by HELEN HARDT
I cleared my throat. “It was the right thing to do.”
“I know that, and you know that now. But you were a ten-year-old kid, Talon. Kids don’t see things the way we adults do. So go back to your ten-year-old mind and tell me. What made you want to protect Luke from the bullies?”
I closed my eyes, trying to conjure Luke Walker in my mind. He’d been such a scrawny little thing, kind of reminded me of a scarecrow. His hair was even the color of straw. And those two front teeth stuck out. I figured he’d probably grow into them or get braces at some point.
But braces weren’t in Luke Walker’s future. Luke Walker was denied a future.
“I just hated the bullies. I hated seeing what their actions did to him. The kid walked around like he was scared all the time. No one should have to walk around like that.”
No one indeed.
“So what did you end up doing? How were able you protect Luke?”
“Sometimes I’d wait for his bus with him. Which meant I usually missed my own bus. But Joe and Ryan would get home on the bus and tell my mom that she needed to come get me.”
“And she did?”
“Yeah, she did. My mom was great.”
I wished I hadn’t said that. Now she was going to want to talk about my mom. Shrinks loved to talk about guys and their moms, right? But to my surprise, she continued with the line of questioning about Luke.
“So what happened to you when you protected him? Did the bullies go after you then?”
“Sometimes. But only when Jonah wasn’t around. He was nearly thirteen at the time, and puberty had already started. All three of us were early bloomers. So he’d had quite a growth spurt and was heading toward six feet already, and his voice was in that middle area between high and low. He was strong from working on the ranch. We all were, for that matter. If he was around, and if his best friend was around—his best friend was Luke’s cousin—no one got near Luke.”
“But when Jonah wasn’t around?”
“They ganged up on me a couple times. Ryan was only seven and would try to get in on it, but I’d tell him to stay the hell away and run toward home. Usually he did.”
“But they obviously never did any real damage to you, right?”
“One of them broke my nose. That’s where this little crook comes from.” I touched my nose. “Other than that, they pretty much just knocked the wind out of me, blackened my eyes a couple times. Nothing I couldn’t take.”
“Was it worth it to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was saving Luke worth getting beat up?”
Hell, no. If I’d known what life had in store for Luke, I wouldn’t have bothered. If I hadn’t interfered in his life, maybe he wouldn’t have been where he was that day. And maybe I would have… “Well…yeah, I guess.” Was it a lie? I’d wanted to protect him at the time. Everything else was hindsight.
“You said he wasn’t a great friend of yours or anything, not the kind of kid you wanted to hang out with.”
I squeezed the arms of the chair. “It was just the right thing to do. That’s all.”
“And who taught you that standing up for the little guy was the right thing to do?”
“My dad, I guess. My grandpa. I don’t know if they ever told me in so many words, but I knew right from wrong, and what those bullies were doing to Luke wasn’t right.”
Dr. Carmichael nodded. “So you said Luke disappeared.”
“Yeah, right around the time…” My skin tightened, and blood pushed through my veins.
“Take a few brief deep breaths, Talon.”
I obeyed, breathing in…out…in.
“Deep breathing has a therapeutic value.” she said. “Just two or three deep breaths will calm you down.”
It would take more than two or three deep breaths to calm me down, but the breathing did help take the edge off a little. I loosened my grip on the armchair.
“Joe was with his best friend, Bryce Simpson. Like I said, Bryce was Luke’s cousin—their moms were sisters—and he lived in town with his parents and older sister. One time, Bryce and Joe were out at Luke’s ranch. They were throwing a football around when Luke’s mom came out and asked them to round up Luke for dinner. They couldn’t find him.”
“When was the last time they had seen him?”
Apprehension oozed through me. I hesitated for a moment. Then, “I don’t know. Joe said he had been at lunch, but then he and Bryce had run off to do their own thing. They never saw him again after that.”
“So then what happened?”
“Bryce and Joe told Mr. and Mrs. Walker they couldn’t find Luke. No one was worried yet. They went ahead and ate their dinner, but then when Luke still didn’t show up, the Walkers called the police.”
“And what happened after that?”
“The police came out and questioned the Walkers and Bryce and Joe. I remember my dad had to go over because Joe was a minor and the police couldn’t talk to him without a parent present. They came home later that night, and Dad told us that Luke was missing.”
“And what did you think?”
I swallowed the knot lodged at the base of my larynx. “I thought the bullies had gotten him.” And indeed the bullies had. Only not the bullies I thought at the time.
“Did you tell the police that?”
I gulped again. “Yeah. I felt really terrible for not being there to protect Luke, and then I got in real trouble with the bullies for implicating them, let me tell you. As it turned out though, all the bullies had ironclad alibis, so they were exonerated right away. After that, no one really knew where to look. The police stalked around the ranch for days, looking for clues, but they didn’t find anything—at least not anything that helped.”
“What do you mean ‘not anything that helped?’ Did they find something unusual?”
Nausea rose in my throat, putrid and acidic. “Yeah.” I exhaled. “They found a black ski mask.”
