Page 33 of Her Braun
Joe laughed, a short cough of sound that she tried to hide from them, failing miserably.
"Okay, I better get to work." Gibson knew that it didn't really matter how Kay and Jacob knew each other. It's not like they were dating.
Were they?
He reached into the back of his truck bed, lifting the top of a storage container and pulling out his tool belt."
"Thanks again for the call, Jake."
Joe called after him. "Let me know when you're done securing the window, Lieutenant. I'm scheduled to be here until they're boarded over."
As he walked around the side of the house, he heard Jacob talking to Joe.
"You call him Lieutenant, why don't you call me Detective?"
"Don't you have a job to do, Detective Rafferty?"
"There," Jacob was smiling, Gibson could hear it in his voice, "that's better."
Later, as he was putting up the final board over the back window, Gibson felt his phone vibrate in his back pocket. He froze for a moment and listened. It buzzed again and he felt it vibrate against his ass. It wasn't Kay. He'd given her a different vibration from the generic one. He had a special one for people who worked in Firehouse Twenty-Nine. Another one for family and the first responders he rented to, and a third special pattern for Kay.
Maybe he was jumping the gun on that, but his gut told him he wasn't.
He looked up at the half size piece of particle board that he was fixing into place and shook his head. He hadn't covered the whole window sash because the last thing he wanted was for Kay to feel like she'd been locked in the dark.
Working odd shifts like he did, she needed to find sleep when she could, so he did his best to make sure she could have sun when she needed it.
"Fuck whoever did this."
Kay worked so hard for everyone else.
How could anyone take her security from her?
Fuckers.
Gibson wasn't a man who liked to swear much. There were colorful ways to speak and so many ways to let off steam. Power tools worked well. He might’ve used his table saw with a sort of grim satisfaction when he was cutting down the particle boards for her windows. Okay, more than a little.
Once he had the last board fixed to the outside of the house, he climbed down off the ladder and laid his nail gun on the crate he'd left on the ground to use as a table.
He took out his phone and read the text message on the screen.
Before he could start to type back, his phone rang, and Gibson was left staring at the screen shaking his head until he swiped his finger across the screen and tapped the SPEAKER icon.
"Really, Taylor?"
He looked up into the sky as Taylor laughed.
"Do you have a satellite or something pointed at me, so you know I have time to take a call?"
"Who? Me?" The snort of laughter Gibson heard wasn't exactly a denial and his childhood friend's family was loaded with money. "Well, maybe I'm just lucky."
"Right." Gibson felt like he should just put Taylor out of his misery. "Look, Taylor-"
"Nope. Please don't say no. I know it'll be tough for you to come. And it's going to be tight on your schedule, but I-"
Gibson heard the huff in Taylor's voice and didn't know what to make of it.
"This is going to sound really crazy, okay? But I think you're supposed to be there. Every time I think about having the wedding and you're not on the chart, I get his stomach thing."
