Chapter Seventeen
Nate checked out the run-down apartment complex Daniel had texted him the address for. He grabbed the six-pack of soda from the passenger seat and climbed out of his car. Sitting here like a pussy wasn’t going to bring him any answers.
Daniel had invited him to watch the Broncos game. Something they always used to do but in a different time, when he was a different man. Daniel claimed he’d changed, and it seemed like he’d changed. It surprised Nate that a part of him still believed in miracles enough to believe it could happen.
He stepped over an upturned garbage bin that had hurled its contents all over the sidewalk in front of the apartment block. Four days’ past collection day and nobody had made any effort to pick it up. Over the token patch of grass beside the entrance, a woman walked a scraggly mongrel. Catching his eye, she nodded and glanced behind her.
In a place like this, the sheriff showing up wouldn’t go over well. The front door hung ajar and he let himself in. Not trusting the battered elevator, he walked the three flights up to Daniel’s apartment. The hallway stank of cigarettes, stale beer, and piss.
Daniel’s door opened before he got there. “Hey. I expected you to change your mind.”
“You live in this dump?” Nate sidestepped a threadbare stroller.
With a grin, Daniel shrugged one shoulder. “Where I just came from, they don’t let you out with a trust fund.”
A woman yelled at someone called Reese from the closed doorway across the hall.
The smell stopped inside Daniel’s apartment. An old, sixties-style kitchen opened onto a living room. The generic brown furniture looked clean but bashed up.
“I see you took care of priorities.” Nate nodded at the big-screen dominating one side of the room.
“Yeah.” Daniel rubbed the back of his neck. “I couldn’t resist. They didn’t make them that size when I went away.” He nodded at the soda. “You could have brought beer; it doesn’t bother me.”
“Nah.” Nate put the soda on the counter. “I’m half on duty anyway. Jeff ’s got a sick baby at home and he might need to take off.”
Daniel nodded. “Okay, then. Shall we watch the game? You can tell me what I missed.”
Leaving the big recliner for Daniel, Nate took a seat on the sofa.
On the small table in front of the TV, Daniel had laid out a bowl of chips and some salsa.
Daniel laughed and rubbed his hands on his thighs. “I was never much of a cook; that much hasn’t changed.”
“It’s all good.”
They sat in silence for a while, watching the Broncos’ defense annihilate the Seahawks.
Daniel waited for the ad break to storm the heavy silence. “So, how long have you been sheriff ?”
“Not long.” Fetching a soda, Nate handed one to Daniel. “I was working up in Salt Lake City when I got the call the town wanted me to run.”
Eyebrows raised, Daniel stopped with his soda halfway to his mouth. “They asked you to run? This town?”
“Yeah.” Nate had to laugh. Could have blown him over at the time as well. He’d have thought they had the pitchforks at the ready for him. “After Sheriff Wheeler died, they brought in someone from Bitter River, but Ghost Falls didn’t take to him. The diva suggested me as a replacement and somehow managed to convince the rest of the town and the county to get on board with her.”
“She still alive?”
“Oh yes.” It would take a force of nature to kill Diva Philomene St. Amor. “Alive and as much the diva as ever.”
“Huh.” Daniel watched Siemian take the field. Incomplete. “She wrote to me when I was inside.”
“She did?” It didn’t much surprise him. The diva had her own way of doing things, and she never allowed anyone else to form her opinions for her.
“Once a month, like clockwork.”
He turned to keep Daniel’s face in view. If Phi had written to him, Daniel would have known everything she knew, which meant pretty much everything that went on in Ghost Falls. “So, you already knew how long I’d been sheriff.”
“Yeah.” Daniel pulled a face. “But I was sitting here hunting for a topic of conversation and that seemed like a good one.”
It never used to be like this. Back in the day, he and Daniel almost never ran out of shit to say. Even better, they’d had that rare kind of friendship that often meant not needing to talk.
“And you wanted the job?”
“I did.” Another incomplete ended the drive and Nate hissed his frustration. Damn Broncos’ offense left all the work to defense. “I was working a tough detail up in Salt Lake City. Special Victims Task Force. It got to me.” It had taken him a long time to come to his next realization. “And I missed it here. Missed the people. Mainly my brothers and Jo, but I wanted to come home.”
“And Matt married Pippa Turner?” Chuckling, Daniel shook his head.
True. Nate hadn’t seen that one coming either. Still didn’t get what the glamorous Pippa saw in his hick of a brother. Still . . . “Matt’s a good guy. He deserves some happy.”
Daniel nodded, and they watched the Broncos’ defense come out again and put more hurt on the Seahawks.
Nate let the ads start again before he asked one of the burning questions. “What’s the plan now that you’re out?”
“Not sure.” Daniel threw him a look that said how much he knew Nate wanted to hear his answer. “Not what I was doing before I went in.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I’m sure.” Daniel leaned forward and grabbed a handful of chips. “I finished high school while I was inside. Even did some courses through an online college.”
Daniel and studying weren’t two things Nate ever thought he would hear in the same sentence. “Studying what?”
“Social work. Counseling.” Daniel went a bit pink. “I know it’s a cliché and all, but we had this counselor who used to run a weekly group. He got me thinking about how someone like me is well positioned to do that sort of thing.”
Daniel might not have liked school, but he never lacked for smarts. If they’d ever needed a plan, back in the day, Daniel had been their go-to guy. “So you’re going to get your degree?”
“Um.” Daniel stuffed his mouth full of chips. “Already got it.”
