Convict: A Bad Boy Romance (7 page)

God, my life has changed.

I can still remember the first time I got taken into custody, the memory perfectly clear, like it happened this morning. I was seventeen. The guy who arrested me was a Floyd County Sheriff’s Deputy, a fat old man who had teeth stained from chewing tobacco and called me
son
in the most patronizing way I’ve ever heard.

* * *

M
y hands are
behind my back held in place by plastic ties, not even handcuffs. My shoulders are screaming in pain, but I grind my teeth together and try to ignore it, because I know he wants this to hurt. This good old boy is pushing me too hard between the shoulder blades, nearly shoving me over.

He walks me through the station like he’s showing off a prize. The other officers, all white men, look over at us like I’m an animal on a leash.

“Can we guess?” one of them asks, his southern accent thick as mud.

“Go on,” the fat old man says.

“Dealing oxy at the high school,” someone says. “Looks the type.”

By ‘the type,’ he means ‘poor.’

“Fuck you,” I spit.

They all laugh.

“Naked with his thirteen-year-old cousin,” someone else guesses.

I snort.

“Why fuck my cousin when your wife begs me for it?” I snarl.

The cop cuffs me hard on the back of the head.

“He tried to steal Doug Childers’s new Dodge Ram,” the cop leading me says. Then he leans in. “They got alarm systems now, boy,” he tells me, uncomfortably close. “Guess there’s not many new cars in the trailer park, are there?”

I don’t answer. I know what the cops here do to people they don’t like. I’ve seen it.

He pushes me onward, through a door, shoves me into a cell. I sit there for three hours before they finally process me.

“You get one phone call,” someone tells me. They all blend together after a while.

“I got nobody to call,” I say.

It’s the first time I spend the night in jail, but not the last.

* * *

W
hen I leave
the Sheriff’s Department in Tortuga, I walk down to the beach, because nothing in town is very far from the water. I spend a long time standing on the jetty and staring out at the ocean, trying to process this.

When I was ten or eleven, I rode my third-hand bike into town and stole a copy of
Point Break
from the video store in town. I remember watching it on our shitty VCR, wavy lines tracing over Keanu Reeves’s face, as my mother snored on the couch.

I thought California was another country, like Canada or Mexico. It still feels like one. I still feel like I’m living someone else’s life.

Sometimes, late at night, I hear cars roar by on the highway, and more than anything I want to go back. At least I knew what I was doing: one job at a time, don’t get caught. Until I did.

I think about Luna again. I can’t stop myself. I think of her lips on mine, her body underneath me. I think of her saying
it looks like the Cheshire Cat took a piss in a martini glass
, and smile.

I think of her saying
I’m anything but
, even though she’s dead wrong.

I don’t think I’ve ever liked a single thing that wasn’t trouble.

I
slather
the ruby-red jam onto a thick slice of homemade bread and push it into my mouth. My mother watches me expectantly.

“It’s really good,” I say, my mouth still full.

“Mhm,” says Cedar, my older brother.

“Which one is that?” I ask, cheeks still bulging.

“It’s a
blind
taste test, Luna,” she says patiently. “You have to try them both.”

I swallow, then slather more jam onto the rest of the bread, passing the knife to Cedar. We both chew in silence for a moment.

“That one’s really good too,” I say. “Is that ginger in there?”

“Secret recipe,” my mom says, but she looks pleased.

“Are you gonna make us guess which is which?” Cedar asks, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

My mom sits back in the Adirondack chair, her long, flowing skirt settling, and tucks her legs under her. She’s not wearing shoes. She’s
never
wearing shoes.

“Which one
tastes
like it came from the garden?” she asks.

I look at Cedar. He looks at me. I narrow my eyes, and we take a step away and turn our backs to mom.

“The first one was a little darker-colored, but a little less sweet,” I say, keeping my voice low.

Cedar nods very seriously, his arms still crossed in front of himself, his dark hair in a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. He’s only fourteen months older than me, so we’ve always been close.

“She may have put more sugar in the store-bought strawberries to make up for their lack of sweetness,” he says. “I thought jam number one did have a slightly deeper flavor.”

