Fortunate Son

by J. D. Rhoades

  Chance nodded. “I get it. I don’t know if I’d want to stay with a guy who—”

  “You don’t get shit, lady,” Savannah flared up. Even in the noisy restaurant, her voice was intense enough to draw stares. She settled back down and crossed her arms across her chest. “You don’t know me. You don’t know my life. So stop trying to pretend you do. And stop trying to get close to me. You’re not going to be my friend. Not now. Not ever. This is business. So let’s do business.”

  “Okay,” Winslow broke in, his voice low but harsh. “Fine. Business. You know one thing they say in business? The person who has the power in a negotiation is the person who can walk away from the deal. We can walk away from this. What we have already is enough to snap up you and Charleyboy and put both of you away for a while. If I have to be satisfied with that, I will.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “You want Luther and Gutierrez so bad you can taste it.”

  Winslow shrugged. “Sure. I’d love to sew up one or both of those two assholes. But they’re assholes. They’ll always be assholes. If I don’t get them this month, they’ll fuck up some other way and we’ll get them then.” He leaned forward. “We’re the U.S. Government, sweetie. We’ve got all the time in the world. You? I don’t know, Savannah. What’s the sell-by date on an aging drug whore?”

  “Goddamn it, Winslow,” Chance burst out.

  Savannah half rose, picking up her coffee cup as if she meant to throw it at him.

  Winslow regarded her coolly. “Go ahead. Storm out. Throw that cup at me. I’ll have agents at the house before you get home. And your boys can come visit you in the roughest federal penitentiary I can find to put you in.”

  She froze. If looks could kill, Winslow would have left the Café du Monde in multiple body bags. After a moment, she sat back down. Chance could see the tears in her eyes.

  “Good,” Winslow said. “Now that we understand one another, I need something concrete by this time tomorrow. I’ll keep working on the deal for you and your boys. But if you don’t call me tomorrow with something I can use, we’re going to have to re-think this relationship.”

  “Okay,” Savannah muttered. Then she looked up. “But not you.” She jerked her chin at Chance. “I talk to her. Only her from now on.”

  Winslow gave her a condescending smile, the smile of a man granting a meaningless concession to a beaten foe. “Sure. Whatever.” He stood up. “Call Deputy Cahill tomorrow.” He got up and walked away. Savannah slumped in her chair, staring into her coffee cup.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Chance said, “I think he’s an asshole, too.”

  “It’s not.”

  “But he has a point, Savannah. You thought you could play us. Am I right?”

  Savannah didn’t answer at first. Then she said, “I guess you put me in my place.” She looked up, the tears coming to her eyes again. “People like you been putting me in my place all my goddamn life.”

  “People like…” Chance stopped, confused.

  Savannah went on. “It was people like you who took my boys away from me in the first place.”

  “I can’t answer for that. I wasn’t there. I don’t even know what happened.”

  Savannah’s jaw tightened with remembered anger. “I thought I’d left my boys with someone I could trust. She left them alone. But it was me who took the blame. Was that fair?” Before Chance could answer, Savannah went on, rushing to tell the story the way she’d undoubtedly honed and polished it in front of any number of listeners over the years, carefully editing and crafting it to make herself the victim. Chance had heard variations on the story before, in the backs of patrol cars, in interrogation rooms, in court. Then Savannah came up with a detail she hadn’t heard before. “And you know the really fucked-up thing? The cop and that bitch social worker who ganged up to take my sons away? They were fucking. The whole time. And he was married.” She smacked her coffee cup down for emphasis. “Bitch was judging me. Judging my goddamn life. While she was fucking a married man.” She looked up at Chance. “I ask you, is that right?”

