Unbridled

by Diana Palmer

  There was a click. Tonio grimaced and turned off the game.

  “Who the hell was that other boy?” John demanded, black eyes flashing.

  Tonio swallowed. He could cross tongues with the meanest of other students, even teachers, but he quailed in the sight of his father’s muffled fury. “Uh, that was, that was David,” he began.

  “Who’s David?” came the softer, more dangerous question.

  Tonio got up. “You said supper?” he asked, trying to soothe his father.

  It didn’t work. “I said, who’s David.”

  Tonio grimaced. “Okay. He’s a guy from school. We play online together. He’s in my clan.”

  “Your what?”

  “We have clans in Destiny,” Tonio explained. “It’s like guilds in other games. Groups of us play together.”

  “You still haven’t answered the question.”

  “He’s in eighth grade,” he said finally. That was two grades above Tonio. “He plays Destiny with me, and we talk back and forth.”

  John’s eyes narrowed. “I cuss. You don’t,” he said. “And I don’t want you around kids who do.”

  Tonio laughed.

  “What’s funny?”

  “I’m in an alternative school, Dad,” the boy said. “Not exactly church, is it?”

  “You’re in alternative school because you attacked a teacher at Jacobsville Middle School,” came the sharp reply. “And you’re lucky Sheriff Hayes Carson didn’t arrest you. The teacher saved your neck, even though you were expelled.”

  “He pushed me,” Tonio said, repeating what he’d told his father before, but he kept his head down when he said it.

  “We’ve been through this before,” John said quietly. “He was trying to get you away from the other boy, who was hitting you. You thought the teacher was attacking you, so you punched him in the stomach. That’s assault,” he added curtly.

  “Then why didn’t they arrest Teddy? He was hitting me!”

  “Doesn’t work the same way between students as between students and teachers,” he replied. “The world is changing. You have to change with it.”

  Tonio bit his lower lip. “I don’t like the new school.”

  “So? You didn’t like the old one, either.”

  “Jake goes to school in Jacobsville,” he said. “I only have David in San Antonio.”

  David. The boy who cursed like a sailor. For not the first time, John worried that he’d made a mistake taking his son to San Antonio for his education. But he hadn’t had a great deal of choice.

  “That fancy chicken again.” Tonio sighed, making a face as he and his father sat down at the table.

  “It’s elegant chicken,” Adele chided, “and you like it.”

  He made the face at her, too, but he smiled. He loved Adele. “I’ll eat it. Go ahead. Use me for a guinea pig for all your recipes.”

  “I will.” She dropped a kiss on his head and finished serving the meal. She pulled off her apron. “Leave the dishes, I’ll be back when I feed my brood!”

  John chuckled. “Thanks, Adele.”

  “No problem.”

  * * *

  “I miss Mama,” Tonio said suddenly.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” John replied tersely.

  Tonio’s cell phone rang. They could both hear it coming from his room.

  “Leave it,” John said. “No electronic devices at the table.” That had been the psychologist’s advice. It did seem to be working, a bit. At least the two talked, although not much.

  “How was school?” John asked.

  Tonio grimaced as he picked at his food. “Older kids just love to torment us.”

  “That’s life. Get used to it. There’s a pecking order everywhere you go. I have a lieutenant who tells me what to do, he has a captain who tells him what to do. That’s life,” he repeated.

  “David’s sister went to the school and raised...she raised the devil,” Tonio said, “when an older kid picked on him.”

  “I don’t interfere unless I have to,” he was reminded. “Listen, son, you won’t learn to stand on your own two feet if I fight all your battles for you.”

  “Sure.” His dad never fought any. The first time he’d even been to Tonio’s school in Jacobsville was after the fight. Other kids had both parents, and they took an interest in what their children were doing. Tonio’s parent was rarely even home. His job took up almost all his time. Tonio got what little was left. At least at the supper table they could exchange one or two sentences. Not that it would last long. He sighed. Any minute now...

