Breathe the Sky

by Michelle Hazen

  He tossed a glare at his brother in the dim light of their one flashlight and clicked on his phone. The battery was down to 8 percent. It’d probably die before the workers in the front of the warehouse left for the day and he could get to an outlet to charge it. Leroy knew a guy who worked in the warehouse, who’d snuck them into this far back room where they’d be safe from the assholes who were after him.

  It had a bathroom—well, a drain, which was about as good as it got when you were on the run. But they had to be quiet as hell so the other workers didn’t figure out there was more living in this warehouse than roaches and pizza yeast. Unfortunately, quiet and Leroy never had seemed to exist in the same place for long.

  Jack thumbed his phone again, staring at the battery icon and trying to remember how long 8 percent might last.

  If Mari called this afternoon, he’d miss it.

  Not that it mattered. She’d had four days to call, and she had chosen not to. He’d fucked up something fierce when he stuck his oar in about her being on Junior’s crew.

  “Stop checking that phone like a girl that just got her first training bra,” Leroy said. “We’ve got nothing to do but sit here with our thumbs up our asses. You think we wouldn’t have heard it ring?”

  “Guess you can shut the hell up, since you’re the reason we ain’t got nothing to do,” Jack said. “If you’d paid those pricks back, we’d be waiting on your trial in your apartment right now. Eating real food, not that gas station shit.” He jerked his chin at their two shopping bags of canned hams and Slim Jims, a few bags of jalapeño Doritos thrown in for “the vegetable group,” as Leroy put it.

  “I would have paid them back all nice and square if the coke hadn’t gotten stolen before I could turn around and sell it.”

  Jack scoffed, looking away.

  “What? Not my fault I got robbed, could happen to the best of us. Even angelic little you, Jackie-O.”

  “You robbed your own junkie ass,” he bit off. “And the guys you owe aren’t dumb enough to buy that story, either, or they wouldn’t have shot up my bike.”

  “You oughta be thanking me for helping teach you a valuable lesson,” Leroy said. “Don’t drive a getaway truck with a motorcycle in the back. Too recognizable and it makes a bigger target.”

  “Blocked a bullet meant for your thick head, so maybe you can shut the shit up about what I drive when I’m saving your ass.”

  Jack was really thinking that of the two, he would rather have the bike. Especially since his phone battery was down to 7 percent and he was looking at another ten days before he could deliver his brother to his court date. Ten more rounds of this glorified closet all day and sleeping out in the warehouse at night, using bags of powdered pizza dough mix for pillows.

  “Aww, your panties are just in a pinch because of this girl. I’m sure she’ll call, kid. Prize like you? What woman wouldn’t want you?” Leroy said it with a straight face, but he couldn’t keep the chuckle out of his voice.

  Jack turned the phone over in his hand, nearly dropping it because the case had gotten oily with days of sweat. He rubbed it against his jeans.

  Maybe for Mari, this was the best thing that could have happened. Leroy could mock all he wanted, but the kind of man Mari deserved wouldn’t be trespassing on Cheesy Charlie’s property to hide from drug dealers. What was he going to tell her about the bullet hole through the back of his motorcycle?

  Decent guys didn’t have bullet holes in their stuff.

  His shoulders hunched as he tried to block out whatever Leroy was rambling on about. She’d smiled all the time when they were together. It had been her idea to have sex. Her idea to . . . do what she’d done with him in that motel room last week. Surely she wouldn’t have done all that if she had just been biding her time before they could break up.

  Maybe she was still pissed at him and hadn’t listened to his voicemail, so she didn’t know why he hadn’t come to work. Maybe if he called her and got her to pick up, he could apologize and explain in person.

  It wasn’t like this was his mess, anyway. He wasn’t the one who owed money to a gang. Though it would probably be his money paying them off, once they could figure out a way to contact them without fighting their way through another ambush like the one blocking the street between the town and the prison.

  Jack chewed the inside of his lip. Until their argument, Mari had liked him. He was pretty damn sure. He could still remember the soft glow she’d get in her eyes when she looked at him. Fuck Leroy, and all his “real men don’t have to call, let the ladies come to you” shit.

  He hit the button for her number and turned his back on his brother.

  Three electronic tones sounded in his ear. “I’m sorry. This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”

  He pulled it away from his ear and frowned at it, but no, he’d dialed directly from his contacts, so he couldn’t have put in a number wrong.

  “Hey, when a phone’s battery goes dead or it’s shut off, do you get the out-of-service message?”

  “Nah.” Leroy bit off a black-ringed fingernail and spat it across the closet. “Goes to voicemail. That your first phone, or what? Let me give you a little tutorial: you push the buttons with the numbers on them, then you talk into the bottom, and the phone sex lady talks out the top end.”

  Jack didn’t even hear him, pushing to his feet to pace around the racks of cleaning supplies.

  Her phone hadn’t given that message before, when he’d called to leave a voicemail.

  His stomach twisted sickly. She’d never answered, and she’d never called him back. He could picture her staring at her phone screen and sighing when his name popped up again, hitting “Ignore.”

