Free The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks

hours.
    He glanced at Zeus. “Seems like you’re going to be on your own tonight. I could bring you, but I’d have to leave you outside and I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
    Zeus continued walking, his head down, tongue out. Tired and hot. Zeus didn’t care.
    “I’ll put the air conditioner on, okay?”

5
    Clayton
    I t was nine o’clock on Saturday night, and he was stuck at home babysitting. Great. Just great.
    How else could a day like today end, though? First, one of the girls almost catches him taking pictures, then the department’s camera gets stolen, and then Logan
Thigh-bolt
flattens his tires. Worse, he’d had to explain both the loss of the camera and the tires to his dad, Mr. County Sheriff. Predictably, his dad was spitting mad and somehow didn’t buy the story he’d concocted. Instead he just kept peppering him with questions. By the end, Clayton had wanted to pop the old man. Dad might be a bigwig to a lot of the folks around here, but the man had no business talking to him like he was an idiot. But Clayton had kept to his story—he’d thought he’d seen someone, gone to investigate, and somehow run over a couple of nails. And the camera? Don’t ask him. He had no idea if it had even been in the cruiser in the first place. Not great, he knew, but good enough.
    “That looks more like a hole made by a buck-knife,” said his dad, bending down, examining the tires.
    “I told you it was nails.”
    “There’s no construction out there.”
    “I don’t know how it happened, either! I’m just telling you what happened.”
    “Where are they?”
    “How the hell should I know? I pitched them in the woods.”
    The old man wasn’t convinced, but Clayton knew enough to stick to his story. Always stick to the story. It was when you started backtracking that people got in trouble. Interrogation 101.
    Eventually the old man left, and Clayton put on the spares and drove to the garage, where they patched the original tires. By then a couple of hours had passed, and he was late for an appointment with one Mr. Logan Thigh-bolt. Nobody, but nobody, messed with Keith Clayton, especially not some hippie drifter who thought he could put one over on him.
    He spent the rest of the afternoon driving the streets of Arden, asking whether anyone had seen him. Dude like that was impossible to miss if only because of Cujo by his side. His search yielded zippo, which only infuriated him further, since he realized that it meant Thigh-bolt had lied to his face and Clayton hadn’t picked up on it.
    But he’d find the guy. Without a doubt he’d find the guy, if only because of the camera. Or, more accurately, the pictures. Especially the
other
pictures. Last thing he wanted was for Thigh-bolt to stroll into the sheriff’s department and drop that baby on the counter—or even worse, head straight to the newspaper. Of the two, the department would be the lesser of two evils, since his dad could keep a lid on it. While his dad would blow a gasket and most likely put him on some crap detail for the next few weeks, he’d keep it quiet. His dad wasn’t good for much, but he was good for things like that.
    But the newspaper . . . now that was a different story. Sure, Gramps would pull some strings and do his best to keep it quiet there, too, but there was no way that sort of information could be kept in check. It was just too juicy, and the news would spread like wildfire through this town, with or without an article. Clayton was already regarded as the black sheep of the family, and the last thing he needed was another reason for Gramps to come down on him. Gramps had a way of dwelling on the negative. Even now, years later, Gramps was still bent that he and Beth had divorced, not that it was even his business. And at family gatherings, he could usually be counted on to bring up the fact that Clayton hadn’t gone to college. With his grades, Clayton could easily have handled it, but he simply couldn’t imagine