Liability (Suncoast Society #33)(50)

Slowly shaking his head, Mason turned and grabbed his stuff before he walked up to his door. He didn’t even bother looking back at Freddie.

If the little f*cker keyed his car or something tonight, he’d file a police report about it, but he was done. Done trying to act nice, done talking, done thinking, and done being conscious for the next eight to twelve hours, give or take.

He unlocked his door, walked through, then locked it behind him, forcing himself not to slam it. It’d be a miracle if he hadn’t awakened any of his neighbors with the screaming.

And he double-checked that he’d locked it behind him, because he was so f*cking exhausted, he couldn’t even remember in the time it took him to turn around if he had locked it or not.

Dropping his shit onto the couch, he made sure the screen door onto the lanai was locked, as were the sliders leading out there.

Then he started stripping and by the time he faceplanted naked in the middle of his bed, he was already asleep.





It was Mason’s bladder that awakened him some time later Friday morning. He didn’t even bother looking at the time on the cable box, or trying to figure out what the hell he’d done with his phone. He stood there in the bathroom, staring at the wall over the toilet while he peed, trying to remember the nightmare he’d awakened from.

Freddie.

Fucking Freddie, chasing him with a goddamned chainsaw or some bullshit, dressed like a groom and wanting to marry him or kill him, he apparently wasn’t picky which one.

Fuck.

Then his eyes widened as he remembered his encounter with the guy last night when he got home.

That drove some sleep out of his system. He finished, shook, flushed, washed his hands, and grabbed a pair of running shorts from the hamper in the bathroom.

It was a little after ten in the morning. He found his phone on the couch. He had good-morning texts from Cole and Kim, but no missed calls from work and no texts from work—cool.

Several missed calls and no voice mails from Freddie, as well as a couple of dozen texts, the last one in the chain reading Sorry I bortered U. Talk L8R aftR U sleep.

Between the horrendous typos and the text speak, Mason wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the guy.

Mason grabbed his keys and headed out the front door. His car sat parked there, and it didn’t look like it’d been keyed or scratched. All four tires were inflated, both mirrors in place.

Walking around behind it, he saw the taillights were still intact and unbroken, nothing amiss with his shiny new Florida manatee plate that he’d opted for when he’d registered his car.

Nothing apparently wrong with it. He had a locking gas cap, so he knew that unless Freddie had f*cked with his brake lines or something, he couldn’t have dumped anything in his gas tank.

Looking around, he didn’t see anything out of place, no sign of Freddie’s car, or what he’d been driving in Nebraska, at least. An old Chevy something or other that had seen better days.

But it wasn’t parked anywhere around that Mason saw.

He couldn’t remember seeing it there the night before, either, but he’d been so exhausted and out of it that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster could have been performing fellatio on each other on top of a UFO in the next parking space with Elvis running crowd control and he wouldn’t have noticed it.

Making his way back inside—remembering to lock the front door behind him—he found his work cell and checked it. A few routine morning status reports in addition to the paperwork tornado triggered by the problems with the downtime, but nothing he couldn’t let sit until he’d gotten another couple hours of sleep.

He quickly texted Kim and Cole in a group text so he wouldn’t have to repeat himself. Fortunately, they’d both already understood that things were a disaster at work and that he’d be out of contact for a while.

And neither had sent him snippy texts, either.

God, I love those two.

On his way back to bed, he scrolled through Freddie’s other texts. Since he’d put the guy on mute status on his phone, he hadn’t even noticed any of the texts the night before. It’d been so nice to have several days of absolutely no texts from Freddie.

Several of the texts were asking where he was, what he was doing, that kind of thing. Hints that, since Mason now knew Freddie was in Florida, he could tell exactly what they meant.

Fuck.

He was beginning to get seriously creeped out now. Unfortunately, he was also still too exhausted to try to ponder the full implications.

He put both phones on their chargers on the bedside table and had just gotten to sleep when his work phone buzzed.

Fuckity f*ckballs.

Blindly reaching for it, he snagged it without knocking his personal cell off the table, dragged it to his ear, and somehow answered it.

“Mason Lange.”

“Sorry to bother you, Mason, but we have a problem.”

It was one of his weekend supervisors, a guy who’d been scheduled to come in today to cover for the downtime crew getting the day off. Except it looked like none of them would get the day off. A new process added during the downtime had suddenly halted, and restarting it hadn’t fixed the problem.

Worse, it had triggered another cascade effect they were having trouble getting in front of. There was already a page out to the team responsible for the software, but it was serious enough that it was starting to affect web customers and meant that Mason had to be involved in the callout.