I hear a baby scream in the background and rustling over the line before he answers.
“Baby shit, lots and lots of baby shit,” he replies with a sigh.
“Does that mean married life is good or are you ready to throw in the towel?” I ask with a laugh, receiving a punch in the arm from Gwen who’s sitting next to me at my small kitchen table while Layla is showering and the bright morning sun shines through the window.
“Nah, things are good. Things are really good. Parker just got home from a photo shoot in Arizona, and Annie is finally sleeping through the night. It’s good having both of my girls under one roof, man.”
I can hear the smile and happiness in Garrett’s voice. For a minute, a feeling of envy washes over me. Garrett and Parker were able to work through some pretty fucking extreme odds in the last year, and they managed to make it work. They’re both happier than I’ve ever seen them, and it makes me suddenly wish I had that kind of happiness. I never thought marriage and kids would be in the cards for me, not wanting to find someone and then leave her alone every few months while I traipsed across the globe on SEAL missions. Now that I’m retired from the Navy and have a more stable job, not to mention an amazing woman who has worked her way under my skin, I feel more hopeful about the future for the first time in my life.
“So anyway, I got your message last night about looking into Jack Carlysle’s car accident,” Garrett says as I hear Parker’s voice cooing and laughing in the background.
I had left a message for Garrett the night before after Layla fell asleep on the couch with Emma snuggled up next to her. I felt like a pansy-ass for getting all emotional while standing in the room watching them sleep. Gwen and Emma are my whole life, and Layla is quickly moving into that same category. Seeing how well she gets along with Gwen, and then Emma when she got home from school, made my heart feel like it would burst out of my chest.
I tried contacting June at the bar to see if she could expand a little more about the suspicions she said she had involving Jack’s death, but I couldn’t reach her. I called Garrett in the meantime and had him do some digging.
“It took a while, but I was able to find out something a little weird. You said the guy died when his brakes went out and his car slammed into a tree, right?” Garrett asks.
“Yep, that’s what Layla told me, and all the news articles I read and the police report confirmed the same thing.”
I hear Garrett flipping through some pages for a few seconds before he responds.
“Here’s the strange thing. The day before the accident, Jack Carlysle had an appointment at the same garage he’d gone to for twenty years. Local establishment, same owner since the sixties, reputable place. And guess what he fixed?”
Garrett pauses and a feeling of dread fills my stomach before I answer.
“His brakes,” I reply softly.
“Ding, ding, ding! Correct.”
I shake my head in confusion and take a moment to make sure I can still hear the sound of the shower running down the hall where Layla is.
“If his brakes were recently fixed, how the fuck did they manage to go?” I ask angrily as Gwen looks at me with raised eyebrows.
“Well, I spoke to the owner, Bill, real nice guy, and I didn’t get any kind of vibe from him that he had any ill will towards Jack. He was genuinely upset about the whole thing and swore up and down that when he personally changed the brake pads and fluid, nothing was amiss and everything was in top shape when he finished,” Garrett explains.
“So someone got to that car after it was fixed,” I conclude. “Why the hell wasn’t this brought up with the police? Why didn’t Bill tell them there was no way something could have accidentally gone wrong with Jack’s brakes?”
Garrett sighs. “Jack’s vehicle was the last one Bill worked on that day. The last one he worked on ever, actually. He retired that day and closed the doors to his shop, something he’d been planning for over two years. That night, Bill got on a plane with his wife and flew to Spain. They spent three months all