Healing Sands (3 page)

Silence frosted the room that had moments before been a sauna. Jake didn't look at me until he suddenly seemed to realize we were alone. His face came up, ashen and twitching and no longer able to hide the fear that obviously raked at him.

“I'm taking you home with me,” I said, “so we can talk this thing through.”

“I'd rather go to detention,” he said.

His words kicked me in the gut. “You're in serious trouble, son.”

“I
know
!” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, and I watched his bony shoulders shake, sure they'd grown smaller and more gaunt in the last two hours.

“All right—we won't go there right now. Let's just go home where it's quiet and try to sort this out.”

“I'll go home.” He turned the stormy eyes on me. “With Dad. That's my home.”

“You bet, buddy,” Dan said from the doorway. “Hey, it's going to be okay.”

Jake collapsed onto his arms on the table, and I stormed out the door. In the hall, Dan stopped beside a drinking fountain and assumed the position: back against the wall, arms folded across his chest, crossing me out as his brown eyes surveyed the floor tiles. Jake had learned it from the master.

“‘It's going to be
okay
, Jake'?” I said. “What's going to be okay, Dan? The food in detention? Those cool shackles he gets to wear around his ankles when they drag him into court? What are you
thinking
?”

Dan dragged his eyes up to me and held them there. “I'm thinking you hate to lose, Ryan. But for once, it isn't about you.”

I was stunned, and I must have shown it. Why did he choose now to grow a spinal column?

“I know it isn't about me,” I said. “It's about what's best for Jake. If I can get him away from here, I can get him to talk—”

“Since when? He won't even have a pizza with you and tell you about his day.”

I didn't notice until then that Dan was covered in white dust up to his elbows, and the front of his jeans was streaked in it as well, as if he had been rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. He'd obviously torn out of his studio without even stopping to wash off the plaster.

Something dawned on me. “Where's Alex?” I said.

“He's with Ginger.”

“Oh.”

Ginger was Dan's “significant other,” Alex had informed me. If my ten-year-old had used that term for anybody else, I would have been amused. I'd only seen her once, from afar, when I'd dropped Alex off one evening. She'd struck me as a candidate for
Deal or No Deal
, one of those women who stood around with suitcases.

I shoved my hair off my face, though it tumbled back immediately onto my forehead and left several chopped-off, dark strands in my right eye. “Look, you have Alex to be concerned with, and this is going to be huge for him too. You can't deal with both of them, so—”

“Why not? I've been doing it for a year.”

“Right,” I said. “And now one of them has been arrested for attempted homicide.”

“You're saying this is my fault?”

I could only stare at the man whose voice teetered on the edge of anger. Dan usually left the anger to me.

“Jake wants to come home with me, so I'm taking him,” he said. “Otherwise he's going to detention, and I don't want that, and I don't think you do either. I already signed the papers.”

I charged across the hall to the interview room and looked through the wire mesh glass in the narrow window. Jake still had his head on his arms, almost as if he'd fallen asleep.

It was impossible to fathom that my son had tried to kill someone, even in light of the sullen wall he'd built between us. He was angry with me, but in that maddeningly passive way that had driven me away from his father. Surely not angry enough to take it out on—whom? Who was Miguel Sanchez?

I pressed my forehead to the glass. Did it mean something that he was Hispanic? We had never been racist. The boys had been growing up in Chicago before Dan moved them here. Their birthday parties had looked like junior United Nations summits.

And yet Jake didn't deny it, no matter how menacing Detective Baranovic made it all sound. He didn't try to pin it on someone else. He wouldn't even confess that he'd done it.

And I knew why.

I watched him now as he pulled himself up from the tabletop and once again dug into his eyes with his fists while his mouth contorted. He didn't confess, because Jake Coe had never been able to lie. Alex could get away with a fib until he was caught dead to rights, and even then I usually had a hard time believing his little prevarication hadn't been the gospel truth. But Jake had never even tried it. When I broke up brother fights that rivaled WWE, Jake clammed up and let the chips fall where they may. And that's what he was doing now.

