by Amy Lane
“I have no idea what that has to do with my brain. Can we stick to shit I actually need done now, Yoshi?”
“As opposed to what you’ll need me to do next week, when you completely lose your shit over something stupid that’s not what you’re really freaking out about? Sure. I’m down with that.”
“Candace Furman is lost now,” Larx told him. “Next week she might still be lost, but we’ll have less of a chance of finding her.”
Yoshi sighed. “That’s fine. You be a powder keg. Other men might choose emotional health, but you go ahead and do you. I’ve got her teachers pulled up, and it’s the same story as before—falling grades and no involvement. What do you need me to look for?”
“First off, how’s she doing in geography or life science?” Larx had learned that much looking at her profile. “And who are her teachers there?”
“Huh.” Oh, blessed Yoshi—he might know where Larx was going with this. “Those classes she is not failing. She’s getting a B in one and a C plus in the other—apparently she did some extra credit in life science, but I don’t know what the assignment was.”
“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. So here’s what I want you to do—do you have a pencil and paper? We’re going to need to make a list.”
Yoshi let out a raucous squawk of laughter. “Oh my God—you just told me to get organized. I might need surgery myself!”
At that moment Eamon bustled out, looking practically daisy fresh after his nap and some mouthwash. He nodded at Larx, and Larx fell in step behind him, like Larx was a deputy or something. Funny how some men could lead an army with just a nod of the head. Aaron was like that too.
“You’re a laugh riot, Yoshi. Now here’s the list of things you need to do.”
“Okay, CSI Colton High, shoot.”
Larx took a deep breath and watched his step over the snow. By the time they got to Eamon’s unit, he’d outlined about half the list, and by the time he’d hauled himself into the passenger’s side, belted in, and shut the door, Yoshi had the rest.
“So text me what you got when you got it,” Larx finished off with, “and talk to Jaime first.”
“Fine. By the way, that kid and Aaron’s dog have a very suspect relationship. It’s a good thing the dog sleeps inside, or Eamon would be arresting me for child neglect.”
Larx half smiled. “Good. Tell him he’s welcome to sleep with the dog on the couch after you go back home.”
Yoshi’s voice dropped. “Larx? Tane called. His brother’s in a… in a really bad place right now.”
Oh Lord. “Do we need to take him to a psych ward?” Larx asked, mindful that Eamon was sitting right next to him and tended to take things literally.
“God. No.” And Yoshi, cheerful and sarcastic Yoshi, had a moment of complete and total sobriety. “Larx, look. I’ve… I’ve seen one of those places, when Tane and I were dating. Not for Tane, but he told me he spent time in one. They’re… if you don’t have family, like Tane did, they’re not good places. And even though none of us would let that boy twist in the wind, he doesn’t know that. Just… just give him some time. Tane knows how to give somebody peace, okay? I mean… I know he freaks you out because he’s way intense, but he can get this boy to chill. To stay with the living, if you know what I mean. It’s what he was doing in Sacramento when I met him. He took on a student of mine who… who might not be alive today, you know?”
Yoshi’s voice, soft and passionate, actually made Larx’s chest hurt.
“I hear you, Yosh. You’ve got faith in him. That’s all I need. Jaime’s welcome in my house until his brother’s good, okay? And you are too. Tell him that. Tell him he won’t have to sleep outside with the chickens. Olivia and Wombat Willie are going to move to Aaron’s house as soon as the service road gets plowed, and then everybody will have breathing room. Tell him that. And if he likes Kellan’s room, he can have a bag on the floor. But in the meantime you’ve got to ask that kid some questions or we might lose the girl, okay?”
“Yeah. I hear you. Thanks, Larx. He took the love seat last night, and I took the couch—we might do that for a while, but it won’t kill either of us. Thanks.”
“Not a problem. I’m going to sign off and let you talk to him. Text me the info on the teachers so I can talk to them. Eamon’s going to take us to get coffee and then to talk to Candace’s little sister and her mother, and we’ll get back to you after that. Deal?”
“Deal. Break.”
And with that Yoshi rang off, and Larx fumbled in his pocket for the charger so he could plug into the SUV’s power supply.
“I don’t remember anything about coffee,” Eamon mumbled.
