J. Jance - Minor in possession

Her voice was low and husky and deadly serious.

"Get even?" I asked, playing dumb. "What do you mean?"

"I think you know what I mean. Like in the Old Testament. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. I'm going to find whoever did this to him, and I'm going to take them out."

Her words seemed totally at odds with a lady of her demeanor, but there was a chilling certainty about them, a dogged, unemotional resolve, that put me on edge. Determined women who decide to even scores scare hell out of me.

"That's a job for professional police officers," I cautioned.

Unblinking, she stared at me. For a scary moment or two I wondered if maybe that was why she had come looking for me. Maybe she was operating under the misapprehension that I was somehow personally responsible for her son's death. She had laid a narrow purse on the table in front of her. With tension tightening across my shoulders, I gauged how thick the bag was and wondered if it was big enough to hold a handgun. Unfortunately, the answer was yes.

"I had nothing to do with Joey's death," I said.

She arched one finely shaped eyebrow. "Oh? Convince me."

"Convince you of what? That I'm not a narc? That I'm a drunk, dammit, just like everybody else at Ironwood Ranch? We're all drunks or addicts, one way or the other. Believe me, I wasn't there on some kind of undercover assignment. I was there under protest, on doctor's orders."

"That's not what Joey thought," she countered.

"I don't give a damn what Joey thought. He was wrong."

"He said you didn't seem that sick to him, that you made his suppliers nervous."

"I made them nervous? That's a laugh. Why the hell would he tell you something like that?"

"He was afraid you'd do something that would blow the whole operation. He thought he might have to leave the state for a while until things blew over."

"But he wasn't afraid you'd turn him in," I suggested.

"Evidently not," she replied, but the piercing blue-eyed gaze never left my face.

"When did Joey tell you all this?"

"Last night," she said.

"What time?"

She paused before she answered, her blue-eyed gaze cool and assessing. When the answer came, it seemed as though she had reached a decision about me.

"Eleven o'clock maybe. It was fairly late, but I didn't notice the time exactly. He called to ask me for money and a place to stay after he got out."

"He asked you for money? How much?"

"Ten thousand dollars. He said he wanted to go somewhere and start over."

I whistled. "That's a lot. Did you agree to give it to him?"

"Are you kidding? I may have been his mother, but that doesn't make me stupid. I knew what my son was."

"And what was that?"

She smiled bitterly. "A liar and a cheat. A chip off the old block."

"You mean like his father?"

She nodded again. "JoJo uses people too. I'm sure Joey had absolutely on intention of starting over someplace else. Not really. That was a lie to see if I would bite. He would have used the money to bankroll himself into some other deal, and if he got caught again, I'm sure his father could have fixed it again."

"You mean the plea-bargained MIP?"

"That's right. His father's a big-time developer with lots of friends in high places."

"What exactly did they catch him doing?"

"When he got sent to Ironwood Ranch? I suppose he was dealing drugs, but I'm not sure. JoJo passes information along to me only on a need-to-know basis, and he doesn't think I need to know much."

"It doesn't sound like you approve of the plea arrangement."

"I don't," she returned coldly, "but no one bothered to ask my opinion. If my son really was a drug dealer, he should have been in jail, not at Ironwood Ranch. I know they call it a hospital, a treatment center, but it looks more like a resort to me."

I couldn't help feeling a certain grudging admiration for this tough-minded woman. In my experience, most mothers of punks opt for whatever plea bargains are available when their little boys get caught doing what they shouldn't. That made Rhonda Attwood a very unusual specimen. Mentally ticking off what I had learned so far, I went back to something she had said earlier, while we were still outside, her unflinching assumption that Joey had tried to kill me by turning his pet rattlesnake loose in or cabin. That too wasn't exactly standard mother-of-scumbag behavior.

"So you think Joey tried to kill me?"

"Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was nothing more than a practical joke and he was only trying to scare you."

"It worked," I said grimly. "It scared hell out of me."

She laughed ruefully. "I know how you feel. Joey turned Ringo loose in my house once as well. It was a full week before I found him hiding behind the detergent in the laundry room. Joey claimed it was all a joke, that he wanted to see what I'd do."

"Nice kid," I interjected. "I'd have moved out of the house, or moved him out."

"I couldn't, at least not then. I tried to get him into counseling, though, but his father wouldn't hear of it. He said there was nothing wrong with him."

She closed her eyes and seemed to wander far away from the Joshua Tree Motel. I watched her for a moment, marveling once more at what a tough, remarkable woman she was. Eventually I dragged her back to the present.

"Supposing it wasn't a joke. Why would I have been the target?"

"I'm sure it was just like what he said on the phone. The suppliers thought you were a narc and they told him to get rid of you."

"Instead, someone got to him first."

Rhonda nodded pensively while a shadow of grief flitted briefly across her face, then her blue eyes hardened once more in the harsh light from the overhead fixture.

"You have to understand, Mr. Beaumont, Joey Rothman was my son, but I lost him years ago. I had to emotionally disassociate myself or be a party to my own destruction. No. I didn't promise him the money, and I told him he wasn't welcome to come live with me, either. I couldn't afford to be drawn into his machinations."

Hers was an odd perspective. She seemed to differentiate between her loss of Joey and his death. They were two separate and distinct occurrences. For some reason, his death hurt her less than whatever had happened years earlier, although the anguish in her voice was real enough.

"How did you lose him?" I asked, following her lead.

She shrugged hopelessly. "That question has plagued me for years. The divorce, I guess, although sometimes it seems like the trouble started well before that. At the time of the divorce, I couldn't take him, not in good conscience. I didn't have the money. I never would have been able to provide for him financially the way JoJo could-private schools, the swimming pool, his friends."

"Money isn't everything," I said.

"If you don't have any, it seems like it. If I had fought for it hard enough, the court probably would have ordered JoJo to pay child support, but collecting it would have been something else. It was easier to give in. By my letting his father have custody, Joey was able to have some continuity in his life, to stay in the same school system, have the same friends. It hurt like hell, but at the time I thought I was doing what was best for all concerned."

She paused and bit her lower lip. Talking about her divorce and losing custody still bothered her. She smiled sadly. "I wish you could have seen Joey when he was little, when he was smart and kind, both. He was only five when he rescued a Gila monster that came washing by on a piece of driftwood during a flash flood. I was standing on the bank and watched him do it. He managed to catch the branch as it floated by and drag it to high ground."

"A Gila monster?" I asked. "Aren't they just as dangerous as snakes?"

She laughed then. The memory of that experience seemed to ease her pain. "That one wasn't. It was so pale I thought it was dead, but Joey said it would be all right. And sure enough, after the sun warmed it and it dried out, it got up and wandered away.