Taking Mine (33 page)

“I don’t think you heard me, so let me clarify,” he says, pulling a knife from his front pocket. He points the tip into my side, right under my ribs. “Stand. Now.”

I don’t think he’ll actually gut me right here in front of everyone, but I don’t want to chance it. I slide out of my seat, careful to not let the blade dig in any farther, as he opens the door. Once we’re outside, he braces me against the wall, his forearm digging into my throat. My backpack keeps a barrier between the brick and me.

“I think you have a pretty good idea who sent me,” he says, his face inches from mine.

The amount of pressure he’s pinning me with is laughable, enough so that I can’t stop the giggle that escapes my lips.

“What are you laughing at?”

In the last week alone I’ve had a gun pointed at my head, gone to jail, and been confined to my house. It’s the first time in the outside world I’ve had in five days and I’m being held up by knifepoint by a pretty boy wearing a polo and Axe cologne. My life has become a bad action comedy. Oh, did I mention I’ve only had peanut butter, bread, and ramen noodles for substance? Yeah, it kind of takes the cake.

“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to stifle my smile but failing miserably. “Really. I am.”

He steps back, completely baffled by my amusement. “I’m threatening your life and you think it’s funny? Are you demented?”

“You’re right,” I say, straightening my features. “This matter is to be taken seriously. Proceed.”

He’s put off by my strange behavior but raises his knife anyway, closing the distance between us. Reacting at just the right moment, I grab hold of his arm holding the knife and plant my feet, this time aiming for where Justin taught me to. My fist connects with his throat, catching him off guard, and he staggers backward, dropping the knife. His hand closes around his throat as he chokes, eyes wide from shock.

I run.

The quickest way to Justin is through the classroom and into the lecture hall. It’s not ideal, but it’s my best option. I don’t bother looking around as I sprint down the stairs. The professor yells at me for disrupting the class, but I ignore it. Justin snaps up from the wall when I ground to a halt in front of him.

“Behind the building.”

He doesn’t ask questions but tells me to stay put, already running toward the exit. I pace, keeping my eyes peeled on both entrances for his return. And really, I have so little patience, and after fifteen minutes I decide I’ve waited long enough. When I walk outside, a cop car is pulled up against the side of the building. An officer has the perpetrator in cuffs, leading him to the car, as another one talks with Justin. His badge reads Burns, and he looks up at me when I approach, prompting Justin to turn as well. Justin’s arms are folded across his chest as he rolls his eyes at my disobedience.

“I told you to wait.”

“I never agreed.”

Burns doesn’t catch the animosity between us, or he chooses to disregard it. “It’s fine, ma’am. He’s not a threat anymore, although he is a bit mouthy. Mind telling me what happened?”

Justin turns to me, looking me over for any obvious signs of harm. His annoyance slowly dissolves. “You punched him in the throat,” he says, with a hint of a proud smile.

It’s hard not to revel under his praise, but I manage to keep my smile in check. Justin gives me a deliberate look, but I ignore it as I recall everything that happened. Officer Burns writes everything down in a notebook he keeps in his breast pocket, intermediately asking questions as I go along. Justin grows more and more amused as I speak, his grin overtaking his face by the time I finish.

“You did good, kid,” Burns says, giving me a fist bump.

Justin holds out a hand to Burns and does the strange grip, shake thing all men are subject to knowing. “Thanks for getting here so quickly,” Justin says.

“Not a problem. We were just having breakfast at that strange café across the street when the dispatch came in. Good job calling it in so quick.”

Burns shoots me a wink and struts back to his cop car like he’s solved world peace and is looking forward to taking the rest of the day off.

“How’d you catch him?” I ask.

“You must have clocked him hard, because he barely made it to the end of the building. When he saw me, he started running. I got to him right in time.” He lifts his arm to get a look at a strip of grazed skin speckled with dots of blood along the underside.