“Eamon, do you think we’re going to make it anywhere without coffee?” Larx was weary to his bones, and their day had just started. But hey—even Colton had a Starbucks, and it was probably the one business that would be open this morning.
“No.” Eamon let out a sigh that was the closest to complaining the man ever got. “You know, in a bigger town, they would have had takeout coffee in the hospital.”
Larx let out a matching sigh. “They don’t,” he said glumly. “I asked.”
“Been asking for years.”
“Bastards.”
“Yeah. Okay, pity break over. Get back on the horn, boy. We need something to hit Candace’s mother with, because she was not talking last night.”
Larx remembered the dead body on the floor, facedown. “Was she close to her stepson?” he asked, curious.
Eamon grunted. “I’d say more terrorized by him. That family gives me the fuckin’ creeps—I know you and Yoshi were going by the book, but next time you get that freaked-out about a kid, call me first. CPS is so far away, and this thing got bad quick.”
Larx grunted. “It was just… you know. Aaron was called out there for a domestic call Saturday night, asked me to look up the kids. Jaime was fine, but he and his brother had heard raised voices in the Furman house. Berto got freaked-out, so we figured her grades slipping was a sign of other shit. Yoshi called her to his office Monday, and he didn’t like her vibe. We set up a meeting with CPS and the school psychologist for tomorrow… wait. Today. And… and Jaime called me…. God. Last night. Monday night. And….”
Recounted like that—Saturday, Sunday, Monday—what was today?
“Holy fucking Jesus, Eamon, is it only Tuesday?”
“Yeah. Yeah, Larx. It’s only Tuesday. Your life went to hell that quickly. You need to keep up.”
Larx tried to hold his breath—but even more, he tried not to lose his grip. “So quick,” he breathed. “It…. Olivia showed up Saturday, and my life was stable, and now it’s….” He’d left Aaron in the hospital and sent his kids home to Yoshi. He couldn’t put it all together in his head.
His heart might explode.
“He’ll be home by Sunday,” Eamon said practically. “And you can put your life back to where it was.”
Larx closed his eyes. “Olivia and Wombat Willie are going to move into Aaron’s house, and me and Aaron are going to be grandpas.”
Eamon cackled. “That is the most excellent news! I can’t wait to give George shit about that. Grandpa George. Oh my God—it even sounds like Dudley Do-Right!”
Dudley Do-Right. Deputy Dudley Do-Right. “He’ll make a good grandpa,” Larx said, the humor helping to hold him together. Good. Between Yoshi and Eamon, Larx might not lose his shit. His shit might stay completely contained in the same bag that held his panic and his fury. He could do this. He could function. He could compartmentalize.
Aaron probably did this shit every day.
“Yeah,” Larx reaffirmed, feeling stronger. “He’s going to be a good grandpa.” Larx saw Aaron holding his son’s hand at his own hospital bed. “He’s a great father.”
“Yes, he is,” Eamon said gently. “And you’ll find your way to be okay with this. He’s not going away.”
Larx nodded and pulled his shit together—he’d already established he had the bag for it. “I�
��m going to call her teachers. You make a giant, swimming-pool-sized coffee your priority, and I’ll get you some ammunition so you can talk to her family.”
A half an hour later, Larx was so over talking on the phone he almost couldn’t open his mouth to talk to Eamon—except Eamon had bought him not one but two giant mochas, and he was sort of indebted.
“Okay,” he said on an exhale as Eamon idled in the Starbucks parking lot and munched doggedly on a breakfast sandwich. “Here’s what we got.”
Tessa Palmer, her life science teacher, had given her the extra credit for writing a paper on how to survive in cold weather. Her plan had involved a basic backpack of power food, grease in tuna cans, flannel long johns, good boots, a packet of hand and feet warmers, and a shovel.
“Was she carrying that?” Eamon asked sharply, breathing on his Venti coffee black. “Could you see?”
Larx shook his head. “I couldn’t—but I had Yoshi ask Jaime some things, and this is what he remembers….”
