ponder our state of affairs.”

  Garrity felt himself frown, but then he realized this Hudson guy was right. When all this was over, they could maybe get back to civility and good nature. But for now, they needed to load up and go.

  “So I was thinking about some things,” Gator said.

  “The hardware store?” Garrity asked.

  Gator looked shocked by the statement. He appeared to be both thrilled and surprised at the same time, like a kid standing on a carnival scale with a guy that just guessed his exact weight.

  “How’d you know I was going to say that?” Gator asked.

  “Because those guys have a lot of stuff, and they damn near beat me to death there. So it’s like we’re taking from them what they kind of took from us, and getting a little payback, too?”

  “Why did you phrase that like a question?” Gator asked.

  “Yeah, that was odd,” Hudson chimed in.

  “First off,” Garrity said, “I don’t know the pretty boy here, and there’s no way I’m taking Leighton to this. Her parents will kill me.”

  “I ain’t asking to go, Sheriff,” Leighton said. “I’m going.”

  “I’m not a pretty boy, although I prefer to take that as a compliment, but trust me when I tell you, you don’t have to worry about her,” Hudson said. “You can take that shit to the bank.”

  “Maybe I’m worried about you,” Garrity countered, his eyes on Leighton.

  “That’s not necessary,” Leighton said. “Hudson’s crazy enough and talented enough for the both of us, plus he has a thing about fear.”

  “Which is?” Garrity asked.

  “I don’t have it,” Hudson replied.

  “I just don’t want you getting the wrong idea about us,” Garrity said.

  “And what idea am I going to have?” Hudson asked.

  “We formed a hit squad,” Marilyn said, walking out the front door. “We plan on taking out the trash with a bullet or five.”

  Garrity rolled his eyes and said, “Can we please act like taking people’s lives is a big deal?”

  Everyone got quiet, then Marilyn said, “I’ve just never done this before, so acting cavalier was a defense mechanism, or something like that—”

  “We get it,” Hudson said, stopping her. “We smoked about a hundred of these buttholes back in Silver Grove. Burned those motherfu—”

  “What he’s trying to say,�
� Leighton interrupted, looking from him to Garrity, “is that we ran into problems, big problems, but we lived and they didn’t. I’ve seen Hudson in action, and I’d trust him more than I trust you at this point, no offense.”

  “Why’s that?” Garrity asked.

  “Because he’s not beholden to the law, or rules, and he’s made peace with this life.”

  “I like him already,” Derek added, joining the crowd.

  Gator asked, “When we get the loot, and all the guns and stuff, what are we doing about the split?”

  “We’re not robbing anyone,” Marilyn said. “This is a people problem, not a heist.”

  “Someone needs to get the deputy on board,” Gator said. He looked right at Marilyn when he spoke. “We’re going to kill them for the betterment of society, and then we’re going to take their shit. Call it what you want, I just want to plan for that hard curve before we get there.”

  “We divvy it up, even Steven,” Garrity said. Marilyn leveled him with a look. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Unless you want to ignore the best resources we can get our hands on right now. Is that what you want, Marilyn? Because we can do this with a clean conscience, which is something we won’t always be able to say if the power outage persists.”

  “It took me all night to make peace with what we’re about to do,” Marilyn said. “I like the action, but I also take my oath of office seriously.”

  Garrity didn’t have the time or the patience for this. “Same here, but if that conscience of yours is calorie free, carb free, fat free—”

  She held up her hand and said, “I get the point.”

  “If you want to sit this one out…”

  “Of course not,” she replied quickly. “And don’t treat me like I’m the delicate child. I can handle myself just fine. I just guess it’s going to take a minute to shake the oath from my brain and replace it with a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality.”