“Seriously, Mick,” Tyler said. “You’ve got to pull over and get some sleep.”
“I’m fine. I took a little something from Micah’s stash. Just waitin’ for it to kick in.”
“Great.” Tyler sighed and looked out the window again, nervously chewing at his lower lip. Lana passed a package wrapped in white paper up between the seats. Tyler hesitated, especially when he saw the name Keith scrawled in a ragged, childish hand, but his stomach was beginning to growl. He took the sandwich and unwrapped it. It was a sub, made with various cold cuts. In a moment, Lana also passed up a bottle of water, also tagged with the name Keith. He wanted the water more than the sandwich, but he quickly downed both. When he was done, he started again. “Look, Mick. I know you’re afraid I’ll run off if you stop and get some sleep. But I promise. I won’t.”
Mick smiled tightly. “I know you won’t. I took care of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ll see. Soon.”
Tyler stared at him. “Mick. What did you do?” Mick didn’t answer. Tyler sat back in his seat, his panic rising.
“Put on some music,” Lana demanded.
Mick reached over and turned on the radio. It scanned through the stations, finding only commercials and preachers at first before Mick finally stopped it on a staticky classic rock station out of Atlanta. They passed the next few minutes to the sounds of REO Speedwagon and Foreigner. Tyler began to feel dizzy, then a heavy lethargy began to creep up on him. The music on the radio began to take on an odd echo, as if he were hearing it inside an empty airplane hangar. He looked over at Mick, who seemed suddenly blurred and fuzzy. “You…” He couldn’t seem to form the next word. “You,” he said again. Then the world slowly faded to gray, then black.
HE LOOKED over to where Keith slumped in the seat again. He’d hated to use the roofies he’d found among Micah’s stash, but Keith had been right. He needed sleep, and he didn’t have any faith at all in Keith’s promise not to run off. That would ruin everything. Everything he’d dreamed of. Everything he was risking so much for. That didn’t even deserve thinking about. Never had failure been less of an option.
He rubbed his eyes. Now to find a cheap motel and lay up for a few hours before the drugs wore off.
“Lana, baby?” he said to the backseat.
She leaned over the back. “Yeah?”
“Did you get some rest? Because I need you to do something for me.”
A green interstate sign promised LODGING. Exit 34A. He took the exit.
“I’m gonna stop for a little bit at this motel here. I need you to watch my brother while I get some shut-eye. If he starts to wake up, you wake me up, okay?”
He looked in the mirror and saw her nodding. “Can I have some of my medicine? My back’s hurtin’.”
“When we get inside, yeah. But only a little, okay? I need you to stay awake.”
“Okay, baby. I promise.”
He spotted the faded sign, peeling wood placards beneath the turned-off neon MOTEL logo promising air-conditioned rooms and free TV. He pulled in.
WYATT ARRIVED AT the Department of Social Services building a little after 11:00 a.m. The outer waiting room was filled with people, mostly women. Some were alone, sitting and staring into space, lost in their own thoughts while waiting for their names to be called. Others had brought families, and it was those groups that provided most of the din in the brightly lit waiting area. Children darted here and there, pursued by snapped orders or mothers scrambling to catch up. Wyatt navigated his way to the sliding glass window at the front of the room. The receptionist was skinny and snaggle-toothed, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. “Name?” she said without looking away from her computer.
“Wyatt McGee,” he said. “I’m here to see Kassidey Emmerich.”
She still wouldn’t look at him. “D’you have an appointment?”
Wyatt was beginning to think aggravation was going to become his permanent state. “No. Please just let her know I’m here. It’ll only be a minute.”
Only then did the woman turn and look at him, a look of exasperation more eloquent than words. “You don’t have an appointment?”
He was holding on to his temper with both hands and it was slipping from his grasp. “No, ma’am. Just please let her know I’m here.”
She let out a sigh so heavy Wyatt could imagine the floor sagging under the sheer weight of it. “Can I tell her what this is in reference to?”
Out of habit, Wyatt reached for the pocket where he kept his badge and county ID in its leather wallet before remembering he didn’t have it anymore. “She’ll know, ma’am.”
The woman looked at him blankly. “She’ll know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She continued to stare long enough to make clear how hard it was for her to believe that anyone could impose on anyone this much. Wyatt stared back. Finally, the woman sighed again, picked up her phone, and muttered, “Have a seat. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.” Wyatt walked over and took one of the plastic chairs that were bolted in rows to the Formica floor. He shook his head. While he was sheriff, people recognized him, deferred to him, fell all over themselves to accommodate him. Now, he was just another face. He began to look at the people around him in a new light. This was the kind of petty, obstructive bullshit they probably had to put up with every day.
After a few minutes, the door to the waiting room opened and Kassidey motioned him toward the back. Wyatt tried to ignore the resentful stares of the people still waiting their turns. She led him back to an office that, judging from its size, might have once been a janitor’s closet. The desk was piled high with files. “Nice place,” Wyatt said without irony. “A step up from the cubicle, at least.”
She dropped the file she’d been carrying on her desk and sat down. “Perks of being a supervisor.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” she said. “So, what’s up?”
