Nobody Knows (SWAT Generation 2.0 11)

“My friend is well,” I said. “Her turkey basting efforts are bearing fruit.”

Grans threw her head back and laughed.

“I wish that I’d have had the technology to do it on my own. Then I wouldn’t have had to deal with your grandfather.” She snickered. “Good for her, doing it on her own.”

“Her family doesn’t seem to think so,” I admitted what Sierra had told me via text over the last couple of days. “They think she either A, slept around after breaking up with her boyfriend and wound up pregnant, or B got pregnant by her ex and refuses to tell him.”

“Why not just tell them the truth?” she wondered.

“I think had they not jumped to conclusions and allowed her to explain, she might have,” I answered.

“Still bound and determined not to meet her?” Grans asked slyly.

There was an unspoken promise between Sierra and me.

A line that neither one of us was willing to cross—and that was meeting.

We both knew that the other was in or around Kilgore. We also knew what each other’s professions were. But neither one of us had flat out made the move to see exactly where the other was.

Though we texted.

A lot.

“It’s not that I don’t want to meet her,” I admitted. “I would love to. I’m just… a loser. What if she doesn’t like me, Grans? I think that might possibly break my heart.”

Grans let her hand drop and she lazily stroked it over Bobo’s head.

I looked down at the dog that was supposed to be mine, but actually ended up being Grans’ dog.

I’d gotten Bobo a few months ago from a man out of Souls Chapel. The dog had been vital in saving one of my buddy’s off the SWAT team’s wife, Dillan. When we’d learned that Bobo didn’t have a home and was about to be put down because of his distrust of human beings, I’d stepped in and offered to take him myself.

Only, it hadn’t been me that Bobo had come out of the shell for. It’d been Gran.

It’d only been in the last month that we’d decided that Bobo was no longer my dog, but Grans’ dog.

Now he lived with her, and I think he preferred it that way.

I reached my hand out and tried to pet Bobo, but he bared his teeth at me in a silent snarl.

Grans laughed and instead of touching the dog, I wrapped my arm around her frail frame and got an actual growl this time.

Bobo didn’t like when I loved on Grans.

Grans laughed, just as she always did when we played this game.

“I can’t wait for your parents to come to the door,” she teased. “Bobo is going to hate them on sight.”

I agreed wholeheartedly.

“Take a photo.” I paused. “Even better, take a video.”

She gave me a pat on the thigh and stood up. “Take me home so I don’t have to walk?”

Despite being eighty-nine years old, Grans was still very active in life.

She walked to my house from hers every once in a while, when the weather was nice, and sometimes she’d walk back. Other times she would have me drive her, like now, when it was too close to being dark out.

The funny thing was, I’d grown up in a house that was literally a mile and a half away by road from the duplexes dubbed as ‘Cop Row’ where I now lived. And if you took to the woods like Grans did to get here, it was only half a mile, and you had to cross a creek to get there.

Though, when I realized that no matter how much talking I did until I was blue in the face to get her to stop jumping over the creek, I knew that the only solution was to build her a way to get over it via bridge.

Secretly, I thought that she kind of disliked having to use the bridge, but she knew that I worried about her, so she did it anyway.

Grans was the most in-shape eighty-nine-year-old you would ever meet.

She had abs.

She had guns.

And she could do more push-ups than half the men on the Kilgore Police Department.

When she was feeling frisky, she’d even challenge people to push-up contests just to see them lose.

“Of course,” I said easily. “Let me get my bag inside then we can go.”

She waited for me to do what I’d told her I needed to do, then held my hand as we descended the porch steps faster than I took them normally.

I rolled my eyes and led her to my truck, which was no lowrider.

But, like the thirty-year-old she acted like, she had no problem hefting herself into the passenger seat and closing the door.

I opened the back door for Bobo, and he jumped in with barely a growl aimed my way.

Grans and Bobo deserved each other, that was for sure.