Page 172 of Fearless

She laughed. “You really don’t stay on your side of the boundaries, do you?”

“Isn’t that kind of the point of being an outlaw?”

She laughed again, took another bite of her burger, licked ketchup off her thumb. “Yeah, I guess,” she said as she swallowed. “Gimme five more minutes and I’ll be in driving shape.”

She ate three-quarters of the burger and drank half the Coke. She needed water, more than anything, but this quick fix had perked her up. She pointed out buildings to Littlejohn as they walked to the truck, because he seemed interested in knowing more about the school. He confided, as they passed the library, that he’d always wanted to go to college. “You could take night classes,” she offered, but they both knew that he’d signed away that possibility the day he’d prospected with the Lean Dogs.

Her headache flared back up full-force when they reached her truck and she saw that the left rear tire was flat.

“Shit.”

Littlejohn crawled up under the bed to get down her spare, but crawled back out and declared it to be flat too, undercarriage dust clinging to the ends of his hair.

Ava chewed at the inside of her lip and stared at the flat a long time, a tingling sensation prickling up and down the back of her neck. It was a normal, everyday occurrence, a flat tire. Inconvenient as shit, commonplace as hell.

But there’d been nothing commonplace about her rearing, and so she found reasons to suspect foul play where no other girl would have. Had this happened at UGA, she would have brushed it off. Happening here, given the state of club relations, she felt the uneasiness steal over her.

“I’ll call your dad,” Littlejohn said, pulling out his phone. “Or Mercy, maybe? Let them know what’s up.”

She shook her head vigorously and then regretted it. Holding her temples, she said, “Call the auto garage. Dublin’s running it; get him and one of his guys to come out with the flatbed. Trust me: neither of us wants Dad or Mercy making a big show of this in the middle of campus.”

He hesitated a moment.

“Just do it, prospect.”

He nodded and dialed.

The Moorland Auto flatbed pulled in fifteen minutes later, Dublin behind the wheel, Walsh riding shotgun.

“Sir, are you sure you’re a mechanic?” Ava asked him with a grin as he walked around the back of the truck.

“I’m certified to do a lot of things; I choose to do one,” he replied in what amounted to a snarky comeback in Walshworld. He drew up beside her and bumped her shoulder with his in greeting. “Dublin said someone slashed your tires?” Little lift of his pale brows.

“It’s just flat. I don’t know about the slashing part.”

“We’ll see,” Dublin said, getting down on his knees beside the tire. “Prospect, grab me the jack off the truck.”

Dublin – gone paunchy as he aged, hair thinning on the sides these days – had not a drop of Irish blood in him, but had played for Notre Dame for one year before a broken collarbone had sidelined him long enough to strip him of his scholarship. After a series of odd jobs, a couple of bad turns, he’d found himself in Tennessee, offering to work part time for the Dogs. He’d been a hangaround, then a prospect, then a member, and the club had been the central figure in his life for the past twenty years.

“You didn’t call your man?” Walsh asked as he and Ava stood back against the flatbed and watched Dublin and Littlejohn wrestle the tire.

Ava didn’t fall into the trap. She shot him a rueful grin. “You thought you’d just slip that one past me?”

He shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

Ava studied his profile; he had only faint lines on his face. His constant lack of expression had prevented the deep grooves that age always brought, the laugh and frown lines, the roadmaps of emotion. Maybe he was a vampire. At the very least immortal. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” she asked, quietly.

His face didn’t change. “No. I think, the way you grew up, you never had a prayer.”

She shivered.

“Look at this,” Dublin said, drawing her attention. He’d found a clean slice in the rubber. “Slashed,” he said, looking first at her, and then at Walsh.

She shivered again, clasping her arms across her middle this time.

“We’ll have to tell Ghost,” Dublin said, tone gentle, like he knew she didn’t want that. “He needs to know.”

She nodded, and pulled her phone from her sweatshirt pocket as it started to ring.

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