Beautiful Disaster

by Laura Spinella

  “Except you.” The words were a reflex, tumbling out of his mouth before he could stop them. In a way, she was right. Leaving would be the humane thing to do.

  “Bottom line, I have nothing but your word.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, sighing. Leaning back into the sofa, Flynn waited once again for judgment to pass.

  “I’m grateful, Mia. Grateful that you haven’t alerted the authorities, that you’re willing to sit alone in a room with me. It’s more than I deserve. I’ll be gone by morn—”

  “Flynn,” she said, lurching forward, her hand grabbing his. “I believe you.”

  He jerked his gaze to hers, unsure if he heard her correctly. “You do?”

  She nodded, pulling closer to him. “You’d never hurt Alena. It isn’t in you. I’m sure of that much.” She smiled at him, displaying the confidence he’d seen emerge in recent months. “I’m Lincoln Montgomery’s daughter, and my instincts are that sure. As for everything else, how you took the fall for what happened . . . I don’t claim to completely understand it. But what’s done is done. My question is what are we going to do about it now?”

  He looked into her expectant face. He hadn’t considered a conversation beyond “I’ll give you a ten-minute head start before I call the police.” What am I going to do about a future that doesn’t belong to me?

  Mia continued on, reading his mind. “Well, it’s not like we’re in a position to seek a new trial now.” His heart caught on the we and he pulled her close. But her body didn’t relax into his. She pushed away, shifting on the sofa. “There’s, um, something else I need to ask you about. It’s something that Roxanne said.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore, her fingers nervously rubbing the nap of the fabric. “Flynn, you’re not . . . Roxanne, she, um, she suggested something to me. I told her it was crazy.” She stopped there, hanging onto the last word as her gaze trailed back over him. “I don’t believe . . . I don’t want to believe it, but Roxanne . . .”

  “Roxanne what? You didn’t tell her—you know, about me and prison.”

  “Of course not! I’d never tell anyone. Don’t you know that you can trust me with anything?”

  “I do trust you,” he said, tipping his forehead against hers. She pulled away again. “I’m sorry. It’s just that, well, I’ve only given you about a million reasons not to trust me, not to ever want to see me again. I know how Roxanne feels about me, and what she might say to keep us apart.”

  Mia’s gaze dashed to his. “She would, wouldn’t she?” Roxanne would say almost anything. “That’s possible, isn’t it?” He offered a vague nod, although she appeared to be waiting for something more. Mia laced and unlaced her fingers with his, almost examining them. “Flynn, tell me something. When you escaped, where did you go? Did you go to your brother’s like you told Roxanne?”

  He started to answer, but stopped, wondering exactly how much more confession she could take. “No, not quite.”

  “You mean you didn’t head southwest? Your brother doesn’t live in that part of the country?”

  “Yes and no. I did go to Arizona. But Alec, he lives in California.”

  “Arizona, I see.” He watched her expression rise and fall with the answer. “Well, if you didn’t go there to see your brother, why were you there? What’s in Arizona?”

  “Look, what I told Roxanne were half-truths.”

  “Half-truths? What does that mean?”

  “Well, she started asking all those questions. I had to say something and I wasn’t really prepared for an inquisition. I just escaped from a federal penitentiary. Do you really think I’d run to a relative? Don’t you think that’s the first place they’d look? What I told her, it just popped into my head. I couldn’t say what I was really doing there.”

  “Why not?” she asked sharply. “What were you doing that was so awful you couldn’t tell her?”

  “Because telling Roxanne that I went there to buy an untraceable vehicle from an ex-con who operates his fugitive-assistance program out of a doublewide in Bisbee might have thrown her already suspicious mind into a convulsion, don’t you think?”

  “Oh,” she said softly. “I guess it would. How did you know to go there? For that matter, how did you escape?”

  “Would you believe a clerical error and one fresh-on-the-job, overzealous guard?” He watched her face, the bend of her delicate brow. It was going to require details. “Okay, it goes like this. It was late afternoon, right around shift change. I was in the infirmary—”

  “Infirmary? Were you sick?” she asked worriedly, her hand reaching to his face as though he still might have a fever.

