Fortunate Son

by J. D. Rhoades

  Winslow was returning to the table. He saw the look on Chance’s face. “What?”

  She choked back the laughter that threatened to bubble up. “Nothing.” She composed herself and picked up her fork. “So what is it that we’re talking about here?”

  He looked suspicious, but went on. “I want you to talk to Savannah. Become the main contact with her.”

  Chance frowned. “Me? I don’t have any experience in…” She put down her fork, her frown deepening. “Wait a minute. Is this because I’m a woman?”

  “Well, yeah.” He took a bite of his own food. “Hey, this is really good.” He stopped when he saw the expression on her face. “What?”

  She shook her head. “Wow. Okay.”

  He looked puzzled. “I mean…we just thought a new approach might—”

  “We?”

  “Well, of course, I ran it by the agent in charge.”

  “Of course.” She shook her head and went back to her meal.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  She remembered the waitress’s words. If he’s makin’ you do things you ain’t comfortable about, we can get you straight out of here. She wished it were that simple. “No. Nothing’s wrong.”

  He apparently took her at her word and returned to his meal. “Anyway,” he said after another couple of bites, “we’d like to set up a meeting with Savannah. With you there.”

  “To do what, exactly? Convince her to keep playing ball? Even if you can’t arrange protection for her boys?”

  “We just need to get her settled down. Everything’s kind of in a state of flux right now.”

  “Are the boys getting protection or not?”

  He shook his head. “We’re working on it. But I’ve got to tell you, it’s kind of a longshot. The older one, Mick…he could be a problem. He’s a loose cannon, from what I hear.”

  “So by ‘get her settled down,’ you mean you want me to lie to her.” Chance put her fork down, her omelet half finished. The fact that Winslow was ruining a meal she’d looked forward to was making her even angrier.

  Winslow put his own fork down and looked at her steadily. “She’s an informant, Cahill. Informants are to be run. To be managed. And you know why that is? I really shouldn’t have to tell you. It’s because they’re on the other side.” He picked up his fork again. “Maybe you’ve lost sight of who the good guys are.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I have.” More than anything at this moment, she wanted her father’s advice. “Let me get back to you.”

  “No.” The blunt finality of the word startled her. She stared at him, suddenly apprehensive, as if he might spring across the table at her. “This thing’s moving too fast. I need an answer now, or you can go back to St. Bernard today and get back in uniform.” He finished the last of his eggs and pushed the plate away. “Are you in or are you out?”

  She picked up her fork and pushed her food around on the plate. She didn’t want to go back. Winslow, prick that he was, had summed up how she’d felt about being a road deputy. She wanted out, and up, and this was opportunity knocking. And in the end, Winslow was right about Savannah. However sympathetic she might be, thanks to her efforts to dig herself out of the hole she was in, it was still a hole she’d dug for herself. Her father’s voice came back to her. You have to learn to keep your distance. Don’t let them suck you into their game.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m in.”