“I’m just trying to fill in some things I don’t remember. Like where Mick Jakes went after Savannah’s rights got terminated.”
She looked surprised. “So you’re really looking into it?”
“I guess I am.”
She smiled. It was a smile he remembered all too well. Then it was gone, replaced by an appraising look and a slight tilt of her head. “And how does your wife feel about all this?”
“She’s okay.” He laughed, and it sounded insincere even to him. “She’s just glad to get me out of the house.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound convinced. She picked up a file from the stack. The manila folder was yellowing and frayed at the edges. “I had to look it up myself, actually.” She opened it up and paged through it. “We’ve been trying to digitize all this stuff,” she muttered, “but it’s been kind of a nightmare.” She found the page she was looking for. She read it and grimaced. “Worse than I remember. Mick went through eighteen placements in the thirteen years we had him.”
Wyatt shook his head. “Eighteen.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s hard to place a kid, even a young one, with the kind of problems Mick had. He’d be doing fine for a while, then he’d go off the rails. The first year, when we could keep the boys together, was the most stable. But when we had to split them up, he lost it. He started stealing, fighting other kids, running away. And then, of course, he discovered drugs and alcohol in junior high.”
“Like mother, like son,” Wyatt murmured.
“I guess. But that had him bouncing back and forth between detention, foster care, and inpatient treatment. He’d been through detox and rehab twice by the time he graduated high school.” She put the paper down, a look of pain on her face. “Some of the foster placements were…not ideal.”
“What does that mean?”
She didn’t look at him. “One foster home lost its license when we found Mick and another foster child locked in a coat closet. Together. The foster parent did it because he
said he couldn’t control, and I quote, ‘those little bastards’ any other way. Mick was thirteen. The other kid was fifteen and…” she took a deep breath, “…awaiting trial as an adult for sexually abusing his seven-year-old sister.”
Wyatt felt cold twisting in his gut. “Was Mick…” He trailed off.
“We don’t know,” Kassidey said. “Mick never would say. And, of course, neither would the other kid.”
Wyatt’s shock was turning to anger. “And who the hell had the bright idea to put those two in the same house?”
She looked at him for the first time since opening the file. “Me.” When she saw the look on his face, she flushed. “You don’t know what it was like, Wyatt. We didn’t have a whole lot of options with Mick.”
“Okay, okay.” He took a deep breath to calm himself. “So I guess what I need to know is, where was the last place that the agency knew he was?”
She opened the file again. “The two years before he turned eighteen and aged out were relatively stable, if you don’t count the thirty days he spent in jail on his first adult charge after he turned sixteen.”
“Wait, how did a sixteen-year-old get active time on his first charge?” North Carolina was only one of two states that began trying defendants as adults at age sixteen, but juvenile records were supposed to be sealed, and what was technically a first offense should have resulted in probation, not jail time.
She checked the file again. “Got thirty days suspended on a carrying a concealed weapon charge, then told his probation officer to ‘suck his dick’ at the intake interview.”
“That’ll do it.”
She nodded. “But going to adult jail seems to have been some kind of wake-up call. When he came out, we started him on an independent living plan, to get him ready to live on his own. He didn’t get in any trouble after that, at least nothing he got picked up for. The foster parents we found for him that last time seemed to be a good fit. Or at least if Mick gave them problems, they didn’t let us know.”
“Can you give me a name?”
She chewed her lip and looked at him uncertainly.
“Look,” he said, “I know it’s against the rules. But you asked me to look into it. And if this family is someone Mick might have been in contact with, they may have some idea where he went.”
She nodded. “I know. I did ask you. But I didn’t really think you’d do it.”
He laughed. “Me either.”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to call and ask. I think only one of them’s still alive, though.”
“The husband or the wife?”
“I guess you’d have to ask him.”
“What?”
“It was two men. A gay couple.”
He frowned. “You put a messed up teenage boy with a couple of—”
She cut him off. “You’re showing your age, Wyatt. These two men were some of our best foster parents. They’d take the kids no one else wanted. And there was never a whisper of anything inappropriate. And you know what? I’m getting a little tired of you judging my decisions when you—”
He held up his hands, taken aback by her sudden anger. “Okay. Okay. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
She’d risen partway from her chair as her voice rose. Now she sank back into it, rubbing her eyes tiredly. “Yeah. You did. But let’s not have that argument right now. I’ve already said too much.” She looked up at the clock, then back at him. “You free for lunch?”
He was. And he wanted to have it with her. But something inside told him it would be a bad idea. “No,” he lied. “Sorry. Got an appointment with the sheriff up in Spencer.”
She smiled sadly. He remembered that she always used to say what a terrible liar he was. His first wife had said the same thing, but with more heat. “Okay. Some other time, then.”
“Yeah. Some other time.”
He walked out past the noisy chaos in the lobby to his truck. He sat in the front seat for a while, contemplating his next move. Appointment or no, he could drive on up to Spencer, talk to the investigators up there. Or he could talk to the surviving foster parent who’d been with Mick before he’d dropped off the radar. The mention of lunch, however, reminded him that he was hungry. And thirsty. He knew just the place.