Dr. Carmichael cleared her throat. “That doesn’t seem so unusual here in Colorado. Lots of people ski.”
“The Walkers didn’t, apparently.”
“What about other people who hung out at the ranch? Your brother and Bryce, for example.”
“The Steels have never been big skiers, believe it or not. I don’t know about Bryce. But obviously the black ski mask didn’t lead to anything.”
I gripped the chair again in the devil’s clench. Tried the deep breathing again. I had to maintain… Had to move forward…
“That’s good, Talon,” Dr. Carmichael said, standing. “Breathe in, breathe out. Excuse me for a moment. I want to get you some water.”
“No!”
Dr. Carmichael stilled, her face unreadable.
“I… No.”
“All right. A soda?”
I nodded. “That would be great. Soda. Please.”
“Regular or diet?”
“Regular.”
She came back with a cola. I opened it and took a deep drink, letting the cold liquid soothe my throat.
“Ready to talk again?”
I nodded.
“So what happened next?”
“A couple of days went by, and we didn’t hear anything about Luke. My dad would call every day for an update, but the police didn’t have any leads, and nothing had been found other than the black ski mask. Joe and I both took this kind of hard, because his best friend was Luke’s cousin, and I had always kind of protected Luke, even though we weren’t great friends. So one day, Joe, Ryan, and I decided to go into town and talk to the police. We rode our bikes. It’s a couple hours. But we made it and walked right in there. I think it was a Saturday.”
“Why didn’t you ask your father to take you?”
“We did. He said no, that we had work to do around the ranch, and that he had been calling every night and there wasn’t any new news.”
“Did you think the police were holding something back? Is that why you went?”
I shook my head. “We we
re kids, Doc. Someone we knew was missing. Someone who meant something to us. We were impatient. We just wanted to know what was going on.”
She nodded. “I understand. So what happened when you got to the police station?”
“Joe walked right in there and demanded to see the chief of police.” I chuckled, remembering. “He thought he was such a big shot. But it was Saturday, so the police chief wasn’t even in. Just a couple of uniformed officers. Of course they told us no, that we couldn’t talk to anyone without our parents, and to please leave. Joe started to make a stink about it, and we were ushered out.”
“And then?”
“We got an ice-cream cone and rode our bikes home. Dad was steaming mad that we had gone off and didn’t know where we were. There were no cell phones in those days.”
“I would guess he was quite upset,” Dr. Carmichael said. “After all, a kid had just gone missing. He was probably afraid the same thing might happen to his children.”
Wow. I’d never thought of that. Dad had been pretty over the top that day. Normally he didn’t care if we ran off and had some fun, especially on the weekends. I didn’t voice this, though.
“So you couldn’t get help from the police. What next?”
“The next week we went back to school. It seemed strange without Luke there.”
“But you and Luke weren’t really good friends, right?”
“No.”
“Then why was it strange?”
“I… I just had a weird feeling. I can’t really put it into better words than that. The black ski mask…”
God, the black ski mask.
“Anyway, I wanted to go up to Luke’s ranch and look around. I asked Joe and Ryan to go with me. We would get on Luke’s bus instead of our own after school. Jonah said no. He had stuff to do at home, but maybe he’d go with us some other time.” I drew in a deep breath. “But I was dead set on going that afternoon, and Ryan decided he would go with me.”
I’ll go with you, Tal. He’d put his hand in mine. I’d kept telling him he was too old for that, that boys didn’t hold hands. God, the kid had followed me everywhere.
“So you and Ryan went, alone, to Luke’s ranch.”
I nodded, my vision blurring… If only I could go back…back…go back, not go to the Walkers’ that day…
Again I clenched my fingers into the armchair… My heart beating rapidly… My stomach churning… My bowels clenching…
I heaved…and blackness curtained around me.
The boy had been walking with his little brother for about an hour. Their tummies were full. Mrs. Walker had given them oatmeal cookies and watermelon when they showed up at her door. “Y’all can look around if you want to,” she’d said. Her eyes were recessed and sad. “Just come back before dark. Do your mom and dad know you’re here?”
The boy had nodded. It was a lie, but their older brother would tell their parents when he got home.
“This is where they found the mask,” the boy said, more to himself than to his brother. The boy looked around. Nothing was visible. Even the Walkers’ house had faded from view this far out. The cattle must not have grazed in this area, because the grass was tall. It brushed his knees.
In the distance stood a little shack.
“Let’s go check out that building,” the boy said to his brother.
His little brother nodded, and they traipsed forward.
The wood was gray and splintered, old. The boy reached out to touch the knotty surface, when—
“Talon! Auuuughh!”
He turned at his brother’s blood-chilling scream, his heart drumming. Two figures had emerged from the structure, dressed all in black, their faces obscured by ski masks. Two large hands held his brother by the shoulders.
Fear and rage rose in the boy. “You leave my brother alone!”
The other pair of hands lunged toward him, but before they could grab him, the boy ran into the man holding his brother, kicking at his shins. “Let go! Let go! Let go!”