“You’re kidding me.” Nate didn’t bother to hide his surprise.
“I had nothing but time on my hands.” He cleared his throat. “So, Siemian, huh?”
“Yeah.” Looking at Daniel was weird. Like seeing two people cohabit the same body. His cynical side clung to his old image of Daniel, but the new Daniel kept busting through regardless. “What are you going to do with your degree?”
“Work with at-risk teens.” The passion in Daniel’s voice was straight-up truth and no bullshit. “Try to make sure kids don’t pull the same dumb shit we did.” Elbows on knees, he leaned forward. “I don’t know if it would have made any difference, but when I was inside, I kept wondering if I’d had someone to talk to. Someone who’d been there, walked that road, and come to a dead end, maybe I would have made different choices.”
“Do you think we would have listened?” And it was a we, because regardless of where they’d ended up, he and Daniel had started at the same point.
Daniel laughed. “I don’t know. We were pretty stubborn little shits.”
“That we were.” Here they sat, two kids who’d made the mistakes and paid for them. Daniel more so than him, but only because Nate had wised up a bit sooner. But then, he’d had Matt who, despite being young, had kept the ship sailing for them. And Eric had picked up some slack for Matt when he could. Nate could never prove it, but he had the feeling Eric had spoken to old Sheriff Wheeler about him. “You make contact with your family?”
“Nah.” Sadness flashed over Daniel’s face and disappeared again. “I tried, when I first got out, but they only want enough money from me to drink themselves to death.” He shook his head. “Do you ever speak to Blake?” Daniel named the third musketeer in their group.
“He left town.” Nate shook his head. “Last I heard, he was working in Vegas.”
“Counting cards?”
Nate had to laugh. “Maybe, but for the right side this time.”
They sat through another defensive annihilation.
Somehow, they’d all made it. God knows how, and they probably didn’t deserve it, but they had. “Here’s to us.” Nate raised his soda can. “And getting our shit together.”
Daniel raised his can and grinned. “To getting our shit together.”
* * *
Jeff ’s baby developed a high fever and Nate got called into the station. Things would be quiet until the Broncos game ended and then there’d be a spate of alcohol-fueled celebration or mourning antics going on.
“Do you even have a life?” He greeted Gabby, perched at her desk and tapping away at her keyboard.
“Not like yours.” She smirked. “Player.”
He should fire her ass or toss her in front of a disciplinary committee or something. But he kind of liked her anyway. “I was with a friend. A male friend.”
Up went her eyebrows as she raised her hand. “Hey, Boss! I don’t judge.”
He settled for a glare, because it was probably the closest they’d come to a meaningful exchange in the eighteen months she’d worked there. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Chasing a little rabbit called Adam Smith,” she said.
“You find anything more?” Nate peered over her shoulder.
She tapped a couple of keys. “You could say that. Seems like Adam Smith doesn’t have a record, or much of anything, but Aaron Sykes has been a very busy boy.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. I’m guessing Aaron and Adam are one and the same.”
“You got it.” Gabby beamed at him.
It struck him dumb for a moment. She was goddamned gorgeous when she smiled. “Tell me.”
“So Adam Smith first makes an appearance about eight years go,” she said. “When I tried to go back farther, nothing.”
“Fake Social Security?”
“Nope.” She glanced at him. “You wanna hear this?”
“Tell me about Aaron.”
“When Adam came up as a squeaky-clean nothing, I started looking for similarities in MO. Stalkers who appear in a town, the flowers, even ran Bella’s physical description through the database. About nine years ago, an Aaron Sykes is charged with beating the crap out of his wife. According to the police report, it wasn’t the first time Mrs. Sykes had ended up in the emergency room. But this time Aaron took it too far and Mrs. Sykes wanted out.”
Nate’s nape prickled. This was going nowhere good.
“Aaron didn’t take so kindly to his wife leaving him. She filed a restraining order against him.” Gabby pulled up a new screen. “It all goes quiet until Mrs. Sykes gets a new boyfriend. Seems she has a thing for bad boys and this time bags herself a scumbag called Tony White, aka Tony the Tiger, aka Terrible Tony, aka Torture Tony.”
“These are his nicknames?” Nate subtracted originality points from Tony.
“Tony runs a prostitution ring that doesn’t care too much about the age of his girls.”
“Shit.” Nate perched on the edge of her desk. Shit like this was what made him not miss his old job. “And this relates to our boy how?”
“So, Aaron breaks into Tony and Mrs. Sykes’s love cottage one night. He’s there to get himself a helping of revenge but stumbles on a whole lot more than Mrs. Sykes.”
Nate had heard enough. “So, Aaron shares his findings, DA cuts a deal, and Adam Smith crawls out from his sewer.”
Her face carefully blank, Gabby shrugged. “That’s the gist of it. But there’s one more thing.”
“What?” He knew he was going to hate what she said next.
“Mrs. Sykes turns up in an emergency room again about three months later. Cops would have looked at Tony for it, but he’s locked up tight. Nothing points to our boy at all, and Mrs. Sykes is saying nothing more than yes to Jell-O, but I spoke to the detective who worked the case and his gut told him Aaron Sykes was the perp.”
“Damn!” He sprang to his feet. Was he fucking psychic or what? Cops and their hunches were worth listening to. Adam Smith had made his gut chatter since that night he’d first seen him cozying up to Bella. Alarm spiked through his veins and congealed into rage and he kicked a dustbin across the office. “I gotta go.”
Gabby leaned back in her chair. “Thought you might.”