Page 106 of Cruel Lies

The first dayof the week was always the hardest.

Unless you were me, andthen the last day of the week was the hardest. Why, you ask?

Because Ialwaysscheduled my most challenging jobs on Fridays so that if I ran late or ran into issues, I had the weekend to deal with them. So that if a job pissed me off, I didn’t have to worry about it tainting my whole mood for the week.

It worked for me, until today.

I wondered if this day would have gone differently had I not stayed later than usual to work on the fucking engine of the stupid Firebird that the asshole who lived next to John insisted we handle in a rush.

And of course, I was the only person with an open slot and the know-how.

Well, Sport had been scheduled to handle it, but he never showed up for work today, so it fell to me.

Dark was falling fast, and I hadjustfinished tightening the bolts on the manifold and crawled out from beneath the damn car when a voice echoed at the edge of my bay, where my garage door that IknewI’d left closed was nowopen.

I’d had the fucking noise canceling headphones on to muffle out the irritating sounds of metal on metal, mainly to keep the headache I’d been battling all day from getting worse.

If not for those damn things, I would have heard the damn door mechanism go up.

If I had just put the car up on the hydraulic jack, I wouldn’t be caught off-guard, either.

Hindsight, man. Not only was it 20/20, it was just like karma, too—a real bitch.

"Hey, is anybody there?"

The voice sounded oddly familiar, and though I couldn’t place it right away, I knew where I’d heard that voice before, and it wasn’t here atthe shop.

No.

That was the voice of a woman I’d run into with the boys.

Beatrice. Bethany. Brittney. Bubonic Plague.

What the fuck was her name?

I didn’t answer her. Anyone sly enough and ballsy enough to open a door that was previously closed either had nefarious intentions or a death wish. My luck was shit, so either was gonna be bad news.

Suddenly, I was very fucking glad I was holding this damn heavy ass wrench.

If she got close enough, I could just crack her skull.

Instinct told me the boys wouldn’t have sent someone to follow up on me. Not in public, at least. And anyone sent by them would have said so right out of the gate.

No, this bitch wasn’t good news.

Bunny? Becca? Bobbi? Brianna?

Fuck, why couldn’t I think of her goddamn name?

I made sure to step light as fuck as I inched around to the back of the car, kneeling at the bumper in the hopes she didn’t see me around this massive ass metal hunk of junk.

"Come out, now, bitch. I know you’re in here. I just wannatalk."

Oh yeah, and I’m a fucking squirrel."Get fucked, bitch," I muttered under my breath, suddenly wishing I hadn’t left my damn cellphone at the front of the damn car. My only hope was that she’d move around the vehicle and give me a chance to slide to the front, grab the phone, and get the hell out of there.

If I was lucky, I might survive the day.

I watched her shadow, faint though it was, slide slowly toward the back of the car as she giggled like a fucking lunatic and talked to herself—well, okay, tome,but I wasn’t answering, so she might as well have been talking to herself.

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