  WYATT CAME TO not knowing where he was. He hated when that happened. The answer was usually nowhere good. He raised his head slightly, the skin on his cheek peeling away from a sticky leather surface. His mouth felt as if someone had scoured it with sandpaper. Slowly, he levered himself up to a sitting position, biting back a groan at the pain in his joints, then giving in and letting the groan out as the change in position made him realize the even worse pain in his head. He blinked as he looked around the dark room before realizing he was in his own living room, on his couch. He saw a blanket on the floor. Glenda must have tried to cover him. Oh god, he thought, and then the nausea hit. He staggered to the downstairs bathroom, fell to his knees, and got the toilet lid up just in time for the first convulsion to hit. The vile odor of his spew set off another spasm, then another, until all he was bringing up was a thin yellow bile. He hit the lever to wash the vomit away. His stomach rebelled again. He felt a presence behind him and started to get up, but another retch drove him to his knees. He saw Glenda’s hand reach around and place something on the toilet seat—a washcloth soaked in cold water. He picked it up in shaking hands and wiped the spittle and vomit from around his mouth. He heard her place something on the vanity beside the toilet, then she was gone. He reached for the glass of cool water he knew would be there, took a mouthful, and rinsed the vile taste from his mouth. It might have been another few minutes before he knew the sickness had passed. It might have been an hour. He thought of just sinking to the cool, inviting tile floor and sleeping the rest of his life there, but the awful clarity of his position made rest impossible. He flushed again and pushed himself painfully up. He downed the remaining water in a gulp, then pulled out the drawer of the vanity until he’d located an old tube of toothpaste that was rolled up almost to the top. There was no toothbrush to be found, so Wyatt managed to squeeze a dollop of cement-like paste onto his index finger and rub it over his teeth and gums until his mouth felt less like an untended dumpster. He’d been trying not to look in the mirror over the sink, and when he did, he wished he hadn’t. His face was pale and drawn, and there was a cut over one eye, blood crusted over a wound he had no idea how he’d gotten. “Shit,” he said out loud, and it came out as a deathbed croak. He stumbled out of the bathroom like a man who’d forgotten how to walk and saw that things weren’t about to get any better for him. The light was on in the kitchen, and he could hear the sounds of Glenda moving around. He took a deep breath and walked toward the light like a man headed for a date with the noose.

  She was seated at the kitchen table, a cup of steaming tea in front of her. She wouldn’t look at him. He was surprised to see a cigarette dangling from between the fingers of one hand.

  “I thought you’d quit,” he said, sliding into the wooden chair across from her.

  She looked him in the eye then, her eyes narrowed and furious, her brows drawn together. “You really think this is a good time to bring up my bad habits?” She flicked her ash into a saucer she’d pulled out in lieu of an ashtray, as if daring him to make a further comment.

  “I know. Sorry.” He looked over to the kettle on the stove.

  “There’s more tea,” she said. She didn’t offer to make it. He got up, still shaky, and prepared himself a cup. Neither of them spoke. He poured the water over the teabag and spooned in two heaping tablespoons of sugar before he took his seat again. She was back to not looking at him again.

  “At least tell me I didn’t drive home like that,” he said finally.

  “No.” She stubbed the remains of the cigarette out in the saucer. “She brought you home.”

  There was no doubt from the venom in Glenda’s voice who she was. “Oh, damn,” he said. Then he added desperately, “Look, honey—”

  “Oh, I know. Nothing happened. She said it, you said it, and from how messed up you were, I sure believe it.” She took a sip of tea and he saw that her hands were shaking. “That doesn’t change the fact that you called your old lover to come get you instead of your wife.” She looked at him, her eyes brimming with tears. “You told me it was over. You told me…” She set the cup down, no longer able to control the shaking. She took a deep breath. He could see her drawing herself together with sheer force of will. “I thought looking for Tyler Welch would help you. Give you something to do besides drinking yourself to death. But I was wrong. It’s making you worse.”

  “Glenda,” he said, “it’s not your fault.”

  She looked at him as if he’d started babbling in Ancient Greek. “I know it’s not my fault, Wyatt. You don’t have to tell me that.” She shook
her head and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she looked at Wyatt with quiet determination. “We’ve both been married before, Wyatt. I came into this knowing we both had some baggage. Some damage. I thought we could make it better for each other. And you’ve made it better for me. Mostly. But…” She stopped, choking on the next words before going on. “I guess I can’t fix everything that’s wrong with you. You need help, Wyatt. You need AA, or rehab, or something. Some kind of treatment that’s beyond me. And you…you need to decide who you want to be with.”

  “You,” he said immediately. “I want to be with you, and nobody else.”

  “Then prove it,” she shot back. “Get the help you need.”

  He got up and went to where his tea was steeping. He pulled the bag from the hot water and put it on the saucer as he considered his next words. “Finding Tyler is the help I need,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe you…”

  “No, hear me out. Please.” He took a long drink. The sugar seemed to hit his system almost immediately. “If I find Tyler, I find Mick. And I failed Mick.”

