Shield Page 2

  But like when you gain a few too many pounds, regardless of if you lose them again, the sweater will never fit right. Just like when you change too much from who you were before—you would never fit back into your old life.

  The cold beer slid along the bar, a lemon sticking from the neck of the bottle—not because it was trendy, but because it kept the flies away from the rim. A water glass filled with clear liquid that was so not water joined it.

  It was what I liked about this country. They knew how to drink.

  Then again, most of the population were living in poverty and subject to political upheavals, corruption and violence—a heavy hand was medically necessary as a prescription to cure this thing called life. A bullet was another, just about as common.

  “En la casa,” the bartender told me with a sneer that I think he was trying to fashion into a grin.

  On the house.

  I raised my brow, not grinning, and slammed cash down on the bar. “Despite the fact that putting anything heavier than a couple of raindrops on the roof of this particular house would cause it to collapse, I pay for my own drinks,” I replied, evenly meeting his lecherous gaze. “Tends to help bartenders punching way above their weight from getting the wrong idea.”

  I picked up the glass, letting the harsh liquid slide down my throat and soothe some of the burn that had been present for months, ever since I left.

  Since I ran away.

  From Amber.

  From my family.

  My girls.

  Him.

  But I wasn’t allowed to think of that. Those blue eyes, those sculpted muscles, or that kiss.

  That fucking kiss.

  No, I had to focus on the shield. That shiny, squeaky-clean piece of metal that was now tarnished and blood-splattered.

  Because of me.

  I blinked the blue eyes out of my mind and focused on the hardened, muddy brown, and mean ones of the bartender.

  The gaze tried to tell me that he wasn’t used to rejection. I had to think the opposite was true. He had a moustache that only Tom Selleck could pull off, and it had pieces of his last meal trapped in the wispy stands. Broken capillaries on his cheeks gave away the fact that he sampled his wares more than a little. Prison tattoos snaked across the soft skin of his arms, exposed by a filthy wife beater, a hairy paunch sticking out from the space between it and his belt buckle.

  I wasn’t exactly at my best, in ripped jeans and scuffed combat boots, my tight tank only slightly cleaner than his. I only had a swipe of mascara on my eyes, for business purposes more than anything else, and I’d grown out my chocolate curls to a length that cried out for multiple styling products. Which I didn’t have. They were all littered on my bathroom counter at home. Along with the broken pieces of the old me. My current makeup collection consisted of old mascara, a cracked lipstick and an empty tube of concealer.

  The wardrobe situation was even more dire.

  So un-Rosie-like.

  Which was kind of the point.

  But even with all that, I was nothing to sneeze at. I wasn’t afraid to admit that I had a bit of that natural beauty thing going on. On a good day, I had a lot of it going on.

  That day, and the ones before, and most likely the ones proceeding it, couldn’t and wouldn’t be characterized as ‘good.’ Happiness made a woman glow with natural beauty; heartbreak and pain did something too. Magnified her beauty in a hard way that almost hurt to look at, but made her more endearing nonetheless.

  I snatched the cold bottle of beer, my hands dampening from the condensation running down the chilled glass in the sticky room.

  “The right idea,” I clarified, “would be to make sure you and your buddies figure something out.”

  I glanced around the dirty and poorly lit room, a fan laboring at the ceiling to circulate the smell of hot body odor and cigarette smoke. Men and a handful of women were scattered around the tables, most lingering in the shadows. The men were more or less different versions of the bartender, some a little more attractive but with a meanness radiating around them that I recognized immediately.

  That and the hard and cruel beauty of the women who were with them told me I was in the right place.

  “That none of them think I’m looking to exchange free drinks for… anything,” I continued. “That’s if they actually like holding onto their manhood.” I winked at the scowling toad in front of me, whirling on my boot to find shadows of my own.

  They’d come.

  They always did.

  And then my job began.

  Chapter Two

  Rosie

  Age Seven

  Death isn’t something kids understand. It’s some black cloud that drifts in and out of their lives, perhaps when some barely known great aunt gets swallowed up in its embrace. They witness it from afar, feel its chilly grip drifting past. But most children, the lucky ones, they forget that fleeting coldness and sense of terror; the cloud drifts away with the winds of youth brushing it quickly by, replacing it with whatever new toy was around, the best places to ride their bikes, the best way to escape the newest bully.

  For most children.

  I was not, nor had I ever been, a normal child.

  Death wasn’t a disembodied cloud, drifting far above my innocent head. It didn’t just brush me and then move away. Death was always a thing, a personification that had always existed.

  Like Santa Claus.

  But instead of the red jolly man, the black and imposing thing did not come giving gifts. That menacing presence came and snatched things off me. Little pieces here and there, leaving empty spaces in the mosaic of my family.

  Always violent. The endings of the men patched into the Sons of Templar were not anticlimactic, withering away in old age and senility.

  No, it was always a rapid and violent end.

  I was spared some of the violent endings.

  Some were inevitable.

