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He shook his head.
“Hands off the steering wheel!”
Someone roared over the intercom, and I instantly ripped my hands away from the no longer warm steering wheel. A deep chill raced down my spine as a cop ran up to the car and opened the door. Several pairs of hands grabbed at me, and I watched with shock as Rico ripped the gun out of the back of his pants. He whipped his arm over his head and threw the piece as far as he could into the median.
I screamed when another gun fired nearby, slapping my hands to my ears when they started to ring. Several pairs of hands quickly patted me down before forcing me to the concrete. The others were being dragged out and cuffed, same as me, but Rico was lying on the ground. I could see him from beneath the car.
He wasn’t moving.
A puddle of blood shone against the pavement, slowly growing bigger, and I knew that he wouldn’t be getting up again.
Ever.
CHAPTER2
Caitlin
It wasn’t until the next day that the full details of the heist were made clear to me. I’d spent hours in interrogation after being forced to take a drug test, with one officer after the next hammering me for details that I didn’t have to give.
They tried to trip me up several times, but I told the truth, or at least as much of the truth as I could. This was big time shit, and the only way I could see forward was trying to be as honest as possible.
The more I learned, the worse it got.
According to the investigative officers, Rico was more of a bad seed than I had initially realized. Since the time he was sixteen, he’d been arrested twice before: once for aggravated assault and the second for manslaughter. In both cases, he’d been tried as an adult, and this would have been his third strike. They wouldn’t tell me for sure, but I was mostly certain Rico was dead. If he’d been taken in last night, he would have been sentenced to life in prison. A part of me thought he’d made himself a target on purpose, but I would never know for sure.
The cops wanted to know what a girl like me was doing with a guy like him. They’d been able to dredge up a little bit of my history, but most of it had been cleaned off my record aside from one small minor shoplifting charge a few years ago. Back then, I’d served some community service and it had never gone to court.
Apparently, Rico and his gang had been planning this heist for a long time and the cops had gotten wind of it about three weeks ago. Extra security had been put in place at the jewelry store, including hidden cameras and silent alarms that would be triggered if any case was opened without the corresponding key.
There had been one clerk in there after hours, and instead of just cleaning out the cases, Rico and Trey had gone in and tried to rob the vault in the back office. The clerk and the two of them had gotten in a scuffle and Rico had fired a shot, hitting the clerk in the chest. He was at the hospital now, but it was still unclear whether or not he would make it.
For hours, I waited in that room until at long last they put me in a cell all by myself. Tina and Stacy were nowhere to be found. I didn’t know where Trey was either, but I stopped caring a little while later when one of the cops told me everything that I was looking at.
My charge list was long, but not as long as the others.
Theft of a motor vehicle, evading arrest, robbery, reckless endangerment, and a list of other minor charges including speeding were rattled off to me as I sat there, more than a little bit dumbfounded.
Since it was the weekend, there wasn’t any posting bail until Monday. I tried ringing my dad with the one phone call they offered me, but he didn’t pick up and I slowly began to lose hope. They took my clothes and had a female officer perform a full strip search on me before I was given the ugliest set of grandma underwear that I’d ever seen along with the orange jumpsuit typical of county jail. I chewed my lip, left alone for much of the time, listening to the shouts of other inmates all around me. I didn’t speak and they left me alone.
When Monday morning came around, a man in a suit came to my cell. He stared at me in silence as he slowly unlocked the door that held me prisoner. I didn’t recognize him.
“Your bail has been posted,” he said vaguely.
“Who?”
Honestly, it was a silly question. I only had my dad and no other surviving relatives. I wasn’t the type of girl that would receive this kind of charity, so it could only be him. I scowled and turned my head.
“Has my dad come to pick me up?” I asked hopefully.
For the first time in my life, I was nervous to see him. There was no doubt in my mind that he was going to be furious about this whole mess, and I hoped he’d listen to my side of the story, that it had all been a dumb mistake because I was just trying to impress a boy.
“No. Your father passed away early Saturday morning.”
“What?”
I stopped dead in my tracks and the man turned back to face me. I knew instantly that it wasn’t some sick twisted joke on his part from the solemn look on his face. My shock was probably written all over mine.
“There was an emergency 911 call to your father’s house at nine in the morning. Your father was pronounced dead upon arrival. At this point, it is suspected to be the product of a heart attack or a stroke. Cause of death will be confirmed once the autopsy is complete.”