  Sure enough, the pager on John’s belt buzzed. He pulled it out and looked at it. He didn’t even glance at his son as he went to retrieve his cell phone from the pocket of his shepherd’s coat. He punched in a number.

  “Ruiz,” he said.

  “It’s Alice. Autopsy’s in an hour. You coming?”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He hung up and swung on his coat. “I have to go back to the city. I’ll be late. Finish your supper, do your homework and get to bed early. Adele will make sure you do.”

  “Okay.”

  John swung on his coat, grabbed his keys from the holder beside the front door and went out to climb into the black SUV he drove to work.

  Tonio sat at the table all alone, thinking about how miserable his life had become. His father hardly noticed him, except when he was acting out. He had only one friend in the world, and now Jake was involved in soccer at his school in Jacobsville, as well as being an active member of the school’s agriculture club, and he hardly ever had time for Tonio after school or on weekends.

  That left David. His father didn’t know who David really was. He didn’t realize that Tonio’s new friend was actually the same boy who’d helped him run away from home last year. David was a member of Los Diablos Lobitos. He and his brother, Harry, had lived with their grown sister, Tina, who was a call girl. The older brother had been killed three years earlier. There were rumors that Rado Sanchez had done it.

  Tonio was afraid of Rado. But Tina always looked so nice, and she smelled sweet. She’d been kind to Tonio the two days he’d lived with them. She’d teased him and picked at him and ruffled his hair. He liked her a lot. He knew what she did for a living. David said she hated it, but Rado made her. He said Rado was always around. Tina got along with him. Probably because she did what he told her to. She loved her little brother. David never talked about the brother who’d died. Not ever.

  Tonio’s father almost never talked to him. He hardly ever touched him. He was never here. Tonio was growing up all alone. He had no brothers or sisters and he didn’t want a substitute mother. That was the problem. Ever since he’d objected so violently to his father’s woman friend, there had been a wall between them.

  John said that life went on, that you lost people but you couldn’t climb into the grave with them. John had loved little Maria, his wife. But it had never been the sort of passionate love they showed in movies. It had been more a relationship between good friends.

  Tonio had loved his mother, so much. She’d been his anchor. She was always making things for him, hugging him, telling him how much she loved him, making him feel part of her life. She’d worked in the emergency room of one of the other hospitals in San Antonio, not the one where Rosa was a clerk. Maria had once told Tonio that she felt she did a worthwhile job, a noble thing, helping to save lives. It made her feel good inside. His cousin Rosa, his mother’s first cousin, worked at the Hal Marshall Memorial Children’s Hospital as a clerk. He liked Rosa, but she was in her late twenties, unmarried, and she didn’t know a lot about kids. She worked in the office, not as a nurse. She’d been a policewoman before she changed jobs. She liked Tonio. But it wasn’t the same as when his mother had been alive. Rosa was tough. Well, people in law enforcement usually were. His dad was a prime example.<
br />
  He poked at the potato dish that went with the chicken, but he barely tasted it. There was a cake on the table, in a plastic carrier. He never touched sweets. His father liked them occasionally, but neither of them cared much for dessert. Just as well. This cake was one Adele had baked for the family of a person who’d just died. She was always doing things for other people. Like Tonio’s mother had.

  He got up from the table and went into the living room. There was a painting of his mother on the wall, one his father had commissioned when Tonio was just a year old. His mother had been lovely. She had long, thick black hair and a sweet, pretty face with big black eyes and thick eyelashes and a light olive complexion. Her hands, in the painting, were as they’d been in life, long-fingered and elegant, with pink nails. She was smiling, the way she always smiled in life. In her lap was a small boy with touseled brown hair and big brown eyes, looking toward the artist. The subjects were so realistic that they could have walked out of the painting.

