Buried (Hiding From Love #3) (7 page)

“It’s not guilt,” I say, my voice a bit shaky. “I can’t explain it. David doesn’t understand either, but I have to help him. One way or another, I have to save him, Jill.” I look up at Jill, eyes stinging with the tears I never allow to fall.

Jill takes my hand and squeezes briefly before releasing it. “Oh, Bethy.” She shakes her head and sighs. “So what’s the plan? And how can I help?”

This is the Jill that I adore, the loyal friend who’d walk through fire—or hang out with a felon—to support me.

“I convinced David to come up tomorrow and go visit Juan with me. I told him to get whatever information he can out of Juan. I don’t think he did it. The drive-by. I don’t think there’s any way he could shoot a little girl like that. I mean, I knew him his entire life, Jill. People don’t change that much in a couple of years.” I shake my head briskly to dispel the very idea that Juan could commit such a heinous act. “Something’s just not right—about any of this. Joining the gang, the drive-by, the way he pushes me away. It’s not right. It’s not Juan. There’s something here we’re missing and we just have to keep digging and asking questions until we find it.”

“So let’s say you’re right and there’s more to this than a kid who panicked and joined a gang. How are you going to figure it out if he won’t tell you the truth?”

“I’m going to start by finding out about his conviction. I’m going to get every piece of information on it that I can. Something’s in those records that no one else has noticed and it’s going to help point me to what really happened to Juan.”

“And I suppose I’m going to be bringing you coffee and snacks while you comb through all of these reams of information?” Jill raises an eyebrow at me.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I reply as I reach into my backpack and pull out said reams of information.

S
ATURDAYS
are low-key days at the halfway house. No meetings or training sessions. Just our assigned house chores and free time. For guys who’ve been in prison for a while, time with nothing to do is the rule rather than the exception. We’re real good at sitting around in small spaces with absolutely nothing to occupy ourselves. But here, I can go outside, smell the fresh air, and watch the world. Birds, squirrels, flowers. I’m so hard up that I’m even happy to see bugs. Any chance to be outside and look at something other than chain link and bare dirt. It’s like a gift.

It’s about eleven, and the temperature is getting warmer quickly. Summer’s just around the corner. I can feel it in the air. I’m watering the new plants along the side of the property when I notice a tiny frog in the dirt underneath one of the honeysuckle bushes. I bend down and carefully lift him between my thumb and forefinger. I place him in the palm of my opposite hand and softly stroke his tiny back.

“Hey, little
vato
. How’s it goin’?” I ask quietly.

He’s smooth and still, his sides expanding and retracting as he breathes. I hold him up to my face so we’re nose to nose. He blinks at me. Do frogs blink? News to me.

“I’m putting more plants out here for you, little man. There’ll be more shade and water. We’ll keep you cool this summer, yeah?”

“Wow. I thought the RH would have broken you of the whole talking-to-small-animals thing,” a voice says behind me.

My heart nearly stops. I close my eyes, a sharp pain stabbing through my chest as I try to take a breath. I slowly return the frog to the dirt beneath the shrub. Then I stand and roll my shoulders before I turn around.

David was always an inch or two shorter than me, but he’s filled out, not the skinny kid I used to put in a headlock when we were fucking around at soccer practice. He has his hair cut short—a business cut, I think they call it. He’s wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt untucked over a pair of faded jeans. His watch is expensive, and I notice a set of Volvo keys dangling from his fingers.

My eyes shoot over his shoulder to where Beth stands a few feet away, her hands clasped in front of her chest, a look of hope on her face. She gives me a small, encouraging smile, and I know I have to do this even though it’s nearly enough to put me down for the count.

I scratch my head, not sure how to begin.

“Yeah,” David says as he takes a step closer. “I don’t know what the hell to say either.” He puts out his hand and we clasp for a moment. “It’s good to see you,
hermano
,” he tells me quietly.

I release his hand. “I guess I know how you ended up here,” I answer.

He raises an eyebrow to me then glances behind him. Beth has vanished, leaving us to deal with one another in all our angst and awkwardness.

“You look real good, bro.”

“Thanks, man.” He stuffs his car keys in his front pocket. “Beth tells me you’re here for a few weeks, yeah?”

I nod. “Yeah, just, uh… Just trying to get settled, you know. Find a job, a place to live.”

Fuck, this is humiliating. I want to either die or crawl into the dirt with the frog. David’s everything I always thought I’d be—professional, clean-cut, smooth. The kind of guy girls like his sister should be with. The kind of guy who lives in a big house in San Antonio.

“That’s great, man. Any ideas what you might do? Where you’ll live?”

I glance down at the spot where the frog was and see that he’s disappeared. Lucky bastard.

“Not too sure, no. They’ve got all kinds of fancy ideas for me, but I imagine I’ll be washing dishes at a restaurant or something.”

David scrutinizes me. It’s a dumb-ass word, but there’s no other way to describe it.

“Yeah, you always loved washing up after your mom made enchiladas, so I can see why that’d be a good choice.”

I can’t help it. I snort. My mom made the cheesiest enchiladas ever seen, and our little apartment didn’t have a dishwasher—well, except for me. Trying to pry all that melted cheese off the plates after enchiladas was sheer torture. I used to pay David all my lawn mowing money to get him to do it for me.

