by Dale Mayer
She chose the first of two driveways onto the property and parked her Jeep outside at the far end. When she hopped out, she grabbed her duffel bag and small backpack and dragged them toward the workshop. The big double doors to each end of the shop at the back of the house were open. She expected to see Todd’s truck and trailer pulled in here. Plus, their small tarmac—at the opposite end of this side of the workshop, off the second driveway—was empty. There was no sign of the trailer. Frowning she walked inside the workshop, dropped her bags by the wall and called out, “Todd, where are you?”
A holler came from around the corner.
She walked in that direction to see him straddling a back door that faced the second driveway, where he had parked his truck and trailer. He must have stood there, looking for her.
“There you are,” he said. “I wondered if you’d had a problem after I left. I almost left but parked on the driveway, thinking you may have just stopped for food. But your hands are empty.”
“No. I forgot I had to go into the main office and grab my personal stuff from the locker.”
He nodded. “Did you get everything?”
“I hope so,” she said. “It’ll be a little hard to get anything else now.”
“You got the gear, and you got all the inventory, so that’s what counts. They weren’t going to pay you. We’ve been asking for payment for months now. We had to pay for all that up front. It’s hard enough when we have to carry our own expenses but not theirs too,” he said resentfully.
“It’s a done deal now,” she said. “Although we hardly needed this much stock.”
Todd shrugged. “We’ll use it up fast enough. Not to worry on that score.” He looked around. “Are you alone?”
“I didn’t think so, but I lost Tanner somewhere along the line.”
“You didn’t lose me,” Tanner called from behind her.
She spun around, and, when she saw him turning the corner, entering the designated offices area of the workshop, she smiled.
“I like how you live in a square doughnut with a hole in the middle, giving you a completely private garden. Plus your workshop takes up two sides, I see. So the house must be on the remaining two sides. Nice setup for you guys to work from home and yet keep it separate.” He held up a bag from a local sandwich franchise and a tray of coffees.
She looked at it and said, “You know? I was just figuring out on the drive over what to feed you guys when we got here. I was hoping we had enough sandwich fixings to make a meal.”
Tanner shook the bag. “No need. We passed this place on the way, and I thought I’d go in and grab a few.”
Todd walked forward, a big grin on his face. “Thanks very much. Anybody who brings food is always welcome here.”
Tanner handed a coffee to him. “I don’t know how you take it, so I got some creamers and sugar.”
“Black,” he said. “It’s the only way to drink coffee.” He took off the lid and set it down on a desk to the side, tossing the lid in the can. “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. So, if you don’t mind, we’ll dig into those sandwiches right away.”
“Todd, where are your manners?” Wynn asked, laughing in horror.
He shot her a look. “You didn’t bring anything to eat. At least he did.”
She groaned. “I was planning on making something when I got here.”
“Good, you can probably still make it,” Todd said. “I didn’t get very much in the way of dinner last night. Weren’t you supposed to pick up stuff and bring it this way?”
“I said I would if I could,” she corrected. “Instead Tanner and I had ribs for our dinner and then went to the racetrack for the car show.”
Todd stared at her in mock outrage. “You didn’t get an order to go?”
“If we had, we would have eaten them at the track,” Tanner said. “I gather you like their food too.”
“Love it. I’ll have to get up there this week. Now I’ve got a taste for ribs in my mouth.” He looked at the chunk of sandwich he had just unwrapped and smiled. “This looks great.” He took a big bite.
With a heavy sigh, Wynn walked around to the far side of the desk, pulled up two chairs and said, “I guess we’re eating here in the workshop. Don’t mind Todd when it comes to food. He’s about as Neanderthal as you can get.”
Tanner just grinned. “Hey, a healthy appetite is nothing to sneeze at. Our brain doesn’t function if we don’t get enough food.” He handed her a sandwich, grabbed one for himself and placed the remaining three on the desk. “I wasn’t sure how much to get, so I got large subs and had them cut in half and wrapped separately.”
She smiled as she unwrapped hers. “We pretty well eat anything, so you’re safe there.”
He glanced around as he prepared to eat his sandwich. “You’ve got quite the deal here, don’t you?”
She mumbled around her bite of food, then waited until she swallowed to speak. “Yeah, we’ve been doing this for quite a few years now. We started thinking, creating, tweaking designs almost as soon as we got into competitions but didn’t set up shop seriously until about four—maybe five—years ago.”
“Why did you take the job at the school anyway?”
“I really liked the idea of teaching,” she said. “I was tired of traveling the competition circuit. I wanted to settle down. We needed an income to keep up our patents and to move forward with our research. The IP part is expensive. The materials to create prototypes are expensive. You have to have steady money coming in, if you intend to keep doing this.”
Tanner nodded. “And, of course at that point, Todd had his accident.”
“That was just before I started working. When he stopped competing, so did I. Once I knew he would be okay, I started teaching.”
Todd never said a word, just reached a hand toward the three spare sandwiches, looked over at Tanner with a raised eyebrow.
Tanner nodded. “Two each.”