  It had cost a lot of money. His father never spoke of finances, but there were checks now and then from Argentina. There were letters from someone who lived there. And once, Tonio had seen a website that his father visited in Argentina, which showed a ranch with thoroughbred horses, many at stud or for sale.

  Tonio had asked why his father was looking at a ranch that specialized in racehorses. John had just shrugged and said he chanced upon it during a search and was curious about the name of the horse ranch, because it was Ruiz, like his own name. Not that he was interested in buying any fancy horses, he’d added. The quarter horses they had on the ranch were quite good enough for him.

  The answer had satisfied Tonio, who never could keep his mind on anything for very long. That psychologist he went to see said he had attention deficit disorder. Tonio had drifted off into daydreams while the man droned on, explaining the problem to him. He imagined that his father had also drifted off, listening to the long-winded explanation, because they’d never discussed it again. Tonio wondered if his father had been affronted because the problem might be inherited from him. His dad was touchy about such things.

  His dad’s profession had caused him some issues in Jacobsville. The older kids had made fun of Tonio because his dad was a Texas Ranger. A few sharp words from one of the teachers had stopped some of it, but teachers couldn’t be everywhere. The student he’d gotten in the fight with had said that all cops were crooked and since Tonio’s dad was a Latino, he was probably even more crooked than the rest. Tonio’s blood had boiled. He wasn’t ashamed of his blood, and he didn’t like hate speech, so he’d plowed into the other student.

  He’d tried to explain the insult to his father, but there had been a phone call, another crime scene that his dad had to go to. It seemed that any time he tried to tell his father anything important, to talk to him, that cell phone was always in the way. He couldn’t even have one uninterrupted meal with his only remaining parent.

  Adele came back. He said the food was good, when she groaned at the lack of empty plates, but his dad had to leave and he’d eaten too much at lunch. He went back into his room and picked up the game controller. As an afterthought, he called David back on Skype.

  “Hey, man, watch your language when you hear my dad come in, okay?” Tonio asked. “He’s a Texas Ranger.”

  “Yeah. I know,” came the sarcastic reply. “You poor kid. But, okay, I’ll watch my mouth when the heat’s around. Now, where were we?”

  THREE

  David liked Tonio. But there were other, older members of Los Diablos Lobitos who didn’t. One of them was Rado Sanchez. Nobody knew what the nickname meant or where it came from, but he was cold, dangerous, and he’d taken over leadership of the gang several years ago when its former leader went to prison for murder. Rado was the sort who wouldn’t balk at murder. He sent initiates out to do some pretty bad things. One of them had just been sent to jail for the rape and murder of an old lady. That had shocked and frightened Tonio. He wasn’t in the gang and he wasn’t trying to be in it anymore. But that didn’t stop Rado from trying to pressure him into joining it.

  Rado was tall and thin, with a face like a rat and a smoking cigarette in his hand constantly. He stopped Tonio just off the grounds of the children’s hospital where his cousin worked, late one afternoon.

  “You coming into the gang or what?” Rado asked.

  “Not yet,” Tonio said, trying to look cool as he hid his secret dislike for the older boy.

  “Why not? You scared of your daddy?” Rado drawled sarcastically.

  Tonio straightened. “No.”

  “Sure you are. That’s why you won’t join. You’re scared of the heat.”

  “I can do what I want,” he began.

  “Oh, right,” he said, making a choked sort of laugh as he exchanged amused glances with his three companions, all of whom looked as ratty as he did. “That’s why you’re up here in an alternative school.”

  “I punched a teacher,” Tonio said, trying to make himself look good.

  “I put a teacher in the hospital,” the older boy countered. “Beat him almost to death. He was one of my dealers and he got cold feet.” His face tautened. “That’s what we do to people who cross us. If he’d tried to report us, or if he talked about me, to anybody, he’d be dead.”

  Tonio fought down the fear. “I gotta go,” he said.

  They moved around him, encircling him. “Oh, yeah? And what if we don’t want you to go, Tony boy?” Rado drawled. “What if we got a little job we want you to do for us?”