  He was the guy blowing up her phone who couldn’t take a hint. Harassed her enough she changed her number. Probably that’s how she had to get rid of her ex, too. She’d said he would never give up and leave her alone.

  “What you PMS’ing about over there? Did she yell at you and hang up, or just plain old change her number?”

  He glanced over at his brother, really looked at him for the first time since he’d picked him up at the jail. He was gaunt except for a little pooch of a belly straining a wifebeater undershirt that had a swipe of jalapeño-flavored powder at the hem. All the lines in Leroy’s battered face lifted as he chuckled, because of course he knew what Mari had done. That’s what women always did to shitbag guys like the Wyatt brothers.

  And would Jack want it any other way? Would he want her wiring him money to pay off drug dealers, or straining to hear him whisper into the phone because he was hiding in a storage closet?

  Would he want her to take a guy back who’d made her cry the way he had?

  Jack shut off his phone.

  32

  If the Boot Fits

  There were three men in the construction office trailer, and her.

  Mari wore her best white blouse, buttoned all the way to the top, khakis, and her hiking boots because she didn’t have anything else, though she’d carefully wiped all the dust off them.

  Marcus, in cowboy boots, jeans, and one of the western shirts he always wore.

  Rod, in well-cut chinos and a smile that made her sick to look at.

  And a barrel-chested man with dramatic chops of facial hair and a bolo tie. He was apparently the representative from the power company, and Rod’s boss. She’d only ever seen his name before on the signature line of her paychecks: Stanton Davis. It sounded like a brand of cowboy boots.

  Stanton Davis was currently going down the list of the evidence against her.

  Pictures of the deceased animal, printed from Marcus’s phone into surprisingly sharp eight-by-ten glossies. A baby tortoise only the size of her palm, smashed into the center of a tire track with its shell cracked into pieces.

  The traffic report log of all people who entered and exited that
access road that day, kept by the biologist who monitored the road.

  Her report, stating that she worked at Tower 2123 that day, and that she cleared the area of all biological resources and observed no fatalities.

  When he was finished, Stanton tapped the edges of the papers together, then gave Marcus a slight nod.

  It had been six days since she and Jack fought and he disappeared. Three since Brad had called her, and two since that first awful meeting when Marcus told her that he had to suspend her while they investigated. Sympathy in his eyes when he said he hadn’t believed it, so he’d gone out and seen the tortoise’s body for himself. He’d been so sure it wasn’t her crew, that he’d find someone else had been on that site. But no one else had been, and now her friend had no choice.

  Marcus turned to her with tight lips and sad eyes. “I’m sorry, Mari, but I’m going to have to let you go. I’ll need your access pass and any company equipment you’ve been using.”

  It took less than five minutes to lose everything she’d worked for since the divorce.

  The job, all the friends she’d made. Any hope of paying her medical bills. She’d already moved out of the motel, which was the only half-assed excuse for a home she had.

  At least Jack had left before he could see what she’d done. How thoroughly she’d failed the only job she had on the construction site: to protect the animals she loved. He would have been so surprised and so disappointed.

  She could still remember how carefully he held the tiny tortoise he’d found under his own tire. If he’d been at work, he probably would have seen the tortoise she’d missed, and it wouldn’t be dead.

  The day it happened, she’d been so distracted, thinking about Jack and then with Brad calling out of the blue . . . She’ checked all the tires, she was sure she had, but she’d been rushing. Maybe she’d glanced past the tortoise and not even seen it. Had it been her tire? Had she even noticed the bump when she ran it over? It was so small . . .

  She’d always been absentminded when she was stressed. Had misplaced her keys a thousand times, living with Brad, even after he installed hooks by the front door for her. She thought she’d changed the oil according to the sticker on the windshield, only to find the car was choking and the numbers on the sticker were different than what she remembered . . . She’d been like this for years. How had she thought she could handle a job with so much responsibility?

  Brad wouldn’t have been surprised at her failure. She always figured he’d be aghast if he knew her new career. How it all hinged on her being attentive when he always accused her of being thoughtless to the point of stupidity.

  “Have to say, I’m starting to wonder if we shouldn’t revisit which company we’re contracting for our biology work.” Rod gave a concerned look to Marcus. “We chose to use experienced personnel specifically so you could save us the sort of take fine we’re about to pay out because of one of your people.”

  “I do apologize, sir,” Marcus said, his voice so uncomfortable it didn’t really sound like him. “Mistakes do happen, though, and even the best biologist can miss tortoises. In fact, before California tightened its regulations, many projects didn’t impose a fine for takes smaller than one hundred fifty millimeters, because the statistical probability of finding those animals is so low. That’s nearly twice the size of the tortoise Mari missed.”

  “Doesn’t matter what used to be,” Rod said. “It matters what the regulations are holding us to now. Are you saying none of your people can be relied upon to spot the tortoises we’re not allowed to run over?” He pursed his lips and looked to his boss. “If this is the kind of carelessness we can expect from this company, perhaps we need to discuss the tickets this girl has been passing out like Tic Tacs. If she can’t see the animals she’s hired to find, can we trust her judgment about what is or is not a violation?”

