No Saint

by Jo Raven

  They say that pain makes you stronger, but that’s bullshit. It only drives you mad, makes you hard, numb, uncaring. I feel the walls going back up, the hard mask slipping over my face as I lean back in my plastic chair. I feel ice feeling my veins.

  It’s the only way to get through this new twist, the news that I’m probably going back to hell. Just laugh in the face of trouble, roll with the damn blows, pretend you feel nothing, that you don’t give a shit, until it becomes true.

  Been there, done that many times before. Got the T-shirt. It will be harder this time, after I’ve dismantled the whole façade I was used to wearing, but hey, I took my chances. I’ll fight this setback, too, fight until I can’t get up anymore, and then...

  Why does her face keep coming up in my thoughts? It breaks my concentration, shatters my control.

  I rub at my brow, and start pulling myself together again. Again and again and again, until I can face the prospect of years in this goddamn prison like I’m not scared shitless, like I’m not back in that cell, on that bed, waiting to die.

  I search for my anger to suck on, but it’s all gone. What do I have to draw on this time around? I feel so fucking... empty inside. I can only think of Luna, in my arms, in my bed, her head resting on my shoulder, her laughter ringing inside the room.

  “You have no alibi,” the man says, slamming a bunch of papers on the table. “All evidence points to you. Give it up, Jones. Confess, and tell us where your buddies are hiding. If you confess, we could work on getting your sentence reduced. For being cooperative. You know what I’m saying.”

  I lift my head, stare at him. Weigh his words.

  “Has Luna... Has a girl been around to visit me?”

  He frowns. “Nope. No girls. No-one.”

  Yeah, that sounds about right. I’ve lost everything. If this is my only chance to reduce my sentence...

  “I’ll confess,” I whisper.

  ***

  So this is it, I think for the thousandth time since my self-imposed goddamn blinkers fell off and I started to see, to understand. This is what it feels like to be bullied, to be crushed, to be left with no option but to bend over and take it raw. This is who I was. This is how fucking bad it sucks. What a moron I was.

  What an asshole I am.

  And knowing it, understanding it, can’t undo the wrongs. Can’t roll back time.

  Nothing can absolve me, and now that my perpetual anger has left me, I feel cold and dead inside. So it is fair, I guess, that I’m here. Retribution. Karma. Whatever you wanna call it. It finally turned around and bit me in the ass. Here I thought regret and penance would be enough to get me off the hook. That the happiness I felt was real and solid.

  But it seems to be drifting through my fucking fingers like smoke, vanishing away.

  Alone. When did I end up so damn alone? Luna doesn’t believe I’m innocent, my half-siblings are in St. Louis—though why would they come to my aid? After the way I treated them.

  The answer is, of course, that I’ve always been alone. Even with Dad. Even with my gang at school. I hadn’t realized until recently, until Luna, just how much.

  Shut in a jail cell with some other drunks and miscreants, I sink down to the floor and rub the back of my neck, waiting for my fate. My mouth is so dry my lips are cracking, and my stomach is a tight knot of pain. I’m thirsty, but not hungry. Couldn’t stomach anything right now. I could use a stiff drink, but if I started drinking now... I may never stop.

  Hope is a fucking bitch. I wish I’d never trusted it.

  ***

  It seems I’ve dozed off, my chin resting on my chest, a painful crick in my neck. One of the drunks is laughing low somewhere to my right, a hollow sound, and there are raised voices outside the cell.

  “He has confessed!” Someone is all but yelling. “It’s done.”

  “Bullshit. I want to see the recording.”

  “What for? You know as well as I do Jones did it.”

  I grunt, rolling my neck, wondering who’s talking. The voices are familiar. Is one of them the sheriff?

  “You have to prove it, Sheriff. Just because you believe it doesn’t make it true.”

  Ah. Bingo.

  “There’s plenty of evidence. The footage from the security cameras, the witnesses, the pendant—”

  “His face doesn’t appear on the cameras, does it?”