  Like the time, right after my first day at school, when I’d been sitting on Dad’s workbench, swinging my boots, sucking on a lollipop and daydreaming of that boy I’d seen. Then my magical daydreams of princes and princesses and all those simple fantasies that can only be made in youth were snatched away with the screeching of tires and shouts and chaos.

  There was always chaos.

  “Rosie, baby, stay there and don’t move until I say,” Daddy shouted, dropping his tools with a clatter and sprinting toward where the black van had stopped. It was parked funny.

  I wasn’t focused on how Evie would yell at the grown-ups for blocking the parking lot because there was more than that to focus on.

  Red.

  Blood.

  It stained the cracked concrete of the parking lot.

  I blinked, just in case I was seeing something that really wasn’t there. Like how I had been just seeing that boy smile at me and say hello and take me for a ride on his horse even though he’d never smiled or talked to me.

  But it stayed.

  And it got worse when I saw the blood was coming from Sonny.

  He wasn’t moving.

  He was staring at me.

  But not in the way he did when he pulled a penny from my ear. There was no sparkle in his eyes. No twinkle. There wasn’t anything in them.

  My lollipop tumbled to join Daddy’s discarded tools on the ground, where the blood would eventually creep up and swallow it away.

  That was only the first, and most dramatic, time.

  When I’d met the man called Death.

  It didn’t happen often, but I saw him more than Santa Claus.

  He had been taking pieces from the mosaic of my life, but I managed to glue what remained together, still smile and pretend to forget about the thing called Death.

  That was until he grabbed me by the throat and smashed every piece of my mosaic apart.

  It was when he took Daddy.

  I didn’t see the glassy stare of Death replace the fond gray gaze of my father like I had with Sonny.

  I wishe
d I had.

  It would’ve been bad. Horrifying. Terrifying.

  But it wouldn’t have been—couldn’t have been—as bad as Evie walking woodenly toward me. Like a zombie. Like a stranger wearing her skin and impersonating her almost perfectly.

  Almost.

  “Rosie, it’s your father,” she said, the rough husk somehow disappearing from her voice. It was the audible version of cardboard.

  My stomach dropped, in a hideous and unbearable way, and it didn’t stop dropping. Like a pebble tumbling into the black depths of a well.

  “He’s dead,” she choked out, her shaking hands pulling me into an uncharacteristic embrace. “Your dad’s dead.”

  Evie didn’t hug. She wasn’t like the other moms: she didn’t bake, didn’t dress in pastel, didn’t join the PTA.

  She wasn’t even really my mom.

  But my real mom was even less like a mom than Evie.

  And Evie loved me in her own way. But it was never in a way that hugged me, held my hand or kissed me on the forehead.

  Yet she did all three now, like if she did something as completely uncharacteristic as show me affection that maybe it might work to distract me from her words. Take the burn away from them.

  But it only intensified the pain.

  There was no moment of blessed numbness as a child tried to reconcile the distant concept of death and wrap it around the constant figure of their parent.

  There was none of that.

  Only Death’s gaping and toothless smile as it engulfed my father, snatching him away, showing me that I’d never see him again.

  He was gone.

  Sonny’s stare replaced Evie’s eyes, tears streaking through her makeup.

  That was my father.

  Not exactly the same, but it would’ve ended in blood.

  My seven-year-old self knew that.

  We were at war.

  My seven-year-old self knew that too.

  Because I wasn’t allowed to play after school. Or ride my bike with the neighborhood kids. I was only allowed out if at least two people with at least two guns on their hips came with me.

  I knew that because even when I tried the hardest, I could only coax the smallest smile from my father’s marble face. Because sometimes he didn’t hug me good night because he didn’t come home at all. And sometimes he hugged me so tight I was sure he was going to squeeze my eyes right out of my head. He hugged me like he never might get to do it again.

  And now he wouldn’t.

  I wondered idly if he knew, if he’d seen glimpses of Death at the corner of his eyes, knew that he was waiting.

  I tried to remember if it seemed that way, if when he said goodbye to me he knew it would be the last time. Even though I’d only seen him that morning, before I left for school, I couldn’t remember what he said. What I said to him. It was desperately important to remember what my last words were. Did I tell him I loved him?

  I didn’t know.

  How could I not know? I had the best memory. I played a game with Brock at who could remember the most current patched presidents.

  I always won.

  But now I could barely remember what my daddy looked like.

  It was like Death had snatched not just my daddy’s body and that light from his eyes but all of the memories of him, scratching my mind clean when I was too busy practicing how to pick locks with Steg.

  Evie brushed my wild curl away from my face, clearing my dry eyes. “Baby?” she asked. “Did you hear me?”

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said robotically. “Daddy is dead. I heard you.”

  She flinched like I’d hit her, her grip relaxing on my shoulders.

  I hadn’t planned it, but I used the slackening in her grip as an opportunity to yank myself away from her grasp. I escaped hers, but not Death’s, its skeletal hands still digging into my shoulder so deep I was sure it drew blood.

  I didn’t look to see.

  I reasoned that I just needed to run fast.

  And I did.

