They both carried backpacks with them; if anyone glanced, they would probably think they were members of the football team, trying to talk to their coach. If they took a closer look, they would wonder why two grown men were carrying backpacks, but they were hoping that a short glance would be all the notice that anyone paid them. Once they got to the back, they realized this was much better. There were huge trees that were overgrown and no houses that backed up to this one.
“Mind if I do this?” Layne grinned at the other man. At one time, they probably would have argued over who would do the breaking and entering.
Rooster moved back and swept his hand out. “Be my guest.”
He watched as Layne reached up over the door, feeling for any kind of alarm system. Then he walked to the side of the house and checked the wires leading in before walking back over. Once he was satisfied that there was nothing that would let someone know they were there, he got to work. Rooster watched as he manipulated the lock, and less than a minute later, he had the door open. He had to admit that it would have taken him longer.
“You can clear the building,” Layne told him softly.
There was no more grinning and joking. A part of Layne’s PTSD could sometimes be triggered by clearing buildings, and neither one of them wanted him to have a flashback here. They couldn’t afford for him to, not when they weren’t sure about what they would be facing inside.
“Got it covered,” Rooster told him, pulling a gun of the small of his back. It had been a long time since he’d done this, and to be honest, he was looking forward to it.
Rooster took point like he always had at his previous job. His heart rate slowed down and his eyes became alert, his ears listening for anything that was off, taking in all his surroundings. He went through the kitchen, living room, and the bathroom before he came back to get Layne.
“All I’ve got left are the two bedrooms. Come with me in case there’s something in there I can’t handle on my own. Those doors are shut, and I don’t want you to be surprised if someone besides me comes outta this house.”
They went inside and stopped at the door to the first one. Rooster put his hand on the knob and nodded at Layne. Pushing the door open, they breached the room, only to find it empty. Moving to the second door, they did the same. This time, however, to their shock, there was a baby in a crib and a woman lying on the bed.
“Is she alive?” Layne asked, gesturing towards the woman. She had a tourniquet wrapped around her bicep, a needle in her arm, and her breathing was slow. Much too slow for the two of them to feel good about the situation.
“Barely.” Rooster came over to stand beside her, assessing her like he’d assessed victims for years. “Ma’am, can you hear us?”
Her eyes popped open and both men looked at one another. They had enough experience to know that she didn’t have much time left. Whatever she’d taken was coursing through her body at an alarming rate, and it was getting to be too much for her system to take. They were going to have a dead body on their hands in the next few minutes.
“Where did you get this?” Layne gestured to the needle in her arm.
She reached over towards him, pointing towards the closet. Layne walked over and opened the door, whistling. “There’s a ton of shit in this closet.” He looked back at Rooster. It looked like a medical facility storage room. Vials were stacked on top of vials. There were some names he knew, others he’d never seen before in his life. He knew, however, that most of it was high grade, and whatever this woman had taken, it was going to be the end of her. God, he hated that, because she looked young.
“She’s fading. What are you doing here? Who was the coach to you? Is this your daughter?” He glanced over at the baby, asleep in the crib, oblivious to everything going on around her. What the fuck were they going to do with a baby? What about all the questions he had?
“Please,” she wheezed. “Find her a good home. Let her have the life I didn’t get to have.”
With those words, she was gone. Layne and Rooster looked at each other, both shocked. They didn’t need a dead body on their hands, that wasn’t what they were here for. That had thrown a wrench in their plans, and now they were going to have to wing it. At least this was the coach’s house and there were enough drugs in the closet to put him away forever. “We gotta get outta here,” Layne said, grabbing up the baby stuff that he could find and carry. “You grab her.”
Rooster looked around, locating a car seat, and picked up the baby, putting her in it. Adalynn was printed on the outside; he assumed that was the child’s name. They quickly made their way out of the house and back across the street to Rooster’s truck. Once there, he reached his hand out to Layne. “Give me one of those burner cells.”
Layne took a deep breath and tossed it across the seat.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Pick up the fucking phone,” Rooster mumbled as he listened to the phone ring in his ear. Finally, he heard the call connect.
“Statesman.”
“Randy? It’s Rooster.” Randy Statesman was one of the top-ranking members of the sheriff’s department and had more seniority than most everyone else combined.
“Rooster?”
“Yeah, look, I don’t have a lot of time to talk.”
“Why are you callin’ me from a burner phone?” He was quick to ask the questions that Rooster didn’t want to answer.
Those questions were not something he wanted to get into and were why he had chosen to call from a burner phone. “That doesn’t matter, but I’m going to give you some info. This didn’t come from me.”
They were quiet for a long time, and Rooster wondered if his old friend would take the info or if he would come looking to bring him in. He was taking a huge chance, but the community needed Larry Thistle locked up, and if they couldn’t take care of it, then the authorities needed to.
Finally, the other man answered. “Alright, this stays between us. What do you have?”
