Page 5 of The Truth You Told (Raisa Susanto #2)

CHAPTER FOUR

Shay

August 2009

Four and a half years before the kidnapping

Shay should have seen the signs that the guy—Callum Kilkenny, according to that badge—was FBI. Or at least law enforcement. The cops cruised through her neighborhood enough times a week that she should have been able to pick one out from twenty yards away.

Her hands shook as she jammed her keys in the ignition of her car. The hotel room he’d taken her to had been a short jog from the bar’s parking lot, and she barely even remembered the trip, panic chasing her.

The rational part of her told her to calm the hell down. The G-man hadn’t been at the bar to question her—he’d been there to get a drink after a long day.

Probably he was in town for that girl they’d found at the Double X Ranch.

That made sense.

Hadn’t he made some disbelieving sound when one of the men had guessed she’d been killed in some satanic ritual?

Shay exhaled. Her brain was still a bit staticky from fear, but she was at least able to take in her surroundings now. Almost home. Almost, but not quite. She parked a street over from their sad little house, and kept to the deep shadows until she could see Beau’s car.

He was home, though that didn’t come as a surprise. Her half brother worked erratic shifts at the hospital, which left Max alone more than either Shay or Beau would like. But he was also the most reliable man she’d ever met when it came to getting back to their house after his shifts. He never stopped off at a bar to obliterate the memory of a hard day, even if Max would probably be fine if he’d wanted to do that a time or two.

That wasn’t how Beau was built, though. While Shay had to consciously choose to be responsible every day, it came naturally to him. Sometimes his goodness made her irrationally annoyed, as did the fact that he never judged her on the days that she was unable to consciously choose to be responsible. But mostly, she was just glad he was in her life, that they had been able to figure out this coparenting-a-sibling thing together.

Max seemed happy enough with them, even when they made mistakes. They were still probably better than her taking her chances in an overcrowded system that seemed designed to send kids into a terrible pipeline for violence and crime.

And it wasn’t like their mother, Hillary, was going to take her back in. She showed up about once every three months or so, asking for money and a place to stay while she passed through this part of Texas.

They’d learned long ago to hide anything valuable or hock-able when they heard her shot-to-shit muffler turning onto their street.

So, no, they weren’t perfect. But they were family.

You killed for family. You hid the body for family.

Sometimes ... sometimes you hid evidence for them.

A dog barked a few houses over, and Shay flinched, nerves frayed. It got her moving again, creeping around the corner of the house into the “backyard.” She crouched when she got to the flimsy wooden stairs that led down from the kitchen door.

One of the slats was loose, and she carefully worked it free to create a space large enough to slip her arm in. Shay closed her eyes and prayed that no creature had made the stairs into their little den and began feeling around on the ground.

A couple of times she yanked her hand back as imaginary whiskers brushed her fingers, but finally her knuckles tapped against metal.

She grabbed the handle and pulled the gun free, only half wishing she’d pulled out a snake instead.

The weapon looked so innocuous.

Shay couldn’t ever see it without seeing Max, too. There had been so much blood, but none on the handle, where her little knuckles had gone white with how hard she’d been gripping it.

I’m glad he’s dead.

Shay shook her head and shoved the thing in her waistband, scuttling through the dark back to her car, hoping the fact that it was just past 3:00 a.m. would give her cover.

She wasted some of her precious tip money from the busy night on gas—the bored teenager working the till nearly having to pull the bills out of her hand. It was a place close to their house, deliberately picked so that if anyone went asking later, she could just tell them most of the truth: she’d hooked up with a dude and then realized she needed fuel when she was almost home.

No one would ask later. She was being paranoid.

But that’s how the best criminals got away with things. They thought through everything that could go wrong, and when it did, they’d already taken steps to avert disaster. All it took was one gas receipt from a station near Galveston to have the police getting interested in her.

The drive passed in a blur, her thoughts pinging between This is ridiculous and This is the smartest thing you have ever done .

She didn’t land on either for long.

Callum Kilkenny wasn’t going to come after her. Logically, she knew that. He didn’t even know her last name. But he was smart, clearly. If he found the articles somehow, if he linked Shay back to Max ...

He was an FBI agent, not some local at an overworked sheriff’s department willing to believe an easy explanation when it was given on a silver platter.

Callum Kilkenny was harmless, maybe. But he had the potential to ruin their entire lives.

What it all came down to was that Shay should have done all this earlier. It had been almost a year now—it was time to get rid of the damn thing.

Maybe then Shay would be able to stop picturing Max’s cold eyes that night.

The creeping dawn light brushed over rusted hunks of metal up ahead, and Shay slowed as she neared the junkyard. A couple of years before, a boyfriend had taken her here to drop off some car parts, but Shay had no other ties to it. There was nothing that could be traced back to her.

Shay pulled to a stop at the back corner of the place, the little office just visible half a mile away. There wasn’t a security fence, likely because nothing in the yard that was actually valuable was easy to steal. She didn’t understand the business model, but she did know there were hundreds of cars here that would never be sold. Maybe they’d be stripped for parts if someone ever got around to it, but if she found the right one ...

She tucked her hair underneath a ball cap that had been sitting in the well of the passenger seat. It would hide the length and color just enough that any description of her would come out bland. Then she wiped the gun, getting all the nooks and crannies. She wasn’t about to go to jail because she missed a partial print.