  “Ah, no,” he said smiling, clasping his fingers around hers, drawing them away. “I kind of met with the business end of a shank.”

  “A what?”

  “Homemade knife. The Marines had their how-to book, so did prison.”

  “A knife—somebody stabbed you?” she said, her eyes pulsing wide. “How bad?”

  “Just a few stitches. Look, Mia, you have to remember where I was. Attempts on someone’s life, it’s not unusual. Anyway, this time the wound had gotten infected—”

  “This time? How many times did they try to kill you?”

  “Let’s just say it happened enough to keep me on my toes,” he said tentatively. “Being ex-special ops made me a rare commodity and a target, if not a trophy. Prison is all about pecking order; taking out former special ops would have gone a long way in assuring a place at the head of the mob. It stood to reason there would always be a next time.”

  “So you didn’t just escape because of the nightmares. You escaped to save your life. They would have gotten to you eventually—killed you, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe . . . probably,” he admitted with a dry swallow. “It was clear that I was going to die or just rot in that prison. At some point you either give into it—or you find another way. Anyway, the situation presented itself and I grabbed it. It came down to the untimely passing of one poor bastard and one wild insane mix-up. There had been an incident earlier that day. An inmate, Lyle Cochran, was killed. Particularly unfortunate for him because he was due to be released that afternoon. Seems he owed a debt that he wasn’t going to make good on before his departure. Because the infirmary is the release point for inmates, all his paperwork had come upstairs, signed off, stamped, and ready to go. It sat on the table right next to me. The only thing left was for Cochran to be handed a change of clothes and to be escorted out. A call came in that a guard had been injured. It must have been serious, because all the medical personnel went tearing out of there. A minute later another guard, one who’d only worked there a month or so, buzzed in to collect his discharge. He already had a nasty-ass reputation, and I wasn’t looking to rattle his stick. He demanded the paperwork and I handed it to him. I started to explain, and he told me to shut the hell up. Said part of his job might be putting scum back on the street, but he sure as hell didn’t have to converse with it.”

  “And he didn’t catch it? He thought he was releasing Lyle Cochran?”

  “Funny thing about military mug shots, all perps tend to have a uniform look. With a shift change underway, that guard was my handler all the way out the front door, expedited me right through the system. He was cocky; more concerned about demonstrating who was in charge, telling me how I’d better watch my ass on the outside rather than doing his job. He never looked twice. I’m sure they realized what had happened fairly quickly, but it was long enough for me to land in a different zip code.”

  “And after that? What made you go to Bisbee?”

  “A while back I’d been talking to a couple of inmates. Supposedly, this guy in Bisbee offered a pre-parole plan to fugitives. I didn’t know if it was just folklore, but they even talked about the freight train you hopped in Oklahoma City to get there. I tucked the information away just in case. I made it to the train yard the next night. Short of drawing me a map it worked out like they said. I bought the bike from him.”

  “Okay, but how�
�d you pay for the bike? I assume he wasn’t giving them away. Where’d you get the money, Flynn? Did . . . did you steal it?”

  He leaned back into the couch, wondering how many crimes she thought him capable of? Guilty or innocent, time served had that effect. “Mmm, I see. What’s a little thievery after doing a stint for murder?”

  “You didn’t murder anyone,” she insisted. Then in a smaller voice, “You didn’t murder Alena. I told you, I believe that.” There was an awkward hesitation between them as Mia looked hard at him. It was as if she was trying to look right through him. “People steal for a lot of reasons. I could understand if you were scared or desperate. It might make you do, I don’t know, crazy things.”

  “Crazy things? Exactly what kind of crazy things are we talking about? What’s Roxanne filling your head with? No, I didn’t steal it. Though I guess it’s an obvious conclusion—for both of you. I earned the money. In prison. Unconventional methods maybe, but I did earn it.”

  “Earned it?”

  “Yeah, prison details,” he said, shifting again, unable to get comfortable with her and the topic. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I’m a big girl, Flynn. Unless you’re going to start telling me stories that involve a shower and a bar of soap.”

