by Jeff Shelby
“I need the keys,” Jillian said.
“It's my dad's,” Tim said, his voice hoarse. “It's not really mine.”
“I'm not asking,” she said coolly. She still held the weapon and she looked like a mercenary who wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
He felt around in his backpack with his good arm, without much luck. I pushed his hand out of the way and dug deep into the pocket, past the bottles of what I assumed were sunscreen and insect repellent, past a pack of gum and a wallet and the cellphone he’d said was tucked inside. I finally found the keys, pulled them out, and tossed them to Jillian.
She caught them. “Thanks.”
“What's gonna happen to me?” Aaron asked. “If we tell them the truth, then I'm...what's going to happen to me?”
Before I could rip into him, Elizabeth beat me to the punch.
“Are you serious?” she asked, her voice rising. “Are you kidding me?”
“What?” he asked. “You want me to get arrested?”
“I seriously don't even care what happens to you, Aaron!” she yelled. “I mean, what the hell is wrong with you? You're selling weed. You're lying to me. And to Tim. You bring him up here. He gets shot. We get kidnapped. We almost get killed. People were shooting at us! Tim got shot!”
“How is all that my fault? I didn’t tell you to come up here.”
I wanted to punch him in the mouth, shut him up for good, but Elizabeth wasn’t finished.
“I came because I was worried about you and because Tim was freaked out,” she said, her voice shaking with anger. “All this happened because of you and your stupidity and all you care about is...you? How stupid are you?” Then she shook her head like it was the wrong question. “Actually, how stupid am I?”
I expected Aaron to take all of that in and look a little embarrassed, maybe ashamed. But he really didn't seem to have it in him. He looked more indignant than anything else.
“Easy for you to say when you aren't looking at getting arrested,” he said, frowning at her. “You don't have to worry about it. You can go home with your dad and everything will be fine. Because—”
Elizabeth's fist cut through the air, landing squarely against the side of Aaron's jaw. His head snapped back and he staggered away from her, his hands up at his face.
“Just shut up,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing is fine and you're the reason. You're lucky we don't just leave you here. So just shut up.”
Aaron rubbed at his jaw and said nothing.
A thin smile crept onto Jillian's lips. “I think you guys will be fine. So I'm leaving.”
She walked over to the pickup, got in, and turned it on. The truck sputtered to life, exhaust from the tailpipe wafting out behind it like a cloud of smoke into the mist. The engine idled for a moment.
I walked over to my bullet-riddled car and waited next to the door. For what, I didn’t know.
She watched me through the glass, then pressed a button and the window dropped halfway down.
“Thanks,” I said. The word surprised me as it left my lips. I hadn’t intended on saying anything more, but it suddenly seemed urgent that I convey this to her before she left. “If I didn't say that before. Thank you.”
“You're welcome,” she said.
She made no move to leave.
“DEA, right?” I asked. “You have to be DEA. Undercover. Need to vacate before sheriff gets here and lots of questions start getting asked? To keep your cover?”
She didn't say anything, but she didn’t have to. Her silence was answer enough.
“I'm sorry if we screwed it all up for you,” I said. “I get the feeling this was big and ended before you wanted it to.”
“You didn't screw anything up,” she answered. “Things were already screwed up.”
“Doesn't feel that way.”
“I don't think you had any conversations with Curry about who I am,” she said, a sad smile on her face. “So that was coming no matter what happened today. Somehow, I got burned. I may have been the one who got lucky.”
A siren howled in the distance.
“You should go,” I said. “We'll be fine.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding, but she still hesitated.
“But you are DEA, right?” I asked.
The smile changed. Less sad, more amused. “Maybe we can talk about it another time,” she said. “Because I know who you are, Joe Tyler, and I’m pretty sure I could find you if I need to. If I want to.”
The window rose up, ending our conversation. She maneuvered the truck into a tight U-turn and disappeared over the hill, down toward the desert and wherever she was headed.
THIRTY SEVEN
Elizabeth pushed against the garage door and kept her left leg in a straight line, stretching out her hamstring, her Achilles, and her calf. “I feel like I haven't run in a month.”