  Chance didn’t know what that had to do with anything, but she just nodded, trying to look sympathetic. She tried to get the conversation back on track. “The question is, what do you do now? You’ve got a chance to get out of this life. You’ve got a chance to be reunited with your sons. But for that to happen—”

  Savannah broke in. “All I have to do is betray the man I love.” The tears were brimming in her eyes again. “I know,” she said. “Yeah. He loses his temper sometimes. He goes over the line. But you don’t know what he used to be like. Charming. Funny. He could be in a crowd and look at me across a room full of people and make me feel like I was the only girl in the room.” She smiled wistfully. “And oh, how that boy could dance.”

  “Not much dancing going on now, though,” Chance said.

  The smile faded. “No.” She stood up. “Give me your number. I’ll call you tomorrow if I can find out anything. And keep that shithead away from me.”

  Chance took a notebook out of her bag and wrote her cell number down. “I’ll do what I can. But he’s the one running the investigation.”

  “Whatever.” She walked away without looking back. Chance took a last sip of her coffee and grimaced. It had gone cold.

  THE SCRAMBLED EGGS and bacon had been tough to choke down at first, but Glenda had been right. Breakfast and a shower had put Wyatt back to something resembling functional. He’d come up with a plan over the breakfast table: talk to the detective who’d investigated the robbery in Spencer, then see if he could track down Mick Jakes’s last foster parents. They might still have contact with him, or at least know where he might be. Glenda had taken him to recover his truck from Val’s, where it was the lone vehicle left in the dirt parking lot. He’d given his wife a long, deep kiss before getting out of her Subaru and trudging to his vehicle. When he got in, he saw his phone, still plugged in. He picked it up and grimaced. There were four messages from Kassidey, beginning at seven in the morning. He considered not answering, but then it occurred to him that he needed to talk to her in order to get the name and possibly the address of that last foster family. He grimaced. “Shit,” he muttered out loud. Awkward didn’t even begin to cover what this conversation was going to be. He hit the button to dial her back.

  She answered on the first ring. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated. “Thanks. For bringing me home, I mean.”

  “Yeah. It wasn’t the most comfortable evening I’ve ever spent.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are. You kept saying it. You said it a lot.”

  “Well, I am. I had no right to ask you to—”

  Her voice rose for the first time. “Damn straight you had no right.” The force of her anger silenced him. “Jesus Christ, Wyatt, do you have the slightest goddamn idea how humiliating that was? To have you ring me up in the middle of the night, drunk off your ass, like I was some kind of booty call?”

  “It wasn’t that. I swear it.”

  “Oh. So you called me up for the express purpose of taking you home to your wife? Even if I believed that, would you expect that to make me feel even a little bit better? Goddamn it, Wyatt!”

  He leaned forward and rested his head on the steering wheel. “What can I say other than I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing. Don’t say another goddamn thing to me. The only reason I didn’t tell you to fuck off last night was I was afraid you’d try to drive in that condition and kill yourself.”

  “Well, you don’t want me dead. That’s something.” Gallows humor had always brought them together. It didn’t work this time.

  “Do not even try to be funny, Wyatt. Do not.” Her voice was shaking with rage. “The worst part was having to deal with Glenda.”

  He sat up, alarmed. “Did she…”

  “She was as nice as she could be, Wyatt. I expected her to try to claw my eyes out
. But she was totally polite. Even thanked me. Several times. And that made me feel even worse. She couldn’t have made me feel more like trash if she’d set out to do it. But I know she didn’t. She doesn’t have it in her.” Kassidey paused for a moment, and then he heard her take a deep breath. “Don’t call me anymore, Wyatt. Drunk, sober, whatever. We’re done. I didn’t break up your first marriage, although everyone thinks I did, and I’ve been living with that in this goddamn county ever since. And I’m not going to be blamed if your second marriage goes down the tubes, either. Just don’t, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I need one more thing.”

  She was silent, disbelieving. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she finally said. “You are the most…” She sighed. “Okay. What is it?”

  “I need the name and contact information, if you have it, for Mick Jakes’s last foster family.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to try to find Tyler. He’s with Mick. Maybe Mick’s ex-foster family might have heard from him.”

  “That sound you hear,” Kassidey said, “is me grinding my teeth. I already told you I can’t release that information. Not without violating about ten different regulations and several laws of the State of North Carolina.”

