Total pages in book: 142
Estimated words: 136507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 683(@200wpm)___ 546(@250wpm)___ 455(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 683(@200wpm)___ 546(@250wpm)___ 455(@300wpm)
It turns out my brother was no better than a dirty Murphy.
Dad is quiet, but the look on his face isn’t shock. It’s more like resignation. “What’s this got to do with you and Hank?”
Good question. “It sounds like Ian and Jay had a stash. Probably the money they were making off whatever they were doing, or something they took that they were waiting to offload.” If they were rendezvousing with planes carrying drugs and guns on midnight runs, they were involved with some serious players. “Hank seems to know about it but doesn’t know where it was, and for some reason, he thinks Jay told me.”
“Did he?”
I pause to give my father a look of incredulity. “Don’t you think I would have told the cops? Or my lawyer?” Maybe it could have shaved a few years off my sentence. “Hell, I would have told Dorsey when he started threatening me about it.” I gesture at my ribs for impact.
Shock fills his eyes as he puts two and two together. “That guy knew about it too?”
“It sure as hell wasn’t random.” Though that’s what everyone believed, because I let them believe it. I pace as I unload the story—the months Travis Dorsey invested, first as an old friend of Jay’s and a curious inmate, and then when that wasn’t proving fruitful, as a threat—in the dining hall, in the yard, in the showers. He let slip that he knew Ian and Hank well, and that Hank was looking for this supposed treasure too.
It finally came to a head the day Dorsey drove that lengthy shiv through my ribs, puncturing my lung. I guess he figured he’d take me down and scare me into spilling secrets while I was on my knees, laboring for breath.
But he made a grave mistake.
“Dorsey had a picture of Emery and Isla at Christmas. It was one Mom sent in her letters. I don’t know how he got hold of it. Lifted it from my cell, I guess.” From under my pillow. It was my favorite one of Emery, her smile genuine as she kissed the chubby-cheeked toddler in her arms. “He pulled that picture out of his pocket and started talking about how he was gettin’ out soon and was going to drive up to Cold River to meet them.” But the glint in that fucker’s beady little eyes told me he had intentions, and the guy was in prison for sexual assault. “That’s why I did what I did.”
I study my hands. Now they wear scrapes and cuts from working outdoors. That night, they wore the blood of a man who threatened a woman I’ll never stop loving. “I would have killed him if the guards hadn’t stopped me.” It took five of them to pull me off.
I finally dare meet my father’s gaze again, and his returning stare is unreadable.
Does he see his son?
Or a monster?
It feels like forever until he finally says, “You told your mother to stop sending pictures after that. Said it was too hard to look at everyone’s faces.”
“I didn’t want to risk a repeat, if someone else came looking.” But after that, few inmates dared provoke me. “I almost told her not to write me either anymore, but—”
“She wouldn’t have listened,” he finishes for me.
“No.” But I made sure to tear up every letter as soon as I finished savoring them, reading the words a dozen times over, memorizing details, closing my eyes and pretending I could see what she described.
Dad paces—four steps to one side, four steps to the other—as he digests the heaping plate of skeletons I just fed him. And I hate to admit it, but the relief that it’s out in the open is enormous. His shoulders seem to sink under the weight of it all. “Jesus, Logan. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“What? That Jay was a genuine piece of shit? That he had all this, he had us, and he’d rather be slumming with degenerates, moving fucking guns and drugs that hurt people for a quick payday?” A truth that has tainted every good memory I’ve ever had of my brother, as I struggle to reconcile the side I knew with the version that ruined so many lives. “You knowing that wouldn’t have changed anything. You knowing what Jay was wouldn’t have made anything better. It could have made it worse. Because we don’t know what else they were into. All I do know is they pulled those guns damn fast that night. Like it wasn’t the first time they’d pulled guns on someone before. And Mom …” I shake my head. “I was afraid this might be the thing that finally breaks her.”
Dad presses his hands on the hood of the truck, as if needing the support. I’m surprised I can’t hear the mice scurrying within the walls, as deathly quiet as it has become in the garage.