by Nora Roberts
18
Shelby started out the morning singing in the shower. She felt the spring to her step and didn’t care who saw it or guessed the reason why.
She got dressed, helped Callie dress.
“You get to go to Granny’s today.”
“To Granny’s house?”
“That’s right. It’s her day off, and she asked especially if you’d come over and stay with her. Won’t that be fun?”
“Granny has cookies, and Bear.”
Bear was the big yellow dog who’d race and play with a little girl all day—and sleep in the sun when nobody was around to play with.
“I know. And Grandpa’s going to be there for a while, too. Your Gamma’s going to take you over on her way to work. I’ve got some paperwork of my own to get to this morning. Then I’ll come get you when I’m finished work today.”
With Callie babbling about everything she had to take to Granny’s, everything she had to do at Granny’s, they walked into the kitchen.
Shelby’s parents broke off their conversation immediately, and the quick look they exchanged set off Shelby’s radar.
“Is something wrong?”
“What could be wrong?” Ada Mae said brightly. “Callie Rose, it’s such a pretty morning, I decided we’re going to have our breakfast on the back porch, like a picnic.”
“I like picnics. I’m taking Griff on a picnic date.”
“I heard about that. This can be like practice. I’ve got these pretty strawberries all cut up, and some cheesy eggs already scrambled. Let’s take this on outside.”
“Mama wants a picnic, too.”
“She’ll be right along.”
Shelby stood where she was while Ada Mae scooted Callie out onto the porch.
“Something’s wrong. Oh God, Daddy, did someone else get shot?”
“No. It’s nothing like that. And I want to tell you right off, he’s all right.”
“He— Griff? It’s Griffin.” As her heart took a hard bump, she grabbed her father’s hands. He’d stay steady, she knew, no matter what. “If it was Clay or Forrest, Mama’d be a mess. What happened to Griff?”
“He got a little banged up, is all. It’s nothing serious, Shelby, you know I’d tell you if it were. Somebody ran his truck off the road, and into the big oak on Black Bear Road last night.”
“Banged up how? Who did it? Why?”
“Sit down, take a breath.” Turning, Clayton opened the refrigerator, took out a Coke. “He’s got some abrasions from the seat belt, the air bag. And got a pretty good knock on the head. Emma Kate took him into the clinic last night, gave him a going-over, and I’m going to do the same myself later this morning. But if Emma Kate said he didn’t need a doctor or the hospital, we can trust that.”
“All right, I will, but I want to see for myself, too.”
“You can do that,” he continued in his calm way, “after you take that breath.”
“It must’ve happened when he was driving home from here. He wouldn’t have been on the road if he hadn’t insisted on following me back here, making sure I got home all right. I want to go over and see for myself, if you could keep Callie.”
“Don’t worry about Callie. He’s not out at the house. He stayed the night at Emma Kate’s as she wouldn’t have him stay on his own.”
“Good.” She did manage that breath now. “That’s good.”
“But I expect he’s on his way to the police station by now. Forrest and Nobby—you remember my second cousin Nobby—they went down the holler last night, and brought Arlo Kattery in.”
“Arlo? He ran Griff off the road?” She pressed her fingers to her eyes. “Drunk, I expect, and driving crazy.”
“I don’t know as that’s the way it was. You go on down. It’s best you hear it straight-out, than the bits and pieces I have. And you tell Griffin he’s got an exam at ten o’clock or he’s not clear to drive or so much as touch a power tool.”
“I will. Callie—”
“She’s just fine. Go on.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
When she ran out, leaving the Coke unopened on the counter, Clayton knew his little girl was at least halfway in love. With a sigh, he picked up the can, opened it for himself. It was smarter than a shot of whiskey at seven-thirty in the morning.
• • •
GRIFF STRODE INTO the station house, eyes—including the left one, where angry bruising had come to the surface overnight—hot. He arrowed straight to Forrest.
“I want to talk to the son of a bitch.”
Forrest stopped tapping at his keyboard, pulled the phone from between his shoulder and ear. “I’ll get back to you,” he said, and clicked off.
“You’d best simmer down some first.”
“I’m not in a simmer-down mood. I don’t even know Arlo Kattery, never spoke a word to him in my life. I want to know why he deliberately ran me off the road.”
“Forrest?” The sheriff spoke up from his office doorway. “Why don’t you go ahead, let Griff go back and have his say,” he said when Forrest hesitated. “In his place, I’d want mine.”
“All right, thanks. Nobby, you think you could call back that fella at the lab, finish that conversation?”
“I sure can. That eye doesn’t look too bad there, Griff.” Nobby, a twenty-year vet, gave Griff’s face a considering look. “Seen a lot worse. You get some raw red meat on it, won’t be so bad.”