It took her twenty minutes to find the right car—a battered old Ford with just enough of a glove compartment left to hold the weapon. The thing was parked in the farthest corner of the lot, mostly crushed beneath the weight of three other trucks, all in better condition. If the gun was ever discovered, it would likely be in years and not months. And it was more than probable that whoever found it wouldn’t be the type of person to hand it over to the police.

Careful not to leave any prints, she managed to get the weapon hidden and get herself back to her car without unspooling into a panic attack.

The whole way home, her eyes kept flicking to the rearview mirror, sure there would be red and blue lights there. But she pulled into her neighborhood, unimpeded.

The whole thing had been rather uneventful, and she was beginning to feel incredibly stupid about it all.

Beau was in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, coffee cup cradled in both hands, staring at nothing. He startled slightly when the door banged open.

“Sorry,” Shay said, listening for Max. She was in the shower, still rapping. It was as if the past twelve hours hadn’t happened.

“Morning,” Beau said, his voice a sleepy rumble. Then he wrinkled his nose. “You stink like sex.”

Shay thought it more likely she smelled like gasoline and rust and that Beau was just giving her a hard time since she’d obviously spent the night out.

“ You do,” Shay said, mostly to be a brat. But he flinched like she’d struck a nerve. Shay paused where she’d been reaching for her own battered mug, and whirled on him. “Beauregard Samuels. Are you dating someone?”

Everything about Beau had relaxed in the minute since she’d accused him, and he was back to looking loose and tired, slightly amused and slightly irritated. Pretty much his de facto mood.

“Are you ?” he shot back, the implication clear. She wasn’t exactly in a position to judge anyone for a one-night stand. Still, she was curious who it had been with for Beau. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d hooked up with anyone, let alone dated. He didn’t even try to pick anyone up when he came into the bar on his nights off.

“Touché,” she murmured. “I heard Mrs. Jackson has a nice—”

“Nope,” he cut her off. “I don’t care what relative that old bat wants to fob off on me. I’m not looking. And now, it’s time to move on from Beau’s Personal Life and to the electric bill.”

“You’re no fun,” Shay said as she reached into her pocket, where she’d stashed her tips. Beau’s paycheck, while not insubstantial, went to his father’s medical bills. Shay wasn’t exactly unsympathetic—and Beau certainly paid his equal share around the house despite the fact that his bedroom was a glorified pantry—but sometimes she wished they had the cushion of his full check.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll send it in.”

“Let there be light,” Shay murmured, and then headed for the shower when she heard Max’s door close behind her. “I’ll get to the groceries today.”

After so many years living together, and now sort of raising a kid together, they’d worked out a fairly equitable system that left little room for resentment to fester. What Shay selfishly worried about the most was Beau wanting real dressers and his own bathroom and personal space away from his two sisters.

Except Shay wouldn’t be able to afford the expenses by herself. That wasn’t a problem she had to worry about today, and she had made a habit of only worrying about ones she would have to deal with in the immediate future.

As she stood under the lukewarm spray, she let herself wonder if life was ever going to get easier. Max still had six years before she could legally be in charge of herself. That might as well be decades for how daunting it seemed right now.

Shay loved Max, had since Hillary brought her home, smelling of baby powder and innocence. Max hadn’t cried, she’d simply stared with those baby-big eyes and wrapped her tiny little hand around Shay’s finger. But Shay wished for all their sakes that Hillary had been even a slightly responsible parent. That she’d stuck around, that she’d contributed to taking care of her own daughter.

Hell, if she simply didn’t steal all the petty cash they had when she did swing by, that would be an improvement.

All of them had been forced to grow up too quickly, because Hillary wasn’t just a crap mother. She also knew how to pick the biggest losers out there to father her children. The only halfway decent guy was Beau’s dad, and even he was only tolerable because he had wrung out the hundred-proof liquor from his barely functioning liver.

Back in the day, Beau would come home after a weekend with Billy covered in bruises. Shay suspected there’d been a couple of broken ribs that had never healed right, because Beau sometimes got more winded than he should.

Shay’s own dad was a blank spot on a birth certificate. A musician passing through, Hillary had told her the first time she’d asked, which made Shay think it was the closest thing to the truth. It changed after that—a truck driver, a dictionary salesman, a fugitive on the run from the law.

Maybe it was depressing, but Shay felt pretty lucky. At least no one had put cigarettes out on her arm.

That was the bar Hillary’s children were working with. And the less said about Max’s father, the better.

She pushed those thoughts away, her mind sliding back into that warm hotel bed with the FBI agent, his long, competent fingers, his half smile. The way he always looked a little surprised when he laughed. Like it was a rare occurrence.

Shay probably wouldn’t laugh much, either, if her job was staring at brutalized dead girls all day.

How long would he be in town if he was working a murder case? Days? Weeks?

Would he come to the bar again?

For a moment, she was back in the junkyard, dogs barking in the distance, the gun cold in her hand.

Her stupid heart hoped he would return.

Her head knew better.

There would be no repeat of last night, even if he sat on that dang stool for every minute of every shift she worked until he left town.

Shay might curse her life sometimes, but there was little she wouldn’t do to protect it.

Even say no to Callum Kilkenny.