  It was the first time I’d ever done something like that. After that, the club, down to the freshest prospect, knew to be prepared against it. These guys didn’t expect it. Which was what made me successful.

  Which was what got me miles away from the club, sitting at the end of a wharf, dipping my toes in the ocean as it gushed forward at high tide. I was wishing it might swallow me up. That’s how I discovered another first on that day: no matter how hard you tried, wishes never came true.

  I didn’t hear his approach because of the roar of the waves, because of the deafening cry of the pain echoing in my ears. It was only when his lanky body folded down next to me that I realized Death and I had company.

  The ocean swallowed my swift intake of breath.

  It wasn’t Cade, as I’d expected it to be.

  It wasn’t anyone wearing a leather cut.

  It was a tanned and lean teenage boy wearing a navy-blue tee, neatly pressed so his sculpted and tanned arms snaked out of it perfectly. His mussed hair blew in the wind, and I gaped at his glassy blue eyes. They almost matched the water I’d been wishing to drown in.

  I got my wish then. A different kind of ocean swallowed me up.

  Luke.

  I didn’t know how he found me. Didn’t know, at that point, that half the town, including his father, were so focused on the death of my own father that only one person noticed me missing.

  Don’t ask me how he knew I was gone. How he knew I was sitting on that wharf. How he knew to gently engulf my small and pale hand in his large and tanned one. Knew not to say a word but just to sit with me, holding my hand and watching the ocean.

  I didn’t know any of it. I only knew that it was the first time Luke Crawford, the sheriff’s son and the future sheriff, saved me.

  It wasn’t the last, either.

  Luke

  Age Fourteen

  Luke couldn’t remember when exactly he stopped looking at his father as a hero.

  He couldn’t exactly remember when he started to, either. It seemed he’d always thought of his father as that, in that way that everybody who has a decent dad who gives them time, attention, teaches them how to ride their bike, play catch, winks at them at the table when their mother is chastising them both for having candy and not having room for dinner.

  There was all that normal hero worship that every kid had, every child should have had if they had a father who was doing their job right.

  Then there was something more than that. There was Luke watching his father drink his coffee, read the paper, have his mother kiss his clean-shaven cheek and hand him a soft-boiled egg, wheat toast, bacon on the side.

  OJ for vitamins.

  He’d be wearing his uniform, collar unbuttoned, gun belt absent—it hung at a hook beside the door, where he’d put it every night when he got home, too high for Luke to reach.

  Luke would eat his Froot Loops or Cheerios, watch his father read the paper, dip his toast into the yellow of his egg.

  “You gonna catch the bad guys today?” Luke would ask.

  His dad would chuckle, his eyes appearing from the top of the paper, crinkling at the sides. “No bad guys to catch. Not in Amber, son. Gonna make sure it stays that way.”

  “So you’ll keep us safe?”

  His father’s eyes wouldn’t crinkle. Something would pass over them that a young Luke couldn’t understand, and an older Luke would recognize as his father’s silent battle between his job and his moral responsibility.

  “I’ll always keep you safe. Whatever it takes.”

  And he did. Luke and his mom were safe, happy, content. He would walk down the street with his father, watch him greet everyone, most people by first name—he took the time to do that kind of stuff. Amber was small, and there weren’t any bad guys, so he had the time.

  He didn’t know when it stopped. That hero worship thing, that boasting to his classmates that his daddy kept the whole of Amber safe.

  Maybe it was when Luke began to und
erstand the politics of the town. Who really ran it. Not his father with his uniform and moral responsibility but the motorcycle men, with the tattoos and that something else that Luke wouldn’t see as morals.

  He didn’t know when the hero worship started to fade off. But he knew when it disappeared completely.

  He’d often ride with his father in his cruiser after school, when his mother was at book club or working at her part-time job at the library. He loved it at first, riding up front, watching his dad at work.

  But he was older now, and he didn’t quite know if he liked watching anymore. He didn’t quite like what he saw.

  He’d been pissed that day that he couldn’t go shoot hoops with his friends. He couldn’t escape this horrible feeling creeping up on him like a bad tuna sandwich that his dad wasn’t the man he thought he was.

  Then he got the call on the radio telling him to go to the compound. The one on the outside of town where the bikers lived. His dad’s jaw went hard and he raced out there, lights and everything. Before that, he usually only put them on when Luke begged him. Or if someone was going just a little too fast on the road outside town.

  His dad usually didn’t give them tickets, just warnings. Luke used to think that was cool.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “You need to stay in the car, Luke,” his dad ordered in a voice Luke didn’t quite recognize.

  Luke didn’t answer, because they were screeching into the clubhouse and he saw blood. A lot of it. And a dead body.

  His father saw it too.

  “Luke, do not move and do not look.”

  Luke squeezed his eyes shut, not just because his dad ordered but because he didn’t want to look. No way.

  But he couldn’t help it.

  When he heard the car open and close, and muffled voices and radio noise, he opened them again. His father was looking down at the man with the blood. Talking with the men.

  He waited for his father to do more than look and talk.

  He was waiting a long time.