Prodigal

by TA Moore

  Tomorrow Donna would email, and then text, a heartfelt apology. She’d be sorry by then for how much she drank and for what she said, but she still meant every word. Not that he could blame her.

  Sometimes Boyd wished the same thing.

  THE WOMAN’S screams went through Boyd’s head like a drill. It was a beautiful sound. As long as her mouth was open and her lungs full of air, she was alive. The plan was to keep her that way.

  Heat scorched the back of Boyd’s neck and made him sweat under his heavy jacket as he crawled into the twisted frame of the car. Glass crunched under his elbows and knees as he tucked himself into the compressed space. There were files in the back seat and a broken laptop. He pushed them out of the way and reached through the front seats. With gloved fingers he found the bony point of the driver’s elbow and squeezed gently.

  “Hey,” he said. “My name’s Boyd. We’re going to get you out of here. Okay?”

  She hiccupped to stop midscream. Her voice was harsh, scraped raw, and unsteady as she rasped out, “It’s so hot. Why’s it so hot?” The driver’s seat shuddered as she struggled in place. “I can’t get out. Oh God. I don’t want to burn. Please don’t let me burn!”

  Panic made her voice spiral back up to a harsh, terrified wail, and a wildly flailed arm jabbed back between the seats and caught Boyd in the temple. He shook off the impact and blocked her arm as she swung it his way again.

  “You won’t. That’s why we’re here,” he told her. “All you have to do is stay calm and let us do our jobs, okay? We’ll get you out of here. What’s your name?”

  “Laura.”

  “I’m Boyd, and I’m a paramedic,” he said. “So I’m going to take a look at you and see if you’re hurt.”

  He squirmed between the seats and into the front of the car. The driver hung upside down from the seat belt, face flushed and puffy from gravity. When the airbag deployed, it had broken her nose, and blood dribbled down her forehead and matted her hair.

  “Why’s it so hot?” she asked frantically as she pulled at the collar of her prim silk blouse. Sweat plastered the pale material to her body. Tears welled in her bloodshot eyes as she blurted, “What the fuck happened? I was on my way to work and… I can’t remember what happened.”

  “There was an accident,” Boyd said calmly. He gently caught her arm and pressed his fingers against the inside of her wrist. Her pulse battered frantically against the thin layer of neoprene—too fast but strong. “Your car was flipped, but as soon as I check you over, we can start to get you out, okay?”

  It was a simplified version of events, but Boyd didn’t think the full details would help her calm down any. As far as the team had been able to reconstruct, a drunk driver in an old flatbed truck sideswiped her Prius on the way to the off-ramp and flipped it. The car had slammed, upside down, into and under a semi in the fast lane. She was dragged down the road for about half a mile before the driver of the semi lost control and spun off the road into a tree.

  The heat was because the truck was on fire, and so far they’d only been able to suppress the flames, not put them out. It hadn’t reached the back of the truck, where Laura’s car was wedged between the rear set of tires, but it would. So they needed to get her out.

  He could hear the chatter of the rest of the crew outside, the rattle and groan of overheated metal as cold water hit it. The driver of the truck had a dislocated shoulder and burns to his hands. The drunk driver was, until he sobered up and realized how much trouble he was in, fine.

  “Does anything hurt?”

  “Everything,” she said with a nervous gasp of laughter. “My head, it’s killing me. And my legs. Jesus, my legs really hurt.”

  Boyd reached up and cupped her head so he could explore her skull with careful fingers. The broken nose he’d already noted, but there was also a bruise on the far side of her temple that made her yelp when he tested it. It was probably from the side window.

  “I can’t see, so I’m going to have to go by feel,” Boyd said as he got his knees under him. “That okay?”

  She nodded with a small, decisive jerk of her chin. Boyd pulled himself and tracked her legs down from her knees to—

  Fuck.

  His fingers touched hot metal and raw flesh. Laura whimpered and tried to move her legs at the contact. Fresh blood dripped down onto Boyd’s jacket.

  “Stay still, Laura,” he said. “You’re doing great, okay?”