  She frowned. “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “I put all my interest in helping Tyler. I found him a new home. A place where he could have a new life. Even a new name. But Mick? I just let him go. I don’t know why. I guess I thought Tyler was the one who was salvageable. And I gave up on Mick. Now look what’s happened.”

  “Wyatt…”

  “It all comes back to you. It always comes back. All the things you’ve done wrong, all the mistakes you think you got away with. You haven’t. They’re still out there. Waiting. Waiting for you to make it right. Or pay the price.”

  She blew out an exasperated breath. “You’re still drunk.”

  “A little,” he confessed. “But I know this is something I have to do. And I need you to know it too.”

  “Do what, exactly? Find Tyler. And, I guess you’re thinking, Mick Jakes, and then…what? Fix it all for them?” She got up and came around to stand behind him. She slid her hands down his chest and rested her chin on the top of his head. “You think if you can save Mick, it’ll make up for Morris Tyree.”

  The name took his mind back to that cramped interrogation room, the smell of fear-sweat, of anger, the dizzy feeling of crossing every line of civilization and knowing he was completely in the right to do so. He saw his hand pinning the right wrist of skinny, shaking, contemptible Morris Tyree, who’d been the last person seen in the vicinity of four-year-old Rachel Wagstaff, to the table. He saw his other hand, holding his father’s shiny, legendary Ka-Bar knife, laid across Tyree’s frantically squirming fingers. He heard a voice that he’d never imagined would come out of his own throat, low and terrifying. You sign that confession, boy, the voice had said, or you say goodbye to these fingers.

  The thing was, he had known Tyree was guilty. He had known beyond any reasonable doubt that Tyree, a convicted sex offender with a folder full of candid pictures of beautiful blonde Rachel on his old and barely functioning computer, was the one responsible for leaving her battered and violated body lying in a ditch alongside State Road 113. He had known it with such complete conviction that when the weeping and sniveling Tyree had insisted he’d had nothing to do with the girl’s death, it was more than just a challenge to Wyatt’s interrogation skills. It was an outrage too great to be borne. So the knife had come out. Morris Tyree, fully cowed, had signed the confession that would send him to death row.

  Nine years later, a DNA match had conclusively proved that while Morris Tyree might have been Rachel’s stalker, her killer had actually been a homeless drifter with a long history of violent mental illness named Judah Cuddahy. Before being finally run to ground, Cuddahy had committed two other murders of young girls, inflicting exactly the same sort of grotesque injuries he’d committed on Rachel Wagstaff. The day the State Supreme Court issued the order for Tyree’s release, Wyatt turned in his resignation as sheriff, headed straight for Val’s, and stayed drunk for a week. He and Glenda had been married for three years at that point, and he expected her to leave him. In a way, he’d wanted her to. He’d wanted her to pack up, to leave, to show him and the world he really was as big a monster as he now knew he was.

  But she didn’t leave. She didn’t even complain. She listened to his drunken diatribes, held him when he wept, and rode out the storms of his self-loathing. Finally, in one of his more lucid intervals, she’d sat down across the kitchen table from him and calmly said, “Okay. You messed up. You messed up bad. What are you going to do now?”

  In the two years since, he hadn’t come up with an answer to that question, but while he looked for an answer, he’d managed to keep the drinking under control. Or so he thought. The revelation of what had happened to Mick Jakes, something to which he’d given little or no thought in the intervening years, had made him realize that there were more failures in his career than just Morris Tyree. The county had done a good job of covering up the Tyree fiasco. A generous cash settlement with an ironclad confidentiality agreement had kept Wyatt out of the public eye. But he couldn’t hide his failure from himself. Now more of his failures were coming back to haunt him.

  “Maybe I do,” he said in a low voice. “Glenda, I’ve screwed up. In so many ways.”