Todd snatched up the closest one to him, unwrapping it. “Yeah, my accident changed everything. But it is what it is.”
“You seem to be getting around not too badly,” Tanner said cautiously. He’d seen an awful lot of men injured in the line of duty, and their various reactions to their injuries were always a tough one to predict. Some were stoic; some were ready to rant and rave at the first sign of anybody willing to listen, and others just laughed and shrugged it off.
“I am now,” he said, “but it’s been a few years. I didn’t handle it very well in the beginning. I was young and cocky and stupid. When I slammed into the ground, all that youthfulness and cockiness and stupidity got slammed out of me. But then you don’t know who you are—not when you’re that young and especially not immediately after an accident like that. It takes time to figure it all out. It’s been a slow process, but I’m getting there.”
Tanner said, “That’s admirable.”
Todd shook his head. “Not really. Sometimes life’s a bitch, and sometimes she’s your bitch.”
At that, Tanner chuckled. “I like the sound of that.”
Todd glanced over at Wynn. “She said she was teaching you and another SEALs unit. So you’re always in the line of fire yourself. Have you had any bad accidents?”
“Well, I’ve been shot. I’ve been stabbed. And I’ve been partially run over,” Tanner said with a grin. “But I’m still here, still standing strong.”
The other two stared at him.
He shrugged. “They weren’t major injuries. And getting run over was because one of the guys on base didn’t know his reverse gear from his drive gear. He hit the gas and roared backward, knocking me down. But that was something I got to tease him about for a long time.”
“That must have been tough,” she said.
He shrugged. “I wasn’t badly hurt. I was more pissed at the time.” He glanced over at her. “What about you?”
She sighed and shook her head. “A couple minor injuries, hard landings, things like that. But nothing major.”
&
nbsp; “Broken collarbone, a couple busted ribs,” Todd said, looking at his sister. “And what? You broke your right ankle or was it the left?”
“Left leg,” she said quietly. “But everything is healed and doing fine again.”
“That’s the trick, isn’t it?” Tanner said. “Not to get hit so bad that you can’t get back up again.”
They finished the sandwiches and sat in companionable silence. Finally Wynn said, “You don’t have to worry about me, you know? We’ve been looking after ourselves for a long time.”
Tanner looked at her with amusement.
She glared at him. “What?”
“I can’t tell if you’re trying to get rid of me for real or if you’re just giving me an out in case I’m feeling responsible and you don’t want me to feel that way.”
Todd chuckled. “It’s the latter. She’s obviously interested. Otherwise she would have cut you dead the first time.” His sister shot him a look. But he just chuckled and waved at her. “You know it’s true.”
Tanner watched the sibling exchange with interest. He was an only child and always felt like he’d missed out on something major by not having a brother or a sister to grow up with. It was one of the reasons why he’d taken to the naval life and to the SEALs teams with a vengeance. He had brothers now. Something he’d never had before. And, just like these two, Tanner had a similar rivalry between the guys on each unit. But there was also trust and caring and respect. He could see that here too. “You’re both very lucky,” he said.
Wynn looked at him with raised eyebrows.
He shrugged. “I don’t have any siblings. And you two look like you really love and care for each other.”
“Oh, we do,” she said. “And then sometimes I want to kill him.”
“Ditto,” Todd said cheerfully.
“As long as you don’t try, it’s all good,” Tanner said. The conversation died there. He gave a half wince. “I didn’t mean to make that sound like you were a suspect.”
“Are you looking into the sabotage?” Todd challenged him.
Tanner nodded. “Unofficially, yes. But now that the police are involved, I’ll make an official witness statement.” He turned to Wynn, hoping to get an explanation now that she wouldn’t give him at the school.
She sighed. “Yeah, about that. Todd called the police. Not me. So I guess I need to make an official statement too about my near-death experience. I’m still afraid the police won’t think that a break-in and these three random accidents are hardly anything to be worried about. Maybe we should have the cops just focus on the sabotage.”
“And what if they don’t stop with those?” Tanner asked. “You said at the river that you thought that particular accident was supposed to be the finale. Well, you lived through that attempt. What if somebody continues to try to kill you?”
She stared at him. “That’s not likely, is it? What with you involved and now the police? Surely not?” Her voice got fainter. “I was hoping to not go in that direction.”
“Regardless,” Todd said, shaking his head, obviously frustrated with his sister, “you have to give the police your statement of the events. I’ve already given them mine.” Todd turned to Tanner. “Why is she being so stubborn, so uncooperative?”
Tanner nodded. “Until you find out why somebody is trying to kill you in the first place, how can you tell when he’s ready to walk away? Tell me about the first incidence in greater detail.”
She shrugged, her palms up. “We were going for a drive up the coast. I wanted to get out and think about my life and what I was doing. Todd wanted to just get out of the city. I took some back roads that kept leading to more back roads. With the Jeep’s top off, we went out to enjoy the day.”
“When did you realize you were in trouble?”
She turned and looked at Todd, frowning. “We passed a truck parked on the roadside on the way up. And when we went as far as we could, we stopped, went for a bit of a hike, got back into the vehicle and headed back down the road again. When we passed the truck the second time, maybe an hour after the first time, we honked and waved and carried on. But I think it was the same truck that tried to run us off the road shortly thereafter.”