“I’ll do that.”
As Griff turned toward the back, Shelby came flying in.
“Oh, Griff!”
“Now, Shelby honey, I was just telling him it wasn’t that bad.”
“It’s not.” Griff picked up Nobby’s theme and ran with it. “I’m okay. It doesn’t hurt.” Ached like a son of a bitch, but didn’t hurt.
“Daddy said it was Arlo Kattery. I don’t know why the man has a license if he’s still driving drunk like he did when we were teenagers.”
“We don’t know as he was drunk when he ran Griff off the road.”
“He must’ve been. Why else would he do something like this?”
Forrest exchanged a look with the sheriff, nodded slightly.
“Why don’t we go back and ask him? He was half drunk when Nobby and I went and got him, and tried to say he’d been home all night. The plow was still on his truck. Arlo gets paid to plow some of the private roads outside of town,” he explained to Griff. “Hardly much reason for a snowplow on his truck in May. White paint on it, too. And yellow paint, like the plow, on the back of Griff’s truck. Nobby and I informed him of those facts, so he claimed somebody stole his truck, put the plow on it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Knee deep in it,” Forrest said with a nod to Griff. “Not too much use arguing with a man half drunk, and chasing his tequila with a joint, so we just hauled him in. And we left him last night to sleep on the fact we’d be charging him with attempted murder this morning.”
“Oh my God.” Shelby shut her eyes.
“That’s the reaction we want from him. Attempted murder’s a stretch,” Forrest commented, hooking his thumbs in his belt. “But he’ll surely go down for hit-and-run, reckless endangerment and so on.”
“We can tie quite a few and-so-ons onto the package,” Hardigan said.
“Yeah, I expect so. He’s going to do a few years however it slices out. We’ve just been letting it sink in. The sheriff here, if I’m reading him correctly, thinks what’s sunk in may come rising up if he’s faced with the pair of you.”
“That’s a fine read, Deputy.”
“All right, then. Let’s see what we see. Y’all don’t mention lawyer, all right? He hasn’t gotten there yet in his pea brain.”
Forrest led the way back through a steel door and the three cells.
In the center one, Arlo Kattery sprawled on a bunk.
She’d gotten a look at him that night at Bootlegger’s—him and his pale-eyed stare. What she saw now didn’t look much different than the last time she’d seen h
im in full light years before. Straw-colored hair shorn short, face grizzly with the pale blond scruff. Those small snake eyes—closed now—long neck with a tattoo of barbed wire circling it.
On the short side, and stocky, with scarred knuckles from countless fights—most of which he’d instigated.
Forrest let out a shrill whistle that made her jump, and had Arlo’s eyes popping open.
“Wake up, darling. You’ve got company.”
Eyes so pale blue they seemed almost colorless, skimmed over Griff, landed on her, slanted away again.
“Didn’t ask for no company. You best let me out of here, Pomeroy, or your ass is in the fire.”
“Looks to me like it’s your ass smoking, Arlo. All Griff wants to know—and it’s a reasonable request—is why you rammed his truck and forced him into that old oak tree.”
“Wasn’t me. Told you that already.”
“Half-ton Chevy pickup, dark red, yellow plow on the front, bumper sticker on the bottom left of the tailgate.” Griff stared at him while he spoke, saw Arlo’s jaw twitch.
“Plenty fit that bill around here.”
“Nope, not with the details. Funny bumper sticker, too. It’s got a target on it full of bullet holes, and it says: ‘If you can read this, you’re in range.’” Forrest shook his head. “That’s sure a knee-slapper, Arlo. Add that paint transfer, and it’s all wrapped up. Nobby’s out there right now talking to those forensic people over in the lab. Might take a little time, but they can match that yellow paint to your plow, that white paint to Griff’s truck.”
“That lab stuff is bullshit. More bullshit like all the rest of this.”
“Juries set store by it, especially in capital cases, like attempted murder.”
“I didn’t kill nobody.” Arlo surged up now. “He’s standing right there, isn’t he?”
“That’s where ‘attempted’ comes in, Arlo. Tried and failed.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill nobody.”
“Huh.” Forrest nodded as if considering that, then shook his head. “Nope. Don’t see a jury buying that one. See, we do what we call ‘accident reconstructions.’ And it’s going to show that you deliberately and repeatedly rammed Griff’s truck. Took some skill, so you won’t be able to try for diminished capacity, saying you were drunk. That wouldn’t buy you much time off anyway. I figure you’re going down for about twenty here.”
“No fucking way.”