Rooster told him the story of the high school football coach, ending with the coach’s address, the amount of drugs he had in the house, and the fact that there was a dead woman in the bed. He left out the fact that there was a baby. If anyone knew what to do for the baby, it was Meredith. She had been doing placements for over a year at CRISIS. He was sure that Tyler knew that, but privacy laws made it so that she couldn’t tell other people. Secretly, he’d worked with her when he was working for the county. If anyone knew what to do with the baby, it was her. The baby looked to be less than a year old, and it was obvious she’d not had an easy time of it so far.
“I’m sending units out right now, so if you need to leave, you need to go.”
“Thanks, Randy. I owe ya.”
He had no doubt that at some point in the future his old friend would take him up on that favor. He tossed the phone to Layne; Layne cleaned it with a rag and then dumped it out on the ground so that the tires of Rooster’s truck would crush it. With any luck, it wouldn’t be found, not on a heavily traveled road like this.
“Where are we headed?” Layne asked as Rooster fired up the truck and took off out of the neighborhood.
“To take this little girl to the only person that we know who can help her—Meredith. I’m not leaving her in foster care. There’s no telling what might happen to her there. Meredith works with CRISIS, I have no doubt she can either find a family to keep her or figure out what to do with her. I know what happens to kids that go into foster care. I’ve sent a lot of them there already—some of them I’ve seen back out on the streets as barely eighteen-year-old criminals. I feel like this little girl needs more, deserves better. She was going to be alone in that room while her mom died. I can’t leave her life up to chance. I just can’t do it.”
Layne took a deep breath. He’d seen a lot in his years too. “I get it. Let’s take her to people who know what to do with her.”
In the back of his mind, Rooster wondered, what if this had been his and Roni’s child? Would he want that child
to go people who wouldn’t give a shit about it, or would he want that child to go to people who would love her? The answer was without a doubt to people that would love her. “Why don’t you call them and tell them that we’re on our way.”
Meredith and Tyler waited in the front room of their house, watching out the front window for Rooster and Layne to pull up.
“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” Tyler asked, swinging his arm around her shoulder and clasping his hands together at her collar bone. “What if this kid has other people out there who would like to find her?”
“That’s why I called the attorney for CRISIS. This is on the up and up, Tyler. We will look for a next of kin. If there isn’t one, then we’ll deal with it as it comes. Until we find out for sure what we’re dealing with, she will be taken care of. That’s what we’re here for, even though we’ve never been called to be in a placement situation. If Rooster thinks we should do this, then we should. I feel that in my heart”
He sighed heavily into her hair. He had to ask the one question that was burning at the back of his mind. “Okay, then my real question is, can you handle this? What if they do find a relative and the baby goes back?”
“It will be hard, but I have a good feeling about this Tyler. I feel like things happen for a reason, and there was a reason that Rooster and Layne found this child today, of all days. There was a reason they called us, and there was definitely a reason that CRISIS is full and can’t take any more people, no matter how little they are. This will work out fine,” she assured him.
It was hard to trust that things would be fine, especially after they’d gone over a full year, each month hoping that she would be pregnant, and that positive pregnancy test never came. She’d stopped coming to him when it was negative or when her period would come. She’d stopped crying to him about it, and while he wanted to ask her what was going on in her head, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. There was still a part of him that wondered if she blamed him, if she thought that he was the reason the two of them couldn’t have children. They’d undergone every test imaginable. Nothing was wrong with either of them. It just wasn’t meant to be right now, that’s what they kept telling themselves.
“You okay?” she asked, running her hand along his arm.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Just wondering what she looks like.” It was becoming easier to lie to her, to tell her what he thought she wanted or needed to hear. There was a part of him that worried about that. He’d never lied to her before, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her all the things he wanted to about their lack of a child. He felt like he would put their relationship into a much harder place. Instead, he smiled, nodded, and went on about his business. It wasn’t a question of love. He loved her more than he’d ever loved another person in his life, and he would die if he didn’t have her to share his life with, but he wanted to give her everything. Until they had the missing piece, they wouldn’t have everything.
“Is that them?” she asked as she saw a trail of gravel dust coming up the drive.
“Probably, we really need to see about getting the driveway paved,” he mumbled. It had been something that had been on his to-do list forever, or so it seemed.
“Not right now.” She smacked him as they made their way out of the house and onto the front porch.
Layne and Rooster came to a stop, both getting out of the truck. Layne had his arms full of the stuff he’d found that the baby might need, Rooster carried the car seat.
“She’s asleep right now,” he told them, handing it over to Meredith. “But I’m not sure for how long. When she did wake up, she was very disoriented, and we’re not sure how old she is. There’s baby food in the bag, so we’re assuming she’s no longer bottle-fed, but we don’t know for sure.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Meredith assured them. In her time volunteering with the CRISIS center, she had become accustomed to working with whatever information she had. She was good at observing and figuring out on her own what people needed and what needed to be done. It was something she’d worked very hard at doing.