  “Now you’re nitpicking. Do you know Ross Jones personally?”

  “As much as I know most people around these parts.”

  “Well, then you know that he deserves to be behind bars. Should be. He’s following in his father’s footsteps. I remember Jasper Jones when he was young. The girls loved him. He had his gang, later joined an MC. Bad to the marrow of his bones. A troubled young man, from a problematic family. Ring any bells? See the similarities?”

  “God’s sake, sheriff, you can’t imprison Ross because he started out as his dad. What about individuality of character, what about circumstances and free will?”

  “He has no alibi, Detective. I’m sorry.”

  Detective? Could it be John Elba?

  I rub at the grit in my eyes and sit up, fully alert for the first time in what feels like days.

  “This is personal, isn’t it, sheriff? You’ve been longing to put Ross away since he was a kid. End the Jones line. Stop what you see as an inevitable downfall. Ross Jones is no saint, granted, no angel. I’ve been watching him since he was young. But he’s no criminal, either.”

  “Detective. Fact is, the boy confessed.”

  “And confession under duress isn’t valid.”

  “Under duress? Now you’re out of line, Detective. You accusing us of not doing our job properly? Unless you have proof of his innocence, I suggest you leave.”

  “This isn’t your jurisdiction, sheriff.”

  “But it is.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Great. Is this a case of territorial pissing? For a second there I thought...

  I thought John Elba had come for me, not to piss on the sheriff’s shoes. Not that it didn’t feel good, hearing someone defending me, but now I’m properly awake, and starting to realize that this probably wasn’t about me at all.

  Yeah, killing hope isn’t as easy as it sounds, but I’m getting there.

  ***

  “Hey!” I bang on the bars, shake them. Sometimes I wonder if I’m dreaming, if this is a nightmare and I’m caught in it in a fucking loop, never actually waking up. “I said, hey!”

  “What do you want?” the bored officer at his desk asks, without lifting his head.

  “I wanna make a phone call.”

  “Don’t you have your cell phone?”

  “You guys took it.” Said it was so I wouldn’t warn my accomplices. What the fuck ever. “Give it back to me and I’ll use it.”

  “I’ll have to check with the sheriff.”

  “Check what? I’m allowed phone calls, right? I wanna call my family.”

  “He’s right,” the drunk beside me confirms, and shoots me a conspiratorial grin. “He’s got rights.”

  Awesome.

  “You’ll get your phone call,” the officer says. “In a minute. Just calm the hell down, the lot of you.”

  I have to call Merc, tell him about the earrings and the letters, about the names I found out from Dad. Who knows how much leeway I will have down the line to call. Better get this over with now. Merc can look for our lost brother.

  And if he finds him, maybe he’ll keep me out of it, not mention that he has a half-brother who fucked up so royally he’s locked up in prison for the foreseeable future.

  I just hope he lets me know if he finds him, so that part of me that’s worried about the boy can relax.

  If only I could let go of Luna, too, then I’d be ready to accept my fate.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Luna

  “Ross called,” Merc says, coming back to the porch. We’re still at Ross’s house, sitting out front, thinking.
I know where he’s kept.

  “That’s good.” I turn away to hide my face, not to show the shock. He called Merc, not me. Why? “Is he okay?”

  “Says he is. He sounds like shit.”

  I turn back to face him, my heart pounding. “Did they hurt him?”

  “I think he’s just tired and stressed. He only called to ask me to grab a box from his bedroom. Do you know about it? Letters and earrings... he says they could lead us to a half-brother Dad talked to him about.”

  “Is he serious?” Gigi mutters, looking up from her phone. She’s been texting back and forth with her boyfriend, Jarett, who’s babysitting Octavia and Matt’s kids. “Tati mentioned something like that years ago but I thought Ross had made it up.”

  “Seems not.”

  “He told me about it,” I say. “He said he’s worried about the boy. Would like to track him down.”