I glance back at the jams. Mom’s watching us, entertained.

“Which one tasted like it was grown with sunshine, harmony, and love?” I whisper.

“I think it’s number one,” he whispers back. “I could almost hear
kumbaya
playing as I ate it.”

We grin at each other.

Sometimes, I’m pretty sure that my parents had Skye and Raine because Cedar and I came out so different from them. They love growing their own food, meditating, and kombucha; we prefer grocery stores, surfing, and beer.

Cedar’s a forest ranger, so he wears a uniform and works for the government. My parents hated it. Then I entered the police academy and gave them something to really get angry about.

That was the only
real
fight we ever had.

“So number one is the garden strawberries?” I whisper.

Cedar nods. We turn around, and I point at the jam on the left.

“Garden,” I say, and point at the other one. “Grocery store.”

My mom beams.

* * *

A
fter dinner
, around nine, we’re drinking my dad’s homemade blackberry wine in tiny hand-blown glasses when my phone rings, and I pull it from the pocket of my jeans.

“Luna,” my dad says, frowning underneath his long gray hair.

It’s Batali. She never calls me about anything but work. Of course.

“I have to take this,” I say, making a face. “Sorry.”

My parents both sigh. Cedar looks entertained.

“She’s lying, she’s gonna go look at Facebook,” Skye says.

I roll my eyes and walk away.

“Rivers,” I say.

“There’s been a very serious crime,” she says, sounding like a policeman in a murder mystery.

“What happened?” I ask.

Batali actually sighs, and I frown. Outward displays of emotion aren’t her thing.

“Someone set fire to two cars on Palms Road, right where it goes under highway one,” she says.

I blink in surprise. That
is
a serious crime.

“Was anyone hurt?” I ask, my heart speeding up.

“No. How soon can you be at the scene?” she asks.

I look back at my family. Both my parents are looking at me. I feel bad, but there’s been a serious crime.

“Thirty minutes,” I say, and hang up.

* * *

T
he whole underpass smells wretched
, like burnt plastic, rubber, and weird chemicals. The fire is out, obviously, and the firemen are packing up their hoses when I get there. Both burnt cars are soaking wet, though.

Getting evidence is going to be a clusterfuck.

Batali’s already there, arms crossed, just surveying the scene, and I walk up to her. This is the first arson I’ve worked as a detective, so I’m glad she’s there.

She walks me up to both cars, careful not to touch anything, and points to the inside.

“See that?” she says, gesturing with the beam of a flashlight.

I nod.

“Looks like the point of ignition was the front seat of the vehicle,” she says. “The cab is pretty much charcoal at this point, and the trunk is pretty well toasted as well.”

“Meaning the engine didn’t catch fire first,” I say.

She nods.

“Meaning this probably wasn’t an accidental fire,” I go on.

“There’s an excellent chance we’re investigating an arson,” Batali says, and points her flashlight at the roof of the car. “The burn pattern here also suggests that someone splashed an accelerant up here. Probably gasoline, that’s the easiest.”

I write down everything. I ask Batali questions, I investigate oddities, and I go over both cars with a fine-toothed comb.

It’s terrible, but I’m excited.

A double arson is by far the biggest case that’s come my way in the last month and a half. Mostly, I’ve been investigating who knocked over a mailbox or stole a twelve-pack of beer from a convenience store.

But
finally
, something to sink my teeth into. Something I can prove myself with. If I solve this, maybe Sergeant Pushton will stop looking at me like he regrets my promotion.

And as an extra
special
bonus, it’ll distract me from wondering why the hell Stone kissed me and walked away the other night.

I’m so wrapped up in my work that it’s almost two hours before I realize Chad is there, directing traffic away from the scene. I only realize it because I walk out from under the overpass, trying to see whether the flames were large enough to leave soot on the outside.

“The fire was on the inside,” he calls. “You get lost that easy?”

I don’t bother answering and just look up at the bridge over the road. There’s a little soot, as expected, but nothing to indicate that the fire was bigger than we already thought.

“I’m surprised you stuck around after the firemen left,” he says, waving a car away. “I bet if you’d asked, you could have gotten them to take their shirts off.”