  “Horse puckey.” The vehemence of her voice combined with the awkward half-curse made him laugh in spite of himself. She glared at him, then she had to smile, too. He rose from his chair, the two of them wrapping their arms around each other and holding on tight. She shifted around to settle onto his lap. “The first time I met you,” she whispered, “you were larger than life. Everybody treated you like a superhero. You were Wyatt by-God McGee. You were a rock star, and I was like a teen-aged girl.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  She pulled back slightly and cuffed him lightly on the side of the head. “Be quiet and listen to me.” She nestled back against him. “Imagine my surprise when I found out you were just a human being after all. And imagine my surprise when that made me love you harder.”

  All he could think of to do was hold her tighter. All he could think of to say was, “I love you, too.”

  “Good.” She pulled away. “So. What do you do now?”

  That question again. This time, he answered without thinking. “I need to find Tyler. And Mick. Not because of Tyree. For them. I need to try to bring them back. Bring them home. Not for my sake. For theirs.”

  She nodded as if this was the answer she’d been working toward all along. “There’s my superhero.” She lifted her head and fixed him with a steady gaze. “But I want you to know something. I’m not saying for sure it’s the last time I’m ever going to put up with something like what happened last night. But it might be. I’ve got my limit, Wyatt. And you coming home drunk in another woman’s car—a woman you used to be involved with—that came pretty close. Right up to the edge. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  He nodded. “I do. I don’t want to lose you, Glenda.”

  “Then don’t.” She slid off his lap. “Now. You may not feel like it, but you’re going to eat some breakfast. You’ve got some traveling to do.”

  EVEN THOUGH SHE’D grown up in and around New Orleans, Chance had never been a huge fan of the Café Du Monde. Sure, the famous restaurant down by the French Market had good beignets and coffee, but there were plenty of places that made both as well or better and that weren’t crowded, noisy, and overrun by tourists. Still, if that’s where the informant wanted to meet, that’s where they were going to meet. Winslow told them to grab a table while he fetched them breakfast from the place’s limited menu.

  “So,” Savannah said, not looking Chance in the eye, “I guess they figured a woman might handle me better.”

  Chance felt completely out of her element. A couple of conversations with her dad and some admonitions from Winslow had done little to prepare her for handling informants. She decided to try honesty. “Yeah. Maybe.” She lea
ned forward. “But this shit Charleyboy’s trying to play? Trying to play Luther off against Gutierrez? Honey, that’s fucking nuts. You’re all going to end up in prison. Or dead, more likely.” She paused, took a deep breath. “And your sons are going to get caught in the middle of it.”

  Chance felt slightly guilty for how well that shot struck home. Using Savannah’s children as a means of leverage left a bad taste in her mouth. Savannah only nodded. “Everything I do,” she said, “I’m doing for them.”

  “Right,” Chance said, although she didn’t entirely believe it. In her career in law enforcement, she’d heard people try to justify some pretty heinous behavior by claiming they were doing it for their children.

  At that moment, Winslow appeared bearing a tray burdened with plates of crisp, heavily sugared beignets and cups of coffee. “Ladies,”’ he said in a smarmy voice that made Chance roll her eyes as he distributed liquids and pastries. “So,” he asked when he was done, “where are we?”

  Savannah spoke up first. “We’re waiting to see what you can do about protecting my boys.”

  Winslow nodded. “We’re working on that. But as a gesture of good faith, if you could maybe give us a date when the delivery is supposed to be made. A time. A location…” He trailed off, looking at Savannah expectantly.

  She smiled without a trace of warmth. “The date is the twelfth of fuck you. The time is fuck you o’clock. The location is fuck you street, fuck you, Louisiana.” She took a sip of her coffee. “You get shit until I cut a deal that provides safety for me and my boys.”

  Chance’s voice was gentle. “What about Charleyboy?”

  Savannah took a sip of cafe au lait, not meeting Chance’s eyes. “If we can get him out of this…well. That’d be good.”

  “But it’s not a deal breaker.”

  “No.”

  “So, when this is over,” Chance said, “do you see you and Charleyboy together or apart?”

  Savannah looked her in the eye for the first time. “I don’t know,” she said.