He wouldn't confess, because he hadn't done it.

I tried to turn the door handle, but it didn't budge. When I whirled around to go for the detective, I saw a petite woman with impossible breasts running down the hall, mahogany curls bouncing as she half stumbled in kitten heels toward Dan. When she reached him, he bent over to allow her bronzed arms to fold around his shoulders. She pushed his face into her neck, where I was certain he'd be bruised by the barrage of necklaces that dipped heavily into her cleavage.

“Are you all right?” she said into his hair.

This was Ginger. She pulled back and cupped Dan's face in her hands, which I was surprised she could lift with the number of rings she was wearing.

“It's bad, isn't it?” she said.

“It'll be okay. Where's Alex?”

“He's with Ian. It's bad. You're just so strong about stuff like this.”

Stuff like this? She'd seen Dan faced with his son's possible incarceration before?

I turned back to the window to see that Jake had gotten up from the table and was standing in the corner with his back to me. A mental picture formed, what I had come to know as a God-image because it emerged whole and unbidden. It was Jake at five, putting himself into time-out before I even knew the balloons had been tied to the cat's tail, before I'd even pinned the deed on him. He was now a lopey five-foot-ten, but he was the same little boy who would take a punishment he didn't deserve if it meant he could avoid a confrontation.

I slapped my hands against the door on both sides of the window— but that was as far as I let my anger go. I had to have a plan, and as I stood there absorbing my son's pain through the glass, I arranged it, shot by shot, in my mind. I would get to the bottom of this for him.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he juvenile prosecutor did indeed file formal charges against Jake that afternoon. Although the fitness hearing wasn't until one o'clock Friday, I took the day off so I could find a lawyer. I didn't even have a dentist or a hairstylist yet in Las Cruces, much less an attorney. Locating someone in criminal law had not been on my to-do list.

The only people I knew to ask were my colleagues at the paper, and I didn't want them to know about this. Because Jake was still a juvenile, at least for the moment his name wasn't released. I turned to the Internet, where a Uriel Cohen sounded good on her Web site and even better on the phone—sharp and intelligent. She promised to meet Dan, Jake, and me at the courthouse at twelve thirty.

“I wish you'd lawyered up before they interviewed him,” she'd said.

“Don't worry,” I said. “He didn't say a word.”

Until noon, I poured coffee I didn't drink and made the bed I hadn't slept in and studiously avoided the front page of the
Sun-News.
I'd told Frances I didn't have anything worth sending her. In truth, when I looked at my shots on the laptop the night before, they told a clear story of a vicious attack on a young man that left his family and friends seized with horror.

I finally relented around eleven that morning and skimmed the text of the front-page article. Miguel Sanchez was in serious but stable condition at Memorial Medical Center.

Señora Sanchez probably hadn't slept any more than I had. I could see her in my mind, where God put her—pressed to her son's bedside, trying to push life into his forehead with her hand, whispering the will to survive into his ear. It was everything I wanted to be doing with my own son.

But I didn't see Jake until he and Dan slipped into the courtroom at the Third Judicial District Courthouse a mere fifteen seconds before the bailiff called our case. It might have been by design, so I wouldn't have a chance to speak to him, but then, Dan was always late and, like today, always seemed surprised that it made any difference.

“Didn't you get my message?” I hissed to him. “We were supposed to meet with the attorney first.”

I jerked my head toward the fiftyish woman with limp white hair I'd just spent thirty minutes stalling with.

She gave Dan a quick assessment through black-framed rectangular glasses and said, “We'll talk later. This is only a fitness hearing.”

Only a fitness hearing?
I wanted to scream.
They're going to decide whether to handle our son like the young boy he is or treat him like a career criminal.

