Spin Out (23 page)
“Bet it did.” I offered him up a little sympathy.
Austin gave me one of those glares that said he thought I was patronizing him like every other adult he knew. “I was like, this is never going to end. My folks found out about it at the start of this year and they got into it with everybody else’s parents…and so shit got worse, ‘cause even if most of those idiots had graduated, everyone knows everyone. I couldn’t walk five feet without hearing comments in the halls.”
“It ain’t easy, sometimes, living in a small town.” Some days were rougher than others.
Ignoring me, Austin kept on with his story. “Then on Thanksgiving, my mom and Trey’s mom got into a big fight, screaming at each other in the middle of the street. I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I wrote this note and put it in a ziplock, ‘cause I figured it might be awhile before it got read, and took my rifle and my dirt bike and the next day headed up into the forest.”
“Why?” I hoped the answer wasn’t going to be what I thought it probably was. Still, Austin hadn’t gone through with things and that equaled pretty positive in my book.
His lips went tight and he shrugged. “Because I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Felt like he didn’t want to discuss that part. “Okay.” About that point I realized I should be taking some notes. I grabbed a pen from the cup and the note pad off on the side and started jotting things down. “So you’re up at Mount Dutton with your rifle.” The press didn’t know yet that Lane’d been shot. “What type?”
“Marlin .30-.30. I’m really pissed I lost it.” My heart almost did a belly-flop into my stomach when Austin said that. “My dad’s gonna kill me when he figures out it’s gone. Cost him close to three hundred bucks.” Matched the caliber of the slug the OME pulled out of Lane’s skull.
I had to keep things easy and slow if I were gonna find out anything. “When’d you lose it?”
“That day…” Austin heaved up a big ol’ sigh. “I’ll get to that.”
“Alright.” I just nodded and kept taking notes
“I went to a place that my dad and brother and I used to go camping.” He started pulling bits of tinsel off the garland Noreen strung around the lip of my desk. “We’d just go for a day to spend time when I was little and I really liked it. So, I’m sitting on this log trying to work myself kinda up for it when Alex comes roaring on in on a bike.” Austin kinda swooshed his hand across the desk, showing me how fast the other boy’d been moving. “He sees me and takes off. So, I’m like, crap… I didn’t want any of them around, especially not that time. I head over to my bike, thinking maybe I’ll go somewhere else and then they all come back.”
“They?” I could guess, but I wanted to know exactly who all’d been around.
Austin ticked the names off on his fingers, “Alex, Trey, Lane, Chris and Cooper.” His face got all hard. “Cooper and Alex are on dirt bikes and they start circling around me.” He spun his fingers ‘round each other then moved one hand over top the other. “Trey’s got his truck and gets between me and my bike, gunning the engine and all. They all jump out and start pushing at me.”
That little bit maybe lined up with bruising the OME found on Lane’s body. “You all got to fighting?” Austin said they pushed him, didn’t mean he didn’t push back.
He snorted. “I got to be beaten on. First, I just tried to keep away, get to my bike. But there’s five of them and one of me. Trey came at me and Cooper had gotten in behind me and so I tripped over him. I dropped the rifle and they all start in on beating the shit out of me.” Took him a few swallows before he could go on. “Well sort of. Trey and Cooper,” he corrected, “they hit me. The rest were just yelling and all.”
I spun the pen through my fingers a moment. “How long that go on?”
“A few punches.” The way he said it, I figured it probably equaled more than just a few. “Then Lane gets in between Cooper and me, and shoves Cooper on his ass.” Austin pushed his hand out like he shoved somebody down. “Lane had my note in his hand.” A little red crept across Austin’s cheeks as he talked. “I guess he must have found it and read it and figured why I was out there, ‘cause he starts you know, ‘Let’s just go,’ ‘it’s not fun anymore,’ that kinda shit.”
“What happened next?”
“Trey grabbed the note out of Lane’s hand.” Now the boy started shaking. Not hard, but just enough so I could tell. “And he’s reading it to the others and laughing about it.”
“Okay.”
“That’s when I got pissed. I ran up and just whacked Trey in the nuts with a branch.” At that he gave a little smirk. If I had to guess, that crotch shot bit of revenge probably felt better than just about anything in Austin’s life. “I got on top of him and we’re punching and rolling around on the ground. Lane pulled me off and shouts at me to get gone.”
