Last Breath: A Novella

Last Breath: A Novella Karin Slaughter The fantastic prequel to THE GOOD DAUGHTER, the stunning new standalone from the No. 1 bestselling author of the Will Trent and Grant County series.Protecting someone always comes at a cost.At the age of thirteen, Charlie Quinn’s childhood came to an abrupt and devastating end. Two men, with a grudge against her lawyer father, broke into her home – and after that shocking night, Charlie's world was never the same.Now a lawyer herself, Charlie has made it her mission to defend those with no one else to turn to. So when Flora Faulkner, a motherless teen, begs for help, Charlie is reminded of her own past, and is powerless to say no.But honour-student Flora is in far deeper trouble than Charlie could ever have anticipated. Soon she must ask herself: how far should she go to protect her client? And can she truly believe everything she is being told? LAST BREATH KARIN SLAUGHTER Copyright (#uc151f881-bb99-5208-8240-e9e9daae91c5) HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017 Copyright © Karin Slaughter 2017 Cover © Collaboration JS/Arcangel Images (http://www.arcangel.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=Homepage) Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017 Karin Slaughter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780008252939 Version: 2018-06-20 Contents Cover (#u3c71517e-b1fd-5a18-b351-d88d53997269) Title Page (#uc06a48c8-db8c-5d84-9a6f-11e2306f9afe) Copyright (#ud230b92d-c853-58ec-8135-96f71267e880) Chapter 1 (#ufde6c530-6a9b-5023-ba26-a9c0d310222b) Chapter 2 (#ud2147006-8a80-5172-ad7c-1ce63622c7d1) Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo) Can’t wait for the next book from internationally-bestselling author Karin Slaughter? (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Karin Slaughter (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) June 8, 2004 (#uc151f881-bb99-5208-8240-e9e9daae91c5) 1 (#uc151f881-bb99-5208-8240-e9e9daae91c5) “Come on now, Miss Charlie.” Dexter Black’s voice was scratchy over the jailhouse payphone. He was fifteen years her senior, but the “miss” was meant to convey respect for their respective positions. “I told you I’m’a take care of your bill soon as you get me outta this mess.” Charlie Quinn rolled her eyes up so far in her head that she felt dizzy. She was standing outside a packed room of Girl Scouts at the YWCA. She should not have taken the call, but there were few worse things than being surrounded by a gaggle of teenage girls. “Dexter, you said the exact same thing the last time I got you out of trouble, and the minute you walked out of rehab, you spent all of your money on lottery tickets.” “I could’a won, and then I would’a paid you out half. Not just what I owe you, Miss Charlie. Half.” “That’s very generous, but half of nothing is nothing.” She waited for him to come up with another excuse, but all she heard was the distinct murmur of the North Georgia Men’s Detention Center. Bars being rattled. Expletives being shouted. Grown men crying. Guards telling them all to shut the hell up. She said, “I’m not wasting my anytime cell-phone minutes on your silence.” “I got something,” Dexter said. “Something gonna get me paid.” “I hope it’s not anything you wouldn’t want the police to find out about on a recorded phone conversation from jail.” Charlie wiped sweat from her forehead. The hallway was like an oven. “Dexter, you owe me almost two thousand dollars. I can’t be your lawyer for free. I’ve got a mortgage and school loans and I’d like to be able to eat at a nice restaurant occasionally without worrying my credit card will be declined.” “Miss Charlie,” Dexter repeated. “I see what you were doing there, reminding me about the phone being recorded, but what I’m saying is that I got something might be worth some money to the police.” “You should get a good lawyer to represent you in the negotiations, because it’s not going to be me.” “Wait, wait, don’t hang up,” Dexter pleaded. “I’m just remembering what you told me all them years ago when we first started. You remember that?” Charlie’s eye roll was not as pronounced this time. Dexter had been her first client when she’d set up shop straight out of law school. He said, “You told me that you passed up them big jobs in the city ’cause you wanted to help people.” He paused for effect. “Don’t you still wanna help people, Miss Charlie?” She mumbled a few curses that the phone monitors at the jail would appreciate. “Carter Grail,” she said, offering him the name