  “No one has to know.”

  “Yeah. Seems like I’ve heard that before.”

  “You said you could call the guy. Ask him if it was okay.”

  She sighed. “Hang on a minute.” She put him on hold. An earnest recorded voice reminded him that the mission of the Department of Social Services was to assist people with life’s challenges and strengthen the community through high quality social services. A lengthy recitation of the various ways DSS could aid the challenged followed, then a reminder that Wyatt’s call was important and that he should please stay on the line. He’d heard the message play through four times by the time Kassidey came back on the line. “Okay. Got a name, got a phone number. The name’s Delwyn Chandler.” She read off the number as Wyatt scrambled for a pencil and paper in the truck’s center console. “And he’s willing to talk to you.”

  “You spoke to him? Just now?”

  “I wasn’t going to give this to you otherwise.”

  “Okay. Thanks for making the call.” Something occurred to him. “You said Mick was placed with a couple.”

  “Chandler’s partner died about two years ago. Cancer, I think. Sounds like Delwyn’s still taking it hard, so you might want to stay away from that subject.”

  “Got it. And thanks, Kass.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “And…I really am sorry about last night.”

  “Don’t mention that, either. Ever. Good luck, Wyatt. And goodbye.” Before he could answer, she’d hung up.

  He looked at the number he’d scrawled on the back of a Walgreen’s receipt. It was another piece of the puzzle, another stepping stone toward the truth. He felt a faint shiver of the thrill he’d used to experience when he realized he was on the way to solving a crime, taking one more step in the darkness, not knowing where the next step would lead him, but knowing, deep in his heart, that he was going to put things right. Then he remembered how that feeling had led him so badly wrong, how that feeling of needing to take the next step toward the truth had led him to pull his father’s legendary knife from his belt and torture a confession from an innocent man.

  The sound of an engine broke into his reverie. He looked up and saw a dented and dirty Ford pickup pulling into the parking lot. Val had come to open up. He knew he could get out of the truck, cross the lot, and Val would pour him a “freshener,” a “hair of the dog what bit you,” an “eye opener.” She had an inexhaustible store of terms for the first drink of the day. She wouldn’t judge, wouldn’t urge him, wouldn’t make any comment beyond, “You want another?” Or maybe, much later, “You want me to call somebody?” He watched Val shift her bulk out of the front seat. She noticed him sitting in his truck and gave him a cheery wave before turning and trudging to the front door. Yeah, he thought. Val would take care of him. Right up until the day he died.

  He started the truck and headed up the road to Spencer.

  TYLER DIDN’T KNOW what he was looking at. He seemed to be hovering above a rough, flat desert liberally strewn with rocks, mottled brown and dirty white. He blinked once, twice and then with a nauseating swoop, his perspective changed and he realized he was looking up, not down. The barren landscape he was surveying was a stained and crumbling popcorn ceiling. As more of his awareness returned, the nausea intensified. He let out a low groan and tried to sit up. The effort nearly made him puke. He fought it down, mostly because he didn’t know where to find a toilet or even a wastebasket in which to spew. Once he’d struggled to a sitting position, he saw that he was perched on the edge of a bed. The bed was covered with a thin, scratchy spread.

  A godawful sound split the air. It was a grotesque gurgling, rattling noise, like a tiger trying to roar while drowning in its own phlegm. Tyler snapped his head around to see Mick lying on his back on a twin bed on the other side of the room. His mouth was open and his eyes were shut tight.

  “I don’t know how anyone can sleep through that,” a female voice said. Tyler’s head wasn’t going to take many more sudden changes in perspective. He squinted across the dimly lit room and saw Lana sitting in a chair, at a table, by a window. The window was covered by a thick curtain that only let in a thin sliver of sunlight from outside. He realized he was in a motel room. A dirt-cheap one from the looks of things, with the emphasis on dirt.

  “Morning, sunshine,” Lana said. She took a drag off her cigarette. Her other hand rested on the big revolver on the table.

