Prodigal

by TA Moore

  He raised his eyebrows with bitter humor. The kettle spewed out steam and flicked off.

  “Only for getting into trouble,” Morgan said. “I’m an ex-con, but I figure you know that already.”

  Shay nodded that he did.

  “I’ve got a juvie file as thick as your head too, and I have a mean streak. One thing I’m not is a con artist.”

  “So it wasn’t you who cheated a grand out of Robbie at the Red Lion the other night?” he asked.

  “Hustled. It’s different. He didn’t seem like he missed it.”

  Shay laughed. “If you con someone who deserves it, you’re still a con.” He turned around to pour hot water into the cups and then held one out toward Morgan. “Besides, I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

  Grains of coffee floated on the surface while the creamer thickened into off-white clots around the edges. Morgan held it in both hands while Shay drank his with the confidence of someone whose coffee hadn’t killed them yet. He gave Morgan a hard, humorless grin over the rim of the cup.

  “What?” he asked. “This not going the way you expected?”

  Morgan shrugged and held his tongue. That smile felt like bait, and yeah, this wasn’t how he expected it to go. The uncertainty made his neck sweaty and his fingers itch to check under the desk for a recording device taped to the leg.

  When he didn’t bite, Shay filled in the silence for him.

  “Let me guess? You thought I was going to warn you off?”

  A second shrug. “Didn’t figure you’d be thrilled I fucked Boyd.”

  Shay made a sour face. “You had your cock out. That’s not sex,” he said. Morgan guessed that Boyd had changed his mind about having a dirty little secret, not that it mattered. “But you aren’t going to be around long enough to hurt him, are you? I mean, that’s why you’re here. The plan was you listen to me tell you to get out of town, then you pitch a dollar amount that would make that happen. Am I warm, or am I boiling?”

  After the brawl last night, Morgan figured he’d defanged his temper, at least long enough for his ribs to heal. It turned out he had a little left in the tank. He curled his lip in a sneer as he got up from the chair and gave it a shove to slide it back under the desk.

  “You’re a dickhead,” he said. It always stung more when someone insulted you with the truth. But he didn’t have a price in mind. He’d planned to play that by ear. “I’m done here.”

  Shay grabbed his arm on the way past and tightened his fingers.

  “What’s your price?”

  Morgan gave him a thin slice of a smile. “What for? Hand job or sex?”

  A horrified flush crawled up Shay’s face from chin to temples, and he let go of Morgan’s arm as though he were scalded.

  “I didn’t…. That wasn’t…,” he stammered uncomfortably. After a second, he pulled himself together and glared at Morgan. “Go to hell.”

  “Long as it isn’t here,” Morgan said as he tugged his T-shirt straight. “Next time I see Boyd, I’ll give him your regards. Oh and, ah, in case you’re wondering? He gets it on the house.”

  He flashed Shay a humorless grin and went to walk away. This time he got halfway across the shop before Shay got his voice back.

  “I’ll pay it.”

  The magic words. Morgan stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t proud of it, but he wasn’t surprised either. Money talked, and more importantly, it walked. Guilt scraped down Morgan’s spine, but…. The last thing Boyd would want was for Morgan to end up in jail, he told himself. Besides, he tossed the sop to his conscience, give him a few months in Mexico to get his feet under him, and he’d start paying Boyd back.

  It was a lie—well, not yet, but Morgan knew himself—but his conscience took what it could get.

  Morgan turned around. He hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans.

  “You’re going to pay me to sling my hook?”

  Shay took a gulp of his coffee, despite the heat that made him grimace, and wiped his hand nervously over his mouth. There were scars on his wrists, long and white as they disappeared up into his long-sleeved jersey.

  “No. To tell the truth,” Shay said. His voice was tight, clotted with emotion. “Not your truth. The truth. About what happened to my brother.”

  Morgan flicked his eyes around the space with reflexive paranoia. He didn’t actually have anything to confess, but it would be his luck to go down for a lie. But it would be an easy payday. He’d heard enough about sad Sammy Calloway to come up with a good story. He’d get the money, and Shay would get… whatever it was the guy thought he’d get out of this.

