“Okay, sure,” Tavish says, like he didn’t just warn me about the man being a serial killer!
“If it’s only a few miles, we could just walk… right… Tavish?” I ask.
“Nah, why the fuck would we walk when he has an ATV?”
What the fuck? Did he forget he just mentioned that the man would take us home to “dice us up”? Maybe Tavish is confident he could take him. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe his overconfidence is going to get us killed.
“Right that way,” the man says as he waves us ahead of him.
“You have something to eat at your place?”
“I sure do,” he responds with a grin.
Whogrinsafter saying that? And why doesn’t Tavish seem concerned? What does this guy have for us to eat? Arsenic and rat poison?
“Shit, my shoelace came untied,” Tavish says as he stops what he’s doing to kneel right then and there. “I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that there’s a hole in my shoe. Probably not, eh, Ellis?”
“Y-Yeah,” I say as I watch while the man lifts the shovel above Tavish’s head.
Clearly, he’s going to bash his head in, and then I’ll be stuck out here running from the goddamn serial killer alone. Today is not my day.
“Please don’t!” I yell as I rush forward and throw my free hand up to do what? Block the attack? Let him murder me instead? I sure as fuck don’t want to die. And why am I running forward, willing to sacrifice my life for this man I barely know and who has mostly caused me irreparable trauma?
Something drops from the sky and hits me on the top of my head before rolling off into the vase I’m still holding. Slowly, I look down at the apple that the man just thumped off a tree near Tavish.
“You got some hefty balls, my friend. It’s probably not very safe to shove your head right into the area someone’s swinging a shovel. My wife did that to me once… it’s why I only have one nut. She popped the other.”
I simply stare at him as Tavish stands up and starts laughing. “Were you just going to save my life from an apple?”
I blush a little as I realize that I literally ran forward and nearly got smacked over the head with a shovel… because this possible serial killer was knocking down an apple. Can this get any more embarrassing?
With a sigh, I put my hand into the vase, but the moment I grab the apple, I can’t pull it out.
This makes Tavish laugh far too heartily.
“It’s like the book with those coonhounds!” the shovel man says, and that makes Tavish holler as he thwaps the man on the back like they’re best buds.
“It is! He’s like those raccoons that they’d trap with a jar!”
It definitely can get more embarrassing.
Why the fuck did Tavish infest my mind with the idea of this man being a serial killer and then just leave me to fret about it alone while the two of them become best buds?
I open my hand and drop the apple so I can free my hand before shaking the apple out of the vase and handing it over. “Can we go?”
“What’s your name, friend?” Tavish asks.
“Fred. Yours?”
“Tavish.”
“Radish?”
“Close enough,” Tavish agrees. “And this is Ellis.”
“He seems like a fun one,” Fred says as he starts off toward his house. “How’d you get so bloody and haggard looking? And how’d you end up jumping out of a plane?”
“My ex-wife finally snapped. She’s found a younger and cuter man and just fucking stabbed me. We had no choice but to jump out.”