  “That’s what he told me, too.” Merc frowns at the house. “He said the house’s unlocked. I’ll go look.”

  The women get up to follow him, and after a few beats, I do the same. No idea why, but I feel like I should show them around, keep them from touching Ross’s stuff, somehow... protect him.

  From what, I don’t know. They seem to like him well enough, care enough to sit down and try to think how to set him free.

  But as they wander around the empty house, commenting how dirty and rundown it is, how his bedroom could use a good sweeping, maybe burn the sheets and curtains and start from scratch, it bothers me.

  And when Gigi says, “You’d think an animal lives here”, well...

  “He doesn’t live here, and he’s not an animal,” I inform her. “He hates this house.”

  “It’s his home.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s the place where his dad hurt him, where he waited for his mom to come back and she’d been buried in the woods nearby. You can’t expect him to care for it.”

  “I know his dad beat him,” Gigi says quietly. “That’s no excuse to live in this filth.”

  She doesn’t get it. I didn’t at first, either. “He doesn’t live here. He sleeps mostly at the garage, or on the street. This place gives him nightmares.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t seen what that man did to him growing up,” I say, my voice cracking. “You don’t know the things he’d say to him. And the scars...”

  “What scars?”

  “On his back. From his dad’s belt.”

  Three pale faces turn toward me.

  “How bad is it?” Octavia asks after a while, a new emotion entering her eyes. Anger, I realize. Cold and terrible. “For how long was that going on?”

  “Since he was a kid, from what I understood. And it’s bad. Bad enough he refused to take off his T-shirt in front of me until recently. The scars are old, raised. The wounds must’ve been pretty deep.”

  Octavia produces a small sound of distress, and Merc throws an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close.

  “Something happened to him,” I whisper. “In prison. He won’t tell me what, but... sometimes I’m afraid for him.”

  “What do you mean, Luna?”

  “Afraid he’s given up. He fell of the garage roof once—”

  “What?” Gigi this time. “What happened?”

  “He says he slipped, but he’s been going there a lot, standing on the edge like he wants to fall.”

  “Goddammit,” Merc breathes, and the word contains a great deal of shock and frustration.

  “And now he’s going back to prison, and I’m...”

  I’m lost. I don’t know how to help him. I don’t know what to do.

  “We’ll get him out of there,” Gigi says. “Justice will be served. We need to talk to Jon Elba. Where’s Matt?”

  “He was out, trying to call the facility,” Octavia says, and her voice trembles but she’s obviously getting it under control. “Let’s grab the box Ross wanted us to see and go. I can’t wait around sitting on my hands any longer.”

  Me neither. I nod at the box on the bed. “Finding your lost brother may have to wait a little, until we get your falsely accused brother out of jail.”

  Merc grins at me, and I grin back, relieved that we’re done talking and will start acting to help Ross. His face holds echoes of Ross’s features—something in the eyes, in the high cheekbones, the hue of his hair—but the mouth is different, the smile wide and free of clouds and shadows.

  I find I miss Ross’s bitter, faint smiles all the more by looking at his brother.

  Hang on in there, I think as we make it out of the house and head toward Matt’s pickup truck. We’re going to find you and set you free.

  ***

  “You miss him, don’t you?” Merc asks, and doesn’t wait for me to answer. “I understand. I miss my girl and I’ve only been away from her three days. She’s visiting her sister.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Cosima.” His eyes light up when he speaks her name.

  “You love her.” I smile at him.

  No question about it. Every line of his body tells me so. Still, he replies, “Yeah. And you love Ross.”

  “You can’t know that...”

  “You wouldn’t be here, fighting for him, if you didn’t. People think that love is complicated, hard to explain. But it’s not. You like to spend time with someone. You want the best for them. Would do anything for them. That’s love.”

  “You’re oversimplifying.” But I’m still smiling, my cheeks warm.

  “But it is. It’s that simple.”

  Maybe he’s right. As we pile up in Matt’s pickup truck, the thoughts I’d managed to push away come back to haunt me.

