by J. A. Huss
I look at the crowd of people I have to get through. “Shit, Danny.” But when I look back, he’s gone. I swallow hard, holding Olivia tightly to my chest. She’s still asleep, even with all this noise. Something is definitely wrong with her.
I start pushing people out of my way and end up crashing into a short girl about my height. She spins around, beer spilling out of her red cup, and I say, “Sorry.”
It’s that girl I insulted back on the first day of the semester in front of the PE field.
“Oh, look who it is,” she says, slurring her words. “Pinche puta. You’re not fucking Mexican, huh? Then why do you live in my hood, bitch?”
I push past her, my eye on the prize. The back gate. But she grabs my arm, and when I turn around, there’s a lot more of them now.
“Put the baby down, bitch,” one girl says. She’s a lot taller than me. And a lot meaner-looking too. “Or we’ll kick your ass while you hold it.”
“It?” I see red. “Touch me, and I’ll cut your tits off and feed them to my dog, cunt. But if you do decide to mess with me, you better take your best shot, and you better make it good. Because you won’t get a second chance.” I am fluent in street venom. I can spew threats with the best of them. It works in my favor, because it stops the whole group of them for a moment.
And that moment is all I need, because someone yells, “Cops!”
Everyone starts screaming, and the girls turn. I bolt to the back of the property, slip alongside of the garage where Danny told me to go. And find a six foot tall chain-link gate.
Locked.
I turn around, panicked, and find the girls have followed me.
“Looks like a good spot to kick some ass,” one says.
“I bet it’ll take those pigs five minutes at least to make their way back here.”
“That’s more time than we need.”
I let out a long breath and resign myself to a fight. I don’t fight much. I’m not even that good at it. I depend on my mouth to talk my way out of things ninety-nine percent of the time. But these girls are not fucking around. They are gonna kick my ass. They come at me and the first one takes a swing at my face, but I duck, clutching Olivia to my chest.
Then the gate rattles and I whirl around and see Danny there with the key. “Get the fuck off, Maria,” he snaps. “Get the fuck off her, or I swear, I will beat your ass myself.” He opens the gate and lets me through as the girls try to follow, calling out insults. But Danny closes it back up and clamps the padlock together.
They scream at him. But he takes my hand and we run towards my street.
A car cuts us off and two officers get out with their guns drawn. “Down on the ground, Alexander!” they yell.
Holy fuck, I might have a heart attack.
Danny puts his hands up and looks at me. “I’m fine, don’t worry. Whatever they’re here for, it’s not me.” He kneels and then they come and push him face first into the grass, stepping on his back as they cuff him with those plastic zip tie things.
“Shannon!”
I spin around again and find Mateo climbing over the back gate where we just came out of.
“LA, huh?” Danny says up to me, still under the shoe of one of the officers.
I just stare down at him. And feel very, very sad. He was right. Why else is Mateo here?
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Are you OK?” Mateo asks. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
I just stare at him. And then Olivia stirs in my arms and I remember. “Oh, my God. I think something’s wrong with my niece.” I say it to the cops, not Mateo. Not Danny. I really need help and these guys are not the knights I imagined them to be. “She’s not waking up right.”
“Did you give her anything?” one cop asks.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “She was in there.” I nod to Phil’s house. “My brother-in-law left her with his girlfriend and I was taking her home. But something’s wrong. I think she needs a doctor.”
“I’ll take them,” Mateo says.
And if I didn’t know it already, this is the clincher. Because one says, “OK, we got what we needed and all that’s left is to search the house, but we’re going to need to question her. So as soon as you take care of the kid, bring the girl down for a statement.”
Mateo grabs me by the arm and starts leading me across the street. One of his cars is parked there—not the Camaro or the Mustang, one we’ve never driven in before. I’ve seen it in the garage.
I don’t have a seat for Olivia and this makes me nervous, but her slow breathing and lack of response pushes that minor panic right out of my head.
I want to question Mateo. Ask him about so many things. But I can’t stop hugging Olivia. “Something is wrong with her, Mateo. Hurry.”
Mateo sticks a flashing light on the top of his car and speeds to the hospital where he pulls into the emergency drop-off. “Something’s wrong with her,” I tell the receptionist at the check-in desk. “She’s not waking up. She’s not breathing right.”
“Sit down,” Mateo says, pointing to a chair. “I’ll take care of it.”
“No,” I say, getting pissed off. “This is an emergency. She needs help.”
The receptionist picks up the phone and speaks to a nurse who must work in the back, and then she puts the phone down and says, “Have a seat.”
I take a deep breath. I remember how long it took me to be seen when I came here for my ear and there’s no way I’m going to sit quietly for an hour. “I’m not having a seat. I’ll stand here all fucking night if I have to. I’m not having a seat. Get someone now.”
“Ma’am,” another receptionist says. “You’re not the only emergency here.”
“Goddammit,” Mateo says to me. To me! “Go sit down and I’ll handle it.”
