Jeff Abbott - A Kiss Gone Bad

She reached for her phone.

Heather Farrell spent a damp night in a grove of bent live oaks near Little Mischief Beach, surrounded by bluestems that stood tall and thin and kept her hidden. Lying on her back, the limbs of the oaks were fingers of a gnarled claw pointing away from the bay, shaped by the ceaseless wind. At night the trees looked frightening, transplanted from the forest where Hansel and Gretel roamed. When she awoke she peeled a scrawny orange and ate, watching the few pleasure boats plying the waters on a brisk autumn morning. She got out her notebook and began to sketch the boats: the prows cutting the water, the foaming curl of wake left in their path, the hard angles of stern and bow and flying bridge.

She hummed as she drew.

She hoped Sam would come. His father was dead, and Heather knew propriety demanded Sam be at home. He was no doubt upset. But she hoped he might prefer the solace of the beach rather than his frostbitten mother and egocentric grandmother. He might prefer her.

Heather wished for a shower; she had settled for a quick sponge bath at the police station. She rubbed toothpaste on her teeth and gums with her finger and rinsed and spat with a gulp of water from her oversize water bottle she kept in her knapsack. She emerged from the oak motte and headed down to the shores of Little Mischief Beach, and found Sam there, watching the waves inch against the sand.

Heather came up behind him, wanting to touch the cool skin at the nape of his neck and feel his hair, the same color as his father’s. Instead she gently touched his back.

Sam Hubble turned. The wind had reddened his smooth cheeks. Red lines webbed his eyes. A dribble of snot clung to one nostril.

‘Hi you,’ he said.

‘Hi yourself.’ She kissed him shyly on the cheek. She dug a tissue from her jeans pocket and dabbed his nose. ‘It’s okay. It’s all okay.’

‘We shouldn’t be seen together,’ he said softly. ‘And one of my grandmother’s jerks will probably be out looking for me. I’m supposed to be at home, inconsolable with grief.’

Heather loved that Sam used big words like inconsolable – he sounded so smart. Smart guys were sexier to her, but she didn’t know many. She’d get him a little tattoo, maybe of heather in bloom, when they got to New Orleans, and then he’d just be to die for. ‘So we sit tight?’ she asked.

Sam shrugged and sniffed. ‘Probably for the next week or so.’

‘And then we can go? We can get out of here?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘But you’ll be a runaway. No way is your grandmother going to let you go.’

‘I got that covered. There won’t be a stink – she and Mom won’t come looking for me. That’s a guarantee. They can tell people I’ve gone off to boarding school in Houston.’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘If they don’t let us go, then I start talking.’

Heather heard the resolve in his voice, but it didn’t ease the churn in her guts. She leaned away from him and with her fingernail drew a heart in the soft sand. Their plan seemed utterly impossible, but she wanted in her heart to believe it would work. That they could be together, free of Pete and Lucinda and Faith. Me, the smiley-girl optimist. There’s a switch.

‘I want to believe this will work… that we’ll be safe from them,’ Heather said.

He didn’t respond, staring out at the bullet-gray bay.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

Sam shrugged. ‘He was a two-week dad. What’s that, two weeks out of my whole life, Heather? Shit, I don’t even want to figure out the percentage. I’ve been to summer camps that lasted longer.’

He fell silent. Heather ached to take his hand, but instead she kept her palm pressed against the damp cool of the sand.

He cried. Heavy, big tears for his father, and she hugged him close. He surrendered to hard, racking sobs, and Heather thought: He couldn’t cry like this in front of his mother or grandmother. Not allowed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he gasped. He was fifteen, three years younger than her, and their being together was utterly insane. But the world was insane, so why couldn’t they succeed? He leaned toward her as she wiped his cheek clean of tears and he kissed her, hard, and they leaned back in the sand, smearing the heart she had drawn.

Whit’s day typified the joys of the justice court. He first magistrated into the county jail a sobbing carpenter from Darius, a small fishing community on Encina County’s northern tip, who had blackened his wife’s eye and broken her nose during a morning argument over burnt toast.

‘Don’t put me in jail, please,’ the man pleaded. He was not much older than Whit, but he mewled and cried like an ashamed child. His wife’s blood still splattered his T-shirt. ‘I’m claustrophobic. I’ll go apeshit, Judge. Please, please.’

‘Listen, Mr Reynolds.’ Whit wished he could refer to him in open court as you sniveling little dick. ‘I don’t want to hear one bit of whining, complaining, or bitching from you. Are you listening to me, sir?’

Big sniffle from the oversized baby. ‘Yes, Judge, sure am.’

Whit informed the accused of the charges against him, his right to retain counsel, his right to remain silent, his right to request appointment of counsel if indigent – all the Miranda warnings the man had heard when he was arrested by the Encina sheriff’s deputies. Big Baby blinked a lot, as though his brain were clogged, so Whit – carefully and calmly – walked him again, in plainest English possible, through his rights. It was his first arrest for family violence assault. Whit set bond at ten thousand dollars, the maximum.

‘That’s more money than Momma’s got,’ Big Baby wailed, forgetting Momma would have to pony up a percentage, not the whole amount.

‘Such concern for a lady,’ Whit said, ‘is very touching. But wrong lady.’ He stared at Big Baby. ‘I’m also serving you with an Emergency Protective Order, Mr Reynolds, at your wife’s application. That means, after you make bail, you can’t go near her for sixty days.’

‘But I love her,’ Big Baby sniffed.

‘Then you got sixty days to let your heart grow fonder. You go near her, you’re gonna be right back in front of me and I will get medieval on your ass, Mr Reynolds.’

Big Baby was led out of the courtroom, bawling afresh, saying he sure hadn’t meant to hurt his sweetie pie. Whit silently wished castration were back in judicial fashion. But he put his smile on and turned to the next case.

That morning, Pete Hubble tucked in the back of his mind, Whit signed arrest warrants for four hot-check writers (two of whom were sisters who had apparently gone on their overdrawn jaunt together, which made him a little sad); set a forty-thousand-dollar bond for a chronic burglar who had been captured driving away from his just-burgled ex-girlfriend’s house with cash, electronic equipment, and all his sugar’s lingerie; and heard guilty pleas from and sentenced six minty-breathed minors in possession of tobacco to twelve hours of community service each and a tobacco awareness class. Whit thought the class sounded worse than the public service, which usually consisted of tidying the beaches. The puffers’ parents grimaced at him as though he were sentencing their little darlings to rock splitting, and he thought, There’s a dozen votes lost. He saw Buddy Beere, his opponent, sitting in the back row of the courtroom, watching him with all the warmth of a spider approaching the squirming fly.

Grabbing a quick lunch at his desk, he ignored three phone messages from his father. He returned four phone messages from the newspapers in Corpus Christi and Houston, telling them that Pete Hubble had apparently died from a gunshot to the head and he was awaiting autopsy results before releasing cause of death. He’d never rated a phone call from the Houston paper before, and the rising prominence of the case made him nervous.