I still don’t answer, and shine my flashlight up at the overpass. It’s always got a couple graffiti tags on it, but there’s something odd.

Most of the spray paint is under the soot, at least as far as I can tell — it’s past midnight, so it’s dark. But way over, almost at the end of the bridge, there’s one symbol in orange that looks like it’s on top of the soot. A dollar sign, inside a circle, inside a triangle. I photograph it.

I’ve seen it before, and I stand there, trying to sort through everything in my brain so I can remember where I saw it. As I’m thinking I look down.

There’s a spray paint can on the ground. I pick it up with one glove and put it in an evidence bag.

“Try not to break a nail and cry,” Chad calls. I look at him for the first time since I walked over here, because that’s just nonsense. I don’t have nails long enough to break. I never have. He’s just shouting shit in the hopes that something pisses me off.

I glance at the symbol on the overpass one more time, and it hits me: the same thing was on Eddie’s gate. I don’t think I’d ever seen it before that.

“Rivers, are you
crying
?” Chad calls, continuing his stream of dumb bullshit, because I’m obviously not.

“Direct traffic and let the grownups do their jobs,” I call back, walking back toward the scene.

* * *

I
spend
the next morning interviewing the cars’ owners, but it doesn’t turn anything up. They were both visiting friends in the nearby neighborhood, perfectly normal, nice people who are bewildered that their cars were torched. They don’t even know each other.

I’m disappointed, but I remind myself that this is how it goes. You follow leads until something turns up.

The afternoon I spend at my desk, my feet still dangling in my sort-of-fixed chair, going through photos of graffiti until it feels like my eyes might start bleeding. I’m looking through every vandalism photo from the central coast for the past year, looking for that weird symbol, while Batali calls gas stations and asks for surveillance footage, so we can see if anyone filled gas canisters in the area.

Finally, she puts down her phone and looks over at my screen.

“In ancient times, purple dye came only from a certain kind of sea snail and was very hard to get,” she says, looking at a purple graffiti tag on my computer screen. “That’s why it was reserved for royalty.”

“Okay,” I say, assuming that this is going somewhere.

“Fingerprints from that can you found came back,” she says. “Stone Williams. The mechanic from Big Eddie’s.”

I blink, slightly taken aback.

“Really?” I say.

Batali nods. I’m already typing his name into the police records database.

“His prints were also on the paint cans at Big Eddie’s,” Batali says. “I’d prefer for you to do the interview. You seemed to establish a rapport when you spoke with him at the scene.”

That’s one way of putting it,
I think. My heart thuds in my chest like someone stomping on a wooden floor.

“Sure, no problem,” I say, trying to sound casual.

I
could
ask her to do it, but she’s a damn good detective. I’d be confessing within five minutes, and in another five, I’d probably be asking her
why
he kissed me and then ran away, wanting to know
what
is wrong with me.

I have a feeling Batali doesn’t really do relationship advice. Best if I interview Stone.

“Thank you, Rivers,” Batali says, and then sits at her own desk.

I wonder if she really thinks Stone was involved. I know I’m not supposed to make guesses without evidence, but he doesn’t seem the vandalism type.

You might think that because he’s hot and you made out with him in a parking lot
, I remind myself.

I take a couple of deep breaths, doing my best to act like I’m not suddenly more nervous than a cat near a vacuum cleaner.

The records search doesn’t turn up anything, which isn’t unusual. Plenty of people don’t have criminal records. But I run him through a few more databases — legal records, state employee records, military records — and the only thing
those
turn up is his fingerprints, taken by our own office on Saturday.

That’s a little weird. Most people have some kind of paper trail. When you work for any level of government, for example — state, local, federal, even the school system — you get fingerprinted. There’s a record of stuff you do, and even though for most people it’s a tedious, boring record, it’s something.

The part of my brain, the one that tells me when stuff is wrong, the part that I shoved into a trunk?
That
part is talking to me again, pointing out the weird way he tugged on his sleeves when I first talked to him. The way he deflected questions about himself. The way he seems to only go to bars that aren’t in Tortuga.