Griff reached behind his back with the hand that didn't have a finger on the trigger and produced a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket. Just about then I noticed that the good sheriff was no longer hiding by his patrol car. Then, I was slammed into from the side, and my chest smashed up against the hood of the Shelby. Cold metal cuffs were slapped tightly around my wrists.
"What am I being charged with?" I asked again as they both yanked me up to my feet, shoving me toward the cars. Sheriff Fletcher planted his hand firmly on the chain connecting the cuffs. "You are under arrest for the murder of Owen Fletcher," He finally answered, before leaning into my ear and whispering so only I could hear. "You messed with the wrong fucking family, boy." His breath hot on my neck, I fought to contain my gag reflex. There was no way I was going to let that fucker know he'd gotten to me in any way, and that included cringing because of his hot garbage breath.
At that moment, Bee pulled her truck into the lot. When she saw what was happening, she jumped down from the drivers seat, leaving the door wide open, the engine still running.
"Jake!" she yelled, her little legs blurring together as she sprinted across the lot.
I planted my feet in the dirt and locked up my knees in an attempt to hold my ground so I could talk to my wife, but the sheriff pushed on the cuffs and I had to again move forward so I wouldn't wind up face first in the dirt.
"Baby, call a lawyer," I told Bee when she came running up, the idiot lawmen pushing me right passed her.
"Jake! No!" Abby shouted. I was shoved onto the sticky back seat of a patrol car.
"You're gonna need more than a lawyer, boy," Sheriff Fletcher said, slamming the door behind me. He then plopped himself into the driver’s seat. "Jesus Christ himself isn't going to get you out of this."
"Lawyer," I mouthed to Abby, who stood with her mouth agape next to the patrol car.
She nodded, crossing her arms protectively over her chest. In what was only the time span of a few short seconds, the look on Bee's face changed from an expression of concern one would expect to see from the wife of a man being dragged away in cuffs, to completely unreadable.
Her eyes glazed over.
Her mouth formed a straight line.
Bee was shutting down.
Fuck no.
No. No. No.
I'll take my girl angry. In fact, I liked getting her riled up from time to time. The way her eyebrows scrunched together when she's trying to yell at me for throwing my smelly fishing shirts in with the regular laundry is fucking adorable, and has resulted in me bending her over the washing machine on more than one occasion.
I'll take my girl sad. I'm a fucked up individual, and for reasons I'll never understand, the taste of her tears made me rock hard. Besides, when Bee was sad, which wasn't often, I could always crack a few inappropriate jokes and make her laugh her way back to happy.
I'll take anything my wife was willing to fucking give me, because the last thing I ever wanted was for Bee to crawl back into that fucking head of hers again and get lost under all the shit she kept buried in there.
At that very moment she was fading away before my eyes, but I needed her to be present, to be strong.
For Georgia.
For our family.
It killed me that I couldn't go to her, hold her in my arms and drag my Abby back to the surface, and, if necessary, I wasn't entirely against shaking the shit out of her until she refocused and emerged from the fog she retreated to when she just couldn't deal.
Dumb and fucking Dumber both drove off the same way they'd arrived. One at a time, tires spinning dramatically in the dirt, launching onto the street, their sirens invading every corner of the usually eerily quiet neighborhood. The wall of mangroves lining the road flashed blue and red as we passed.
Abby stood in the road and watched us drive off, her expressionless face shrinking smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until she completely disappeared from sight.
I could feel my heart twisting in my chest, and I made a vow right then and there that no matter what happened as a result of these charges, I was going to find my way back to Bee and Georgia as soon as I could.
Breaking out of prison couldn't be that hard.
We turned toward the Matlacha Pass, the only bridge that connected the rest of the world to Coral Pines. Once we were over the bridge, the sheriff spoke to my reflection in the rearview mirror. "Why is it, Jake, that you don't seem surprised that you are being charged with my nephew’s murder?"
I shrugged. "Well, it's been a while since I jaywalked."
The sheriff shook his head. "Touche, Mr. Dunn. Too-fucking-shay," he said, rolling the window down just a crack. He lit a joint he’d retrieved from the center console. "All I'm saying, son, is that I'm hoping they fry your ass real good, hope some skin head with a hankering for blondes makes you his new girlfriend." He held the smoke in his lungs, not even bothering to blow it out the crack in the open window as he finished his little villain speech.
Or was he the good guy, and it was me who was the villain?
The lines between right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark, were always blurred when it came to the comings and goings of the residents of Coral Pines.
You never knew who was going to save you.
Or who was going to kill you.
FOUR