of another lawyer. “That old drunk?” Dexter sounded picky for a man wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. “Miss Charlie, please can you—” “Don’t sign anything that you don’t understand.” Charlie flipped her phone closed and dropped it into her purse. A group of women in bike shorts walked past. The YWCA mid-morning crowd consisted of retirees and young mothers. She could hear a distant thump-thump-thump of heavy bass from an exercise class. The air smelled of chlorine from the indoor pool. Thunks from the tennis courts penetrated the double-paned windows. Charlie leaned back against the wall. She replayed Dexter’s call in her head. He was in jail again. For meth again. He was probably thinking he could snitch on a fellow meth head, or a dealer, and make the charges go away. If he didn’t have a lawyer looking over the deal from the district attorney’s office, he would be better off holding his nuts and buying more lottery tickets. She felt bad about his situation, but not as bad as she felt about the prospect of being late on her car payment. The door to the rec room opened. Belinda Foster looked panicked. She was twenty-eight, the same age as Charlie, but with a toddler at home, a baby on the way and a husband she talked about as if he was another burdensome child. Taking over Girl Scout career day had not been Belinda’s stupidest mistake this summer, but it was in the top three. “Charlie!” Belinda tugged at the trefoil scarf around her neck. “If you don’t get back in here, I’m gonna throw myself off the roof.” “You’d only break your neck.” Belinda pulled open the door and waited. Charlie nudged around her friend’s very pregnant belly. Nothing had changed in the rec room since her ringing cell phone had given her respite from the crowd. All of the oxygen was being sucked up by twenty fresh-faced, giggling Girl Scouts ranging from the ages of fifteen to eighteen. Charlie tried not to shudder at the sight of them. She had a tiny smidge over a decade on most of the girls, but there was something familiar about each and every one of them. The math nerds. The future English majors. The cheerleaders. The Plastics. The goths. The dorks. The freaks. The geeks. They all flashed the same smiles at each other, the kind that edged up at the corners of their mouths because, at any time, one of them could pull a proverbial knife: a haircut might look stupid, the wrong color nail polish could be on fingernails, the wrong shoes, the wrong tights, the wrong word and suddenly you were on the outside looking in. Charlie could still recall what it felt like to be stuck in the purgatory of the outside. There was nothing more torturous, more lonely, than being iced out by a gaggle of teenage girls. “Cake?” Belinda offered her a paper-thin slice of sheet cake. “Hm,” was all Charlie could say. Her stomach felt queasy. She couldn’t stop her gaze from traveling around the sparsely furnished rec room. The girls were all young, thin and beautiful in a way that Charlie did not appreciate when she was among them. Short miniskirts. Tight T-shirts and blouses opened one button too many. They seemed so frighteningly confident. They flicked back their long, fake blonde hair as they laughed. They narrowed expertly made-up eyes as they listened to stories. Sashes were askew. Vests were unbuttoned. Some of these girls were in serious violation of the Girl Scout dress code. Charlie said, “I can’t remember what we talked about when we were that age.” “That the Culpepper girls were a bunch of bitches.” Charlie winced at the name of her torturers. She took the plate from Belinda, but only to keep her hands occupied. “Why aren’t any of them asking me questions?” “We never asked questions,” Belinda said, and Charlie felt instant regret that she had spurned all the career women who had spoken at her Girl Scout meetings. The speakers had all seemed so old. Charlie was not old. She still had her badge-filled sash in a closet somewhere at home. She was a kick-ass lawyer. She was married to an adorable guy. She was in the best shape of her life. These girls should think she was awesome. They should be inundating her with questions about how she got to be so cool instead of snickering in their little cliques, likely discussing how much pig’s blood to put in a bucket over Charlie’s head. “I can’t believe their make-up,” Belinda said. “My mother almost scrubbed the eyes off my face when I tried to sneak out with mascara on.” Charlie’s mother had been killed when she was thirteen, but she could recall