I don’t sit down, but I walk away and watch as Mateo flashes some kind of ID at the lady. She nods and then calls the nurse again. He walks over to me and says, “They’re coming right now.”
“You just didn’t want me to see that, right?” I seethe. “You didn’t want me to know that you work for the police, right?”
He just stares at me. “Later, Shannon. Not here. Not now.”
A nurse calls my name and I hurry over to the door where she’s waiting. “What’s the problem?” she asks, ushering me into the triage area and waving me into a room.
“I don’t know, but she’s sleeping and she won’t wake up.”
The nurse takes Olivia out of my hands and lays her down on the exam table. Olivia’s head rolls to the side and her arms and legs are slack and motionless. I’d think she was dead if I couldn’t see her chest rising and falling. But it’s very slow. Too slow. Even I know this.
The nurse lifts one of Olivia’s eyelids and shines a light in Olivia’s eye. Then she places a tiny device on Olivia’s big toe. A machine struts beeping nearby and I watch the lights dance on the display.
“What did she take?”
“What?” I ask, looking back at the nurse.
“Drugs. What kind of drugs did she get into?”
“She didn’t take any drugs.” But my stomach sinks.
“If she knows,” the nurse says, looking at Mateo now, “she needs to tell me. It will save a lot of time and maybe the baby’s life.”
“Shannon, what did you give her?”
“Me?” He did not just say that. “I didn’t give her anything.”
“It looks like opiate overdose. Pinpoint pupils, depressed respiration, and no response to stimuli.”
“What?” Oh, my God. Jill’s death is flashing back to me. “No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s not possible. That can’t happen.”
She pushes a button and an alarm starts. “You’re going to have to wait outside,” she says, pushing me out of the room while people rush in with a crash cart. “Take her to the triage waiting area,” she tells Mateo.
“Come on, Shannon,” Mateo says, leading me by the arm again.
“Will she be OK?” I
call. But no one answers me.
We end up down the hall and through a doorway, where there’s a small waiting area with a few people looking just as distraught and worried as me. I sit down where Mateo places me, and then he gets a call, checks his phone, and leaves me sitting there.
What the hell is happening? Everything is wrong. Everything is bad.
I sit there in silence for a few minutes, trying to find something—anything—that will help me make sense of my life right now.
I can’t come up with a single thing.
“Shannon?” Mateo says, sitting down in the chair next to me.
“I don’t even want to talk to you right now.”
He lets out a low laugh. “Well, you’re gonna need to. I have a lot of questions.”
“Me too,” I say, looking up at him. “But I don’t have time for you right now, Mateo. I can’t hear any more lies.”
“Lies?”
I huff out a long breath. “You busted Jason tonight? And Phil? Some drug bust, right? Those cops at Danny’s house said you guys got what you needed. You wanna tell me what that was?”
“You can’t possibly be sticking up for them. Tell I’m hearing you wrong.” He stares at me like I’m a stranger.
“Did you bust them?”
“We did. They deserved it. You’re better off, Shannon. It’s for your own good.”
“What?” I ask. “What did you just say?” Danny’s remark about what Mateo said to him when they carted his mother off comes back to me.
“He was hitting you, right? Jason? And regardless of how highly you think of Danny Alexander, Phil Alexander is a whole other story. He was responsible for seven deaths back when we were friends, Shannon. Sold a shitload of coke cut with fentanyl. I bet Danny Alexander didn’t tell you that, did he?”
“What?”
“Fucking figures. Just play stupid a little more, why don’t you.”
“I’m not playing stupid. I’m not from here, Mateo. I have no way of knowing the history of you people. And if that was something I should’ve known”—I seethe the word—“then you should’ve been the one to tell me. Not him.”
“Well,” Mateo says, sighing. “It’s done now. Jason and Phil got caught moving sixty pounds of coke across the border. They’re going away for a very long time.”
I just look at my hands. “I’m happy about that. I am.” I look up at Mateo. “I’m not sticking up for them. But I don’t need you to decide what’s good for me.”
“You sure the fuck do. Because you’ve made a lot of stupid mistakes since we’ve met.”
“Yeah,” I say, looking him dead on. “And my biggest one was trusting you.”
We sit in silence after that. I’m so done with him.
After about an hour two cops come through the waiting room doors. Mateo and I are the only ones left in here. I don’t even know why he stayed. But he gets up and meets them at the door, and then they go back into the hallway to talk.
I cannot believe it’s ending this way. Did he even like me? Or was he using me the whole time just to get to Phil and Jason? He was probably watching me at night to see if I was dealing too. And hey, if you’ve got to keep your eye on an eighteen-year-old girl, why not fuck her in the process?
I feel sick.
“Shannon?” Mateo says from the door. The two cops are next to him, but they walk towards me. One is holding something in his hand. “They need to ask you some questions. You need to be honest.”
“I am honest,” I growl at him.
“Miss Drake,” the one officer says. “Do you recognize this bottle?”
I look at the thing the other officer is holding in his hand. I take it and read the label. “Yes. This is my codeine prescription from when my ear got infected.”