  He unhooked a flashlight from his harness and flicked it on. The beam lit up Laura’s knees—very white and vulnerable-looking through her torn tights—and then into the dark, awkwardly shaped space under the steering wheel.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. He could hear her throat tighten in anxiety, her breathing quick and shallow as fear spiked again. She tried to grope up into the space herself, her body twisting as she clawed blindly. “Can you get me out?”

  “Absolutely,” Boyd told her confidently.

  The light played along the twisted, rust-iron bar that had punched through the side of her car, both of her legs, and then driven itself into the center console. It had gone through the bone, it looked like, on one leg, and the meat of her calf on the other.

  “I just got to get some stuff to cut you loose, okay?” he said.

  “No. No. No,” she stammered as she grabbed at him and hooked her fingers into his collar. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone! Please. Please!?”

  Boyd swallowed the lump in his throat, a sour wedge of old guilt and sorrow, and peeled himself free.

  “I won’t be long,” he said. “I promise. Just stay still. Okay?”

  He squirmed into the back seat and went, ass first, through the broken window. Someone grabbed his feet and yanked him out the last few. His jacket scraped loudly over the wet road as he skidded.

  “Can we pull her out?” Chief Deacon asked as Boyd rolled over onto his back.

  Behind him Danni and Rob had the hoses spooled out and a heavy stream of water directed onto the charred metal of the truck from both sides. Steam and smoke seeped out of the cab in thick, acrid clouds of gray and white.

  “We’ll need to cut her free,” Boyd said. He grabbed Deacon’s offered hand and pulled himself up. “Where’s the ambulance?”

  “They’ll be here by the time we get her out,” Deacon said. His stock in trade was imperturbability. “You just focus on that. We’ll keep the fire under control.”

  Boyd glanced over his shoulder at the long, tubular body of the gas tanker, which listed to the side on one set of wheels. Fuel spilled from a small tear low on one side, the concrete surface of the road burn pocked and scorched where it had caught before they got there. He dragged his hand down over his face and flicked away sweat.

  “You better,” he said. “I’ll need the shears. Jessie! Get the backboard and painkillers ready.”

  It had gotten hotter again when he crawled back into the car, and the smell of gas had settled, thick and noxious, into the seats. Laura had stopped screaming, but she whimpered occasionally as the tanker shifted on top of the car and made it creak.

  “See,” Boyd said. “That didn’t take too long. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “Please,” she said.

  She clung to his shoulders as he reached up into the well of the car. She pressed her face against his bicep. and he could hear her pray in short, disjointed pleas to whomever might be there, for whatever crossed her mind—her son, the boyfriend she’d cheated on, the boss she hated, the parents she’d miss, her son again.

  Boyd thought of Donna. It had been a couple of days since he’d gone to see her. By now she’d sobered up and gone back to work. Like always. Until next year when she let the pain out again.

  If he did his job, Laura’s family wouldn’t have to answer those questions.

  He angled the shears as close to her calf as he could get and cut through the strut. Then he did the same at the other side. Laura screamed as her legs dropped and her knees hit the steering wheel with a crac
k. Fresh blood dripped down her legs as the movement tore the holes in her legs wider.

  Boyd tossed the shears into the back seat of the car. They landed on the torn roof, and someone reached in with black-gloved hands and pulled them out.

  “Get her out of there, Maccabee,” Jessie ordered, his voice tight and nervous. “This thing is still pissing gas.”

  Laura moaned in panic. “What does he mean? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Boyd told her. He strapped her knees together with a bandage to limit movement and cut through the nylon strips of the seat belt. Laura slid free with a shriek, and he caught her. One foot was bare, the other swollen into the hard, leather case of her shoe. “Nearly there.”

  Boyd got her out and onto the backboard that Jessie had waiting, straps across her chest and thighs to hold her in place. He waited until she was dragged out and then scrambled out after her.

  His skin felt sunburnt, hot and tender across his nose and cheekbones, and the glut of adrenaline in his system itched in his hands and legs with the old, familiar need to move. He ignored it as he exhaled slowly and bent over to brace his hands on his thighs.

