Right before the impact, right before I had to watch her end up splattered all over the windshield, the guy who had walked her out suddenly hit her from the side in a flying tackle that had both of them careening hard to the asphalt. I heard her shriek when she hit and turned to try and grab the license plate off of the fleeing sedan. I frowned as I reached the huddled pair on the ground because the plates on the car were missing, making this feel very deliberate and not like an accident at all. I nudged the Spanish guy on the shoulder and he looked up at me.
“Move.”
He huffed at me and rolled off of Brysen. She peeked up at me from between the fingers she had clamped over her eyes like that was somehow going to prevent her from getting run over by a speeding car. I reached down to pull her to her feet and felt my back teeth click together when I saw the bloody mess her arm and legs were from where she had hit the ground.
“Oh my God, Ramon!” She broke away from me and threw herself at the other guy. He wrapped her up in a hug and shook his head.
“That was crazy. A drunk driver maybe?”
Ramon muttered the words while he looked right at me as I just stared at him. I wanted him to let Brysen go—like yesterday.
She took a step away from him and cradled her injured arm to her chest with her other hand. “Thank you so much. You just saved my life.”
“Weird things are in your orbit, chica. You need to keep your head up.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze and looked at me pointedly. “Find someone to watch your back.”
We watched him walk away in silence, and she finally turned and looked at me. I frowned down at her and she lifted up her pale eyebrows to almost her hairline.
“Why are you looking at me like I did something wrong? It’s not my fault that guy was wasted and out of control.” She sounded huffy, but under it her voice was shaking. She was scared out of her mind.
I inclined my chin and let out the breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding.
“That wasn’t a drunk driver. The car had no plates, didn’t have any lights on until you came out of the building, and it was aiming right for you. If your buddy hadn’t taken you to the ground it would have run you over very purposefully. What in the hell is going on with you?”
She blinked up at me and bit down hard on her bottom lip. I wanted to replace her teeth with my own.
“My arm really hurts.” It should. She had a pretty nasty case of road rash and it was bleeding steadily, and half the parking lot was embedded in it.
“Want me to follow you home so you can clean up?”
She shook her head vehemently “no” and asked in a whisper, “Can you just take me somewhere so I can wash it out? I don’t want my sister or my mom to see me like this.”
One of these days I was going to have to get the entire story of what was going on with this girl. I liked a challenge, but she had passed “challenging” a month ago. Right now she was hovering pretty close to “impossible.”
“I can run you by my place.”
She nodded vigorously then looked at her little BMW. “I can’t leave the car. It won’t be here by the time we get back.”
She made a valid point. I sighed and gave her a once-over. She was a mess and there was no way she could drive a stick shift with one working arm. I put a hand on her uninjured arm and guided her to the Mustang. I opened the door for her and pulled my phone out of my pocket. I waited until the nervous voice on the other end answered before telling Brysen to give me her keys.
“Aldo?”
“Yeah?”
I was probably the last person he wanted to hear from. “You want a break on the two Gs you still owe me on the Alabama game from last weekend?”
There was a long silence and I saw Brysen look up at me curiously. I just shut the door on her and walked around to the other side of the car. I tried not to be too sad about the fact she was probably bleeding all over my vintage interior.
“What do I gotta do?” Aldo asked. It was a fair question. No good deed was without a return favor in this world.
“Black BMW in the parking lot on the corner of Paradise and Loft. I want it at the garage within the next twenty minutes. I’m leaving the keys in it, so if it gets stolen in the next five minutes, I’m adding the car to the total of what you already owe me.” Nothing like a little motivation to get the ball rolling in the direction I wanted it to roll.
“I’m across town, dude.”
“I suggest you get unacross town in a big hurry.”
I hung up on him and walked over to her little car and stashed the keys under the floor mat. It was a risky move, but I knew Aldo didn’t have the cash on hand to pay his debt, so he would make it happen one way or another just to be clear of the debt and my wrath.
I got back in the Mustang and looked at my passenger in the dark. Her eyes were wide and the pupils were huge in the center. I wondered if I needed to worry about her having a concussion.
“You okay?”
She rolled her head from side to side on the leather seat. “No. Nothing’s been okay for a long time.”
I started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. The rumble of the engine was oddly comforting and I saw her shift a little as the blood on her legs started to drip toward the floor mat. I wanted to tell her not to worry about it, but her words were buzzing around in my head like a bunch of angry bees.
“Why did someone try to run you over in the parking lot tonight?”
She shot me a sideways look and pushed her hair out of her face to tuck it behind her ear.
“I don’t know. I also don’t know why I’m getting strange text messages, or getting shot at during parties, or why I’m failing a class that should be a piece of cake, or why I keep making excuses for my parents. I don’t have any clue how it became my responsibility to make sure my sister makes it to adulthood as minimally affected by the nonsense at home as possible. None of it makes sense to me, but it just keeps happening and happening and I don’t have any kind of control of my own life anymore.”