As the sheriff, the onus on this fell on his shoulders. “Get the area for the swap. We’ll look at it and figure out where we can go and not be seen. The more people we have around him the better because we don’t know what he’s carrying or how many people he has behind him, so the rest of you,” he addressed the remaining men, “will have to act as backup. You act within the law, do you understand? Failure to do that risks Elodie and Gloria’s lives and puts getting justice for what’s happened at risk.”
The normally light-hearted and easygoing Townsend family remained silent and serious as they all nodded.
“I’m going to call Carter and tell him what to bring to the garage,” he continued. “We do this tight, men. And by tight I mean sticking to the plan unless we move to Plan B.”
All of them confirmed they got it, and then we were moving. As I was walking out the door, Dad caught up with me.
“We’ll get them back,” he muttered. “And your mother’s going to be pissed.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him what was burning in my gut after seeing what Shane had done to Maude and Katy, and that was the likelihood that he’d done the same thing to her. If I thought about that for too long I’d lose the control I had and, not being experienced in this sort of thing, I needed that control to get them back.
This morning everything had been laid out ahead of me. I was in love with Katy, she was in love with me, I had my family and hers around us, we were all healthy and happy, and Elodie had fed me toast, pinching tiny pieces off at a time. As I’d left to go to work, she’d called out, “Love cawot!” and my gut had clenched in a good way hearing it.
Fuck, I wish I’d taken the time to stop and appreciate it all more. I also wished I’d have woken Katy up when she’d said she loved me as she fell asleep and said it back.SeventeenJarrod“Yes?” the sick son of a bitch answered, sounding like he had nothing going on.
“Shane, it’s Jarrod Kline,” I clipped, making a point to talk quickly. “I’ve got what you wanted back.”
I’d learned from DB on the way to the garage that it was apparently no secret Shane had many bad attributes. He was a racist and at one stage it looked like he was bordering on being a white supremacist, too. He’d been investigated over the sexual assault of quite a few women – women who’d withdrawn their statements shortly after he was questioned over the incidents – but he’d always been released due to lack of evidence. Yesterday they’d found his car abandoned just outside of town and it looked like it had been in an accident and they’d already been looking for him when all of this happened to find out what had happened. I hadn’t ever paid much attention to him, so I didn’t know any of this, but now that we had all of this information it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together about his car and the hit and run we’d been involved in.
“Is that a fact? Seems I’ve got two of what you want right here,” he said in a singsong voice which put me on edge.
This fucker was crazy crackers, and he had two pieces of my world in his hands.
Taking a deep breath in to try to stay calm, I made eye contact with DB and nodded when he mouthed “calm” at me just like his brother had earlier. I could see the wisdom in them saying it because losing it wouldn’t get us what we wanted, but it was starting to fuck me off.
“Well, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to find what I’ve got now, Perkins, so it seems to me you’re wanting this badly, bad enough for us to not fuck around and risk it getting lost. You with me?”
There was a pause on the other side of the phone followed by a clanging noise like a metal door shutting.
“Meet me at the lake. There’s a cabin two miles up the slip road just past the entrance.”
With that, he hung up, proving that he had no clue what he was doing. This is why boys shouldn’t play with big boy toys, kids. At no point did he tell me to come alone – even though I definitely wasn’t – and he sounded too confident. His confidence was irritating, but the fact he didn’t know what he was doing concerned me because it meant he was acting on instinct now and that instinct might tell him to just say fuck it and kill Mom and/or Elodie if shit didn’t go his way.