  The memory of a split lip and the electric-shock jolt of anger he’d felt that night flickered across Morgan’s mind. He didn’t care if Boyd had shrugged it off. He hadn’t. Empty pockets and a nice, raw lie might be just what Shay deserved.

  But Morgan made a mistake and looked into Shay’s clouded blue eyes. He couldn’t do it. Whatever he thought of Shay, he couldn’t bring himself to add more to whatever he hauled around with him.

  “Look, Shay, I don’t know,” Morgan said. “Whatever fuckup happened in the DNA lab, I’ve never been to this town, and I don’t have a clue what happened to your—”

  “That’s okay,” Shay said. “You don’t need to.”

  Morgan hesitated as his brain tripped on that. “What?”

  Shay rubbed his neck and dug his fingers down hard into the tendons. He looked away from Morgan and studied the cracked headlights of a Mustang as he talked.

  “What did Macintosh tell you?” he asked. “That no one knows what happened to my brother? That’s a lie. Everyone knows. Everyone knew back then. It was just that Cutter’s Gap PD were so fucking useless that they couldn’t prove it. So this bastard killed my little brother and got away with it.”

  His voice cracked, and he stopped for a second. He set his half-drunk mug of coffee down and walked over to the Mustang, the sleeve of his jersey pulled down over his hands as he buffed out a smudge on the paintwork.

  It made Morgan uncomfortable, how fascinated he was with Shay’s obvious pain. He didn’t enjoy it, but it was hard to look away from.

  “Mac said a lot of people came under suspicion at the time.”

  Shay gave the hood one last buff and turned to Morgan, a bitter smile on his mouth. “You mean he said I was a suspect?”

  Morgan shrugged his agreement.

  “I was. Everyone was. One by one we were ruled out until his name was the only one in the hat.”

  Morgan remembered that—not the name, it slipped out of his brain, but, “The teacher?”

  “Deacon Hill,” Shay said. “That’s the man who killed my little brother, and I want to know your price to tell everyone in town that.”

  It was the sort of question you should sleep on, but the answer was already on the tip of Morgan’s tongue.

  “Your car,” he said.

  For a second, as reluctance flashed over Shay’s face, Morgan thought the deal would be over before it really began. He didn’t know if he’d regret that or not. The money he needed, the guilt less so.

  Then Shay set his jaw, any second thoughts firmly locked away, and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Do it, and the car’s yours.”

  Shit.

  Chapter Eleven

  “OKAY!” THE new school teacher, Ms. Kettler, singsonged merrily as she dusted off the last five-year-old after the stop, drop, and roll demonstration and herded the class back into a loose semicircle on the grass. Thirty pairs of wide, bright eyes stared up with rapt attention at Boyd and Danni, sweaty in their full fire gear in the middle of the afternoon. “So does anyone have any questions for the brave men and women from Cutter’s Gap Fire Department?”

  Her enthusiasm made Danni roll her eyes slightly, but Boyd enjoyed it. Ms. Kettler was twenty-three, had just moved to town, and—for the first time since Boyd had enough seniority to be tapped for the fire awareness training days—she had no idea who Boyd was. Usually it was someone who’d taught him and
Sammy back in the day. They always looked at him as though he were a ghost, an unwelcome reminder that bad things happened out of the blue.

  Not Ms. Kettler, who was more interested in Danni.

  The kids all thrust their hands into the air, but most of them were too excited to wait to be asked. They blurted their questions one after the other, voices tangled together.

  “Did you always want to be a firefighter?”

  “How can he be a fireman if he has to wear glasses?”

  “Can girls do the same stuff as the boy firefighters?”

  “Do you… do you… climb ladders every day?”

  And one sharp little voice from somewhere in the middle. “Have you seen anyone burn to death?”

  There was always one. It was usually a boy, but this time it was a skinny girl with pigtails and an intent, freckled face.