“What kind of truck?”
Todd answered, “I was sitting in the passenger’s side. It was an F-250 black crew cab, slightly lifted.”
Tanner pulled out a notepad and wrote it down. “Any idea what the license plate was?”
“It had a J in it, but that’s all I could see,” Todd said.
“You never even told me that you had looked long enough to get that,” Wynn exclaimed.
“Well, it was a little odd seeing the truck just parked there out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Did you see anybody?” Tanner asked.
Both shook their heads. “No,” Wynn said. “I didn’t see anybody there.”
“So you didn’t stop to see if the guy was in trouble? The vehicle didn’t have a flat? It didn’t look like it had been abandoned?” Tanner frowned at them. “I’m just trying to figure out why that truck might have been there in the first place.”
“Honestly I figured some guy was there for the same reason we were,” Wynn said. “Just out for the day.”
“Did you tell anybody ahead of time where you were going or why?”
“I told a couple people at work,” she said in a low voice. “Just that we were heading up the highway and seeing where it took us.”
Tanner looked over at Todd. “Not a pleasant thing to consider, but have you ever checked your sister’s Jeep to see if a tracker is on it?”
Todd stared at him, his jaw dropping, and then he shook his head. “No. No, I never did. But I will now.”
Tanner held up a hand. “In a few minutes. Let’s get this line of questioning taken care of first. So nobody knew where you were going, and, even if some guy did know, he wouldn’t have gotten ahead of you and parked on the side of the road so that you passed him twice.”
“No. And that’s not very likely even with a tracker, is it?” she said in relief. “So it was just some random guy being a bit of an asshole.”
“Was there anything suspicious about him being there? Or could he have left the truck to go on a hike?”
“Why would there be something suspicious about him being there? There was nothing suspicious about us being there,” she said with spirit. “Think about it. What if the guy went for a drive and a hike, like we did?”
“I saw something just off the side of the road,” Todd said. “But I’m not sure what it was now.”
“On the same side of the road where the truck was?”
He nodded. “Maybe he was digging or doing whatever off to the side.”
Tanner stared at him for a long moment.
Wynn leaned forward. “I don’t think I like the sound of that. You never mentioned it before.”
“I wasn’t being questioned before either, now was I? We were just talking about it but not really realizing there could have been anything important in this.”
“And how about now?” Tanner asked in a dry voice.
*
Tanner said, “All of this could have started with that truck.”
“In what way?” Wynn asked.
“What if he was digging? What if he was burying a body?” Tanner had a dark smile. “For want of another suspicious activity, he could also have been burying weapons. He could have been burying all kinds of stuff, evidence that pointed to him in various criminal activities. So, when you passed him once, he got nervous. Then, when you passed him the second time, he hunted you down. And maybe he was worried you’d seen something. So he ran you off the road.”
“Sure, but then wouldn’t he have hung around and made sure his accident did the job?” Wynn asked.
“Yeah, that would make more sense, unless he panicked and took off.”
“And then how could it possibly have been this same guy in the second incident?”
“Yeah, that didn’t seem to b
e all that clear either from what Wynn had told me before.” Tanner looked at Todd. “Were you with her for the second event?”
“No. That happened at work. She’ll have to tell you more about that. Some beam fell or some stuff from the loft in the warehouse fell and narrowly missed her.”
“I already told Tanner about that.”
“That was scary. Coming from that high up, even just a few lightweight items hitting her could’ve been a bad deal.” He sent a warning glare to his sister. “But, two weeks ago, we had an intruder here,” Todd admitted. “It’s one of the reasons she moved into her friend’s apartment for a few weeks. Just to do a rethink as to what and how she wanted to live.”
“So that move was recent?”
She nodded. “Yes. My girlfriend’s back East for a couple months and wanted someone to house-sit while she was gone.”
It looked like this B&E had very little to no connection between the other incidences.
Only that felt even more wrong.
From the looks on their faces, they thought he was off his rocker. Wait until I say this next part. “If I’m right, it’s not just Wynn who could be in danger.”
“That makes no sense,” Wynn argued. “Think about all the ways there are to kill people. Sabotaging my equipment is hardly the easiest.”
“Sure, but it’s almost foolproof.” He studied her face, watching for the upcoming twist in her features. “I know it’s not something you want to think about, but you need to do just that.”
“If that’s the case, this asshole’s not giving up,” Todd said in a stark voice. “And does this guy know there were two of us in the vehicle that day or just saw one of us?”
“He’d know there were two of us,” Wynn said. “The top was off, so we were both easily visible.”
“And it’s your vehicle,” Tanner continued. “So he’s likely tracked the license plate. Meaning, he doesn’t know where you live now but could know about this place. Hence the break-in.”
Todd then shook his head. “But really, isn’t that foolish? Why risk coming inside and getting back out? He could have lit the place on fire and been done with it. If he’s been in this place, it’s obvious from the adaptations that someone in a wheelchair lives here.”