Page 25 of Shane
Your wife?
Shane kept his cool. Didn’t react. Didn’t get mad. This guy had to be her ex. Everlee’d said she’d been married, not was married. No wonder she’d divorced the jerk. He reeked of body odor and something sour, like he’d recently slept in his own vomit and hadn’t bathed. His long, blond hair was greasy and thin, wispy like the scruff on his chin. Not on his face, just on his chin, like a teenager’s face before his balls dropped and his voice changed. Before he could actually grow anything a man would call a real beard. Or a pair.
Everlee didn’t deserve being ambushed in a semi-dark parking lot even if they were married, and Shane didn’t owe this belligerent any explanation other than, “Not your concern.”
“Oh, yeah? You been fucking my woman? You have, haven’t you? I can see it on your face, you pig.” The man’s head tilted as he yelled around Shane, “Ev! This who you’re sneaking around with now? Jesus, woman! Can’t trust you for shit, can I? Get your ass over here!”
Shane went for broke, just stuck his hand out, needing to tone down the rhetoric. “Shane Hayes. Who are you?”
The man’s chest puffed out. “None of your business. ’Sides, I already told you, shithead. That woman sitting her ass in your truck is my wife! Which makes me her gawddamned husband, and you’re a cheating son of a bitch!” His eyes popped over Shane’s shoulder at the sound of the truck door slamming. “There she is, now get out of my way, asshole. Me and Ev got things to discuss, and they don’t include—”
“Get out of here, Butch,” Everlee ordered, her voice even. She was in her Air Force LT mode, her shoulders back and her face set to give orders. “You’re drunk. Go home to your mom. Sleep it off.”
“But I need you, not Ma,” he declared, his chin up and his red-rimmed eyes bleary as shit. He took a stumbling, sideways shuffle to get around Shane.
Shane cut him off, blocking Everlee’s view. Instead of pushing Shane aside, she replied from behind him, “You never needed me, Butch. You just used me. Like you use everyone else in your life. Go home. We’re through. Have been for two years and—”
“And three months and a couple days! Gawd, you don’t think I know that? I can count, damn it! Git your ass away from this bastard so I can get a good look at you!” Butch swiped the back of his hand under his nose, then smeared a line of snot from his hand across the front of his shirt. Which was just plain disgusting. “I miss you, Ev, I do,” he bellowed, “and you’re wrong.”
The guy stomped his boot like a two-year-old about to have a full-blown temper tantrum. “I really, really need you! Can’t you see? Always did. You never shoulda left me because I can change. I know I can. Just need you and another chance and—”
“And another and another and another…” Her words faded as she stepped forward and bumped against Shane’s right side. When she turned to look up at him, her hand went to his chest and his automatically fell to her hip. “I’m all out of second chances. I’ve told you before, you and me are done. We’ve been done for years. You picked booze, pot, drugs, and cheating over me. I was just too stupid to see it soon enough. Go home to your Ma. She’ll feed you. Take a bath. Eat something, for hell’s sake.”
“Not ’less you come with me!”
Way to impress a woman, Butch,Shane thought as he shifted his hand from her hip to her shoulder and pulled her in tight against his side.Scream. Whine. Act like the snot-nosed addict you obviously are. Ev’s right. Go home.
“I’m not going anywhere with you, and you know it,” Everlee said. Despite the tension in her body, her voice remained uncommonly calm and controlled, like the professional she was. “You need help, counseling wouldn’t hurt. Get it before it’s too late.”
“’S already too late, Ev, baby!” Tears trickled down the guy’s dirty face and into the sparse whiskers on his chin. “If you can’t find it in your heart to forgive me, what else do I got? I got nothing! You took everything I was when you left me behind and moved to Alaska!”
“I didn’t leave you,” she said, confronting his pity-party with the same calm indifference. “You did. With Georgette and Lucy and Kalli and…” Everlee waved her hand as if that list went on and on.
“But this time I really, really” —Butch’s belly expanded with a full breath before he bellowed— “need you!”
Everlee turned to Shane. “Thanks for the ride. See you back at the office.”
Her eyes were still a clear crystal brown, like black coffee. For the first time, he noticed her pupils were huge. She still presented a calm demeanor, but there were cracks in her composure. This confrontation might be a rerun of a hundred others, but it cost her.
The urge to carry her back to his place and hide her and make love to her stormed Shane’s common senses. Everlee was no damsel in distress, and he refused to reduce her to that old-fashioned stereotype. “Uh-uh, Ev. I’m not walking away and leaving you out here alone with this guy,” he told her under his breath. Shane crooked his elbow, inviting her to grab hold of him. “Not until you’re safely inside. Which place is yours? Point the way, and I’ll get you there.”
He didn’t think she’d do it. Everlee was still a puzzle who needed someone willing to take the time to unravel. But she did, just slipped her small hand into the crook of his arm, offered a wan smile, and said, “Thanks, Shane. I appreciate it.”
Poor thing was trembling and that pissed Shane off. “How long’s he been showing up here?”
Her lower jaw widened, stretching her bottom lip into a grimace. “This is the first time since I left Seattle. Guess he heard about what happened on Highway 15. Timing’s about right.”
“What happened?”
“The usual. Ended a pervert’s crime spree. Finch won’t be killing anyone’s little kids anymore. But it made the news and you know how they are,” Everlee hadn’t looked at her ex since she’d turned away from him. Good strategy.
Shane arched back to really see the woman on his arm. “That was you? You’re the one who took down Webster Finch over in Culpepper?”
She shrugged both shoulders like it was no big deal. “Paper got the deets wrong as usual, but yeah. That was me.”
“You sideswiped his car.”Unbelievable.
“Sideswipe, nothing. I meant to hit that piece-of-shit, and I hit it square on like I planned. Highway Patrol Officer McKay boxed him in after the impact, but I’m the one who stopped—”