“Every fucking way,” Griff disagreed. “Forrest, hum a tune and close your ears while I tell this asshole I’ll swear on a mountain of Bibles in front of God and country that I saw him behind the wheel. I’ll swear I counted the bullet holes in that idiotic bumper sticker and got his license plate.”
“That’s a fucking lie. I had the plates covered with burlap.”
“You truly are a moron, Arlo,” Forrest murmured.
“He’s a fucking liar.” Incensed, Arlo jabbed a finger between the bars. “He’s fucking lying.”
“You tried to kill me,” Griff reminded him.
“I didn’t try to kill nobody. It wasn’t even supposed to be you. Was supposed to be her.”
“You want to say that again, son?” Forrest’s voice was quiet as the hiss of a snake, but Griff had already shoved forward, reached through the bars to grab Arlo’s shirt, yanked him so his head smacked the bars.
“Now, Griff, I can’t let you do that.”
But Forrest made no move to stop him as Griff repeated the action.
“All right, that’ll do. For now.” Forrest gripped Griff’s shoulder. “We don’t want him getting off on some technicality, do we? Step back now.”
“Why?” Shelby hadn’t moved, not at the words, not at the vicious look Arlo had given her when he said them, not at the sudden violence. “Why would you want to hurt me? I’ve never done anything to you.”
“Always thought you were too good for me, looking down your nose and turning your back to me. Ran off with the first rich guy you could rope in, didn’t you? Heard that didn’t work out so well.”
“You’d’ve hurt me because I wouldn’t go out with you back in high school? I’ve got a child. I’ve got a little girl, and I’m her only parent now. You’d have risked making my baby an orphan because I wouldn’t go out with you?”
“Wasn’t going to make nobody no orphan. Just going to scare you, is all. I was only going to teach you a lesson, put a scare into you. Wasn’t my idea, anyway.”
“Whose idea was it, Arlo?”
For the first time a hint of canniness came into Arlo’s eyes. He shifted them from Forrest, back to Shelby, back to Forrest. “I got things I could say, but I want that immunization thing. I don’t do no twenty years for what wasn’t my idea.”
“You give me a name, I’ll consider that. You don’t, I’m going to push for twenty-five. That’s my sister, you idiot fuck. One thing you should know about right enough, is family. You tell me who started this ball rolling, or I’ll make sure you go down for all of it, and hard.”
“I gotta have some guarantee—”
“You get nothing.”
“He’ll get more than nothing,” Griff said. “I’ll find a way to get to you. I’ll find a way. And when I do, you’ll wish you’d had a chance to do twenty years.”
“I never touched her, did I? Never laid a goddamn hand on her. Just going to scare her some anyway. She gave me a thousand dollars, said she’d give me a thousand more after I gave you a good scare, taught you a good lesson. Just going to give you a nudge off the road, is all, but you passed me going the other way. By the time I got turned around and going, I seen you head down to the old Tripplehorn place.”
“You followed me.”
“I had to wait, figured, fine, I’d teach you that lesson you had coming when you drove out again. Better when it was dark, right? But then he drives out behind you and I couldn’t get to you. Didn’t see why I should’ve wasted my whole night for nothing. Figured pushing him off would give you a scare.
“Northern boys, they’re good enough for you, looks like. You jumped right in the sack with this one, but you never would give me so much as a long look. I seen him take your clothes off.”
“You were watching.” Too angry to be sickened, Shelby stepped closer. She knew, she knew just who’d paid him. “Did Melody Bunker tell you to spy on me, too?”
“She gave me a thousand dollars, said I’d get another. Didn’t tell me how to go about it, just to get it done. Miss High-and-Mighty’s real peeved at you, real peeved. She come right to my trailer in the holler, give me cash money. That’s how peeved she is you got her kicked out of the beauty salon.”
“I hope you got a good look, Arlo, and you take that with you to Bledsoe County and the cell you’ll be occupying there. And when you do, you think about this, Arlo. I never thought along the lines of being too good for you. I just didn’t like you.”
She turned, started out. Forrest signaled for Griff to go with her.
“Hold on, Red.”
“I can’t hold on. I can barely breathe. I swear, if you hadn’t rapped his head I’d have done it myself. He went after you because he couldn’t get to me quick enough. He could’ve killed you.”
“He didn’t.”
“If you hadn’t followed me home—”
“I did.” He took her by the shoulders. He didn’t want the what-ifs playing in her mind, or his, not then and there. “He’s locked up, Shelby. He’ll stay that way.”
“All this because Melody got her pride handed to her, and got it handed to her because she earned it. She knows full well what he might’ve done. She gave him money and an excuse to do it.”
“I’d lay odds before the morning’s up, she’s in a cell right along with him.”