many a lecture from Lenore, her father’s secretary, about the dangerous message sent by too-tight Jordache jeans. Not that Lenore had been able to stop her. Belinda said, “I’m not going to raise Layla like that.” She meant her three-year-old daughter, who had somehow turned out to be a thoughtful, angelic child despite her mother’s lifelong love of beer pong, tequila shooters, and unemployed guys who rode motorcycles. “These girls, they’re sweet, but they have no sense of shame. They think everything they do is okay. And don’t even get me started on the sex. The things they say in meetings.” She snorted, leaving out the best part. “We were never like that.” Charlie had seen quite the opposite, especially when a Harley was involved. “I guess the point of feminism is that they have choices, not that they do exactly what we think they should do.” “Well, maybe, but we’re still right and they’re still wrong.” “Now you sound like a mother.” Charlie used her fork to cut off a section of chocolate frosting from the cake. It landed like paste on her tongue. She handed the plate back to Belinda. “I was terrified of disappointing my mom.” Belinda finished the cake. “I was terrified of your mom, period.” Charlie smiled, then she put her hand to her stomach as the frosting roiled around like driftwood in a tsunami. “You okay?” Belinda asked. Charlie held up her hand. The sickness came over her so suddenly that she couldn’t even ask where the bathroom was. Belinda knew the look. “It’s down the hall on the—” Charlie bolted out of the room. She kept her hand tight to her mouth as she tried doors. A closet. Another closet. A fresh-faced Girl Scout was coming out of the last door she tried. “Oh,” the teenager said, flinging up her hands, backing away. Charlie ran into the closest stall and sloughed the contents of her stomach into the toilet. The force was so much that tears squeezed out of her eyes. She gripped the side of the bowl with both hands. She made grunting noises that she would be ashamed for any human being to hear. But someone did hear. “Ma’am?” the teenager asked, which somehow made everything worse, because Charlie was not old enough to be called ma’am. “Ma’am, are you okay?” “Yes, thank you.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, thank you. You can go away.” Charlie bit her lip so that she wouldn’t curse the helpful little creature like a dog. She searched for her purse. It was outside the stall. Her wallet had fallen out, her keys, a pack of gum, loose change. The strap dragged across the greasy-looking tile floor like a tail. She started to reach out for it, but gave up when her stomach clenched. All she could do was sit on the filthy bathroom floor, gather her hair up off her neck, and pray that her troubles would be confined to one end of her body. “Ma’am?” the girl repeated. Charlie desperately wanted to tell her to get the hell out, but couldn’t risk opening her mouth. She waited, eyes closed, listening to the silence, begging her ears to pick out the sound of the door closing as the girl left. Instead, the faucet was turned on. Water ran into the sink. Paper towels were pulled from the dispenser. Charlie opened her eyes. She flushed the toilet. Why on earth was she so ill? It couldn’t be the cake. Charlie was lactose intolerant, but Belinda would never make anything from scratch. Canned frosting was 99 percent chemicals, usually not enough to send her over the edge. Was it the happy chicken from General Ho’s she’d had for supper last night? The egg roll she’d sneaked out of the fridge before going to bed? The luncheon meat she’d scarfed down before her morning run? The breakfast burrito fiesta she’d gotten at Taco Bell on the way to the Y? Jesus, she ate like a sixteen-year-old boy. The faucet turned off. Charlie should have at least opened the stall door, but a quick survey of the damage changed her mind. Her navy skirt was hiked up. Pantyhose ripped. There were splatters on her white silk blouse that would likely never come out. Worst of all, she had scuffed the toe of her new shoe, a navy high-heel Lenore had helped her pick out for court. “Ma’am?” the teen said. She was holding a wet paper towel under the stall door. “Thank you,” Charlie managed. She pressed the cool towel to the back of her neck and closed her eyes again. Was this a stomach bug? “Ma’am, I can get you something to drink,” the girl offered. Charlie almost threw up again at the thought of Belinda’s cough-mediciney punch. If the girl was not going to leave, she might as well be