LITMIR.BIZ

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watched her run up the front walk and disappear into the house. He just didn’t get it. Paige told him everything. In detail. Way too much detail, as a rule.

      What could be bothering her that she couldn’t talk about it with him?

      * * *

      The next morning, Carter decided he would walk Sally alone. He was kind of pissed at Paige for shutting him out. Why in hell would he want to walk her damn dog for her?

      And she was in Denver anyway, right? She wouldn’t be there to eat any breakfast he cooked for her.

      But then what about Dawn? Paige hadn’t mentioned whether Dawn was going, too. What if Dawn was home alone? She’d need breakfast.

      And what about poor Biscuit? Biscuit liked his morning walk with Sally.

      So Carter and Sally went over to the Kettlemans’, after all. He got Biscuit and walked the two dogs. On the way back, he called Dawn on her cell.

      She answered with a big yawn. “Yeah, what?”

      “You still in bed?”

      “How’d you guess?”

      He grunted. “Just checking to see if maybe you went to Denver with Paige.”

      “Uh-uh. Too early for me. You coming to make breakfast?”

      “I’m on my way.”

      He made French toast and tried to be subtle when he asked Dawn if she’d noticed anything different about Paige in the last few days.

      Dawn groaned. “Oh, yeah. Something’s on her mind. But every time I ask, she tells me there’s nothing.”

      He felt instantly vindicated. And then he frowned. “So...you don’t know what it is, either, huh?”

      “I’m clueless. Seriously. But how awful can it be, really? I mean, she got up at two-thirty in the morning to spend the day shopping. I don’t think it’s an incurable disease or anything.”

      “A disease?” That kind of freaked him out. “It didn’t even occur to me she might have a disease...”

      “Carter. Pull yourself together.”

      “Well, I’m worried about her, okay?”

      “She’s just feeling down about something.”

      “It’s not like her,” he grumbled.

      “Everybody feels low now and then. Eventually, she’ll tell you. She always does.”

      “Yeah,” he said, feeling marginally better. “Of course she will. She always does.” He knew everything about Paige, all the little things—that she thought she looked bad in purple and she liked ’70s rock.

      He knew that she’d been in love with a loser named Jim Kellogg when she was in college. She and Jim had been talking marriage, but he dumped her when her parents died. He said he didn’t want to follow her to some Podunk small town and help her raise her sister. Since then, she’d only dated casually.

      He asked Dawn, “What time did she say she’d be back from Denver?”

      “Five or six—and, Carter?”

      “Yeah?”

      “Let it go. She’ll tell you when she’s ready to tell you.”

      “You’re right. I will...”

      After breakfast, he took Sally home and then headed for Bravo Custom Cars, thinking about Paige the whole way. About him and Paige, about how they’d hit it off from the start.

      He’d met her at Romano’s Restaurant, where she’d started working after her parents died. He’d liked her right off and he used to eat there at least a couple of times a week, partly because Romano’s had the best Italian food around. But mostly because he loved to sit in Paige’s section and give her a hard time. He’d asked her out more than once. She’d turned him down over and over, but he kept trying.

      Finally, she’d told him gently and regretfully that she was never going out with him.

      She hadn’t told him why she wouldn’t date him. Not then. The truth had come out later, as their friendship grew. About how she was happier on her own, that her heart had been stomped on but good by that Kellogg creep when she was already in bad shape from losing her parents.

      But that was later.

      He could still remember her way back at the beginning of their friendship, still see her so clearly, standing by his favorite booth at Romano’s, her hands in the pockets of her waitress apron. “I don’t need a date, Carter. But I could sure use a friend.”

      “Then you got one,” he’d said.

      The overhead fluorescents had brought out red lights in her dark brown hair, and her soft mouth kicked up at the corners. “Does my friend need another beer?”

      When he opened BCC, she’d answered his ad for an office manager. He hired her on the spot and she got right after it, moving the furniture around in the office for better “work flow,” as she called it, setting up the front counter and the customer waiting area so she could see everything from her desk. He knew cars. Paige knew a whole lot about systems and how to set up the front of the shop. Not only did she seem to have a knack for running the place; she’d been a semester away from getting a BA in business when her parents died and she quit to come home.

      The woman knew her way around a spreadsheet. He’d figured out within the first few weeks that he needed to keep her around. So every year at Christmas, he gave her a percentage of the company as her Christmas bonus. Five years after they opened BCC, they were best friends and she owned 25 percent of the business.

      They had a good thing going. And somehow, now that she’d cut herself off from him, suddenly everything in his life seemed all wrong. Best friends were supposed to communicate. Paige knew that. Or at least, she always lectured him about communication whenever he got feeling down and wouldn’t say what was bugging him.

      He unlocked the gate at BCC and sailed onto the lot. Stopping the Lincoln in front of one of the bay doors, he climbed out and went around to the shop’s side door, where he turned off the alarm and let himself in. A button by the bay sent the accordion door rumbling up. He pulled the Lincoln into the open bay, got out again and shut the bay door. It was sunny out, but only in the midthirties, so he turned on the heat.

      The Lincoln, which he’d customized in a number of pretty cool ways, needed a little fine-tuning. He needed to let all this worrying about Paige go. She would talk when she was ready to talk. And when she did, he’d be there to listen.

      In the meantime, BCC was closed for Black Friday and he had the whole place to himself. He could get the Lincoln purring like a kitten and ready for the day trader from Boulder who’d commissioned it from him. And then he might even get started on the already cherry ’68 Shelby Cobra GT-500 Fastback that Deacon wanted pimped out with a whole new sound system and all the modern conveniences, including GPS. Deacon also wanted a rear spoiler, a modified grille and monster wheels with some really garish rims. It kind of seemed a shame to do that to a work of art like the Cobra. But Deacon didn’t pay him the big bucks to suddenly get squeamish over messing with the classics.

      Carter had a killer sound system in his shop. He turned on the radio to a hard rock station. As ZZ Top roared out, he zipped up his overalls and got down to it.

      He didn’t notice he had company until about an hour later, when he rolled out from under the Lincoln and headed for the inner door to the office and the little table in front of the window, where Paige kept one of those K-Cup machines. He had a nice hot mug of coconut mocha on his mind and had all but forgotten that he’d failed to relock the side door to the shop when he came in.

      Whipping a rag from his rear pocket, he wiped the worst of the grease from hands and switched off the radio. He loved vintage Bruce as much as the next man, but sometimes a little silence was good

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