AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Luke
When I finished, red faced and humming with a cocktail of endorphins and excruciating pain, Mittens and I walked the rest of Cassie’s block.
As I approached, I noticed two figures standing near the ash tree where I’d left my bag and cane. Two men in identical suits.
The endorphins dissolved. Now it was just pain. Pain and knots in my gut.
A few feet from me, the taller of them flashed a badge.
CID, it read. I recognized it. Dad used to have the same one, I remembered that now. My heart raced. Johnno. He really had reported us. The other shoe had dropped.
“Are you PFC Luke Morrow?”
I thought of saying no. I thought of testing my running skills again, of having a few more minutes of freedom before they took me. Some wall had been knocked down. I almost felt like laughing out loud, though there should have been nothing to laugh at.
I tried to keep my voice from cracking. “I am.”
“We’re going to need you to come with us.”
“For what?” I asked, but I knew.
“You’re under arrest.”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from darting across the street, toward Cassie’s house. If she were here, we might be able to talk them down, to show them we weren’t a fraud in the way they thought we were. We could come up with another story together. But the Subaru was nowhere in sight.
I let go of Mittens’s leash to hold my hands up, and said, “Sirs, can I drop my dog at my neighbor’s place?”
Mittens looked back and forth between me and the men like they were her new friends, her tongue still hanging out.
The tall one nodded.
I scrambled in my pockets for the extra key, remembering Rita was at Cassie’s show right now. Where I should have been. Where I wanted to be. Mittens looked at me knowingly for a moment as I shut the door, then turned and ran back into the house. I felt my muscles relax, beyond relax, and fall into bone tired. For the first time since I was nineteen, since before I met Johnno, I wouldn’t have to look over my shoulder. That was it. Johnno had done his worst. Mittens was safe, Rita was safe, Cassie was safe, and they were safe because they were away from me. The dirt was out of their corners, drowning me. It was messy and awful and too much at once, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be floating above my life without any consequences anymore, because up there, I was missing everything. The bad and the good.
This part, the part where the tall officer was picking up my bag as the short one put a firm hand on my back, happened to be bad.
But inside the bag he held, there was no pill bottle. It was in the trash, in the house of a woman across the street. Everything was flowing around me, the pavement, the ash tree, the sweat that still fell in drips from the exertion, the cold handcuffs on my wrists, the good, the bad, I was in it.
I let the CID lead me to their car.
