Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

“While you’re at it, you can write one about what the hell you did to Wallert’s place,” Whitton snapped. “I’ve got three teams of boots still over there, cleaning up. You know what a couple of thousand people on a rampage does to a person’s property? They’re saying there isn’t a shred of glass intact in the entire place. The garage burned to the ground.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jessica said. She rolled up her dirty jeans and slipped her sore feet into the cool water. “I’ll see you later.”

She hung up and opened her news app. The swarm party at Wallert’s house was the lead story. There was a short video of police storming the premises in riot gear, firefighters blasting the flaming garage with hoses. Teens and young people running everywhere, ducking under the coiling paths of tear gas canisters. Jessica scrolled for photographs of the interior of the house, the graffitied walls and smashed furniture, an artistic shot of a pink plastic cocktail glass shaped like a naked woman lying on the trashed kitchen floor. Young Beansie, a man she had arrested a year earlier for organizing a similar sort of party on a golf course, had outdone himself this time. The article was saying five thousand people had been on the scene.

For a second, to Jessica, it seemed as though thinking about Wallert had suddenly summoned his ghost. She smelled bourbon, sweat, his familiar stale reek. But then she felt his hand on the back of her neck and knew he was real. He yanked her upward and Jessica almost fell into the pool.

“You fucked with the wrong guy,” Wallert snarled.

His fist hit her like a hammer blow, exactly on point, crunching against her temple and cheekbone at once. She saw blackness, begged it not to envelop her completely. The deck of the pool area was against her mouth suddenly, tasting of chlorine. He was on her back, punching downward. She managed to roll and slap the gun away as it came up toward her face. It clattered loudly on the deck. She could hear her own desperate cries but not control them. It didn’t matter. What mattered now was fighting back. She doubled up, grabbed his shoulders, rolled with him, got some blows in. But he was in a fury so dark it gave him strength beyond anything she had ever felt. In seconds he had her pinned again, his big hands closed around her throat.

In the terrifyingly calm place between losing the ability to breathe and blacking out, she spied Jamie standing ten feet behind Wallert. She knew the boy was screaming, pleading, but couldn’t hear him. Her face and neck felt hot with trapped blood, her legs spasming. Jamie had the gun pointed at the back of Wallert’s head. Jessica could see the boy’s mother in him then. She could see Blair Harbour standing over Kristi Zea and Adrian Orlov in their house eleven years earlier, begging, pleading, trying to save a life.

Jessica felt a sadness rush through her. Not for her own life, which was sliding away from her in great, heavy chunks, like ice melting into the sea. The sadness was for him. He knew he had no choice. It was her or Wallert.

Jessica watched as the boy balked in desperation, turned the gun in his hands and hurled it by its barrel at the back of Wallert’s head.

The aim was true. The butt of the pistol glanced off Wallert’s thick skull, hard enough to shock him, to break the chain of fingers around Jessica’s throat. She rolled and grabbed the gun as it landed, smacked Wallert hard against the side of his head.

The man collapsed beside her. Jessica coughed and held the ground with both hands as her brain tried to deal with the sudden rush of oxygen. Jamie was standing there with his hands by his side, sobbing madly. It occurred to Jessica how young he looked then. How terror had instantly stripped him of the strength and power and heart she had seen in his face seconds earlier. She rolled over beside Wallert’s body, dragged his arms behind him, cuffed his wrists.

She beckoned the boy and he came, and she held him at the edge of the pool while he cried against her chest.

“Great job, kid,” she said. She gave him a few encouraging thumps on the back. “Great job.”

BLAIR

She was in the gas station for about five minutes before I noticed she was there. She was that quiet. That patient. The man I was serving, who completely blocked her from view, had to be six and a half feet tall, a gentle giant counting out his gas and sandwich money in quarters, making little stacks of coins on the countertop beside my crossword.

To merit: Deserve.

I tidied the bowl of peaches by the register while I waited, checking the clock on the wall to calculate how long until the end of my shift. It was a Sunday. A Jamie visiting day. I’d taken the early shift with the hopes of getting him down to the pier for lunch, but at the rate my customer was going, I was starting to lose hope.

When the big man turned away, I saw Jessica Sanchez standing in the middle of the Pump’n’Jump, reading a magazine from the rack. She was still bruised and battered from her ordeal a week earlier, when my son had saved her from an attack by a colleague of hers at her house in Brentwood.

Sasha had told me about the attack on Jessica Sanchez while I lay low for a week in my apartment, recovering from my gunshot wound. I’d spent my days twitching at the sound of every car door slammed in the street, wincing when the phone rang. It was easy to convince myself that the police knew of my involvement in the events at San Jasinte, though I’d done my best to disappear