  If Ross had a chance to make phone calls, why didn’t he call me?

  If Dad can see that Ross isn’t a bad person, that he makes me happy, why won’t he help me?

  If love is this simple, why is being with Ross so complicated?

  John Elba is a tall, handsome man with intense dark eyes and short black hair. He seems to be strong, but standing next to Matt Hansen he looks slender and frail.

  Then again, most men would, I guess. Not Ross, though. White and golden though he is, I bet Ross is no less intimidating than Matt, with shoulders big and wide, his chest broad and muscular, and that square jaw you can cut glass on.

  Yeah, I miss him already. So frigging much.

  Elba takes us into an empty office and closes the door. He looks uneasy. “Ross says Edward proposed that he joined them in some illegal activity. But he never told Ross what exactly they planned to do. This isn’t helping his case, if he knew about it from before. One could argue he was in on the thing, that he willingly participated, if not orchestrated the robbery.”

  Matt scowls. “Nonsense. The boy would never do that and you know it.”

  Relief swamps me. Yeah, it looks like Matt is on Ross’s side.

  Elba shakes his head. “What about an alibi? Doesn’t Ross have one?”

  “Not for the time of the robbery.”

  “Damn. What does he claim he was doing at the time?”

  “Walking about the woods near the river. He’d been to visit the house of his girlfriend, Luna, but only found her brother. They talked for five minutes and then he left. He could have gone on to rob the bank right after.”

  “That’s my house,” I say, feeling cold and numb. “I’m Luna. What about that meeting with my brother? Can’t he use it as an alibi?”

  Matt shakes his head. “It was early, much earlier than the robbery. He had plenty of time to drive over to the next town over and rob the bank after meeting your brother.”

  My throat is dry. “Can I see Ross?”

  “Not now,” Elba replies. “The sheriff is having him interrogated again.”

  I don’t like the image the word evokes. Brings to mind spikes and blades and fire.

  “Is that normal?” Merc frowns.

  “No. But the sheriff insists that he has the lead on this case, and his men back him up. I’ve made
some phone calls higher up the chain and I hope he gets stopped. I’m afraid...”

  “What?” Matt’s gaze is sharp. “What happened?”

  Elba sighs. “He got Ross to confess to the crime.”

  “What?” I’m on my feet, fists clenched at my sides, my heart pounding hard. “This is crazy. He didn’t do it. You have to help him!”

  “I’ll talk to some people higher up,” Elba says. “I don’t think these charges can stick.”

  “But it’s possible?” Merc asks quietly.

  Elba shrugs. “If he gets a signed testimony from Ross, then it’s probably over. And while he won’t let us see Ross, we can’t warn him not to do it.”

  “There must be something we can do,” Octavia says, gaze flicking between Matt and Elba. “This can’t be legal. We’re his family. Surely we can meet with him. He’s not been indicted, not yet.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Elba says. “I’ll let you know the moment I have word. He should also be able to call you. Has he?”

  “He called,” Merc says, shoulders slumping. “He wanted me to take care of a family matter, but refused to talk about himself. It’s like Luna said. Like he’s giving up.”

  Elba’s gaze is sharp on me. “Did he say that? Merc, did he say anything like that to you?”

  “No.” Merc’s blue eyes are troubled. “But that’s how he sounded.”

  “I think he was pressured to confess. I’ll ask to cross examine the witnesses, see if there are inconsistencies, check the camera feed. We’re not giving up on him.”

  Who knew stupid Ed and his friends would manage to lay such a perfect trap, and that this Summer that promised so much happiness would end so quickly?

  ***

  Leaving the Watsons, who say they’ll stay the night at a friend’s house, I trudge home and hurry up to my room, closing the door and throwing myself on my bed.

  I take out my phone and call Ross again.

  No reply.

  I find myself wishing I had a photo of him. How can you miss someone so much you feel a limb has been hacked off? Phantom touches on my arms, on my lips, phantom pain in my heart.