Leaving Annalise (Katie & Annalise Book 2) by Pamela Fagan Hutchins Page A

to your home.”
    I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. That sounded very good to me.

Chapter Fifteen
    Early one morning a few days later, I swung my truck up toward Annalise to check on the previous day’s progress, with Oso riding shotgun. I was steering with one hand and holding my precious cup of King’s coffee in the other—I had become addicted to my morning dose of the local brew—and cursing Ava with every drop I spilled. She had woken me up at 2:30 a.m. to tell me she’d talked Trevor into a do-over, information that could have waited for a better time, like between dawn and dusk. Oso wagged his tail every time I blurted out an expletive.
    When we made it up to the house, I found Rashidi cleaning a bowl and spoon in the laundry-room basin.
    “Good morning, Rasta man. Do you have the day off?” I asked.
    “And a pleasant good morning to you,” Rashidi said, ruffling Oso’s ears. Rashidi was the one who found my six dogs for me originally, and it was he that selected Oso to act as my protector. They had a special bond. “Yah mon. No tourists, no students. I a free man.”
    “Want to join me on a mission of stealth?”
    “I all about stealth. And missions dem. Me and my good friend Tom Cruise. What this mission, if I choose to accept it?”
    “Egg hinted that I should make a trip out to Junior’s new job site. Something to do with my missing tile.”
    “Uh oh. If Junior involved, it gotta be no good.”
    “My thinking exactly. Just let me check on yesterday’s work first.”
    Fifteen minutes later, we got in the truck and Oso vaulted into the bed, which he was happy about. He loves to feel the breeze on his nose from back there.
    “So when Not-Bart coming back on island?” Rashidi asked, as we drove back toward Town down the rainforest road.
    “A month. His sister is almost through with basic training, and then Nick hands his nephew off to his parents. He keeps asking me when I’m coming there, and he’s so damn calm about it. I don’t think he completely understands why it is impossible for me to leave in the middle of this construction nightmare.”
    “Not such a bad thing, to have someone what want to see you.” He chuptzed low, a rueful rather than a derisive sound, then said, “Ava ’bout through with me.”
    I didn’t know how to respond, so I let silence take over. She hadn’t said so, but I’d noticed Ava losing interest in fidelity again. Someday she’d look back and regret tossing Rashidi aside, I was sure. He was not only smart, motivated, and kind, but he was loyal and easy on the eye. He’d just had the misfortune to fall for a girl with a restless heart. Rashidi really liked Ava—the flesh and blood woman, not just the bombshell that every other man on the island liked. The funny, insecure girl with the giving heart.
    I turned the radio on and we drove into a one-hundred-percent Local neighborhood in the center of the island, listening to The Jam Band sing “Man Terrible.” Rashidi sang along word for word. I had an address for Junior’s job site, but there were no street signs in that part of Town. “Good thing I with you,” Rashidi said. “You be lost and unwelcome without me.”
    The most important characteristic of anyone on St. Marcos is whether or not you’re bahn yah, and my flaw of birthplace was compounded by my lack of pigmentation. I didn’t blend well. Stealth, indeed.
    We pulled up to a peach-colored one-story house with rebar sticking up off its flat, sloped roof. Locals tend to leave room for expansion as cash permits, so it’s a familiar sight. A truck was parked in the driveway, a big newish midnight-blue Silverado that belonged to none other than Junior.
    “Well, we in the right place,” Rashidi said.
    “Yah mon,” I said, and Rashidi laughed. “Let’s make us a little less obvious.” I pulled past two more rebar-topped houses and turned left at the corner. When I was sure I was out of sight, I parked. “I’ll be right back.”
    I