Page 5 of Roulette

I stepped out of the house with one arm through my jacket sleeve and stopped cold. The car sat lopsided in the gravel driveway like something wounded, the driver’s side slumped toward the ground. Both tires on that side were flat -- not just low, but gutted. Clean cuts ran through the rubber, each one about three inches long, the edges peeled back like something had taken a deliberate bite out of them.

The morning air was already thick with humidity, but I felt it go thin in my lungs. I dropped my bag on the stoop and crossed the driveway, gravel crunching under my sneakers. The smell hit me first -- that acrid, synthetic scent of torn rubber mixed with the faint mineral note of the gravel dust. I crouched beside the rear tire and ran my fingers along the cut. The edges were sharp. Precise. Someone had taken their time.

I stood up slowly and pulled out my phone. Six-forty. My shift started at seven. It figured the morning I’d planned to take my car something like this would happen. I did the math in my head without wanting to -- tow truck, minimum an hour wait, probably more. The cost would clean out what was left in my checking account after last month’s bills. I’d be late regardless, and this wasn’t the first time this month. Patsy had already given me one warning about it, tired and not unkind but clear: one more and she’d have to start cutting my hours. Then the bills would stack up even higher than they already were.

I called the diner. Dave answered on the second ring, the kitchen noise loud behind him.

“Patsy’s.”

“It’s Lark. I was going to drive this morning, but my car’s --” I paused, hearing the edge in my voice, and smoothed it out. “Car trouble. Working on getting there.”

He grunted. “Figure it out. We’re swamped, and you know Patsy’s already watching your hours.”

“I know. I’m working on it.”

I hung up and stood in the driveway with the phone warm in my hand, already moving through the short list of bad options. Walking would take forty minutes I didn’t have. The bus didn’t run this early on my side of town. I didn’t know anyone nearby well enough to call at six-forty in the morning and ask for a ride. Admitting that out loud, even just to myself, stung more than I wanted it to. The tow truck was the only real option left, however slow, so I dialed the only company in town and got their voicemail. Of course. I started leaving a message, my voice steady in a way that surprised me, and was halfway through giving my address when I heard the rumble.

Not a car. Deeper. Slower. A motorcycle.

I didn’t look up right away. The sound rolled down the street and then cut off as the engine died at the curb. Gravel shifted under boots. I kept talking into the phone, when a hand reached across and gently took the phone from my fingers.

“I’ve got it,” Roulette said.

I straightened up and found him standing beside me, close enough that I could smell the leather of his jacket and the clean, soapy note underneath it. His gaze swept over the car -- the angle of the cuts, both tires on the same side targeted -- and his expression cooled. Not surprise. Colder than that.

“I didn’t ask you to,” I said.

He was already pulling out his phone. “Cotton. Need two tires for a Honda Civic, last gen.” He rattled off my address without missing a beat, easy, like he’d said it a hundred times before.

I hadn’t told him where I lived. And he hadn’t explained why he was standing in my driveway at six-forty in the morning either -- hadn’t called first, hadn’t texted, had just appeared with the sun barely up like he’d known to be here. Both of those things should have set off every alarm I had left. Instead, standing there watching him take charge of a problem I’d been failing to solve alone for the last ten minutes, I felt something closer to relief than fear, and that unsettled me more than either fact on its own would have.

He listened for a moment, then hung up. “Twenty minutes.”

“I can handle a tow.”

“You can. Or you can let me put new tires on. You’ll be late. Not stranded.”

I folded my hands against myself. The morning heat was building, pressing against the back of my neck where my hair was pulled into its usual knot. Roulette crouched beside the front tire, studying the cut with the same focused attention he gave everything. His fingers traced the edge I’d touched earlier, but where I’d felt fear, he just looked thoughtful. Calculating.

“I can help,” I said.

He kept his focus on the tire. “Jack’s in the trunk?”

“Yes, but --”

“Under the floor panel?”

I closed my mouth. He already had the trunk open, moving the reusable grocery bags and my gym shoes aside to reach the jack. I stepped forward and reached for the lug wrench where it lay beside the spare.

“I can at least --”

He took it from my hand. Then his eyes met mine, level and calm, until I took a step back.

He had the car jacked up in under a minute, the metal groaning as the weight came off the axles. The lug nuts were rusted -- the car was twelve years old and had spent most of those years in Missouri humidity -- and I watched the tendons in his forearm flex as he broke each one loose. A grunt escaped him on the third nut, a strained effort sound he didn’t bother hiding.

I offered again, quieter this time. “Hand me something.”

He passed me the lug nuts as he removed them, one by one, and I lined them up on the driveway beside my foot. My sneaker tapped against the gravel. Tap. Tap. Tap. The rhythm of trying not to think about how those cuts got there, whose hands had held a blade in the dark, about someone standing where I was standing now while I slept thirty feet away.