Ari shook her head. “On a Friday night? Plus, you didn’t get in ’til past two.”
“I don’t know if you want to play the ‘What time did you get home?’ game right now.”
Huh, so he knew how late she’d come in the other night. Ari played dumb, because what was she going to tell him? Lie and say that she stayed at the gym for four hours? The truth, that she made out with some guy she never met against a dirty club wall until the bouncer kicked them out? Oh and by the way, he happened to be the director of the program her client just moved into.
She opted to deflect. “Don’t tell me, you hooked up with Veronica from accounting. Again.”
“She’s really hot.”
“I’ve heard.”
He held up his hands and said, “She and I are like two magnets. The kind that snap together with incredible force. We’re drawn to one another. Typically over a desk or under a desk or somewhere near a desk. We’re on the clock, you know.”
“You’re going to get fired.” They reached the top of the hill and began an easier coast for the last mile. Their goal was in sight. A sweet, delicious, run-worthy goal.
“Possibly, if everyone else in the office wasn’t doing something similar or worse.” He gave Ari a wolfish grin.
“I don’t even want to know.”
“You really don’t.”
At the end of four miles, the roommates raced to their reward. Sticky and delicious doughnuts from a shop near their home. Once purchased, they exited the shop and walked back to the house. Weekend runs started as a way to fight off the extra weight and stress being part of the workforce inevitably caused. Plus, it gave them an excuse to get doughnuts afterwards.
“Try this,” Ari said, breaking off a piece of her Nutella cream puff.
Oliver took the doughnut out of her hand and popped it in his mouth. “Ohgodthat’sawesome,” he mumbled.
They reached their street and Ari noticed something weird in the driveway. “Why is my car leaning like that?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver said. He jogged ahead. “Oh shit.”
“What?” she ran up to him but stopped hard when she saw her car up close. “Motherfudger!”
Two of her tires had been slashed and the entire left panel of her car had key scrapes down the side. Ari’s car wasn’t especially nice. Honestly, it was a piece of junk, but she owned it outright and she tried to take care of it. A wave of anger washed over her. “Asshats,” she said, breaking her own non-cursing rule.“They did this while we were running? In broad daylight?”
“Pretty nervy,” Oliver said, looking up and down the street. It was early enough on a Saturday morning that no one else was out. “Probably only took them a couple of minutes.”
“This sucks,” Ari said, leaning against the lopsided car.
“Let me go call the police.”
Since it was a non-emergency, it took the officer almost an hour to get there. She’d sent Oliver inside for a shower since she was able to deal with this herself. As soon as the officer got out of the car Ari recognized him from the armed robbery at the hardware store.
“Didn’t expect to see you so soon,” Officer Baker said. He kneeled by her car, surveying the damage. “Any idea who did this?”
“Not specifically,” Ari snorted. “But I could probably make a short list.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You have a lot of enemies or something?”
“I’m a juvenile probation officer. I have a caseload of 60 kids. I could narrow it down to about 15 that hate me at the moment.”
Officer Baker whistled. “Yeah, that could be a problem. Or it could be random. Did they take anything?”
“Nope. Just messed up the car.”
“So, yeah, probably retaliation of some kind. Who’s at the top of your list?”
Ari thought about it. She had two boys on runaway status right now—both with outstanding warrants Ari issued when they’d failed to make curfew. Then there was Hope, but she was in lockup. There wasn’t much she could do from inside. She thought back to Jace Watkins and the armed robbery, but Ari still thought he hadn’t recognized her. If so, he would’ve probably done a lot more than slit her tires.
“I’ll write the names down,” she said, taking the pad from Officer Baker. She wrote down three or four, adding Jace’s name at the bottom.
“That’s the kid from the robbery last week,” Baker said, looking over the names. “The one that got away. You didn’t tell me he was a client of yours.”
“He’s not. He aged out a while back but I recognized him from our program. If he saw me that day, he may think he needs to scare me.”
Officer Baker frowned and fished out a business card. “I’ll look into this and send you the report for insurance. Be careful and call me directly if anything else happens.” He looked over at her house. “You have a roommate? A dog?”
“Roommate—no dog. But it’s a guy, if that helps.”