Page 33 of Tate
But she wasn’t going anywhere anytime if she didn’t get the lug nut off.
She rolled over and got up, looked at her stupid car parked in the hot, cracked driveway, the ten-year-old Ford Escape she’d purchased for two grand. She didn’t drive it often—mostly bikedthe 2.3 miles to the San Diego naval base. But she needed it for days like this when she had to drive all the way out to Coronado.
Well, she didn’t have to. Probably, they wouldn’t even miss her.
Ford might, but he’d barely talked to her since arriving back to theSan Antonio. He had a cracked rib from the force of the shot and spent a couple days in sick bay, vomiting up blood.
He’d slept nearly the entire flight home in the C-130. And at the base, while others had family waiting for them, he’d gotten on his motorcycle, still parked in the lot near the cage where the team stored their gear.
She knew because she took an Uber home, no one to greet her either.
In fact, she still hadn’t received a return call from her mother.
She glanced at the flattened tire of the Escape, squashed right down to the rim. And that wasn’t the only issue—when she’d tried to turn the car over, the battery didn’t even tick.
Dead battery, blown tire, and who knew if those were the last of the problems.
She opened up the back hatch and pulled out the taco salad she’d made—silly her. Cruz always had a spread that rivaled the best Mexican food joint, only his fajitas, chalupas, and especially the margaritas were authentic—and he even made her a virgin variety. The man was a Hispanic Gordon Ramsay.
She tucked the salad under her arm and headed toward the house, pulling out her cell phone. She let herself inside, thankful for the air conditioning. When she toed off her flip-flops, her feet cooled against the Saltillo tile flooring that covered the entire house.
Her house.
Tiny—a minuscule seven hundred fifty square foot, one bedroom—but she’d bought it at a steal and fixed it up withher own two hands. She’d personally not only laid the tile but painted the ancient 1968 original-to-the-house cupboards, added hardware, and even remodeled the bathroom. She could turn a wrench with the best of them.
Just not, apparently, unscrew a rusty lug nut to save her life.
The call rang once, twice, and she was about to hang up when someone—not her mother—picked up.
“What?”
“Why are you answering my mother’s phone?” Oh, she didn’t mean it quite that way, it was just…well, she’d never liked her mother’s current boyfriend, even if he had been around for nearly six years. Or was Gunnar already seven? She should have brought her half brother something from her deployment, but what could she get from Bahrain for a little boy?
Yeah, nothing she could think of.
“Sorry, Axel,” she said quickly after he paused. The last thing she needed was him hanging up.
Maybe rounding on her mother.
“Is she around?”
“When did you get back?”
She could imagine him. Long, greasy hair, indistinguishable prison tats up his arms, the smell of beer on his breath. Yeah, her mother knew how to pick them. “A week ago.”
He made a noise she couldn’t interpret. “She’s not…uh…well, you talk to her.”
Scarlett frowned, but headed to the fridge to put the salad away, turning the call on speaker. “Mom?”
A sigh, then, “Scar? Is that you, baby?”
Oh no. Slurred voice. High pitched. And her mother hadn’t called her Scar since…well, since she was ten, maybe. “Yeah, Mom, it’s me. We got back from our deployment and I wanted to see if you were…well, how are you?”
“Where did you go?”
“My deployment. Remember—eight months on a ship?” She, like the rest of Team Three, wasn’t allowed to tell where she’d been exactly, but, “I was in the Middle East.”
“The Middle East. Why would anyone go there?”