  No one was going to go home tonight and wonder where their partner was. Someone might need to bail the drunk out, but at least they’d know where to go.

  BACK IN the station house, Boyd leaned back against the slick tiled wall and let cold water soak the heat out of his skin. Sweat, gas, and the gray flakes of smoke residue swirled around his feet and down the drain.

  “You did a good job,” Harry said. “But you shouldn’t have been there today. I gave you the week off.”

  Boyd opened his eyes and squinted through damp-spiked lashes to where his boss stood just outside the splash zone of the water. Over the last year, Harry’s hair had finally given up pepper and settled solidly into salt, but other than that, he didn’t look much different from when Boyd was a rookie. Not that much different, even, from the big-nosed, dark-haired ladder man who’d been his dad’s best friend.

  “I didn’t ask for it.”

  “I know,” Harry said. “But you needed it, and next time I’ll slap you on suspension if that’s what it takes to get you off my rig when you’re like this.”

  “Like what.”

  “Sad.”

  Boyd flicked off the shower and rubbed his hand through his hair. That wasn’t the accusation he expected from Harry. It caught him off guard, no prepared script ready to cue up from the depths of his brain.

  “It’s better to be busy.” He fell back on the truth for lack of anything else. “Keeps me from thinking too much.”

  Harry raised his eyebrows, still steel gray over his brown eyes. “Next year build a fire pit. Get a counselor.”

  “Tom wanted to go away with his wife.”

  “Yeah, well, she won’t thank you.” Harry picked up a towel and tossed it at Boyd. “Get dried off. Go home. Shift’s ov—”

  The door to the showers was bulled open, and Danni stuck her head inside. She gave Harry a quick nod and then waved a phone at Boyd.

  “It’s for you,” she said. “He says it’s urgent.”

  Boyd slung the towel around his waist and hung on to it with one hand as he padded barefoot over the tiles. He plucked the phone out of Danni’s fingers and raised it to his ear.

  “Maccabee,” he said. “Can I ask—”

  “They found him.”

  “Who?”

  It wasn’t a question. The word was just on the tip of Boyd’s tongue, ready to go, and it slipped out before he could swallow it.

  “Who the fuck do you think?” Shay Calloway exploded at him anyhow. “It’s him, Boyd. They found Sammy.”

  Chapter Two

  “YOU HAVE the right to remain silent. Anything you say,” the younger cop recited by rote in a nervous, precise voice, “can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  With a rough hand, his senior partner shoved Morgan’s face down against the hard, polished oak of the bar while he frisked him. It was the sort of hole where this sort of thing only raised a mildly interested mutter from the other drinkers and made the woman behind the bar shift the good whiskey out of reach.

  What passed for it in here.

  “Hey, Lo,” Morgan ground out through gritted teeth. They’d run into each other before, him and Lo. The cop was a dick, with all the barely repressed anger of a guy who never got promoted off the beat. Morgan braced his hands against the bar and pushed back. “How about you. Get. The. Fuck. Off me.”

  Lo kicked his feet out from under him and smacked Morgan’s face back down onto the bar. He tightened his hand on the back of Morgan’s neck and leaned on him.

  “What’s wrong, Morgan?” he asked, voice slippery and smug as he yanked up the back of Morgan’s shirt. His fingers were sweaty as he ran them around the waistband of Morgan’s jeans. “Got something to hide?”

  Spilled whiskey stung the split in Morgan’s lip. It filled his mouth with the oily taste of liquor and blood, sickly familiar on the back of his tongue. He’d always been an angry, sullen drunk, and even the taste of it got his temper ready to go.

  “I haven’t done anything,” he said—nothing that he thought they’d know about, anyhow. “You have no good reason to take me in.”

  Lo slapped him on the back of the head. “You’re a person of interest,” he said. “And you resisted arrest. So shut up and listen to Owen read your rights.”

  He kicked Morgan’s feet apart and skimmed both hands up the inseam of his jeans. Rookie Owen cleared his throat and stammered through the rest of the Miranda warning.

  “And, um, do you understand these rights as they’ve been told to you?” he asked, his voice pitched up at the end like a teenager on YouTube.