“Are you okay?” I say, turning over his arm to inspect it better.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just a little brush burn.”

“You should at least disinfect it. Wash it out in the bathroom.”

He smiles at my concern and shakes his head, having never lost the grin that’s starting to become contagious. “You did good.”

I’m not sure what he’s talking about until he makes a swinging motion with his fist. “Oh, it was nothing. He actually kind of walked into it.”

“Say what you want,” he says, walking backward from me. “But he was still gasping for air when I tackled him.”

I jog to catch up. “What’s he being charged with?”

Justin turns forward when I reach him. “The knife should be enough to charge him with attempted murder, but the goal is to get him to confess that John Monroe hired him to scare you out of testifying, so they’ll probably offer him a plea deal. That’s what John Monroe gets for hiring a douche bag to do his dirty work.”

“You don’t think he’ll send someone else, do you?”

Justin pauses. “I can’t imagine he has many guys left. Lance was working under him for almost a year and he thinks most of the men fled when everything got raided.”

“What exactly did Lance do for him? Sell?”

Justin bites the inside of his cheek. “There’s a lot I don’t even know, but from what he’s told me, I assume it was a little of everything.”

“That doesn’t explain why he clung to Kaley so much, since he knew she didn’t know anything.”

“Nothing like that,” he says, avoiding the obvious. “Kaley was becoming suspicious of John, and he had mentioned to Lance that he didn’t want her getting too close to his work, so Lance volunteered to keep an eye on her for him.”

“That’s…awful,” I say, trying to grasp how I would feel if Kip ordered someone to keep tabs on me.

“Lance didn’t tell John much, other than whether or not she was snooping. Lance didn’t want Kaley to know about John as much as John didn’t. It’s what’s kept her out of this mess.”

“You two skirt the rules a lot. I would say you don’t take your jobs very seriously, except you still turned us in.”

He stays looking ahead but becomes serious. “Don’t accuse me of something you choose to stay ignorant to.”

His words bite, and it’s equivalent to throwing a bucket of ice water on my head. For a few minutes there, I forgot we’re not on the same team. “It’s corrupt,” I say.

“All law enforcement and government agencies get away with a lot that people don’t know about. It’s not corrupt,” he says. “It’s the norm.”

We walk back to the parking lot in silence, neither one of us acknowledging the other. I had also forgotten what it’s like to receive Justin’s cold shoulder, and I have to fight the urge to eradicate it. I hang on to it, focusing on the lies and deceit.

“Justin,” I say as we’re about to get into our separate vehicles. He’s standing on the other side of my Honda, his hand braced against the inside of the SUV’s door. “I have a question.” He perks up at the prospect that I might want to understand this, him, a little more. “Did you ever actually get arrested for robbing a store?

Just like when he had to confess his real age, it takes him a moment to respond. “My dad was the chief of police. He was able to use a few connections, so I was never charged.”

I purse my lips. “Was that before or after he got sober?

“Before, why?”

I shrug my shoulders. “Just wondering.”

I’m starting to gather that for the most part, Justin told the truth, or as close to the truth as possible. I’m struggling to cling to those tidbits of information and focusing on all of the inconsistencies. It’s a dangerous thing to want the truth all the while hoping it doesn’t make me question my decisions. It’s so hard when everything is gray with black and white muddled in the middle. I need the divide between the two so there’s no doubt.

I focus on the image of Kip behind the glass partition during visitation, and I hold on to it for my sanity.

I SPOKE WITH MY PROFESSORS
, and they agreed to give me the rest of the semester’s work via email. This is a blessing and a curse. I no longer have to worry about getting accosted at school, but now I have to learn all the information on my own, and take all my exams on one day. Can’t pick and choose, I guess.