“We think her name is Adalynn,” Layne said as he handed the things over to Tyler. “That’s the name embroidered on the diaper bag and on the car seat, but we weren’t able to find a last name.”
Tyler took the stuff he was handed and started taking it into the house.
“I was worried about bringing her here ’cause I don’t want you to get too attached,” Rooster told her. “But I knew if anyone could love this child, it would be the two of you.”
“We’ll take care of her, and I will look for next of kin, just like I’m supposed to. We’ll do this by the book, Rooster. I promise.” She reached over to hug him. They’d done work together at the CRISIS center that they couldn’t tell other people about, and they knew each other well.
“I know, but I felt the need to lay it out there again. Just in case. You know me; I have to cover all my bases.”
“I know,” she laughed. “But we’ll take good care of her.” Meredith looked down at the baby that slept peacefully in the car seat. Her heart squeezed slightly in her chest and she breathed a sigh of relief. This was one child that wouldn’t be out on the streets tonight, one that would have a warm bed to sleep in and a safe place to rest. Those were the most important things to her, and she wouldn’t stop until she’d helped as many as she could.
“I know you will,” he told them; Tyler had come back out to stand beside her. Reaching out, he shook Tyler’s hand and then reached down, running a finger down the baby’s cheek. “I hope to see her again sometime.”
“I’m almost positive that you will.” Meredith waved at them. “The two of you better get going. It’s getting dark.”
Rooster and Layne made their way back to his truck. He started it, put it in drive, and took off towards the clubhouse. The faster he dropped off Layne the quicker he could be at the one place he wanted to be more than anything—Roni’s arms.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Roni was worried. Not thirty minutes ago she’d gotten a call from Rooster, and he’d not sounded like himself. It had been a long time since she’d heard his voice take the tone it’d taken while she was on the phone with him. He’d specifically asked to meet her out at their swimming hole. He’d asked her to bring a case of beer and a change of clothes.
She parked her car next to the pool of water and wondered whether she should get out and wait for him or stay there. It was late August, but in south central Kentucky they had just hit their stride. What had started out as a cool summer for the most part had turned hot and humid. It was hard to breathe, and she’d heard more than one person at the shop refer to it as feeling like the armpit of Satan.
Oh hell, she was going to be swimming anyway, what did it matter if she got a little sweaty before that happened? She got out, thinking of the last time they had been here. It seemed like so much had happened in such a short amount of time. That was always how it seemed to go with them. They were balls to the wall in everything they did. She leaned against her car and listened closely, she thought she heard someone approaching. When she turned, she saw Rooster’s truck making its way towards her. He stopped beside her car and cut the ignition.
“Hey,” she called to him as he got out and walked over to her. Her breath caught as she got a good look. He was wearing a pair of worn jeans, a tight white T-shirt covered his body, and he had flip flops on his feet. It looked like he’d either been really hot or just gotten out of the shower because his hair was a little wet around the collar.
“Hey,” he said back as he made his way over to her and picked her up in his arms, twirling her around. He buried his nose in her hair and inhaled deeply. He needed the grounding she gave him after what he had just witnessed. “I missed the hell out of you.”
“It’s only been hours,” she told him.
His reply was to tilt the side of his mouth up. “A full twenty-four. Far too fucking long, especially after what I saw today. I need
to be with you,” he told her. There was nothing he wanted more; he had to bury himself in her, whether that be her core, her mouth, didn’t matter. He needed to forget the things he’d seen, the things he’d done. He wanted to just be, and the only place he could do that was with Roni.
“I got you.” She smiled up at him. She didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she’d had some strange text messages, and she’d been able to talk to Meredith for a few moments. She knew some, but not all. Grasping his hand, she pulled him around her car and back to his truck.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his eyebrows coming together. He was a little on edge, just because of everything that had happened. It made him the least bit nervous.
She winked and reached over, letting his tailgate down. Without speaking, her fingers went to the button of his jeans and unhooked it, pushing them down to his knees. He wore no underwear. “Commando?” She quirked a brow at him.
“I knew we were going swimming,” he whispered, stunned when she pushed him back onto the tailgate.
He was hard, his erection already there waiting on her. The tailgate gave her some room so that she wouldn’t have to drop to her knees. She was short enough that all she had to do was bend at the waist.
When she did, the air whooshed out of his body. He anticipated the warm heat of her mouth, and when it did encompass him, he threaded his fingers through her hair, pushing down hard on her. “I’m sorry,” he apologized when he felt her gag reflex kick in.
She put a hand on his thigh and inhaled deeply through her nose before she slowly inched down his length, taking him further and deeper into her throat.
“Damn, Roni,” he moaned, as he untangled his fingers from her hair and reached down to pull the ends of her shirt up. “Move your mouth,” he commanded, and when she did, he got rid of the shirt, leaving her there in a lacy pink bra. “You’re fucking gorgeous,” he told her, reaching out to palm one of her breasts, squeezing and pressing it up against her chest.
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