The boy was no match for the grown man, and the other had grabbed the back of the boy’s shirt. Still, the boy kicked, determined to free his brother. Brittle fragments of fear inched up his spine, but still he kicked, even as the other man dragged him away. He lodged one last punt with his steel-toed boot to the man’s crotch. His brother fell from the man’s grip onto his knees in the dirt.
“Run!” the boy yelled “Run back to the house! Get Dad! Run, run, run!”
The little boy stood, dazed, immobile.
“Damn it, I said run!”
The other man still held his crotch but got to his feet. The first one shoved the boy down onto the ground. He could no longer see his brother.
Please be running. Please get help, he pleaded silently to his brother.
The boy kicked and screamed, but two grown men were too much for him. They hauled him into the small building.
And lying on a bed by one wall, unconscious, was the boy he’d been looking for.
Luke.
Chapter Thirty
Jade
I checked my watch as I stood outside the courtroom with Talon’s attorney, Peter O’Keefe. Colin hadn’t shown up yet, for which I was grateful, but neither had Talon.
“Have you been in touch with your client?” I asked O’Keefe.
He nodded. “Yes. We’ve been exchanging e-mails, and I texted him half an hour ago as a reminder.”
Just then, Talon emerged at the head of the stairs and walked toward us. I breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“Cutting it a little close, aren’t you?” O’Keefe said.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
He looked like hell. Though he was wearing a navy-blue suit, it was wrinkled and untidy. His blue-and-black striped tie was crooked, and his hair was a tousled mess. A tousled sexy mess, actually, but this was a courtroom. His eyelids were droopy and his eyes caved-in, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. And even though I knew he didn’t sleep, he didn’t look normal to me.
I simply nodded. I needed to act impartial during these proceedings for Talon’s sake.
I looked at my watch again. We were first on the docket. We should get in there.
I was still on edge. Would Colin show up and wreak havoc? I wouldn’t put it past him.
I sat on the prosecution side, and Talon and his attorney sat on the other side. Within a minute, the bailiff entered.
“All rise. Municipal Court of the city of Snow Creek is now in session. The Honorable Alayna Gonzales presiding.”
The judge walked in, sat down at her bench, and took a seat.
“You may be seated,” the bailiff said. “First case on the docket is People versus Talon Steel.”
I moved to the prosecution’s table while Talon and O’Keefe moved to the defense. I remained standing. “Jade Roberts for the city, your honor.”
“Peter O’Keefe for the defense.”
“Mr. Steel,” Judge Gonzalez said, “I understand you wish to enter a plea bargain in this case.”
“Yes,” Talon said.
O’Keefe nudged him.
“Your honor.”
I cleared my throat. “Your honor, the city is willing to accept a plea bargain for reckless endangerment along with a five-hundred-dollar fine and reasonable restitution paid to the alleged victim in this case.” Who still hadn’t shown up, thank God.
“And this is agreeable to you, Mr. Steel?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Since the defendant has no prior arrests on record, I see no reason not to approve this plea bargain. Counselors, I’ll leave you two to work out the details. This case is dismissed.” She pounded her gavel on the wooden surface.
My heart was beating a mile a minute.
Colin hadn’t shown up, thank God.
I didn’t have any other cases today, so I was done here. I had to go back to the office and work a full day though. And first thing on my agenda was finding copies of all the news articles that Marj and I had looked at the d
ay before.
I moved over to the defense table and shook O’Keefe’s hand. “Thank you. It was a pleasure working with you, Mr. O’Keefe.”
He smiled. “Peter, please.”
“Very well. Call me Jade.” I turned to Talon. “I’m glad it all worked out.”
He nodded quickly but didn’t say anything to me. Something was off—more off than usual. And where the hell was Colin? After that scene he’d made Saturday night, I’d more than expected him to show up in court. None of this made any sense. I couldn’t try to figure it out though. I had to get to work.
I headed to the building next door. I said a quick hello to Michelle and then went into my office. A few minutes later, Larry showed up in my doorway.
“How did the Steel case go today?”
“It went fine. The judge accepted the plea bargain.”
“No jail time?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Given the lack of severity of the misdemeanor, I felt it was in the best interest of the people to get a chunk of the Steels’ money rather than spend the taxpayers’ money to keep him in jail. He’s not a threat to society. This was his first offense of any kind.”
“Sounds good. Though I wouldn’t have minded him getting locked up. At least for a few nights.”
I jerked backward. Had I heard him right? “Larry, what makes you say that? Do you have a history with the Steels?”
He shook his head quickly. Too quickly. “No. But those three boys walk around town acting like they own the place. Just because they have the most successful ranch in Colorado.”
I bit my lip. Boys? All three were a head taller than my boss. “Why are you having me investigate them again?”
“I told you before. That’s classified. Have you found anything yet?”
“Nothing that I haven’t already advised you about. But I’ll get back on it today and see what I can find.”
“Great. Thanks, Jade.” He left my office.
Man, something bothered me about that guy. He had a creepy vibe to him, something that went far beyond his questionable ethics as an attorney. If only I knew—
Larry Wade. His last name was Wade.