Page 110 of Coach
It wasn’t until I was sitting in a motel room with Trix as she chowed down on the steak dinner I’d bought her that I realized… There was no way. While I had to admit (reluctantly) that he was a good coach, he wasn’t exactly a genius. If anything, some of the girls used to comment on how uneducated he came off.
He was no hacker.
But he had proven good at things like cameras.
It didn’t feel that big of a leap to assume that he might also know a thing or two about trackers.
First thing the next morning, before I drove one more mile, I found a repair shop and spent a small chunk of precious money to have a mechanic look my car over for any kind of devices.
“Wait… what?” I asked when he dropped four little squares on the counter in front of me.
“Yep. Four.”
“Why would there need to be four?”
“My guess,” the mechanic, an older girl-dad who’d been very concerned at the idea of a single woman with a tracker on her car, said, “is he wanted to make sure that if you found one, you would likely stop looking and not find the others. Then backups in case of battery failure.”
“Wow.”
“I got a buddy heading out of town to visit his family. How about I have him take your trackers with him? Get him moving in one direction while you go the other way?”
“That would be amazing.”
And so it was.
His buddy went east.
I went west.
Then I fell in love with Shady Valley.
And a man named Saul Garza.
I should have known it could never last.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Este
Consciousness came in bursts of pain and confusion.
There was a burning in my lungs and an ache in my throat. Like I’d run a marathon. But also had a cold. Then, God, then there was the screaming pain to the side of my face and the jackhammering of a migraine behind my eyes.
A chill had crept into my bones, making my body rack with shivers. Everything around me felt cold and smelled damp.
I tried to lift my hands, to press them into my eyes to try to ease the throbbing headache. My wrists met resistance.
My mind reeled back.
To a bunker.
To bound wrists.
To two scary men looming over me.
It took a few seconds for my mind to catch back up, flipping through the memories that occurred after being dragged down to the bunker.
The negotiations, the tense ride home, the night of sleeplessness. Then, the next day, the money, work, the wonderfulness with Saul, followed by the awkwardness that still made my heart crumble despite my confusion.