Val’s was a classic roadhouse, dirt parking lot, neon beer signs and all. But they served the best burger in the county, and it was, after all, on the way to Spencer, along what everyone called “the old highway.” Wyatt slid into a booth. Val herself, all three hundred pounds of her, came over to the table. “Well, hey, stranger,” she said as she put a menu down. “Long time, no see. You by yourself?”
Wyatt remembered with a jolt that this was one of the places he and Kassidey had come when they were seeing one another. They’d held hands across this same booth. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I don’t really need a menu.”
Val grinned. “Double ValBurger, American cheese, hold the pickles, fries, shot of Jack, PBR chaser.”
Wyatt looked around. It was barely noon, but the day drinkers were already beginning to congregate at the rickety bar along one wall. He started to amend his usual order to cut out the alcohol, but all that came out of his mouth was, “Yeah, that’d be good.”
WINSLOW WAS PACING back and forth on the concrete walk in front of the restaurant, glancing uncomfortably from time to time at a group of black patrons who stood chatting a few feet away. He was dressed in a brown leather jacket, t-shirt, and jeans that looked as unnatural on him as a clown outfit. Chance hurried across the street from the parking lot in the shadow of the Mississippi River levee. “Hey,” she said. “Waiting long?”
“This place looks like a dump,” Winslow said in a low voice. Not low enough, it seemed: a couple of members of the nearby group looked over at him and frowned.
“Seriously, Winslow,” Chance whispered. “Try not to act like a goddamn tourist.” She led him inside, where a skinny white hostess with a purple streak in her hair and colorful tattoos snaking up both arms led them upstairs and seated them at a table. Brightly colored artwork covered the walls and the tables were covered with equally cheerful tablecloths. “So,” she said, opening a menu, “what’s going on?”
He opened his own menu, still glancing around. The place was noisy enough to provide privacy, but he still acted jumpy. Finally, he took the plunge. “Last night, Charleyboy told Savannah what he’s been up to.” He started to go on, but was interrupted by the arrival of the waitress. Once they’d ordered coffee and the waitress had bustled away, Winslow filled Chance in on what he’d heard.
“Wow,” Chance said. “That’s…pretty major. And a little above my pay grade. I think we need to get my people in on this.”
Winslow shook his head. “I don’t think any of this is going down in St. Bernard Parish. It’s south of the city. Down in,” he hesitated, trying to remember the local geography, “Terrebonne.”
“So we need to let those guys know.”
“No,” he said. “We need to keep this on a need-to-know basis. We don’t know if Luther’s got people in law enforcement down that way.”
Chance was liking this less and less. The coffee arrived and they placed their orders, Chance going for the omelet she’d been looking forward to, Winslow hesitating before picking the “Basic Breakfast” designated on the menu. Chance sipped her coffee, trying to think of the best way to say what she needed to say. “I’m not so sure I like keeping my fellow cops in the dark on this.”
Winslow took a sip from his own cup, his face carefully expressionless. “Suit yourself, Deputy Cahill.” He leaned hard on the word “Deputy,” making it seem like something trivial and pointless. “But an operation like this could be a major opportunity for you.”
She tried to compose her own features into the same bland mask. She didn’t know if she was succeeding. “What exactly does that mean?”
“I think you know.” He sipped his coffee. “I don’t know, maybe when this is over, you want to go back to being a road deputy, busting drunk
drivers and breaking up the same domestic disturbance between the same peckerwood dipshits every Saturday.” He put the cup down. “Or maybe you want to go after the major bad guys. The guys like Luther and Gutierrez who fuck up the lives of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, without thinking for a second about the damage they cause.” He slid out of the booth. “Think about it. I need to take a leak.”
As he walked away, Chance stared down at her coffee cup. She knew Winslow was trying to play her. She knew he was pushing her buttons, playing to the desire that had caused her to put on the uniform in the first place. The desire to help people. To make their lives better. Freer from fear.
The thing was, it was working.
The waitress arrived again, bearing plates. As she slid Chance’s omelet in front of her, she leaned in. “Are you okay, sweetie?”
Chance blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”
The waitress indicated the direction Winslow had gone with a quick motion of her head. “That guy you’re with. I’m getting a bad vibe from him. You need to get out of here?”
Chance stared at her for a moment, then stifled a laugh. “No. No, thanks. It’s fine.”
The waitress looked dubious. “You sure? If he’s makin’ you, you know…do things you ain’t comfortable about, we can get you straight out of here, by the back door. We’ve done it before.” She looked around. Chance noticed the hostess, standing by the stairs. She gave Chance a knowing nod. The waitress spoke up again. “Thing is, honey…I think he’s a cop.”
Chance did laugh then. “Thing is, honey, I’m a cop.”
This time it was the waitress’s turn to look confused. “Say what?”
“We both are. But…”
The waitress straightened up, her face hardening as she saw the amusement in Chance’s face. “Okay. Sorry.”
“No. No,” Chance said quickly. “Really, thank you.” She looked at the hostess, flashed her a quick thumbs-up. “You guys keep looking out for people, okay? It’s important.” The waitress nodded stiffly and bustled off.
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