  “Jessica.” Ms. Kettler clapped her hands together twice sharply to underline her raised voice. “That’s not an appropriate question. Now behave, or we’ll all go back inside and let the brave firefighters get back to work.”

  The kids clammed up, lips puckered or folded between their teeth in exaggerated expressions of silence.

  “Well, it’s our job to try and make sure no one gets hurt in a fire,” Boyd said. “That’s why we’re here to see you, so we can teach you how to be safe and how to help us. You all want to do that, right?”

  All the kids nodded. A few clapped and yelped, “Yes,” in excitement. Then they glanced nervously at Ms. Kettler to see if they going to be dragged inside. She put her finger to her lips and arched an eyebrow, but she let them be.

  “I think Mary wanted to know if you always had ambitions to be”—for a second Boyd thought she was going to say “brave firefighters,” but she caught herself—“part of the fire department.”

  That was another question they got every year. If Boyd was there, he usually caught it first. His story—his dad was a firefighter, his grandfather a fire captain who died in the big mill fire the kids still heard about, and he always wanted to take up the legacy, even with the glasses and Ritalin prescription—generally played well to the under-ten crowd. But today the words stuck in his throat, and his chest felt painfully tight.

  “I guess. I—that’s a good question.” He got that out and then choked.

  Danni gave him a concerned look, but she stepped forward, all big bright smile and never-still hands as she talked.

  “I always wanted to be a hairdresser,” she said, and everyone laughed. “Except I was really bad at it. I was bad at a lot of things until I found something I was good at in the fire department.”

  Boyd tuned her out as he cleared his throat in irritation. He knew this script. He’d done this a dozen times in Cutter’s Gap and some of the neighboring towns. Inspire, encourage, and tell the kids not to set fire to things—it was an easy assignment, and he’d always wanted to be a firefighter.

  Right?

  Danni nudged him. “And as for glasses,” she said, “I’ll let Boyd answer that since I have great eyesight. Boyd?”

  He swallowed the lump that was still in his throat and grinned at the boy who’d asked the question. The kid had mild brown eyes behind thick lens.

  “Firefighters do have to be able to meet certain vision requirements,” he said. “But wearing glasses doesn’t automatically disqualify you. I have contacts that I wear most days, and if I have to respond to a night call and don’t have time to put them in? I have brackets in my SCBA—that’s self-contained breathing apparatus—mask so I can wear my glasses. See?”

  He’d brought his mask with him, slung over his arm, for show and tell. As he crouched down, the kids scrambled over so he could show them the insets and then slip the mask on over his glasses. The weight of the mask pushed his glasses down against his nose and pinched the bridge. It wasn’t supposed to do that, and he’d had it adjusted a dozen times, but it always did.

  Sticky fingers left marks on the mask as the kids poked the plastic lenses and pulled at the straps. One of them tried to climb onto his shoulder like a parrot, and Ms. Kettler had to clap her hands together again to get them to shuffle back into position.

  Back on track, Boyd stripped off the mask—that would definitely need a wash—and pushed himself back to his feet. He passed the baton to Danni to cover how much stuff a “girl firefighter” did. By the end of the course, the kids all wanted to be firefighters, and Jessica had been sent to the headmaster’s office because she asked if they’d ever seen a dead body.

  DANNI SAT in the driver’s seat of the truck with the door open and her heavy boots dangling out as she sucked down a bottle of Gatorade.

  “You know what I’m scared of?” she said. “Ten years’ time, and one of those girls turns up at my door, just so pissed at me that I lied about how it didn’t matter that I have tits.”

  “She’ll be fifteen,” Boyd pointed out as he shrugged out of his jacket. He could smell himself—hot skin, sour sweat, and the vague smoke-and-foam smell that never quite left his equipment. “Although if it’s Jessica, I don’t blame you for being scared.”

  Danni nodded slowly. “Yeah, she was really into dead people,” she said. “But not really fire, so that’ll be Mac’s problem. What happened to you?”