First off, Jaime had been freezing in the outbuilding—but he’d grabbed a blanket for himself and one for Candace off the small cot in the corner. Candace had kept the blanket when she left, shoving it in her pack and thanking him hurriedly as she ran. In return for stealing his blanket, she’d shoved a power bar in his hand while they were waiting to see what would happen. Yoshi said Jaime had blushed about that, like the gesture had been a thank-you or a kindness, and Larx had a moment to think about the goodness that could linger in even the most traumatized kid.
Second, Jaime remembered that as she’d squeezed under the bed, a scraping sound had terrified him in the quiet of the shed. When Yoshi questioned him further, he thought it could be a shovel.
Third, Candace had begged Jaime to protect her little sister. Larx passed that on to Eamon and got “Well, yes—the girl and her mother are being supervised in their own home, but the stepfather—we had nothing on him, Larx, and his son was going to the morgue. So she’s safe for now, but we need to sort this out quick.”
Larx grunted. “You know something? I’m not a stupid guy. Just tell me the job I need to unfuck the world, and I’ll apply for it. Counselor? Lawyer? Judge? Social worker? Which one is it? Is it too goddamned much to ask that kids feel safe in their own goddamned homes?”
Eamon regarded him impassively. “You done?”
Larx scowled and took another sip of his second giant mocha. “No, but the rant is tabled until it’s more useful. So, okay—stepdad is wandering the woods with a gun, kid is wandering the woods with a shovel, hand warmers, and power bars. Why hand warmers?”
But Eamon knew this one. “So she can melt water on the run. I bet she has an aluminum flask. She packs it with snow, tucks it next to a hand warmer, and she has water. Not to mention, if she keeps them both near her core, she has another heat source—depending on which ones she got, those things last a couple hours.”
“God, she was smart,” Larx muttered. “I mean—smart. Her grades were tip-top until this semester, but nobody knew because she kept to herself.”
“I wonder if her little sister’s the same,” Eamon mused.
Larx remembered that Eamon and his wife had no children. Eamon was in his sixties, and he’d met his wife about twenty years ago—perhaps they had simply decided not to. “I doubt it,” Larx responded. “Kids… find a niche. If one of them is ‘the nice one,’ the other one’s going to be ‘the pain in the ass.’ If one of them is the clean freak, the other one is going to need a hazmat detail to clean her room. Part of it is establishing an identity, but part of it, I think, is just that people are different. Kids want their parents to know that no matter how many times you call them by each other’s names, they are not interchangeable people.”
“You’ve done that?” Eamon asked, amused.
“I just started calling them both together so I didn’t have to worry about it.” Larx shrugged. “I do that with students too. The rule is, you look them in the eye and say a name—any name—and that kid has to respond. So you look at Jessica and say, ‘Andrea, what’s the answer to that question?’ and Jessica says, ‘I’m Jessica and I’m pretty sure it’s X.’ Or, ‘Kirby, put the dog out.’ ‘This is Kellan, putting the dog out, sir.’ The first kid who splits hairs has to pass out papers or gets oatmeal for breakfast, depends on the venue.”
Eamon chuckled. “Understood. So, if Candace is an A student, Shelley is probably not.”
“Until this semester, if patterns hold true.”
“Yeah. Maybe call the middle school when we’re done here and on our way to interview the little sister.”
“Yes, sir—but I’ve got one more teacher I talked to, and it’s important.”
Eamon hmmed, and Larx kept going.
“It was geography, Eamon. And apparently she was doing a whole lot of research into the local forest and train routes.”
“Well, we’ve got the local bus and train stations monitored,” Eamon told him, somewhat exasperated. “What else do you want me to do?”
“Except she’s smart, remember? I don’t think she’s heading for the local ones. You don’t ace geography so you figure out how to make it to Main Street and hop on a bus.”
“By God, you do not. Any ideas?” Eamon was looking at him like he held the keys to the kingdom.
“I’d have to see a map first,” Larx told him. “Does your tablet get Wi-Fi?”
Eamon took the tablet and entered the password. “Knock yourself out.”
Larx pulled the map up and adjusted it for size, putting the closest outlying towns on the edge of the screen and Candace’s parents’ house in the center.
“Okay—she’s got a hike ahead of her,” Larx said thoughtfully. “The easiest town to access is here—”
“No bus stop,” Eamon said promptly. “If she’s smart enough to survive so far, she’s smart enough to know that.”