  He held up a hand to stop her. “I assure you it never got that ugly, at least not for me. Long story short, prison is a dangerous place and protecting yourself is like the sun coming up. It’s just going to happen every day. For some people, protection is a service well worth paying for.”

  “You mean you took money from people who would have otherwise gotten hurt? Flynn, that’s—”

  “That’s prison, Mia. It wasn’t the fucking Boy Scouts. It wasn’t a vacation. It wasn’t even the Marines. It was hell, and you do what you have to do. I was in for the long haul, and it was part of surviving.” He got up from the couch, distancing himself from her and his latest confession. “I could have been the one doing the hurting. Maybe that would be easier for you to believe.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” she said, rushing to his defense. “Would you?”

  “I’m no angel, sweetheart,” he said, looking hard at her. “I’m not going to stand here and defend my past; it’s not worth defending. I’d like to think that that kind of violence isn’t in me anymore. But like those guys at the concert, or a nightmare I can’t find a way out of, you never know what will challenge it. You’ll have to decide for yourself what you can accept and what’s just too much.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do.” Mia rose from the sofa and wandered toward the window, staring. “These past weeks, I’ve thought a lot about the things you did. Trouble is I only ended up thinking about where you were. I hate it, you in that place. And now, with what you just told me—you can’t ever go back there.”

  “Mia, I don’t want your sympathy,” he said roughly. “It’s not your cross to bear. What I want to know right now is what Roxanne told you. What’s she got me doing, armed robbery? Maybe some drug trafficking through the Midwest?”

  Mia moved silently across the room, standing opposite him. She picked up his sunglasses from the bar top, toying with the frames. “No, not drugs. Girls, it has to do with girls.”

  “Girls, what girls?”

  “Along the way to here, were there a lot of girls?”

  “You mean that I, um, picked up, had sex with? Is that what we’re talking about?”

  “Yeah, were they all college girls like me?”

  “Like you? No, sweetheart, none like you.” He laughed, but she barely smiled.

  “That’s nice, Flynn, but I wasn’t fishing for a compliment. Could you just tell me, were they all college girls.”

  “I don’t know, I suppose some were. I did tend to gravitate toward college towns, the bigger the better. It’s the easiest place in the world to get lost. But I didn’t ask them to fill out a survey before. Or after, for that matter,” he said shrugging. “Conversation was, um, limited. Do you really want to talk about this? I think I’d rather tell you prison stories.”

  “Yes, I . . . I need to know, about the girls.” She took a deep breath as if bracing for the answer. “So you went to lots of different college towns? There were lots of women? Like how many?”

  He shifted his stance, imagining the sleazy stories Roxanne had dreamt up. “I don’t know, a bunch, a few. I didn’t keep a fucking diary—they weren’t that memorable,” he snapped, hearing Roxanne’s voice more than Mia’s. Flynn rolled his eyes. “What? You want me to do the math?” Mia offered the smallest hint of a shrug. “Okay, fine,” he said tightly. “I’ve been on the run about two years. Let’s see, that’s three or four girls a month, maybe five on occasion—let’s face it, I did spend a lot of years locked up.” Flynn crossed his arms, squinting toward the ceiling as if in deep concentration. “Where does that leave us? Ninety-six, ninety-seven—ah, hell, let’s just go with a round number and call it an even hundred.” He watched her grip tighten around the sunglasses, realizing that perhaps he’d gone too far. His voice softened. “Mia, I’m kidding.” She wouldn’t look at him, her stare concentrated on the glasses. “Really, it was probably more like eight, ten at the most.” Flynn moved forward, clasping his hand over hers. “Exactly what kind of details are you looking for, sweetheart?”

  “Did you spend the night with them?”

  Her willingness to pursue the topic surprised him—the prosecutor’s daughter. He backed away. “The night?” he asked, beginning to wonder if gratuitous sex was really at the crux of Roxanne’s accusation. “If I stayed more than a couple of hours it was a lot. We never got into a discussion of breakfast menus. But what I want to know is, why do you want to know?”

