Shelter From The Storm (The Bare Bones MC Book 6)(16)

“I get so nervous with you watching me,” I giggled, struggling to pull the bowstring past the let-off point. Once there, it was easy to draw the rest, and not look like a hundred-pound weakling shaking while holding the bow. I was more agitated by his body heat as he stood close behind me.

“Don’t be afraid of blowing it,” Fox said. “Just aim and release.”

Aim and release. That’s easy for him to say. I let it fly. Predictably, it landed in one of the outer rings twenty yards away. “Oh, brother.”

“At least you hit the target. Do another.”

“At least I hit the target! Look, I know you’re trying to be supportive of a lame-ass beginner, but shouldn’t I at least be in some of those inner rings? Yours are all in the inner ring.”

“When I started, when I moved to Pure and Easy,” Wolf Glaser yelled, unnecessarily loudly, for he was only four lanes away, “I couldn’t even hit a gym. I only got better when I started doing it every day without fail.” He was using a stick bow without a sight. When he let loose his string, his arrow landed in the target of the lane next to his. “Well,” he said, unshaken by the fail, “these stick bows are notoriously hard to use. I think I’ll go get a smoothie down the block. You guys want any?”

We gave our orders—Fox’s being concocted for a guy about to row to Hawaii, with soy and whey boosts added. My order seemed to give energy for waddling to the kitchen to get more. I cursed myself for ordering first.

“You want extra drizzles of fudge sauce on that?”

I wasn’t sure if Wolf was joking or not, so I said haughtily, “Of course not.”

“Just checking,” said Wolf with a straight face. “Seems like it’d go with the triple chunk chocolate and ultra bananarama ice creams.”

I said nothing, just harrumphed and angrily shot a few more arrows. Hey, I was getting better. Maybe my anger was propelling me, but all three went into one of the inner rings. Not the inner yellow or red scoring rings, of course, but the sky blue and black.

“Hey, look at you!” said Fox in one of those high, singsong voices one uses to encourage a kid to use the pot. “Scored on all three! It’s finally sinking in, then. You’re getting into the swing of it.”

I actually was quite proud. “Yours are all so perfect. How’d you learn archery?”

He shrugged. With one arm resting on the bow rack and his booted feet crossed, he looked sunny and happy. For a guy who murdered strangers for a living, he seemed unconcerned, ironed-out. I felt no fear in his presence, either. He’d saved me from a potentially fatal blunder with the cop. I was never sure how well WITSEC had cleaned my old Flavia Brooks records in their clearinghouse, or whether my Pippa Lofting driver’s license would fly, or if some random childhood prank from my past would come back to haunt me, force me to leave town once again and start all over from scratch. It was a hell of a way to live. So yes, I existed on pins and needles. I was very grateful that he’d come to my rescue.

“I don’t know. Typical boy scout shit.”

I gaped, then closed my mouth as I wandered closer to him. No one else was in the Hip Quiver indoor range at one in the afternoon other than that clown Kneecap, fixing something to do with bows in the repair shop, but I still felt discretion was necessary. “Being a boy scout doesn’t mesh with your hitman career.”

Again he shrugged. “Why not? Hitmen had childhoods, too. I wasn’t always on the path to becoming a hitman.”

“What were you? Were you really a lawyer?”

“I was really a lawyer.”

“But why would someone want to quit a lucrative job—I presume it was lucrative—to pursue such a dirty, dangerous job?”

“Hey. This dirty, dangerous job pays more than lawyering. Especially being a public defense attorney. What made you drop everything and come to P and E?”

That threw me for a loop. I generally tried not to ask people probing questions. In my experience, this just made them poke me back even harder. “So you do it for the money.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t buy that. Someone as clever as you has to have a higher reason for doing something.”

He didn’t answer me right away. It was ballsy of me to poke the brawny hitman. I didn’t even know why I was doing it. Well, it was hard not to see the similarities in our situations, although of course I couldn’t tell him that. For whatever reason, he was running from his former life. And I was running for my life.

He finally said thinly, “Sometimes money does cure all evils. Listen, let’s go get our arrows from the targets. Clear!”

He yelled clear even though we were the only two people in there. Such a thorough man would not have left his former life for trivial, or even strictly monetary, reasons. He couldn’t be in WITSEC, though, I thought with a chuckle. His agent would hardly allow him to work for a cartel. Then I started wondering which cartel he worked for. I was familiar with some of them, though of course not all. But that would be the last question you’d ask a sicario.

“Oh, look,” I said weakly. How embarrassing! “I got the arrow way up there.”

“No big deal. You threw that one away.”

“I’ll say. Can you reach it? No? I’ll go find a stepstool.”

“No sweat.” Bending at the knees, Fox wrapped his big hands around my waist and lifted me. It was fun, being so light, up that high. I admit I made it seem like it was harder than it really was, getting the arrow out of the wall. There were lots of holes in the wall where idiots had done the same thing.