Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 60864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 304(@200wpm)___ 243(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 304(@200wpm)___ 243(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
“Noah,” I started.
“Hey, bud, let’s go back inside,” he said, trying to ignore me.
“No, wait. We need to talk for a second.”
“Sorry, bud, Ally is waiting.” He tried to bypass me, but I put one arm up and stopped him from getting up the steps.
“Before you get up there, I need to ask you a favor,” I said.
“Sure.” He stopped, clearly unhappy about it.
“Please, please tell your wife to stop parading women past me,” I said. “I’m sure Cameron would say the same if he had the opportunity. But at least with me, I have to work with her every day, so it would really suck if I were forced to put her through the meat grinder and make her into a ragu.”
“Alright, Hannibal,” Noah joked. “I hear you. It wasn’t my idea, by the way. But I hear you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her,” Noah said, heading up the stairs.
Sighing, I headed back up myself, prepared to slog my way through the rest of the night.
2
JODI
Something told me to leave my rented room early that morning. It wasn’t my devotion to my job. The breakfast place where I’d put in an application almost as soon as I got to town wasn’t exactly my dream career. But it was something. It meant money was in my pocket, and I could sustain myself for a little bit longer.
Until I spooked and had to move on.
I did my best to keep my head down and work hard no matter what kind of job I found myself in. And that had been quite a few different things. There had been a lot of waiting tables. Standing behind registers. Even a few bouts with a mop and broom. I took whatever I could. It didn’t matter as long as they wouldn’t ask too many questions when they hired me, and I could stay under the radar for the time I worked there. However long that ended up being.
That didn’t mean I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I got out of bed, ready to sweep into the diner for another glorious morning. Sleeping well wasn’t something I did very often, so mornings generally didn’t come late enough, and I rarely got out of the front door early enough. Most of the time I skimmed the beginning of my shift, just making it so I didn’t catch the attention of my boss and possibly put my position at risk.
And sometimes I fell a little short. My boss wasn’t a bad guy, but he definitely didn’t love it when I ran through the back door and lunged for the time clock in hopes of coming in under the wire. He especially didn’t love when I slunk through the back door knowing full well that window of opportunity had long passed, and I was just trying to make it without causing too much upheaval.
That might have been part of what got me out of bed earlier that day. But it felt like something else was dragging me through my morning routine and pushing me through the door a good bit before I’d usually even brushed my teeth.
I wasn’t usually one to lean on the side of superstition. I was far more concerned about the here and now, what I could see and feel. But sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if the Universe was there giving me some sort of nudge when it needed to.
Or maybe it wasn’t anything quite so poetic. Maybe it was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time when I turned that corner and saw a man run out of an alley between two buildings and descend on the woman and her child walking across the street from me.
The woman let out a cry of surprise, and the man grabbed her purse. She latched onto it, tugging at it to try to keep it from her. The man hauled back and planted a punch in the side of the woman’s head, making her little girl shout and leap forward to try to help her mother. This seemed to infuriate the man even more, and he shoved the child aside, causing her to tumble onto the sidewalk.
I could barely believe what I was seeing. A woman was being mugged right out in the open. It wasn’t even nine on a Monday morning, and this was happening right out on the sidewalk on a public street. It was both sickening and infuriating.
It was also happening with only me there to witness it. No one else was around, and with the woman struggling more now and the little boy crying on the cement, there wasn’t time to try to call for help. I had only one choice, and that was to intervene.
“Hey,” I shouted to try to distract the mugger long enough for me to get across the street.