put to use. “There’s some change in my wallet. Do you mind getting a ginger ale from the machine?” The girl knelt down on the floor. Charlie saw the familiar khaki-colored sash with badges sewn all over it. Customer Loyalty. Business Planning. Marketing. Financial Literacy. Top Seller. Apparently, she knew how to move some cookies. Charlie said, “The bills are in the side.” The girl opened her wallet. Charlie’s driver’s license was in the clear plastic part. “I thought your last name was Quinn?” “It is. At work. That’s my married name.” “How long have you been married?” “Four and a half years.” “My gran says it takes five years before you hate them.” Charlie could not imagine ever hating her husband. She also couldn’t imagine keeping up her end of this under-stall conversation. The urge to puke again was tickling at the back of her throat. “Your dad is Rusty Quinn,” the girl said, which meant that she had been in town for more than ten minutes. Charlie’s father had a reputation in Pikeville because of the clients he defended—convenience store robbers, drug dealers, murderers and assorted felons. How people in town viewed Rusty generally depended on whether or not they or a family member ever needed his services. The girl said, “I heard he helps people.” “He does.” Charlie did not like how the words echoed back to Dexter’s reminder that she had turned down hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the city so that she could work for people who really needed her. If there was one guiding ethos in Charlie’s life, it was that she was not going to be like her father. “I bet he’s expensive.” The girl asked, “Are you expensive? I mean, when you help people?” Charlie put her hand to her mouth again. How could she ask this teenager to please get her some ginger ale without screaming at her? “I enjoyed your speech,” the girl said. “My mom was killed in a car accident when I was little.” Charlie waited for context, but there was none. The girl slid a dollar bill out of Charlie’s wallet and finally, thankfully, left. There was nothing to do in the ensuing silence but see if she could stand. Charlie had fortuitously ended up in the handicapped stall. She gripped the metal rails and shakily pulled herself up to standing. She spat into the toilet a few times before flushing it again. When she opened the stall door, the mirror greeted her with a pale, sickly-looking woman in a $120 puke-spotted silk blouse. Her dark hair looked wild. Her lips had a bluish tint. Charlie lifted her hair, holding it in a ponytail. She turned on the sink and slurped water into her mouth. She caught her reflection again as she leaned down to spit. Her mother’s eyes looked back at her. Her mother’s arched eyebrow. What’s going on in that mind of yours, Charlie? Charlie had heard this question at least three or four times a week back when her mother was alive. She would be sitting in the kitchen doing her homework, or on the floor of her room trying to do some kind of craft project, and her mother would sit opposite her and ask the same question that she always asked. What is going on in your mind? It was not contrived to be a conversation starter. Her mother was a scientist and a scholar. She had never been one for idle chitchat. She was genuinely curious about what thoughts filled her thirteen-year-old daughter’s head. Until Charlie had met her husband, no one else had ever expressed such genuine interest. The door opened. The girl was back with a ginger ale. She was pretty, though not conventionally so. She did not seem to fit in with her perfectly coifed peers. Her dark hair was long and straight, pinned back with a silver clip on one side. She was young-looking, probably fifteen, but her face was absent make-up. Her crisp green Girl Scout T-shirt was tucked into her faded jeans, which Charlie felt was unfair because in her day they had been forced to wear scratchy white button-up shirts and khaki skirts with knee socks. Charlie did not know which felt worse, that she had thrown up or that she had just employed the phrase, “in her day.” “I’ll put the change in your wallet,” the girl offered. “Thank you.” Charlie drank some of the ginger ale while the girl neatly repacked the contents of her purse. The girl said, “Those stains on your blouse will come out with a mixture of a tablespoon of ammonia, a quart of warm water and a half a teaspoon of detergent. You soak it in a bowl.” “Thank you again.” Charlie wasn’t sure she wanted to soak anything she owned in ammonia, but judging by the badges