  “I assure you—” Marcus started in, but Mari didn’t even hear him. All she heard was Brad, laying into her for losing the keys again.

  But in the book Jack had given her, it said that abusive men often set up situations to make it appear their victim had messed up, to justify their own anger. And now that Mari thought about it, she realized she had never forgotten an appointment, never forgot to do something. She just got confused when her keys weren’t where she remembered leaving them, didn’t get milk because they had a full carton, found the door unlocked when she swore she’d thrown the bolt last night.

  And how easy would it have been for Brad to move the keys, pour out the milk, unlock the door?

  Looking at Rod right now, with the tiny gleam of triumph behind his fake-worried smile as he argued with Marcus, Mari remembered her life with Brad so, so well.

  She waited for an opening in the conversation, but the men were leaning forward to argue across her as Stanton slouched in his chair behind the desk.

  “Excuse me,” she started, but they just talked right over the top of her. Brad used to do that. Interrupt her and interrupt her until she couldn’t remember what she’d started to say in the first place.

  Mari stood up.

  “I want to see the pictures.” She pointed to the file in front of Stanton. “I remember where every person was parked that day, and I at least want to know if it was me who hit the tortoise.”

  “Mari . . .” Marcus winced. “You’re responsible for the site, so technically it doesn’t matter if it was your tires or one of the work trucks. It won’t affect . . . I’m still going to need to let you go.”

  “I understand. I just want to know, for myself.” She couldn’t get that pop sound of a crunching shell out of her mind. She’d never heard it in real life, but she could imagine it far, far too well.

  Stanton nudged his chair back a touch. “I might duck out, if you’re okay to finish this up, Rod. I need to get back to the main office.”

  “You’d better stay,” Marcus said. “The file and the pictures need to go back to the main office with you to be included in the report to the BLM.”

  “It’ll only take a second,” Mari promised, covering her twinge of guilt at his impatience by snatching the photos off the top of the file. “My truck was to the left of the driveway to the access road. The two crew trucks were on the right side of the pad.” As soon as she saw the concrete abutment next to the tortoise in the first picture, she frowned. “But . . . this is underneath the tower.” She looked up at the men in the office, appealing to Marcus because he spent the most time on-site, so he’d know. “No one parks under the tower when the crew is working. It’s too dangerous—one dropped screwdriver could shatter a windshield.”

  “Listen, honey,” Rod said, “that turtle didn’t run over itself. Somebody must have parked under the tower. Trust me, if those damn linemen could do what they were told, I’d be out of a job. Here, you don’t want to look at those, you’ll just get upset.”

  He reached for the photos, but Mari hung on to them. He even started to exert pressure, trying to tug them out of her grasp, but when she didn’t relent, he finally let go, his jaw twitching with tension.

  The pictures were hard to look at, with the crushed animal and the tire track in the dirt right over the top of it. The tracks looked wider than those of her Toyota, each mark cleanly pressed into the soil by the tread of a tire so much newer and more aggressive than anything she could afford.

  She looked up. “I want to see the road traffic records.”

  “We already went over that in the investigation that took place before this meeting,” Stanton said. “There was no one out of the ordinary, and no one else on that road that would have stopped at that pad except your crew and the mobilization crew that came to move the crane—the ones who found the dead tortoise. We already told you everything it said in the summary I gave.”

  Her skin prickled with the scrutiny of everyone in the room. Stanton checked the time on his phone, and she knew they all thought she was being ridicu
lous. But if once, just once, she’d thought to mark the level of the milk with a pen before she went to the store, she wouldn’t have had to wonder if she was crazy. Not once did she ever have enough faith in herself to think that Brad might have poured it out, because he always looked at her with that crushing combination of disappointment and pity. Just the way Rod was looking at her now.

  “It’s evidence against me. I want to see it.”

  “She has the right,” Marcus said.

  Stanton shuffled through the papers and passed over the records, creases deepening at the corners of his frowning mouth.

  “I looked at them, too, Mari,” Marcus said in an undertone. “Nobody strange went through.”

  She scanned down the records, and it only took her seconds to find what she’d expected.

  She put her finger on the name and slid the paper into the middle of the desk. “That’s who ran that tortoise over. Not me. Not my crew.”

  All the men leaned in to see, and when Stanton recognized the name, he frowned even more deeply. “If we need to call security to escort you out, Ms. Tucker, we will. We investigated, and you were at fault. Wild accusations aren’t going to save your job.”

  Fear fluttered in Mari’s belly, and she started to feel like she wasn’t getting enough air, but she set her jaw and refused to let them see how close she was to a panic attack. “Really? Why was Rod on that road, then?”

  “It’s my responsibility to oversee all the tower assembly crews. That’s what being the assembly manager means, in case you don’t understand the term.” His manicured nails drummed on the arm of his chair.

  “We were the only crew on that section,” Mari said. “The next assembly crew was down at 2144. The only reason you would have had to be on that section was to come to the tower we were at, to check our work. So you were the last person at Tower 2123.”