Mason Spellman, the club’s new prospect (and also Simon’s kid and Sam’s brother), saw Duncan and understood what he was being asked to do. He pulled over and stopped well behind the trailer. Duncan walked over as the driver’s door opened.
Mason jumped down, looking like a guy who’d been pulled from sleep to do a crappy job in the cold. He was the only prospect at the moment, and he lived on his folks’ farm, out in the boonies west of Tulsa, so he’d taken to staying at the clubhouse most nights, just to be closer if and when he got a call like the one he’d gotten tonight.
“Hey, Dunc.” Mason shoved his hands in his jeans as a blast of cold wind hit them.
“Hey, Mace.” Duncan almost apologized for dragging him out here, but patches did not apologize to prospects for giving them work. “The Sierra up there threw a rod. It’s not a repair, just getting it off the road until she can figure out what to do with the corpse.”
“Okay. So should I take it to the station, then?”
“Yeah. Just drop it at the back of the lot. I’ll be in tomorrow, and I’ll deal with it then.”
“Is this a paid job?”
“No.” When Mason’s face took on a fretful scrunch, Duncan added, “I’ll text my dad and let him know. You won’t get heat for not writing up a ticket.”
Relief rolled visibly through Mason’s body. He’d been a prospect for only a couple months, but he already understood how the role stung. “Okay, that’s good. Thanks.”
~oOo~
Once Phoebe got Smoky into the trailer, she went back to the Sierra and packed up her personal shit. Then Duncan and Mason got the dead truck hooked to the wrecker, and Mason headed off to the next ramp, so he could turn back to the city.
As Duncan climbed in behind the wheel of his truck to finally get off this damn shoulder, Phoebe reached over and clutched his arm. “Hey. Thank you for this. Really, thank you. After an hour of watching people drive right by me, trying not to panic about how I’d ever get out of here with Smoky, you stopped and gave me so much more help than I hoped for. You are officially a knight in shining armor.”
Feeling that praise like it had actual warmth, Duncan smiled and attempted a dumb courtly flourish. “At your service, milady.”
Phoebe laughed and sat back. “Okay, don’t let it go to your head there, buddy.”
~oOo~
For the first few minutes of the trip, they rode in relative silence. A few sentences about where, precisely, Duncan was headed, and some discussion about what temperature to put the heater on. But no kind of real conversation. Duncan tried to pick up her vibe and understand whether she’d even like to talk.
He liked this girl, and he wanted to know more. Eventually he was too curious to keep quiet, so he found something she’d offered about herself and used it to maybe start a conversation.
“How’d you decide to start a rescue ranch?” He almost added that his sister was a vet and had just won an award for her work with rescues—hey, maybe they even knew each other—but decided against it. He wanted to know about her. Details about him, or his family, could wait.
Oddly, Phoebe didn’t answer right away, and when he glanced over, she was watching him, her expression almost blank, just a touch of that evaluative look around her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to get nosy,” Duncan said. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just ... it’s a big, long, heavy story, and I don’t want to trap you in something a lot more involved than you were expecting.”
“Hey, we got an hour to kill, right? I’m listening if you want to tell me a story, heavy or otherwise.”
She nodded but didn’t start her story. For a few more minutes, she was quiet, and every time Duncan looked over, she was watching the road ahead of them.
“I was in the Army,” she finally began. “Deployed to Afghanistan.”
“Oh, shit,” Duncan said. He thought about Dex, but again, set details about his life and the people in it aside for later.
“Yeah. I enlisted after high school. I wanted to go to college, but there was no money for it, and I didn’t want to drown in loans. So I went the military route. I was deployed pretty much right out of training.”
“I know people who fought over there,” Duncan said, because she’d paused like she expected some input. “I’ve heard how rough it was.”
“I was there for less than a year. Then the truck I was in rolled over an IED.”
That statement surprised Duncan so much his foot slipped off the gas. “What? Shit!”
She did not look like someone who’d been blown up by a bomb. Duncan had done a couple of Christmases with Dex at the VFW, and he’d seen what IEDs did. He wondered what her big coat and jeans were covering.
His face must have shown that thought somehow, because she said, “I’ve got all my parts. I don’t even have many scars. The guy sitting next to me was torn apart, but I barely bled.” She looked out the side window. “On the outside, anyway. On the inside, I got kind of pureed. The shockwave from the bomb.”
If they hadn’t been towing a horse, Duncan would have pulled off the road and found somewhere to stop so he could really look at her. Unable to do that, he said, “I’m sorry.”
He caught the shake of her head in his peripheral vision.
“Anyway. I was in a coma for about eight months, and when I came out of it, I had to learn to do everything again—walk, talk, write, read, feed myself, everything. I even had to relearn how to think and remember who I was. I was in rehab for almost two years, the last part of it in a kind of halfway house, where you transition back to living on your own.”
“Jesus, Phoebe. Can I ask—tell me I’m an asshole if I shouldn’t ask—but how old are you?” She looked young and fresh, innocent, even. Not like a wounded warrior.
“Maybe it’s rude, but I don’t think you’re an asshole. I’m twenty-five.”
The same age as him. Suddenly his badass biker life felt like make-believe.
It very much was not; the Bulls practically had a wing of the cemetery as evidence of the extreme realness of their life. But he himself hadn’t faced danger like that. He’d been left behind for most of the hardcore shit. Even now, Dex was trying to leave him behind.
Suddenly, Duncan thought he truly understood Dex’s motivation. Still didn’t agree with it, but understood.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
“Yeah, you said that.” Her tone was teasing. “The transition house was in Ohio, on a working farm. There were six vets there, and our occupational therapy was farm work. I’d been raised out here, in the country—my family place hasn’t been a working farm since my grandpa’s time, too much of the land’s been sold off piecemeal for that, but we always had animals. Horses and chickens, a few goats, all that.”
Again, she fell quiet. This time Duncan didn’t feel the need to fill her silence.
“I don’t know,” she continued. “It was something familiar to me, and I needed that. I’m mostly back to normal, but not totally. When I’m stressed, I have trouble processing information, and I can get overwhelmed pretty fast. So I don’t always deal with urgent problems very well, and when I get to that place, I usually get mad and make everything worse. I didn’t feel like I’d be able to handle college or any kind of job where I had a boss breathing down my neck, and I got to thinking about how broken things deserve a good life, too. That’s how Ragamuffin Ranch was born.”