Hold (Gentry Boys, #5)(56)
John pocketed his phone and stood. “Yeah, I’ll do that. Soon, I promise.” He held out his hand again and for the first time his handshake was sincere. “Do better than I did, Cordero. Be there every damn day.”
“I plan to.”
He started to leave and then turned around again. “Again, I’m sorry about Maggie. Please know that there are still some folks in Emblem who remember her as more than a wrecked addict.”
It had always made me sad, to hear stories about what my mother had been like a lifetime ago. It didn’t make me sad anymore.
“Thanks, John.”
When I rejoined my brothers we kept the conversation light as we waited for our food to arrive. The brief sense of calm that I’d felt standing atop the butte with my brothers as we looked at the landscape of our hometown started to return. I would always wonder now and then if there was anything else I could have done for my mother to save her from herself and from Benton. But mostly I’d come to terms with the fact that there wasn’t any other way this could have ended.
“Should we start heading home?” I asked my brothers when the meals had all been polished off.
“Yeah,” Chase said, and then he grinned as he glanced at his buzzing phone. “My bride misses me.”
Probably about ten minutes earlier I’d heard the wails of nearby sirens but they didn’t alarm me. Then they began multiplying and the shrieking symphony started attracting more attention. Some of the other diners began craning their necks to see outside to Main Street, a few even wandering outdoors to find out what the fuss was all about.
A man I vaguely recognized walked inside and wiped his sweaty face with a red bandana before making his way over to the bar. A word caught my attention and I didn’t imagine it because both Creed and Chase were instantly alert, staring straight at the newcomer who had said ‘Gentry’. But he wasn’t looking our way. I knew that whatever had happened had nothing to do with us.
Someone asked the man a question and he shook his head. “Nah, not the kid who works down at Carson’s Garage. It was his brother, Stone Gentry.”
Chase was up and out of his chair in a heartbeat.
“Hey,” he called and the man spun around.
His scowl vanished when he got a really good look at us though. “I know you boys. Benton’s kids, right?” He winced. “Lord sure did take a colossal crap on the Gentrys today. First Maggie and now that hellraising teenager.”
Creed threw some money on the table and grabbed my elbow. “Come on. Let’s go see what the f*ck this is.”
Chase looked pretty shaken up already and the man who’d come barreling into the diner dropping names was low on details. I put a hand on Chase’s shoulder and guided him outside. Every red flashing light in the county was collected at the south end of Main Street. In the middle of it all was a pile of twisted metal and beside it a covered stretcher that didn’t conceal the shape of the human body it held. A pair of paramedics picked it up gingerly and started walking back to a waiting ambulance. We didn’t make it ten yards before we ran right into Gaps. He looked like he might vomit on the pavement.
“I was heading down to the diner,” he said and sounded as if he would rather be saying any other words than the ones he needed to say. “Heard you were there.”
“Where’s Stone?” asked Chase. “Is that him? Is he dead?”
Gaps swallowed and looked at the ground. “No, Stone isn’t dead.”
“But someone is?”
“Yes,” he nodded sorrowfully. “Someone is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
CREED
There was no word that described the news. ‘Horrible’ and ‘tragic’ was the kind of shit people mumbled when they didn’t really know how to label it and just wanted to get away.
At some point between the time we left him standing in front of his house in all his cocky, shirtless glory and half an hour ago, Stone Gentry had stolen a car, raced another jackass kid through the streets of Emblem, and finally crashed so hard his passenger, a teenage girl, was killed instantly. The other driver was a classmate who’d suffered a number of injuries and was carted away in an ambulance. Stone Gentry, however, managed to walk away from the wreckage without a scratch.
He might have been wishing he was dead though, or at least unconscious, as he was hauled away in handcuffs. Just before he was hustled into a squad car he glanced back at the mess he had made. I caught the sick look of grief on his face. There was no way we’d be getting him out of this one.
“Who was the girl?” I asked. “The teenage girl who was killed?”
Gaps grimaced as he looked back at the wreck. “Erin Rielo.” He sighed. “Good kid, good family. Sometimes I play pool with Mack, her dad. Erin was his oldest daughter and he’s going to be hurting like no man should ever have to hurt.”
Erin. The senseless death of a young girl was awful no matter what. But as I tossed the name around in my head I had the nagging sense that it should mean something particular to me.
The instant he heard the news Chase let out a weird noise and lowered his head for a minute, looking like he was going to be sick. Then he lifted his head, swallowed, and surveyed the scene grimly.
“Where’s Conway?” he asked hoarsely.