Gizmo glanced at the girl huddled on the other side of the pickup cab. She held an ice pack to one eye with one hand while the other wrapped around knees pulled up against her chest as she stared out the side window in silence. Guilt bubbled low in his stomach. Worse than anything was his part in all this. He’d come up with the plan. Still, getting her home to her father would make it worth it in the end. He hoped.
They"d manufactured a fight between a couple of his brothers, carefully engineered so she would be nearby and get hit. It wasn"t bad, only a black eye, or the beginnings of one, but he"d insisted on taking her to have it checked out. She hadn’t wanted to go, but the emergency room was the only way they could get her "discovered" so Deanna had a chance to see her and call it in.