“So it is yours?”
“Yes. It’s got my name on it. It was a legit prescription. Why?” I have a very bad feeling about this.
“Miss Drake,” the other cop says. “We’re gonna read you your rights. You have the right to remain silent.”
“What?” I look up at Mateo and he’s frowning, but makes no move to explain.
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
The other cop takes me by the wrists and places me in handcuffs. “What did I do?” I look at Mateo, pleading. “Tell me what I did!”
“You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?”
“Yes, of course! I didn’t do anything.”
“Miss Drake, your niece is experiencing an overdose of codeine. We believe the pills came from this bottle. Did you feed your niece codeine to make her sleep?”
“No! Of course not! I would never do that! Mateo?” I look at him. “Tell them I’d never do that.”
“I did, Shannon. But you told me on the phone tonight that you were taking care of her.”
“I wasn’t! She was with Jason’s girlfriend. I took her out of that house. I found her like this!”
“She’s going through withdrawals, Miss Drake,” the cop who read me my rights says. “They’ve moved her to Children’s Hospital for treatment. This has been going on for months. They think she was born addicted. Dana Alexander told us something of your sister’s past an she admitted that Jason was lacing the baby’s formula with codeine to make her sleep.”
“Dana Alexander is the one who was taking care of her. And my brother-in-law was the one who always fed her! I didn’t give my baby niece drugs to make her fall asleep!”
The cop with the handcuffs takes me by the arm and leads me towards the door. “It should be easy enough to prove, Miss Drake. Try not to get too upset. We’re booking you in tonight, but Mateo said he’d bail you out, so it won’t be long. You need to show up in court tomorrow.”
I look at Mateo as I pass him and see nothing but disappointment.
He thinks I did this.
He really thinks I did this.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I am booked into the jail. They fingerprint me and take a fucking mug shot. That’s what they do when they arrest you. I have a court appearance scheduled for nine AM, but Mateo insisted as they took me away that he’d have me out in a few hours.
Well, it’s been more than a few hours.
And even though I want to scream and shout that I am getting blamed for something I didn’t do, there is this little niggling thought in the back of my head that I deserve this.
I should’ve noticed something was wrong. Do babies really sleep that much? I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had a baby. But there’s this thing called the internet and I’ve had access to it for most of my life. One search was all it would’ve taken to look some of this up. One search after Jill died about the possibility of opiate addiction in babies was all it would’ve taken.
I could blame Mateo. I want to blame Mateo, if I’m honest. And there are so many ways I could justify that copout. But he’s not her aunt. He wasn’t living with her for the past six months.
I could blame Jason. He’s the one who drugged his kid to make her sleep, so it really is his fault. Maybe that Dana chick participated, I wouldn’t know. But I knew Jason was a bad guy from the start. I didn’t need Danny Alexander to tell me that.
I look for Danny at the jail, since presumably he was booked in too. But there are only women in here. Some of them I recognize from the party. Even one of those gang girls who tried to fight me. She’s not looking so tough now.
The place gets more and more busy as the morning approaches and then a guard comes and says, “Drake?”
I get up, but he waves me back. “Alesci said to hold tight.” And then he walks off.
The gang girl snickers at me. “I guess the narc’s girlfriend doesn’t get off as easy as she thinks.”
My spirits sink even deeper. As mad as I am at him, I had a little hope that he’d come through and get me out o
f here.
Welcome to eighteen, Shannon. The age when life gets to kick your ass over and over and all you get to do is stand there and take it. I didn’t think anything could suck worse than seventeen, but obviously I am lacking the wisdom of experience, as Mateo pointed out when we first met. Because my adult life has been nothing but non-stop bullshit.
I sigh and lean my head back, watching the minutes tick by on the clock, and when morning finally comes and the place gets busy with the activities of a new day, they come for us and chain us together like prisoners.
I can only hang my head as they lead us out to the hallway and tell us to keep on the right side of a yellow line that divides it down the middle. I’m last, so I follow along until they stop us at the door and unchain us from each other as we enter another holding cell.
“Drake,” a guard says, putting his hand up to prevent me from entering the cell. “You have a personal appearance in front of the judge. Stay here.”
I stay. The prisoners are told how to behave and that they will be on closed-circuit TV for their appearance. Then he closes the door and uncuffs me. “You’re going home, so relax.”
“How do you know?”
“Alesci has been talking to Judge Otero for two hours. They’re dropping the charges. But you still have to make an appearance.”
The relief is real. It floods through my whole body and I suddenly want to cry.
“Just hold it together a little bit longer, OK?” the guard says in a sympathetic voice. “We know it wasn’t you. There were other kids at that house last night and they tested positive for drugs too.”
“Do you know how my niece is doing? She was taken to the hospital last night for an overdose.” I sob the word. I can’t believe my little niece had an overdose. “She’s only six months old.”
“I think she’s OK. I think we would’ve heard if it had gone bad. We arrested Dana Alexander too. And we would’ve charged her with attempted murder instead of child endangerment if anything was happening at the hospital.”