I twisted to the right and slowly back to the left. “I think it's only been four days.”
“Which feels like a month,” she said. “You wanna start walking?”
I nodded. We walked down the driveway and toward the beach. I knew what she meant by the time reference. It had only been four days since our run on the beach, the one before she’d gotten the text from Tim that had dictated the chain of events that followed.
The sheriff's department had arrived a few minutes after Jillian left us that night. And then more police officers and then guys who looked like either ATF or DEA. I wasn't sure. The EMTs who came took Tim and got him into the ambulance. They did the same to Nick. I wasn't sure what they did with Curry's body. We were all separated and questioned at length. I did as Jillian said and told them the truth about what had occurred. I told them what they'd find in the cabin at the bottom of the canyon and not too far into the questioning, I saw lights panning back and forth down in that vicinity.
We were there for several hours and the sun was starting to come up when they finally told us we were free to go. They'd verified who I was with multiple phone calls and after telling the same story several times over, they seemed satisfied that we'd just gotten unlucky trying to help a kid out. The ATF/DEA guys were particularly interested in Jillian and I told them everything I could, including Curry Thompson calling her out as a cop. They didn't react in any way that would lead me to believe she was telling the truth, their faces like blank slates, but I did notice that they left shortly after their conversation with me.
A sheriff's deputy arranged to have my car towed back to San Diego. He drove Elizabeth and me back to Coronado, a mainly silent ride into the morning daylight.
“Tim texted me today. Said he feels pretty good,” Elizabeth said as we turned the corner out of our neighborhood. “And he said he's tired of everyone texting him and asking him what happened.”
“You been getting that, too?” I asked, squinting into the late day sun.
“It's high school, Dad,” she said. “Of course. Everyone wants in on the drama.”
I'd been worried about her as soon as we got back. I wasn't sure if the whole thing would serve as a trigger for her, bringing up bad memories and unresolved feelings. But she'd been upfront, direct, not hiding from any of it. She'd asked me questions and as painful as it was, I answered them. The only thing we didn’t discuss was my time with Curry in the parking lot. She didn’t know I’d been seconds away from a bullet meeting my brain. She didn’t know that Jillian had saved my life. She didn’t know how dangerously close we’d both been to not making it out alive. And I was determined to keep it that way.
“They asking about Aaron?” I asked.
“Duh.” I didn’t see the eye roll but I knew it was there.
“What have you told them?”
“That he's an asshole and I was stupid,” she said, her eyes focused on the beach in the distance.
They'd arrested Aaron that night. He'd admitted to growing the plants in the canyon and what had happened. There was no way he could avoid it, since Elizabeth and I had already shared that information with the responding off
icers. I wasn't sure whether they would charge him or just question him to find out more about Curry Thompson's operation, but he'd cried when they'd put the cuffs on him and led him to the back of the sheriff's vehicle.
I’d offered to call Mike, to see if he could call out there and find out Aaron’s status and what he might be charged with, but Elizabeth had refused. She didn’t want to know.
“Don't be hard on yourself,” I told her. “It's easy for people to pretend to be something they aren't. And to hide things.” My years as a cop and the time I’d spent as a pseudo investigator looking for missing people had taught me that.
“Still,” she said. “I should've seen it.”
“How?”
She reached back and adjusted the band that held her ponytail high on the back of her head. “I don't know. I just feel like we spent enough time together that I should've known. I should've asked more questions. I shouldn't have trusted him.”
“You don't want to be that person,” I said. “The one who doesn't trust anyone.”
“I feel like I already am.”
“You aren't,” I assured her. “You gave him a chance.”
“And how did that work out?”
We crossed the street to the sidewalk that ran along the sand. “So maybe we just make sure to keep all of the boys away from you.”
She shot me a look that was one hundred percent teenage girl.
“I'm kidding,” I said. “Only kidding.”
“It was weird seeing you...like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Just...I don't know. In control? You just seemed to have it all figured out as it was happening.”
