Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“Bryce or Evan?” Riggs asked.
Harry shook his head. “Not Evan. He’s five ten. This person was more around your and my height. But again, it was shadowy. And they weren’t built, so it wasn’t Evan, but could have been Bryce. We’re pulling him in tomorrow after school to have a talk.”
“Casey’s gonna love that,” Riggs muttered.
“Casey can leave my town and go somewhere where they pamper their kids to the point they grow up thinking the world revolves around them. Because I know you agree that it is a thousand shades of fucked up to do that to any woman anywhere, but one who’s in my town to find a peaceful place to grieve the violent death of her mother is unconscionable. He might not have known that at the time, but he knows it now, and bottom line, it doesn’t matter. What he did was fucked up.”
Seemed Harry was getting more impatient with all this shit than Riggs, and Riggs had zero patience for it.
Then again, Harry was right there at nine thirty at night, dealing with this shit, and not at home, shaking it off.
His friend needed to get home and do whatever he did to decompress from his day so he could face the next one.
“Thanks for the callout, brother,” Riggs said, clapping him on the arm.
“What are you gonna do about Bubbles?” Harry asked curiously.
Riggs sighed.
Then he said, “He’s right. I got Ledger out of his shit. But I also just dropped fifteen thousand dollars on a dog, and I’m facing attorney’s fees because Storm and I are suing for full custody. Onward from that, probably occasionally having to eat shit for a lifetime and watching my son do it, because Angelica is Angelica. But they’ve said I was smart since the second grade, and I still can’t figure out why, no matter the crap he pulls, Bubbles is so fucking likeable.”
“That was what I was chewing on the entire time it took you to get here.”
“Gotta say,” Riggs muttered, “I feel safer, him sitting out here.”
“Yeah,” Harry replied quietly.
“Get home, man,” Riggs urged.
Harry nodded and headed to his cruiser.
You could hear the faint drone of a podcast in the distance, so Riggs looked that way to see Bubbles munching a slice of pizza.
Christ.
Bubbles.
He got in his truck, reversed to a safe spot he could do a three-point turn, then headed home.
THIRTY-NINE
One Of Theirs
Riggs
It was Thursday night, and they’d hit another zone where life was just good.
Riggs had time to get stuck into the new arbor, and so he could hit it early and keep at it until later, Nadia took his boy to school and picked him up.
Before starting dinner, they worked with Gia as a unit, and individually, with Hutch sending him directions on how to do that. He also offered to let him borrow Hannibal, one of Hutch’s personal dogs, an older one who’d worked with Gia on synchronized guarding.
“Two, in any situation, is better than one,” Hutch said.
But Riggs didn’t need his son and woman falling in love with another animal, and considering he was still concerned that Nadia would be tentative to act with worry she couldn’t control the dogs, he didn’t need her worrying about that with two of them, so he declined.
Bubbles was still at the end of the access road every night, and Nadia, who he was learning could hold a mean grudge, offered her usual stipulations that she didn’t know Bubbles or Riggs’s history with Bubbles enough to provide an informed opinion, so she only allowed, “It’s a nice thing to do, but not that nice.”
His mom was over for dinner that night, and they were kicked back at the dining room table, shooting the shit over the crumbs of a banana cake that Nadia had made, when the call came in.
He pulled out his phone, looked at the screen, and, sliding his gaze through Nadia’s where she sat beside him, he got up with a muttered apology and walked to the kitchen.
“Hey,” he answered.
“You want him, you got him. You and Storm should start fucking each other, you’re so good at fucking other people right up the ass.”
And with that dulcet declaration, Angelica hung up.
Riggs walked down into the living room, up to the landing and out the front door.
He didn’t call Storm until he was in the seating area.
“So you got the call too,” Storm said as greeting.
“You did as well?” Riggs asked.
“She just hung up on me five seconds before you called.”
“You hear anything from your attorney?” Riggs queried.
“No. I’m calling him at eight on the dot tomorrow, though. She’s in this mood, I want her to sign her name to it as soon as possible.”
“I’ll give my attorney the heads-up as well.”
“You think it’s gonna be this easy?” Storm asked.
He hoped so, for him and Storm. He hoped not, for Ledger and Viggo.