  She held out the Gatorade. Boyd shrugged as he grabbed it from her and took a swig. It was cherry. Again. He wiped his mouth and handed it back.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just… made me think.”

  “And the new experience scared you?” Danni teased. She stretched out her leg and poked him with her boot. The amusement faded from her face to leave something more serious. “I always figured it bothered you to come back here, but you never let it get to you before. You okay?”

  Boyd chuckled without much humor. “It’s not that. I went to school here, remember, even after Sammy disappeared. It’s weird sometimes, but I got used to it. It’s just… some stuff has come up—”

  “I heard that something new came up in the Calloway case?” she said cautiously.

  That was definitely the sort of thing Mac didn’t want spread, but Boyd needed to talk to someone who wasn’t intimately connected with everything that had happened or was currently about to happen. He affirmed Danni’s guess with a brief nod and tossed his jacket in behind her.

  “I can’t talk about it, but that’s going on. Then the kid asked about if I always wanted to be a firefighter. And I don’t know.”

  “We’re going to be friends forever, Boyd.” He remembered Sammy’s confident voice as they “rescued” the cat from under the bed. “And we’ll be firefighters, and Shay will make sure we’ve got the fastest fire engine in town.”

  “You wanted to be like your dad,” Danni said. “Most kids do.”

  “Honestly, mostly I wanted to be friends with Sammy and ride around in a fire truck,” Boyd said. It hadn’t really been an ambition. They were kids who wanted a future that wouldn’t change anything, one where they still spent all day together and then hung out together in the evening until bedtime. “And after Sammy disappeared, I guess I felt I couldn’t change my mind? I mean, God, what if I don’t want to be firefighter?”

  “Do something else,” Danni said with a shrug. “What are they going to do, drag you out of your accountant’s office and force you to go to incidents? It’s your life, man. They can’t make you do anything.”

  That sounded good, but it didn’t feel true. Boyd tried to imagine everyone’s reaction—Mrs. Calloway, Shay, Mac—if he threw in the towel. It wouldn’t be pretty.

  Before he could say that, the radio crackled with a callout—welfare check on a foul odor, which usually meant meth lab or corpse—and he climbed into the truck as Danni grabbed the handset to confirm they were on it.

  It occurred to Boyd, as they pulled away from the curb, that the only person whose reaction he hadn’t thought about was his own.

  IT WAS a dead body, or what was left of a dead body after three weeks in the West Virginia heat. Garrett
Donegan had been eighty years old and a mean man his whole life. He probably would have appreciated the mess he’d made for his landlord to clean up.

  A shower wasn’t enough to scrape the smell off Boyd’s skin—greasy and fetid and with a weird aftertang of coconut—so he dragged himself down to the gym. Sweat was the only way to get rid of some smells, rinse it out of your pores, and weights worked better for Boyd than the sauna. Sit still and sweat was too much like school.

  “Good night?” Jessie asked archly from the lat machine as he let the weights pull his arms up. Muscles pulled tight under the inked designs that ran from his shoulder to his elbow as he rested his wrists on the handle and let his hands dangle. When Boyd gave him a curious look, Jessie pointed with his chin. “You got receipts.”

  Oh. Boyd reached up and rubbed his throat as though the hickeys might smudge off like ash. There were other marks on him, a few bite marks and bruises from the fight, but none that were so easy to see.

  “It was….” He hesitated as he grabbed a barbell and racked it up. “Complicated.”

  Jessie, who was tied with Boyd for bad decisions made on impulse, flashed a grin that was the mirror image of his sister’s.

  “Now that’s the best of night,” he said. “Want a spot?”

  Boyd nodded as he loaded weights onto the bar. He stretched out on the bench and tested the weight. It felt a little light, unsatisfying, but his inclination to load up the bar until it was only adrenaline that let him make the rep wasn’t actually good for him.

  “Do you smell something?” Jessie asked suddenly as he leaned over and sniffed pointedly. He couldn’t hold the serious expression and cracked up laughing. “I saw Danni on her way through to the sauna. She said it was a bad one.”