I looked past Dan and drank Jake in. He evidently wasn't that long out of the shower. The dark hair was only now starting to curl out of his apparent attempt to slick it back, and his face looked raw, as if he'd tried to scrub off any visible signs of fear. But he'd had no success with his eyes, which had the same frightened sheen I'd seen the day before. Except for the manly Adam's apple that moved painfully with every swallow, he could have been twelve.

He sat so that I was left next to Dan, who smelled vaguely of Irish Spring soap and gasoline and had tried the same approach with his hair that Jake had. Except for their eyes—Jake's were blue, like mine—they were so alike, I used to joke that I'd merely been an incubator for the child. I didn't find it that amusing anymore.

The judge, the Honorable John Hightower, was a boxy, humorless man with more eyebrows than hair. He cocked one of them at us from the bench.

“This is a fitness hearing to determine whether”—he glanced down—“Jacob Coe is to be tried as an adult in the vehicular assault of Miguel Sanchez.

“What do you have for me, Ms. Hernandez?”

He cocked the other brow at the representative from the DA's office, a large woman with mocha skin and enough dark hair for six women, which she tossed over her shoulders several times as she stood up, making her long, beaded earrings dance. The image of a Hispanic matriarch was completed by the command in her stride as she approached the bench.

“Your Honor, I would like to read a note that was found on the seat of the truck where Jacob Coe was apprehended.”

I hated the way she said his name, as if he were a newly discovered disease.

Hernandez perched a pair of red half glasses on her nose.
“To whom it may concern—that would be you, Sanchez, in case this strains your English vocabulary.”
Hernandez gave the words a sarcastic twist. I crossed and recrossed my legs.

“Whereas you are a lowlife immigrant loser, and whereas I am an American-born citizen with certain inalienable rights—therefore, you are going down, dude. Way down. When I'm finished with you, you'll be licking the dust.”

Hernandez looked over the top of the paper, directly at Jake. He stared at his hands, which shook where they dangled between his knees.

I leaned into Uriel Cohen. “Jake didn't write that,” I whispered to her.

She didn't answer. Hernandez was handing the note to her, which she studied for an interminable moment. Dan tugged at my sleeve.

“What?” I said between my teeth.

“Leave it alone.”

“I'm going to tell her Jake's dyslexic. There's no way he wrote that.”

“Just leave it.”

Uriel put her hand on my arm and stood up.

“This is typed,” she said to the judge. “And it's unsigned. I don't see a strong link to my client.”

“Except that it was on the seat next to him with his fingerprints on it.” Hernandez drew herself up. “This vehicular assault was clearly not an accident, or even an impulsive act. It was planned. That alone indicates that he should be tried as an adult.”

“He's fifteen years old, Your Honor,” Uriel said.

“I don't care if he's ten—this is a premeditated crime with racial features. That sounds pretty adult to me.”

Judge Hightower smeared his hand over his lower face. “What else do you have, Ms. Hernandez?”

My pulse raced. There was more?

Hernandez swept to her table and then to the bench, wafting yet another sheet of paper in his direction. “Your Honor, phone logs have also revealed that a call was made from Jacob Coe's residence to the home of Miguel Sanchez one hour before the incident.”

“Which proves what?” Uriel said.

“It doesn't have to prove anything, Ms. Cohen,” the judge said. “It only has to give me a reason to bind this case over to regular court.” The courtroom fell silent as he worked his eyebrows over a file in front of him.

“Is there a history of problems at home?” he asked.

“The parents are divorced, Your Honor.”

“As are 50 percent of the parents in this country,” Uriel said.

“The defendant's father has sole custody,” Hernandez said, as if that alone was reason to lock Jake up indefinitely.

“Any evidence of lack of parental control?”

“He was driving a vehicle without a license. He—”

“I mean prior to the incident.”

Hernandez folded her arms. “None that has been reported.”

The judge looked up at us. “What about family support?”

“You see that both of his parents are here,” Uriel Cohen said.

“However, the detective who interviewed the accused reported that they argued—”