A wave of guilt washed over me. I hadn’t been in control during those final moments with Curry. I had been desperate, ready to bargain with anything I had to spare my daughter’s life. “I was more worried than I let on.”
She shrugged, one of disbelief. “Maybe. But as scared as I was, I still thought you were going to get us out. I can't explain it.”
“I'm glad you felt safe,” I said, because I wasn't sure what else to say. “I was thinking about some other things, too.”
“Like?”
“Like the job thing,” I said. “Just getting everything together. Moving forward. Like you were asking about.”
It was a partial truth. I hadn’t thought about that much at all once things had taken a turn for the worse in the canyon. But ever since we’d gotten home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
She nodded. “Okay. That's good. Right?”
I punched her lightly in the shoulder. “I hope so.”
We crossed the soft, uneven sand to get to the hard-packed shoreline along the water. The air was warm again, the heat wave having parked itself over the coastline. The wind was nonexistent and I knew it wasn't exactly running weather. But Elizabeth had said she wanted to go and I knew she'd go even if I said no and I was still having trouble letting her out of my sight in the aftermath.
I knew I needed to move forward, find a way to get myself out of neutral. Not just for her, but for me, too. Even though I wanted to chain her to my side and never let her go, I knew it was an unreasonable thought. She was growing up. She’d be leaving for college soon. My gut still tightened at the thought of her going anywhere far from home, but I had a few months to sort that out, to come to terms with it. But me? I could start figuring out me, and what I needed to do to get things right again. Maybe not right; nothing was going to feel right without Lauren and with the past that Elizabeth and I both had to claim. But I could stop treading water and take a few tentative strokes to see just where I wanted to go. I wasn't sure if I was going to call Mike or what exactly that meant, but I was determined to figure it out. For me and for my daughter.
Elizabeth took a deep breath, set her hands on her hips, and fixed her gaze down toward the hotel. “When we were up there and everyone was shooting and everything, all I could think about was Mom.”
It took everything I had to keep my voice neutral. “Your mom? Why?”
She stubbed the toe of her running shoe in the sand. “Because I just kept thinking if she'd been here, maybe we wouldn't have gone. Like maybe she would have backed you up about not wanting to go and actually forbade me from doing it. Or maybe she would have told me he was a jackass and to not date him.” She shook her head. “Totally random stuff, but I was thinking about her.”
I nodded. “I thought about her, too.”
I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t tell her how every single moment of my time spent with both of them had flashed before me and how I’d begged and pleaded for Elizabeth’s life in the same way I’d done for Lauren’s, hoping against hope that this time it would be different.
Elizabeth chuckled, snapping me back to the present. “Yeah. Just weird.”
A young couple was wading into the water a few hundred yards in front of us. They were probably in their twenties, I thought. They were tiptoeing in, testing the water, letting the waves tease their toes. The woman pushed the man and he stumbled forward right as a small wave crashed into his legs. He laughed and grabbed for her and she shrieked as he picked her up and carried her out further and more memories washed over me, of the first weeks and months Lauren and I had spent together. We were foolish and in love and had no clue what the future would hold for us.
Just like this couple.
I hoped life would be kinder to them than it had been to us. Gentler.
“We made it,” Elizabeth said.
I glanced at her. “What?”
“We survived.” Her smile was more reflective than anything. “Again.”
“I guess that's who we are,” I said. “I hope that's who we are.”
“What? Survivors?”
I nodded.
She twisted at the hips, a final series of stretches. “I guess. Would be nice to not have to just survive for a change, though. I kinda want to be normal for once.”
I wondered about finding that normalcy, if it was within our reach, or if our history just wouldn't allow us to be normal, that we were destined to always be survivors, to never settle into something that felt like normal, whatever that might be.
She smiled at me. “Don't take that the wrong way.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. I did, and I was determined to find it for her. For both of us. “We'll see what we can do about that.”
She reached her arms up and bounced on her toes. “You ready?”
I knew what she was asking. Was I ready to run.
But the question I was answering was different.
“Yeah,” I said, taking a few steps before starting to jog. “Let's go, kid.”
The End
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