I wrote some. Then I realized that Austin was waiting on me. “Go on,” I prompted.
“And then Cooper’s got my gun, and he’s got it pointed at me, yelling, ‘You really want to do this! I’ll do it for you!’” Austin shouted it out and then seemed kinda embarrassed that he’d yelled. His next few words were quieter, not quite a whisper. “Cooper’s looking at Trey like he’s some kinda superhero or something, Alex is freaking out more than me and Chris is yelling, ‘Dude, stop!’ I think, maybe, Lane realized it was all kinda out of control, ‘cause he stepped in and knocked the rifle out of Cooper’s hands…told him to cut it out.”
“What happened then?”
Austin’s eyes went wide. “I realized like maybe I really didn’t want to die and got the heck out of there.”
“You ran?”
“I got on my bike and got out ‘round behind Trey’s truck.” He nodded, the volume and excitement in his voice gaining more ground as he spoke. “For a while Chris chased me. But my KTM is a 450…it’s pretty old but, you know, still a racing model, I do motocross, and he was on this gutless little piece of junk. He ate my mud.” He smirked a little with a teenage boy’s pride. “No way he could have caught me.”
Decided to bring him ‘round back to the real meat of his story. “You know what happened after that?”
“No, I ah, got home and my mom and grandma and everyone is there.” His body sagged a little. “They’d all be talking and figured I should move in with my aunt in Colorado. Start over, you know.”
“How’d you explain,” used my pen to kinda draw the air along the line of his body, “you being all muddy and messed up?”
Like it was the most obvious solution in the world, Austin said, “Told them I fell off the bike.”
My folks would have bought that. I think they probably got the same line outta me once or twice after I’d been almost caught scrapping. “When did you know the boys had gone missing?”
Austin seemed to think it over. “I heard about it later.” For a moment, he chewed on the inside of his cheek, maybe trying to sort the thoughts in his head. “I mean my mom told me and I told her I’d run into them that day—but, you know, not all of it, because I didn’t want her to know how down I was…it would be too many questions. But like I said, she said if you needed to talk to me, you all would.” He scrunched up his face into a look that said he thought his momma should have known better. “I asked her a couple of times if the cops had asked and she said ‘no.’”
“Did you think it strange that Lane and Chris wound up missing after all that?”
“Kinda.” He looked a little contrite. “I figured they were assholes and had always talked big about getting out. So I thought maybe they just did, you know. Especially after they had that blowout with Trey and Cooper. They didn’t have a lot to hold them to Escalante, might as well just the get the heck out of Dodge.” He shrugged again. “You know? Especially when you guys weren’t really asking any questions about it.”
Yeah, the department hadn’t treated it like much at all back when. Couldn’t blame Austin’s folks for feeding off our attitude…especially if he hadn’t come real clean with them. “If’n I show you something, think you can identify it?” I reached over across my desk to rifle in the stand up file rack. A copy of all the pertinent bits of Lane Walker’s file sat there. Tugged out the folder and then fished on sheet from inside. “It’s a copy.” The original sat in the evidence locker.
Austin leaned in. “Of what?”
“This.” I offered him the photocopy of the note we’d found.
Almost like he was afraid it’d bite him, Austin rocked back in his chair. “Where’d you find that?”
His attitude told me pretty much what I was hoping for. “Lane’s pocket.” I set the paper on the desk between us.
“Why would he have my note in his pocket?” Austin talked to me, but his eyes were glued on the note.
“Don’t know.” I tapped the sheet with my finger. “Do you think, and I don’t want to put nothing on your shoulders by this question, that knowing what you set out after, he might have chose that?” At this point, I didn’t think Lane had. The one thing that kept hinting at suicide, the note, well now I knew for certain it didn’t belong to him.
Austin looked up at my question. “Lane.” The way he said that one word told me he thought I was plumb nuts. “Kill himself?” He wrinkled up his nose and shook his head. “If he was that miserable, he hid it well. His life was kinda messed up. I just… no, not Lane. Can’t see that.”
I came back around to a part of his story. “So how’d you come to lose your rifle?” Tested bits of his story for consistency.