  “What happened?” Tyler groaned. “Where are we?”

  She shrugged. “Georgia, maybe. Maybe Alabama. I don’t know. I ain’t the captain of this ship. He is.” She nodded at where Mick still lay sprawled on his back. As Tyler watched, he gave a great snort and rolled over onto his stomach. Mick began to breathe deeply and evenly, without snoring. “Thank god,” Lana said. “I was about ready to shoot him myself.”

  Tyler wanted to reply, but another wave of dizziness overwhelmed him. He leaned over and put his head in his hands. He heard Lana moving about, but didn’t have the energy to look up and see where. The bed creaked and sagged as she sat down next to him. “Here,” she said gently, handing him a paper cup from the bathroom, “drink this.”

  His first instinct was to shy away, but when he took a sip he realized it was just water. It tasted of rust, but he drank it down, grateful for the relief to his dry mouth.

  “I told Mick he was givin’ you too much,” she said. “But he’d been up for two days and he wanted to make sure he could get some sleep.”

  Tyler shook his head. “You two drugged me.”

  She shrugged and took the cup from him, putting it on a scarred and battered bedside table. “I know. Kind of fucked up, ain’t it? Him bein’ your brother an’ all. But you have to admit. If he’d fallen asleep while you was awake, you would have been out of here like a rabbit. Am I lyin’?”

  “I guess not.” The dizziness was subsiding slowly, but Tyler still felt as if he’d been clubbed in the back of the head.

  “So what’s the deal with you and Mick?” Lana asked. “He said the county pulled you two apart. Kept you from each other, and your mama.”

  “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “I was, like, three years old. I don’t remember any of it. All I know is what my parents told me.”

  “Your parents.” The words came out flat and expressionless, but there was a world of contempt in her expression.

  “They raised me.” Tyler felt defensive, then resentful for feeling that way. “They’re the only family I ever knew.”

  “So you never saw Mick after that? They didn’t let you see your own brother?”

  Tyler searched his memory. He could remember nothing clearly; just vague flashes of a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, a little older than him, a thin arm across his shoulder, a v
oice in his ear. We’re gonna be together again, lil’ bro. You, me, and Mama. Real soon now. “I think I saw him, some. Early on. But I really can’t remember.”

  “That sucks,” Lana said. “I remember my brother. He was my best friend.”

  “Was?” Tyler asked.

  She drew herself up onto the bed, her knees to her chest, her back against the headboard. “He got killed in Iraq. Blown up. Or shot through the head when his Humvee got blown up. We never did get the whole story. All we know is he came home in a casket they told us it was best not to open.”

  Tyler didn’t know what to say, so he fell back, as he’d been taught, on comforting clichés. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She frowned at him. “You didn’t even know him. You don’t know me.”

  “I—”

  “Tell me this. Before he picked you up, did you even remember Mick’s face?”

  He didn’t want to have another glib answer slammed back at him, so he thought for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he finally admitted.

  She shook her head. “I don’t get that. I can remember everything about my brother. His face. His voice. I think about him every day.”

  “I was just a little kid,” Tyler said.

  “So,” another voice said, “did your parents,” he leaned on the word with contempt, “not tell you anything about you having a brother?”

  Tyler shifted around to look at the other bed. Mick was awake, sitting up, looking at him. His brows were drawn together in the angry expression Tyler was already learning to dread. “They did,” Tyler said. “I just…after a while…”

  “After a while I just faded away.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Mick stood up. “You didn’t have to. Well, lil’ bro, like the song goes, it’s better to burn out than to fade away. But I ain’t doin’ either one.” He hitched up his pants. “I gotta take a leak. Then it’s time to get back on the road.” As he headed for the motel room’s small bathroom, Tyler noted that the gun was on the bed nearest him, with Lana on the far side of the room. He tensed, waiting, nearly vibrating with the strain until the door closed. Then he bolted for the door, yanked it open, and stumbled out into the daylight.