AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Pretty much?” Zaxx countered and put a spoonful of plain chocolate concrete into his mouth. Where frozen treats were concerned, he was a purist.
They’d ridden on his bike to the nearest Andy’s location, ordered and collected their treats, then found an empty bench outside. The May evening was pleasant, still sun-warmed but with a light kiss of cool in the breeze, a faint echo of a winter than had hung on firmly through most of March.
When Zelda had eaten about half her concrete in sullen silence, Zaxx had finally given her a gentle nudge to start talking.
Now she glared at him. “When did you become a traffic cop? Whose side are you on?”
“I’m on your side, Peach. I’m just trying to figure out how pissed I need to be at this guy.”
“Really pissed. It was bullshit that he pulled me over, and all I did was tell him that, and then he got all Rambo on me.”
“Rambo how?”
“He demanded my license, and while I reached over to grab my pack, I told him what I thought of him. Then all of a sudden he yanked my door open and pulled me out of the car! He threw me around like a fucking Elmo doll, and he shoved me face first onto the hood of Bluey. The way he frisked me, I thought he was gonna do something really bad—”
Adrenaline burst in Zaxx’s brain like a Roman Candle, and he cut her of. “What do you mean? How did he frisk you?”
“Really rough, and really thorough. Like, I’m wearing this”—she indicated her purple plaid pleated miniskirt—"and he felt me up so far he knows the pattern of the lace trim on my underpants and probably knows I’m due for a wax.”
Zaxx felt chocolate ooze over his hand; he looked down and saw his fist had clamped around his paper cup hard enough to push concrete over the rim.
His sister noticed as well, and her mouth developed a small, but clearly pleased smirk.
She looked up and met his eyes. They shared the blue-eyes trait with their Anglo-Irish mother. In fact, Zelda looked a lot like Mom—same coloring, same propensity for freckles, same height. Zelda had a little more meat on her bones than Mom, who was thin enough to blow away on a breath. Zaxx featured their Sicilian father more, except for his eyes, and his height. At six-two, Zaxx was five inches taller than Pop. Nobody had any idea where those inches had come from in their otherwise shortish family.
As Zaxx grabbed some napkins and cleaned up his mess, Zelda continued, “So I stomped on his foot. When he yelled and let me go, I turned around and kneed him in his junk. That dropped him for a few minutes, and I could’ve run, but I didn’t. I waited. That’s the opposite of resisting arrest.”
His heart thumping with rage and worry, his hands sticky and his appetite for frozen custard gone, Zaxx imagined the scene—Danvers on his knees, curled over in that gut-exploding pain, and Zelda standing patiently by—and could not suppress a grin. He was proud of her for sticking up for herself, for fighting back hard. And there was no way in hell his baby sister was quiet while she waited for Danvers to get his feet under him again and arrest her. By the time that bastard cop got to his feet, Zaxx had no doubt she’d done more damage with her tongue than her knee had done driving his nuts into his chest cavity.
But fighting with a cop was dangerous business, especially for a little bit like her. “Did he hurt you more for payback after that?”
She shrugged. “He made the cuffs tight enough to hurt, but other than that, I’d say he was extremely careful from that point. Probably because he wanted to kill me and it was broad daylight on campus during finals week.” She sighed and pushed the rest of her concrete away. “I’m pretty sure I completely tanked my physics final, by the way.”
And there was probably the inciting event of this whole mess: Zelda was upset about a bad exam, she’d been driving home after it and did a rolling stop. That was barely even a traffic infraction; even when a cop was nearby to see it happen, most only tagged people for it if they were racing the end of a quota period, were bored, or in a foul mood. Zaxx bet Danvers had been in a mood. Mix one part smartass little girl punk in a snit with one part redneck cop in a mood, stir in some moderate sexual assault and battery, and everything go boom.
Meanwhile, those three bullshit charges had the potential to add up to eighteen months in jail. Her juvenile record had been expunged, thankfully, so it wouldn’t bear on this charge and make it even worse.
Still, Zelda couldn’t go away for a year and a half, and she wasn’t going to win in a she said/he said standoff. “I’ll talk to Badge, see if there’s a back he can scratch somewhere to make this go away.”
“I want to fight it,” Zelda said. “I don’t want it to go away. I want to be found not guilty. I am not guilty.”
Shit. If she got this in her teeth ... “Zelda—”
“No!” She slammed her palms onto the table so hard the whole thing shook. “Fine, I rolled a stop sign. That’s all I did wrong, and the fine for that shouldn’t be getting fingered by a cop! IT’S NOT ILLEGAL to tell a cop off! He has to take that just like everybody else! So fuck that handsy motherfucker into the earth’s core. He had his fingers in my panties, Zaxx! I want to cut those stubby digits off his hands with a fucking nail file. Kneeing him was self-defense!”
Zaxx sent a discreet look around them. It was a nice evening in early May. Andy’s was doing a brisk business, and most of the outside tables were occupied. His sister was yelling, and people were noticing.
“Okay, Peach. Okay. I hear you, I get you, I’m with you.”
That sentence, those nine words, had been a mantra between them for most of Zelda’s life. Both promise and comfort. They worked their magic now; she took a breath and settled. Zaxx reached across the table and took her hand.
“We’ll figure it out,” he assured her. “He won’t get away with it. I promise.”
Zaxx meant that promise. But he knew he couldn’t leave the outcome in the hands of the law.
Chapter Two
Gia exited I-44 and made a right at the end of the ramp. Another fifteen miles or so down a lazy stretch of macadam, lush farmland on either side, and she passed a wooden sign offering her a ‘Welcome to Signal Bend!’