“I told you.” He glared. “Cooper had it and then I ran. I really wasn’t thinking about getting my .30-.30 at that point.”
My gut told me Austin weren’t lying. Didn’t mean he was telling me everything though. Just ‘cause Austin said he’d run didn’t mean he had. Although, Trey and Cooper leaving this whole bit out, that set me thinking that I needed, maybe, to talk with the two of them some more. Knowing there was a rifle up there, how it got there and that the boys had been amped up with fighting, that sent my suspicious nature into overdrive. Now I really wondered what happened to Chris, where he’d gotten off to. Wished I could track Alex down as well ‘cause he might have bits that Austin wasn’t privy to and the others weren’t talking about. For a boy that should have been as easy to find as a fire on a hill top, I couldn’t quite lay my hands on him.
“After you left, did you hear anything?” The note served its purpose. I put it back in the folder as I talked. “I mean, any of your friends send you emails, text you or anything?”
“What friends?” His laugh came out all strangled and not a bit amused. “Seriously. I mean there were a few kids that weren’t as mean as the others, but nobody’d step out of line and be friends with me. Ever since I was like twelve, it’s just gotten worse and worse.” He rolled his eyes. “So, no, to answer your question, nobody said squat.”
I flipped over a page and slid the pad towards Austin. “Alright.” I handed him my pen. “Leave me your information, how I can get hold of you.” As he wrote I pulled one of my cards out of my shirt pocket. When he finished, I handed it to him. “If you think of anything else, you just give me a call here…call collect if you need to.”
Austin looked relieved. “Yes sir.” He stared at the card in his hand a moment before tucking it in his back pocket. “I will.”
Got home from the station that afternoon and took a shower. Tried to puzzle through what it all might mean, now that Austin’s story was in the mix. It settled a few questions, but raised a crop of others. Why didn’t Trey and Cooper mention Austin being up there? I mean, I might have put it off some, Austin that is, on a boy seeking attention. ‘Cept, Austin hadn’t come in until a month after the fact and he had bits and pieces no one else were privy to. I couldn’t see though, the other boys protecting a kid like that…especially after the way Austin talked about how they’d been to him.
Stepped out of the shower and dried myself off, still messing with the thoughts in my head. To my mind, lots of folks might have tried to shuffle the blame onto the odd man out. ‘Course, Austin up and left town right about the same time as the boys went missing. Maybe they figured he was out of the picture and wouldn’t mess up their story none.
‘Bout that time someone banged on my door. Lord Almighty, there I was nekkid as sin. Wrapped the towel around my middle and leaned out the bathroom door. I had a straight view from the kitchen, over the breakfast counter and to the front door. “Who’s there?”
I heard a key in the lock. Since my folks were still in Russia on their retirement mission, it had to be Kabe. No one else had a key to my place. I didn’t have a clue why he came over, but I weren’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I tucked the towel in over itself and padded towards the front door. Kabe’d seen me with far less on.
“Kabe?” I mean I figured it had to be him, but I asked anyway.
Got a, “Yeah,” in response as he walked through the door. He still wore the resort parka with the logo stitched on one side and his name badge tucked in a little plastic pocket on the other.
Everything I kinda wanted to say vanished right out of my head with him standing there. Best I could manage was, “You’re here.”
“Finished work.” He unzipped the parka and shrugged it off. “Thought I’d come by.” Tossed the coat over my chair as he walked through the living room.
“Yeah.” I shook off the worst of my slack jawed state. “Hey, well, ah… I got a Christmas present for you.” That was nowhere near what we needed to talk over, but it was a start. “Let me get dressed, I’ll makes some sandwiches or something and you can open ‘em.”
By that time, Kabe’d come right up against me. “I had something else in mind.”
“What?” I mumbled that one word as he hooked his hand in my towel and yanked it off. “Oh, Lord, that.” Ran my hand up along his arm. “We could do that.” Part of that sentence got swallowed up in his kiss. Then that hot tongue started working down my chest. My body knew right where Kabe was headed and started to rise up to meet him.
He knelt down and wrapped his mouth around my dick. Nothing quite like feeling some guy sucking you to full-on hard. I braced myself up against the counter and rode the pull of his lips across my skin. His mouth darn near burned my skin with wet heat. I’d missed that mouth on me and it hadn’t been more than a few days.
