Mandaline fought the urge to break into tears of relief. She didn’t know why she felt so strongly about this, or if it was just because of losing Julie, but hearing that Sachi would come home with them immediately put her at ease.
The men returned. “Sachi,” Brad said, “do you have storm shutters or something we can put up for tonight until I can get it fixed tomorrow?”
She nodded. “Yeah, in the garage. Plywood panels, stacked on the far side. They’re labeled. That window is labeled Bedroom 3.”
The men disappeared again.
Sachi stroked Mandaline’s hair. “Happy?”
Mandaline vigorously nodded. “I’m sorry, but I’m feeling a little momma bearish right now.”
Sachi hugged her again. “That’s okay. I’ll put up with it because it’s you and I luuubs you.”
She laughed. “I luuubs you, too. Now let’s get you packed.”
It was close to midnight before the police finished their investigation and the four of them got back to the store. Mandaline set Sachi up on the sofa, but any thoughts of getting frisky with her men again had fled. They’d agreed on heading over to her house to fix the window tomorrow morning, and Sachi would stay with them until she got an alarm installed.
“Hey, I really appreciate this,” Sachi told them without a hint of snark. “Look, how about tomorrow afternoon I take you guys out skeet shooting.”
Ellis nodded. “I’m game.”
Brad frowned. “No, thanks. I appreciate the offer but I’ll pass.”
The men headed to bed. Mandaline gave her one more hug. “Thank you for humoring me,” she said.
Sachi nodded, still in serious mode. In fact, since the phone call, Mandaline hadn’t heard a single snark out of her. “Thank you for being such a good friend.”
They hugged one more time before Mandaline headed to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sachi waited until Ellis was in the car with her Sunday afternoon and on the way to the skeet fields to ask it. He was glad she’d had enough tact to wait to ask. “Spill it. How come Tarzan looked like he was about to shit bricks when I offered to let him come with?”
“How much did Mandaline tell you about us?”
Her expression turned wary even though she didn’t look away from the road. “Why?”
“Did she tell you Brad was in the Army?”
“Yeah, he was injured.” She thought for a beat. “Ah.”
“His PTSD isn’t as bad as it used to be before the motorcycle accident. Part of his new superpowers,” he joked. “But he doesn’t want anything to do with guns. He knows about my concealed carry permit and that I have one, but he wants nothing to do with them.”
“Did he have to kill anyone?” she quietly asked.
“He doesn’t like to talk about that, but I think the answer is yes. He saw a lot of people die, including some he had to kill.”
“Then I’ll make sure to remember not to tease him about not wanting to shoot skeet.”
“I appreciate that. I’m sure he will, too.”
She looked over at him when they hit a red light. “I might be a snarky, ball-busting bitch at times, but even I have my limits.” She gave him a playful smile.
They reached the skeet field about ten minutes later. It was situated on a large parcel of land bordered by woods he suspected were part of the state forest. As she’d predicted, there were only five other cars in the large parking area.
“Why skeet?” Ellis asked her as he followed her to the office. “Why not pistols or rifles?”
He didn’t miss the way her jaw tightened. “It’s fun,” she said, although her voice sounded a little too tense. “I enjoy it. Been doing it since I was a kid. I’ll be twenty-seven this summer, so over fourteen years.” She turned and flashed him a too-bright grin. “Don’t need a concealed carry permit for a skeet gun.”
“That seems to be a running theme with you. Why is that? Why don’t you get a carry permit?”
She stopped so suddenly he had to side-step to avoid plowing into her. She looked down at her feet for a moment before looking up at him again. He had seen anger on her face, and good humor.
But he wasn’t sure he wanted to try to label the expression she now wore. Somewhere between rage and terror.
“Did Mandaline ever tell you about me? About how I came to live in Florida?” she softly asked, not a hint of snark or humor in her voice.
He shook his head.
She took a deep breath and looked around. “I guess lawyers are used to keeping their yaps shut. Come on.” She abruptly changed direction and headed toward a nearby picnic table, which sat in the shade of a makeshift shelter covered by a tarp.
She sat straddling one of the seats. She waited until he’d sat across from her to start talking. “Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a girl from New Jersey. She was born and raised there, until she was thirteen and her airplane mechanic father decided he’d had enough of The Garden State. Despite his daughter’s objections and tantrums, he packed his wife and daughter up and moved them to Buttfuck Acres, Montana.”
She’d clasped her hands together on the table next to her, her thumbs templed. “Middle school in a hick town sucks when you’re a preteen. Especially when your dad is Jewish and your mom is a first-generation Japanese American. Whatever mean nickname you can think of, the girl was called that by her classmates, and then some. The half-breed girl from ‘Jew Jersey.’”
She looked down again for a moment before continuing. “Wasn’t a really big town. Middle school and junior and high school grades stuck together in the same place. So that just added to the girl’s misery. This went on for a couple of years. The girl had the same social studies teacher for those years. She taught multiple grades. She saw how alone the girl was and sat her down to have a talk with her. Mrs. Ellington. Junior skeet team coach. Asked her to come out that afternoon with her for practice.
“Now, the girl’s parents were dead set against it at first. But the teacher was persuasive, and the girl begged and pleaded until they felt like crap and gave in. Long story short for that section of our tale, the girl loved skeet, and proved to be quite good at it. Which was a good thing, because despite being half Jewish and half Asian, she sucked at both math and science.
“This, you might say, was a good thing, right? The skeet, I mean, not the math-science suckage. Something to do, a team sport, a way to get involved and fit in. And you’d be sooo fucking wrong. Because on this junior skeet team was one Jacob Clary. His father, Jackson Clary, was a Buttfuck Acres, Montana, deputy.
“Jacob was a junior going on senior, on the football team, all the girls loved him, all the boys wanted to be him or secretly fuck him, yadda yadda yadda. Since he was the son of a deputy, he was usually the one getting everyone else into trouble and coming out clean while everyone else wallowed in his shit. Right? Following me?”
Ellis nodded. “Yeah,” he quietly said, his gut tightening as he suspected where this was heading.
“Jacob was also the only kid up until that point to shoot a clean hundred. Some of the other, older kids could shoot twenty-fives on the odd round, but Jacob had the highest overall scores.” She smiled, but it held no humor. “Until guess when?”
Ellis didn’t need any psychic skills. “Until the preteen girl from Jew Jersey started shooting?”
She nodded. “First day out, the girl, who’d never picked up a shotgun in her life, shot in three rounds a fourteen, an eighteen, and a twenty-one, in that order.”
“I take it those are good scores?”
“For a beginner, especially a kid, those are fucking amazing scores. There are adults who can’t even break twenty after months of shooting, much less their first freaking day on the field.