Kip met with the judge, and his bail was set higher than we can afford, but we already knew it would be. The good news is that the prosecutors are trying to expedite the process. They don’t want a long, drawn-out preliminary meeting, so they’re offering deals to the minor violations. John Monroe has turned down every deal they’ve thrown at him, aiming for as little to no jail time as possible, and the prosecutors want to get him to trial before his attorney can build a case. Not that they have much to worth with—the evidence is really damning. Lance recorded enough audio to not leave anything to question. John Monroe is going to prison. He’s just deluding himself. His wife, on the other hand, is missing. Most likely still in Switzerland, hiding.

So they offered Kip a plea deal anyway. His arraignment is today, and I’m waiting to hear whether or not Kip took it and what it’ll mean for his future. I’m sitting on a bench outside the courthouse, trying to ignore Justin’s smoking habits as I wait to hear a word from Kip’s public defender. That was an entirely different argument within itself as Kip refused to spend money on an attorney or allow me to visit him. He doesn’t like me to see him incarcerated, but he’s going to have to get used to it. There’s a good chance he’s going away for a long time, and I’m not going that long without seeing him.

But for now, I have to live with Justin’s assurances that he knew a decent defender that would do right by Kip, and that’s not saying much considering I trust him all of zilch. But for some ridiculous reason, Kip does, and that just rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t catch his name, but Kip’s lawyer exits the courthouse wearing a brown suit that’s baggy in all the wrong places. I’m not one to pay close attention to attire, but even I can’t miss the atrocity that this man is wearing.

“Miss Foster,” he says, reaching a sweaty hand for mine to shake.

I stand. “Yes?”

“Kip asked me to give you a rundown on what he decided and where he’s headed from here.”

“Okay.”

I sit back down and he follows my lead. “The prosecutors offered Kip a very good deal. According to the evidence, he never actually transported the drugs or had them in his physical possession. He was simply an accomplice.”

“But he didn’t even know that,” I say, trying to defend him.

“And that has all been presented to the court and taken into consideration. Same ethics, I’m afraid,” he says. “From my understanding, Taylor Moore received a plea deal very similar.”

“You still haven’t explained what exactly they offered.”

He opens his briefcase, pulling out a single piece of paper and passing it to me. “Kip pled guilty to two federal counts of conspiracy to transport fifty kilos of cocaine over state lines. He’ll serve eight years in a federal penitentiary. He’ll be eligible for parole in four.”

It’s as if I was standing in the courtroom and the sound of the judge’s gavel ricochets through my body as he reads off the indictment. Eight years. He’ll be over thirty before he’s even considered for early release. But I knew the odds were stacked against him. It could have been worse. The maximum sentence reaches closer to twenty. And with the two counts, he really made out like a bandit. It’s just the finality of it that stings.

The lawyer seems to let me process this before he says, “He’ll be transported by the end of the day. You can visit him this weekend if you would like.”

I blink back my emotions and fold my hands. “He’s okay with that?”

The man smiles, and it’s the first emotion he’s shown since I’ve met him. “He said he knew you would anyway.”

I smile. “He knows me so well.”

He stands to leave. “I almost forgot,” he says, digging in his suitcase once again. “He wanted me to give you this.”

I pull the sheet from his hand. It’s a savings account with far more money than I thought Kip possessed. “Wait, what is this? I mean, how?”

“It’s an account that was opened by your father right before he died. I don’t know the specifics, but everything you need to have to access to it is right there on that paper. You’ll have to speak with Kip if you have any more questions.”

I’m still staring at the paper in disbelief when I feel Justin sit down next to me, having all but forgotten he was even here.

He whistles. “That’s a lot of money.”

I nod, at a loss for words.

“What are you going to do with it?”

I shrug.

It’s filled with more zeros than I thought my parents ever saw in their lifetime. My parents were poor when my dad died. He was just a mechanic making minimum wage. The only way he would have ever made this much money was if he was doing something illegal. It’s extremely fishy that it was opened only a week before he was killed. Maybe Dad wasn’t as innocent as we thought. It’s still in his name, but Kip and I are down as authorized users.