  Tonio felt real fear, but he tried not to show it. “I don’t have time.”

  “Lots of kids in that hospital. Scared kids. Sick kids. We got drugs you can give them.”

  One of the boys went backward, tugged by the back of his jacket. A woman with long, blond hair in a long black coat moved right into the circle with her cell phone out. “Yes, is this 911?” she asked and glared right at Rado. “I want to report—”

  “Let’s go!”

  Rado and his friends scattered. Rado looked back, furious. “I’ll get you! I missed once. I won’t miss again!”

  Before she could speak, he and his gang ran into the parking lot and disappeared past the surrounding buildings.

  The blonde put the phone, which she hadn’t even activated, back into her pocket. She kept her hands in her pockets, so that the boy wouldn’t notice that they were shaking. It took nerve to stand up to Rado, and she had more reason than most to fear him. But seeing the boy being tormented brought back memories of bullying that she’d had to survive when she was in school. She hated bullies.

  Tonio was barely able to get his breath. His heart was hammering in his chest. He looked up into the soft, brown eyes of the woman who’d saved him. She looked like an angel to him when she smiled.

  “You okay?” she asked softly. She took her hand out of her pocket long enough to push back a lock of thick, black hair that had fallen into Tonio’s eyes. Her touch was as gentle as her manner.

  “Yeah.” He swallowed. “Thanks,” he whispered, grimacing.

  “Those boys are big trouble,” she said, glaring after them. “We get victims of Los Diablos Lobitos in the hospital from time to time. Yesterday we got one of Los Serpientes. They’re pretty sure that Lobitos killed him.” She cocked her head. “You know about the little devil wolves? They like to recruit boys for their gang, because juvies don’t go to prison for things that would put them away for years.”

  “I know about them,” he said in a quiet tone. “Los Diablos Lobitos keeps after me. I don’t want to join them.”

  “That Rado is bad news,” she continued. “He’s killed men. The police here keep trying to put him away, but he’s as slippery as a fresh-caught fish.”

  He managed a smile. “How do you know about Rado?”

  “I live in the Alamo Trace apartments, there,” she said, indicating an old
er building in the distance. “Rado’s been around here for many years.” She didn’t add that she knew him very well because of what he’d done to her family. They were old enemies. She’d have given anything to see him go up for murder, but he couldn’t be caught.

  “You work around here?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I work there.” She indicated the children’s hospital.

  “You do?” he asked. “I don’t recognize you.”

  Her eyebrows lifted.

  He laughed. “I stay here in the cafeteria after school. My cousin works here, too. She gives me a ride home.”

  “Well! Small world,” she teased.

  “Do you work in the office?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I’m a nurse.”

  So had his mother been. He loved nurses. “You like nursing?”

  “More than anything.” She pulled her coat closer. “If you’re going my way, you can walk with me and protect me from evil gang members,” she teased.

  He chuckled. “That was sort of the other way around.”

  “I was bluffing. The phone wasn’t even turned on. I should take up poker,” she said, frowning, as they walked together toward the main entrance. “Apparently, I bluff pretty good.”

  He laughed out loud. “Yes, you do.”

  “Want to have a snack with me?” she asked. “I’m not on duty for another thirty minutes. I don’t usually come in this early, but I set my clock wrong.” She sighed. “I’m a born klutz. I unplugged it to clean, and then when I finally plugged it back in, I forgot to reset it.”

  He grinned. His dad was the same way. “I’d love to have a snack. I have money left over from lunch,” he added quickly, to make sure she knew he wasn’t going to mooch off her. He knew that nursing didn’t create millionaires. Most nurses weren’t in it for the money, anyway.

  She grinned back. “Okay.”

  * * *

  She went with him to the canteen on the first floor, the one used by visitors. There were always members of the staff around, and security, so it was safe for a young boy to sit there while his cousin finished her shift.