“Seriously,
hermano
,” he says as he walks past me and sits backwards on the bench at the picnic table. “What the hell are you doing? A dishwasher? Why don’t you go back to school, try community college or something? Maybe coach some soccer? You’re good at all kinds of shit, and you know as well as I do that you’re a good damn student. There’s no reason you should be washing dishes at some greasy spoon.”

I try really hard not to scoff at him as I kneel and start pulling tiny weeds out of the flowerbed I’ve created next to the rosebush.

“Yeah, well, ain’t no one going to be letting me near their kids to coach soccer, bro. In case you don’t remember, I just spent four years locked up for killing a kid. Not exactly soccer coach material.”

“You spent four year locked up for the being in the
general vicinity
when a kid got killed. Beth doesn’t think you did it,” he answers, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

“Beth’s got a good heart, man. But not much knowledge about how the world really works.”

He nods like he’s thinking about stuff. His lips kind of purse the same way Beth’s do when she’s about to let loose over something.

“Funny thing is,
I
don’t think you did it either. I spent my whole fucking life with you, and as long as I can remember, you were rescuing kittens and helping my little sisters with their homework, talking to toads.” He huffs out a bitter laugh. “Hell, you wouldn’t even kill a bug when you found it in the house. I can’t even begin to remember how many times I watched you catch some sort of spider or beetle and toss its ass outside instead of just smashing it the way everyone else would. You could no more shoot a child than I could hit my mother.”

I look at him, an understanding of sorts passing between us. It might have been seven years, but David knows me—better than anyone else in this world.

“Yeah, well, the courts said I did it, the penal system said I did it, the newspapers said I did it, so that’s all that matters now.”

“No, it’s not,
hermano
.” He stands and walks to me before he places his hand on my shoulder and looks me in the eye. “There are people who care.
I
care. Your
family
cares. Don’t let this go. Fight it, man. Fight it all. If it’s too late to fight the conviction, at least fight for the rest of your life. You’re twenty-five damn years old. You’ve got sixty years ahead of you. Fight for that shit.”

I shake my head at him, my insides aching and my stomach nauseated and cramped. “Look, Beth doesn’t understand this and I don’t want to explain it to her, but you can. The RH will never let that happen. I’m stuck in Texas for the next seven years because of the restrictions on my parole. If I get settled anywhere in the state, they’ll find me. You don’t walk away from them, bro.”

He looks horrified. And rightfully so. His hand drops from my shoulder and he runs it through his hair, immediately messing up the stylish cut.

“So what the hell are you going to do? You can’t go back to them, Juan. Seriously. Tell me you aren’t just going to go back to that.”

“No, man. I’m going to try to do everything I can to stay the hell away from them. But that means I’m going to be taking whatever backroom jobs I can find, living off of cash, in out-of-the-way spots, and moving around as much as possible. There’s no fancy schools or cushy office jobs in my future.”

I almost feel sorry for him. No civilian could ever really understand what I’m facing here. And it’s not like I’m a normal gang member. The RH knows exactly who I am and how much I’m worth. They keep much tighter tabs on me than they do a normal member.

But I’ve forgotten how smart David is. He’s always been quicker than a whip, outsmarting teachers and coaches our whole childhood. Not always the one to shout out the answer, but always ready with it when needed.

He’s pacing the area between the planter and the patio now, wearing out the poor grass as he goes. I can tell the wheels in his head are grinding away, and I’m scared of what he’s going to come up with.

“Why’d you join?” he says suddenly. “You had a safe place to live. You know my parents would have let you stay forever. You’d have had a home there for as long as you wanted or needed. Why’d you run off and join the RH? I never understood what happened.”

“I was going to get deported,
ese
.”

“And we were ready to fight that. You know we were. You couldn’t prove you were born here, but they couldn’t prove you weren’t. Without a birth certificate, no one could prove anything. It would have taken years to get to the point where someone was seriously looking to deport you. By that time, all kinds of things could have happened—another amnesty act, a great lawyer, some loophole somewhere.”

“I couldn’t take that chance,” I say, my agitation at his line of questioning increasing by the second. This is the conversation I’ve been avoiding for seven years, the one I knew would happen if Beth pushed me to keep seeing her and her family.

“And if you
were
deported? Would living in Mexico with your mom really have been that much worse than sitting in a prison here? Fuck, man. How can Mexico be worse than
prison
?”

And there it is, the crux of it all. As usual, David is too damn smart for his own good. And certainly for mine. I debate. Do I pull out RH Juan? Tell David to fuck himself, threaten him maybe? It’d send him and Beth on their way for good, I have no doubt. There’s no chance David will risk Beth’s safety if he thinks I’m violent or unpredictable. It’s what I ought to do. The smart, safe thing to do, because if he can ask the question—why is living in Mexico worse than living in prison—then he can search for the answer, and I can’t let that happen.

But somewhere deep inside me, there is a seventeen-year-old straight-A student and soccer star clawing to be free. A young man who has a future and wants to claim it in spite of the odds that it’s already far too late. So I don’t pull out RH Juan.

“You got to believe me on this one,
hermano
. For
me
, living in Mexico would be worse than being in prison.” Then, before he can say another word, I give him a quick tap on the shoulder. “Thanks a lot for coming by. Tell Beth I said goodbye. Take care, bro.”

I head inside faster than one of my homeboys leaves the scene of a turf war.