Nobody Knows (SWAT Generation 2.0 11)

He was my first call.

“I’ll start here. You go to the nicer ones in Longview. I doubt that, with their money, they would settle for anything but the best,” Sammy explained.

I believed him.

And that was why, an hour later, I most certainly did find the truck getting fixed.

Which made me wonder.

Why had they waited so long to get it done? Had he been planning this the entire time?

There were so many fucking questions that were swirling in my mind.

Sadly, none of them were answered.

Even more sad, the truck had already been stripped of any and all evidence.

“You normally work this fast?” I asked the guy that’d done the stripping. The fucking owner himself.

He shook his head as I looked at all the body parts that were now being sanded and ground.

“No,” he said. “We normally have a system. But this guy’s a friend, and he said that his kid needed his truck.”

I sensed something more than that but chose not to push it.

Not yet, anyway.

“What about all these other cars in line?” I asked, gesturing around at the seven or so cars that were in the garage.

“I’m working on this one since I said we could get it done,” he answered. “Why? Is something going wrong?”

I didn’t see the point in not telling him the truth.

“We believe this truck was involved in a hit and run last night,” he said. “And now, suspiciously, all the evidence that we would’ve had of that is now wiped away.”

The man’s face went white.

“You’re shitting me,” he said. “That… the kid? Adrian?”

I nodded.

“The kid’s a good kid. Sure, he can be a little much to handle sometimes with his me, me, me attitude, but overall, I’ve never seen him act with anything but decency when he’s around me. I think that you might have the wrong kid,” he said.

Oh, and he was lying.

His fucking eyes were bouncing this way and that, as if he wasn’t quite sure what the hell to think or say.

“I didn’t say it was the kid. I said that the truck was involved,” I said. “And, if you don’t mind, stop all work on this truck. You’ll have a legal notice in about ten minutes. Or, don’t. Not my problem, but you might want to look up the consequences of ‘obstruction of justice.’”

With that, I left the small work area he was in and didn’t look back.

Instead, I went back to work, and let Anna deal with it from there.

I was sure that I’d hear it from my supervisors soon, anyway.

It was about thirty minutes into my shift that I got a text from Sierra that significantly brightened my day.

Sierra: This place is sucky today. Bring me food and I’ll love you forever. Bonus if you bring everyone food. They’ll love you forever, too. I know you’re working but… please?

I checked in with dispatch, then told them that I was going on lunch, leaving me with enough time to grab the food that I’d ordered—which was a shit ton of it—and take it all up to the NICU where she worked.

I arrived with my arms heavy with food.

“Eeep!” Sierra clapped when she saw me. She pointed at the table set up outside and gave me a finger raise indicating one minute.

I put it all down outside the room and walked up to the glass.

I’d been here quite a few times before, but none of those times had been to visit Sierra.

Actually, they’d all been to visit Nathan and Reggie’s new baby, Dare.

Dare who was growing like a weed, and hopefully would get out soon.

“Is this Thanksgiving?” Reggie asked as she hustled out the door toward me.

Sierra was hot on her heels.

“Actually,” I said. “It can be. But no, this isn’t. I think we have what? A week left before it is?”

I honestly wasn’t too sure on the timeline anymore. I rarely paid attention to holidays after I got back. I ignored them and avoided them like the plague.

But again, Thanksgiving was kind of hard to miss seeing as stores put on sales, people started begging for money, then there were the fellow cops begging their comrades to switch days with them so that they had the day off with their family.

Which, inevitably, always happened for me—the day off thing. I always ended up having the day off for some weird, fucked-up reason. I mean, I never even asked for the fucking day off, and I got it.

Like this year.

I had the damn thing off.

Unless some SWAT call came up that I knew nothing about?

“Ten days, actually,” Sierra said. “That’s something that Mom and I are supposed to talk about today. Do you and Grans want to come to that? It’s a big event since it’ll have all of the Spurlocks at it, but it’s fun. And you can hide outside if you want. So I’ll have an excuse to go find you.”