  “Morgan?” Lo said. “He knows them better than you, kid. Mr. ‘No Right to Do This’ here’s been in and out of jail since he was fourteen. It’s like a dating app for him, ain’t that right?”

  He groped between Morgan’s legs with hard fingers and leaned on his neck. Morgan swallowed the blood and booze that still laced his tongue and let his temper slip the leash.

  Fuck it. If Lo wanted to see resisting arrest, Morgan could arrange that for him.

  This time when he pushed himself off the bar, he threw his head back too. The back of his skull smacked into Lo’s face with a wet crunch and a pop of hot pain, but it was worth it as warm liquid splattered his neck and Lo lurched backward with a gargled curse.

  Morgan spat a mouthful of blood onto the bar and turned around. He flashed a tight, gory smile at the swearing cop. Blood dribbled between Lo’s fingers as he staggered, a flicker of fear naked in his already puffed-up eyes.

  Anger filled Morgan’s lungs with dry, scorched heat and ached in his knuckles as he clenched his fists. He wanted to wipe the smirk off Lo’s face, break the bastard into bits, and he probably could. In a fair fight. A few steps behind Lo, the rookie cop spluttered and grabbed for his gun.

  Cops never fought fair.

  Morgan forced his fists to relax. It felt like there was rust in his knuckles, gritty and stiff in the joints. He lifted his hands and tucked them behind his head.

  “Looks like you’ve got me, Officer,” he said. “Slap the cuffs on and take me in.”

  Lo wrenched his nose straight between thumb and forefinger. It snapped back into place with a wet sound, and Lo wiped his face on his sleeve as he looked around at the interest turned his way. He pulled a sour expression, yanked a pair of zip-tie cuffs from his belt, and strode forward.

  “You could have just cooperated,” he said. “But you had to be an asshole.”

  Once he was close enough, Lo hooked a short, mean punch around into Morgan’s side. The kidney shot sliced a hot, sharp pain through Morgan’s guts and down into his cock. It made his knees go rubbery, but Lo propped him up with his shoulder. Morgan clenched his teeth and swallowed hard as he tried to will the pain back into his side.

  “And now so did I,” Lo said as he turned
Morgan around and shoved him back into the bar. He pulled Morgan’s arms back and yanked the cuffs tightly around his wrists. “So answer Owen’s question, Morgan. You understand your rights as they’ve been read to you?”

  “Sure,” Morgan said as Lo pulled him off the bar. In the middle of the bar, Rookie Owen stood with his gun still awkwardly clutched in one hand. “I get exactly how this is going to go.”

  IT TURNED out he was wrong.

  “Do you know this boy?” Detective Heather Bennett asked as she slid an eight-by-ten glossy across the scarred metal table.

  Morgan ignored it as he glanced around the beige box of the Huntington Police Department’s interview room. He clocked the two discreet cameras in the corners of the room and the long window. Then he looked back at Bennett.

  “No,” he said.

  “You didn’t look.” She tapped the paper with one short-nailed finger and raised her eyebrows. “Have you ever seen this boy before?”

  “Have you ever seen due process? I want a lawyer.”

  Bennett sat back and crossed her arms. She didn’t have much makeup on, and, instead of the usual female detective’s “just one of the boys” uniform of T-shirts and button-downs, she had on a high-necked cream sweater. It made her look like someone’s TV mom, which probably served her well with some perps. Not really Morgan’s thing, though.

  “You’re not a suspect,” she said. “We just need to ask some questions.”

  Yeah. He’d heard that before—never fallen for it but definitely heard it. Morgan lifted one hand and rattled the cuffs that shackled him to the table.

  “I’m under arrest,” he said. “And I want a lawyer, and then you can ask me about this kid all you want.”

  She pursed her lips. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

  “Yeah, said every cop ever just before they frame you,” Morgan said. “Lawyer. Or cut me loose.”

  “This is Samuel Calloway,” Bennett said as she picked up the photo and held it in front of Morgan’s face so he couldn’t avoid it. “He was only eight years old in this picture. It was the last time anyone saw him, that we know of.”