Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(38)
She lifted her robe off the back of the door and went out as she slid it over her shoulders. When she came into the front rooms, she heard the sizzle of a frying pan at work, and smelled…cheese?
Rad was at her range, wearing nothing but his jeans. He had his hair pulled back in its stubby ponytail. Willa put her hand to her chest at the sight of him.
He was making scrambled eggs, and he must have added cheese to them. There were two hunks of cheese from her fridge—cheddar and provolone—on the cutting board with her grater.
Ollie had been sitting at Rad’s side, watching with interest. When he saw her, he trotted over for a morning cuddle, and Rad noticed her. He grinned.
“Mornin’. How’s your leg?”
Rad and his fixation with her leg. “It’s fine. Good morning. You cook.” The toaster popped, and four golden slices of bread appeared.
He brushed her observation off with a lopsided shrug. “Nah. I can wreck eggs and stick bread in slots. Can’t make coffee, though. Never figured out the secret.”
With a grin, Willa gathered up the toast and spread butter on the slices while they were still warm. Then she brought her bag of Colombian roast down and got the coffeemaker going.
The eggs were done, and Rad stood there with her skillet, looking stymied. She took down a couple of plates and set them out on the counter, dropping two slices of toast on each. “We’ll have juice now and coffee later. You want jam on your toast? I’ve got strawberry jam and plum butter.”
“Not for me.” He plated the eggs while Willa filled two glasses with cranberry juice. They carried their breakfast to the dining room.
By force of habit, because she always watched the news with breakfast, Willa picked up the remote from the sideboard where she’d left it last night and turned on the television.
It was too late for the morning news, but the noon report was on. As she returned to the table, she noticed that the current story was about some woman, heavyset, with brown hair in a short, mannish cut, being arrested. She was trying to shield her face from the cameras.
Willa’s attention wandered to her plate, and she took a bite of eggs—they were good—but Rad picked up the remote and turned up the volume. The clipped, unaccented voice of one of the Tulsa daytime news anchors ran over the footage.
After a brief armed standoff with county deputies, Gaines was arrested near Dexter, Missouri, where she was hiding out at the farm of her uncle, Morris Gaines. Again, for those just joining our broadcast, Roberta Gaines, of Inola, was arrested this morning in Dexter, Missouri.
The anchor, a generically attractive woman with perfectly coiffed blonde hair and wearing a conservative, pale blue suit, appeared on the screen before an image of the Tulsa skyline at midday. With a serious expression befitting the tone of the story, she stared earnestly into the camera lens and continued to read the teleprompter.
The incident, now known nationally as the Winchester Wreck, left eleven people dead and sixty-three others injured earlier this week. Of the injured, seventeen remain hospitalized, nine of those in critical condition. Multiple witnesses on the scene reported a Ford Aerostar minivan being driven aggressively for several miles before the first impact, when the minivan sideswiped two motorcycles, each bearing two riders, and started a chain reaction collision on the busy highway. In all, nearly one hundred vehicles were involved in the crash, and US-75 was closed for more than five hours.
A silver 1983 Ford Aerostar is registered to Roberta Gaines. It was seized during her arrest.
The screen shifted away from the news anchor and showed a picture of a silver Ford Aerostar with a badly damaged left front fender and side. Then the image changed again, and Willa saw herself, helping Chase, the paramedic she’d met that night, calm a crying little girl. That little girl was an orphan now. Another image showed the crash site from the sky, and Willa’s memory heard again the buffeting chop-chop of a helicopter hovering overhead.
Gaines is being held at the Stoddard County Courthouse pending extradition to Oklahoma, where she is expected to face multiple charges, including several counts of vehicular homicide. Morris Gaines, her uncle, was arrested on the charges of obstruction of justice and armed criminal action.
“It was a woman who caused all that?”
Rad turned sharply at her question. “Women can be *s and cowards just like men.”
“I know. Sorry. It’s just…God. All that rage, all that death. I was sure it was a man.”
“Truth is, so was I. Fuck. Fuck.” He slammed his fist on the table, and Ollie sat up.
“You’re upset.”
“I don’t trust law. Somebody who did that wreck deserves real punishment. But a woman…f*ck.”
Willa understood that Rad had been planning, or at least considering, hurting, perhaps even killing, the person who’d caused the wreck. Seriously thinking about it. But he wouldn’t hurt a woman.
She tried to feel worried about getting involved with a man for whom killing wasn’t unthinkable. But she couldn’t.
She laid her hand on his. “With all the press the crash got, and all the people who saw the way she was driving, and her van trashed like that—she won’t get off. Kids got killed. People won’t stand for her to get anything but justice.”
“Maybe. But you know yourself—lawyers twist everything up.”
That was true. To save the state the expense of a trial, the prosecuting attorney in Austin had let Jesse plead down to burglary. That charge, and the light sentence he got for it, erased what he had really done to her. As far as the law was concerned, he hadn’t beaten her, hadn’t strangled her, hadn’t ripped her clothes off and shoved himself into her, hadn’t bruised her, torn her, made her bleed, hadn’t left her curled on the floor sobbing and broken.