“Truth.” Larx studied the map some more. “So we’ve got Foresthill, which has a train stop, and Dogpatch, which has a bus station.”
“Foresthill is closer,” Eamon reminded him.
“Yeah, but Dogpatch is easier. Not so many hills or snow pitfalls or cliffs.” He hmmed. “What do you want to bet she has a compass?”
“No bet.” Eamon gathered all his wrappers and put them in a trash bag in the front of the cruiser. “What do you want to bet she’s got a hunting knife?”
Larx paused. “I hope so. If her stepfather’s out there with a gun, I don’t want her to be defenseless.”
Eamon sent him a long look. “What happened to ‘children and guns are a bad combination’?”
“I didn’t say arm the psychopaths, Eamon! I just said don’t let the sexually abused fourteen-year-olds wander the snow without a knife!”
Eamon grunted. “You know, I like police work. There are a lot of absolutes in police work. There’s law and not the law and—”
“And good cops know the gray areas too. Don’t bullshit me, Eamon. You wouldn’t like Aaron so much if he didn’t see the human factor in between the bylaws.” Larx swallowed, because the mention of Aaron had come out so easily. “How did he get shot?” he asked, even though he knew this. “Why was there a gunfight in the living room of Berto Benitez’s house? Aaron was in there alone for a minute—what happened?”
Eamon sighed. “What happened?”
“Yeah. How’d it go so wrong?”
Eamon pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re the first person to actually ask that. Everybody else, we said, ‘Suspect with a gun. George arrives first, Mills second, suspect opens fire.’ You are the first person to ask me how it went wrong.”
Larx shivered. “Eamon?”
“It’s like there was a black man in the room, Larx. Because there was. Me. The guy was yelling at Berto—saying the shit you’d expect from a racist asshole, and then I walked in, and that kid’s hostility level jumped through the roof. I said, ‘Son, just calm down’—doing my best Morgan Freeman, I swear to Christ—and Braun Furman just swung around wit
h his gun drawn. Aaron shouted his name just as he fired or I’d be toast, because it was close quarters and he was aiming at my head. Those were the shots that took out Aaron’s unit, by the way—you’re welcome.”
“Jesus.”
“But Aaron was shouting to draw his attention, he swung back around, and we both shot at the same time. Aaron lived. Braun Furman didn’t.”
Larx frowned. “Aaron shot?” Aaron hadn’t thought he had.
Eamon frowned back. “I… you know, I’m… oh God. I’m not sure. His arms were out until Furman was down. I guess we’ll have to wait for forensics. Does it matter?”
Larx thought about it, shivering some more. “I hope he did,” he concluded, surprising himself, going back on everything he thought he’d believed. “I hope he defended himself. I… I don’t ever want him to hesitate because he’s thinking about what I would do instead.” Larx smiled at Eamon a little. “You either.”
Eamon sighed. “You were asking which job you needed to unfuck the world?”
“Yeah?”
“Law enforcement ain’t it. Our job is to catch the fucked-up. But you—you figured out the fucked-up was happening and are trying to stop it. I’d put my money on you and Yoshi any day.”
Larx gave him the side-eye. “Do you have any idea how screwed up that is?”
Eamon’s laughter was sort of a miracle, and it rolled through the car as he turned the ignition. “Let’s go talk to that little girl’s mom.”
THE PLOWS had just cleared the roads as Eamon pulled up to the same neighborhood that had seemed so terrifying the night before. In the daylight, Larx could see Berto and Jaime’s little house and the crucial outbuilding across a snow-covered yard and up a hill from the perfectly maintained log-cabin-style house where Eamon parked.
Berto and Jaime’s house looked old—a classic small ranch house, probably bought to fix up, with yellowing stucco, chipped on all the corners—but Larx could see signs of life: new gutters, bright and shiny, new roof tiles, unstained raw boards replacing some of the weathered, warped boards on the porch. Old, but with new life—the potential for one, anyway. There was also a small greenhouse, hastily erected—with what were probably exactly five marijuana plants as well as some cooking herbs and maybe a flower or two—attached to the back of the house.