His Best Friend's Baby by Molly O'Keefe Page B

didn’t know whether to laugh or put a bullet in his head.
    He stepped onto the long grass and left footprints in the dewy lawn as he crossed the backyard to the garage nestled back amongst some pines and more weeds. The door had once been red but now was the faded gray of weathered wood. The whole structure leaned slightly to the left and Jesse figured gravity would soon take care of the rest.
    The garage had never housed a car. Inexplicably, his dad had once come home from the bar driving a golf cart and it had stayed in the garage for a week until the cops had come looking for it.
    They’d all laughed over that.
    What had always been housed in the garage—and Jesse was half hoping had been sold or lost or stolen over the years—were Granddad’s old woodworking tools. The planers and awls and chisels fit Jesse’s hand as though they had been born there. He had spent a lot of years in this garage with the tools, pretending that the world outside the sweet smell of fresh oak didn’t exist.
    He could do with a little of that pretending right now.
    The heavy door slid back on the nearly rusted rollers and the odor of sour, rotting wood poured out. He reached for the light switch, and was surprised when it flickered on, illuminating the cracked cement floor.
    Along the back wall was the workbench he’d made himself a million years ago and on the wall above it, still as neatly arranged as he’d left them, were the tools.
    When he was younger they’d offered him, if not a way out of his family and his home, a way to survive.
    Jesse took a deep breath and stepped into the musty familiarity of the garage looking for something, anything, that could be saved.

CHAPTER FIVE 
    “Y OU’RE A KILLER ,” David Mancino’s father said. “We trusted our boy with you and you brought him home in a body bag.”
    “But look.” Jesse tried to show Mr. Mancio what he’d brought in exchange for Dave. He held out his bloody palms and tried to give Mr. Mancio the still-beating heart .
    “What the hell is wrong with you, boy?” Mr. Mancio smacked Jesse’s hands away and the heart fell to the ground. “We heard you were crazy!”
    It’s ruined, Jesse thought, watching the heart pump blood into the dirt. No one is going to want that now.
    “Wait, wait. I brought more, just a second.” Jesse waved over the thin blond woman with the haunted blue eyes he’d never been able to forget and she, in turn, led Wain and a man in a black hostage mask. “See, you can have the dog, and the—”
    Jesse woke to the sound of a key sliding into the lock on his back door. The dream vanished and he traveled from sleep to battle ready in seconds—another little gift from the United States Army. He could kill a man in a hundred ways and he hadn’t fallen fully asleep in over six years.
    The pain meds he’d popped last night made his brain feel thick and stupid, but the well-honed instinct in him was still razor sharp.
    He crept from the couch, barefoot and in his blue jeans, toward the back door, where he had heard the distinct sound of a lock sliding open.
    Wainwright snored on his pillow.
    Some guard dog you turned out to be .
    He fully expected Rachel to be busting in, and he relished letting her know in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t welcome. Her days of coming and going in this house were over.
    But he yanked open the door only to find Mac Edwards, his arms filled with grocery bags. Jesse rocked back on his heels.
    “Help a guy out, would you?” Mac asked over the perforated edge of one of the bags. The look in his light blue eyes went through Jesse like a knife. It was the look his men used to give him—respect and a general gladness to see him.
    “I don’t—” Jesse started, but Mac stepped in and pushed the bags into Jesse’s chest. Instinctively, Jesse caught Mac’s burden and Mac used the opportunity to barge in.
    “Nice one,” Jesse growled, his throat rusty.
    “Old trick I learned from a nine-year-old,” Mac said