  “It’s just that Roxanne said . . .”

  “Okay, hold it right there,” he said, taking a step toward her. “I’m having a definite problem with sentences that start with ‘Roxanne said.’ I . . . I thought you were past this, buying into what Roxanne thinks. Exactly what is she accusing me of?”

  “I’ll be right back.” Mia dropped the sunglasses onto the bar top and turned the corner into Roxanne’s bedroom.

  Chapter 21

  Mia stared at the news stories tucked between two books on the shelf. She thought about just handing them over, demanding that he explain. Then she considered the hurt look on his face a few moments before, when she’d only accused him of stealing. Confront him, ambush him with this and he probably wouldn’t even bother saying good-bye. Trust and blind faith were drawing a fine line between one another. She squeezed her eyes shut tight and reached for the papers.

  A rush of guilt nearly threw her off balance as Flynn interrupted. “Mia? What are you doing?”

  His soft voice held her steady. She spun around, looking at him, waiting to be accused, tried, convicted—all within the context of Roxanne’s theory, some circumstantial evidence, and a road map. Mia guessed that his court-martial was as swift and calculated as Roxanne’s rush to judgment. She’d made a good case for guilt, but what made him innocent? There had to be something. Mia took a breath, treading carefully with one fact at a time. “You know Roxanne, how suspicious she can be. Well, she thinks . . . She’s got this crazy idea that you killed a girl,” she said softly. “That girl from Birmingham, Alabama. You remember—on the news?” There was silence from the doorway and she thought he hadn’t heard her. “Flynn?”

  “Roxanne told you what? She said what?”

  “The girl from the University of Alabama. She was murdered right before we met in June. Actually, it was the day before we met. You said that you came here from there. You told me that at the Odyssey. Do you remember?”

  “Wait, this is just Roxanne’s twisted sense of humor, right? Jesus, Mia, the girl needs to get a hobby or a boyfriend or maybe just a good . . .” He stopped. “Holy shit, she’s serious.”

  “Answer the question, Flynn.” Mia sensed the shift, felt the trust between them strain.

  “No, I really don’t remember. But
does it matter what I say?” His voice was incredulous and cold. “Looks like you’ve already got your mind made up. Though even I have to admit, it’s a very dramatic ending. Roxanne ought to rethink her major. Holly-wood could use her.”

  “Ending for what?” He didn’t answer, heading for the apartment door. Mia raced around the corner, his hand already on the knob. “Flynn, wait! Just listen to me. You told me the night we met that you’d never hurt another human being ‘like that’—with your hands. Even then I could see it in your eyes, something so awful it made your stomach sick to look in a mirror. I understand. I understand how what happened to Alena makes you feel. You can’t live with it when you’re awake, and I’ve seen how it haunts you in the dark. Somebody who feels that much wouldn’t do that to another person, not intentionally. But I do believe the guilt you feel over her death is—consuming.” She grabbed the sunglasses, thrusting them at him. “Your hair, the beard, it’s not a disguise to keep some cop from making a connection, from recognizing you. It’s so you see someone else when you look in the mirror.” He looked away, gripping his arms tightly around himself as if to hold in everything she exposed. “I believed what you said that night. I still want to believe it, but I want . . . I want . . .”

  “You want proof, Mia, and I can’t give it to you. I can’t prove I wasn’t in Birmingham any more than I could prove I was on the moon. Hell, I don’t exist except for right here in this room with you. You are the only thing that has given me a moment’s peace since . . . since that day. And God help me, I let you. But if this is where we’re going, where we are—well, what the hell’s the point?”

  “The point is that I’m trying to understand everything you’ve been through, to put it into some kind of context.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that. If you can make sense of my life, sweetheart, you’re a fucking giant step ahead of me,” he said, his face stony, his expression bleak. “But I can tell you this; I won’t defend myself to anything Roxanne has to say. Her dislike for me goes back to a cold stare from across a bar. And her need to judge is only outdone by her need to control. Influence, Mia—you shouldn’t let either one of us have any over you. We both tend to lead you places you probably shouldn’t go.”