on the sash, the girl knew what she was talking about. “How long have you been in Girl Scouts?” “I got my start as a Brownie. My mom signed me up. I thought it was lame, but you learn lots of things, like business skills.” “My mom signed me up, too.” Charlie had never thought it was lame. She had loved all the projects and the camping trips and especially eating the cookies she had made her parents buy. “What’s your name?” “Flora Faulkner,” she said. “My mom named me Florabama, because I was born on the state line, but I go by Flora.” Charlie smiled, but only because she knew that she was going to laugh about this later with her husband. “There are worse things that you could be called.” Flora looked down at her hands. “A lot of the girls are pretty good at thinking of mean things.” Clearly, this was some kind of opening, but Charlie was at a loss for words. She combed back through her knowledge of after-school specials. All she could remember was that movie of the week where Ted Danson is married to Glenn Close and she finds out that he’s molesting their teenage daughter but she’s been cold in bed so it’s probably her fault so they all go to therapy and learn to live with it. “Miss Quinn?” Flora put Charlie’s purse on the counter. “Do you want me to get you some crackers?” “No, I’m fine.” Remarkably, Charlie was fine. Whatever had made her stomach upset had passed. “Why don’t you give me a minute to clean myself up, then I’ll join you back in the rec room?” “Okay,” Flora said, but she didn’t leave. “Is there anything else?” “I was wondering—” She glanced at the mirror over the sink, then back down at the floor. There was something delicate about the girl that Charlie had not noticed before. When Flora looked up again, she was crying. “Can you help me? I mean, as a lawyer?” Charlie was surprised by the request. The girl looked nothing like her usual juvenile offenders who’d been caught selling weed behind the school. Her mind flashed up all the nice, white-girl problems: pregnant, STD, kleptomaniac, bad score on the SATs. Rather than guess, Charlie asked, “What’s going on?” “I don’t have a lot of money, at least not yet, but—” “Don’t worry about that part. Just tell me what you need.” “I want to be emancipated.” Charlie felt her mouth form into a circle of surprise. “I’m fifteen, but I’ll be sixteen next month, and I looked it up at the library. I know that’s the legal age in Georgia to be emancipated.” “If you looked it up, then you know the criteria.” “I have to be married or in active service in the military or I have to petition the court to emancipate me.” She really had done her homework. “You live with your father?” “My grandparents. My father’s dead. He overdosed in prison.” Charlie nodded, because she knew that this happened more often than anyone wanted to admit. “Is there anyone else in your family who could take you in?” “No, it’s just the three of us left. I love Paw and Meemaw, but they’re…” Flora shrugged, but the shrug was the important part. Charlie asked, “Are they hurting you?” “No, ma’am, never. They’re…” Again, she shrugged. “I don’t think they like me very much.” “A lot of kids your age feel that way.” “They’re not strong people,” she said. “Strong in character.” Charlie leaned back against the counter. She had left child molester off her list of possible teenage-girl problems. “Flora, emancipation is a very serious request. If you want me to help you, you’re going to have to give me details.” “Have you ever helped a kid with this before?” Charlie shook her head. “No, so if you don’t feel comfortable—” “It’s okay,” Flora said. “I was just curious. I don’t think it happens a lot.” “That’s for a reason,” Charlie said. “Generally, the court is very hesitant to remove a child from a home. You have to provide justification, and if you really looked into the law, there are two other important criteria: you have to prove that you can support yourself without your parents, and you have to do this without receiving any aid from the state.” “I work shifts at the diner. And my friend Nancy’s parents said I could live with them until I’m out of school, and then when I go to college, I can live at the dorms.” The more Flora spoke, the more determined she sounded. Charlie asked, “Have you ever been in trouble?” “No, ma’am. Not ever. I’ve got a 4.0 GPA. I’m already taking AP classes. I’m on the Principal’s Scholars list and I volunteer in the reading lab.” Her face turned red from the bragging. She put her hands to her cheeks. “I’m sorry, but you asked.” “Don’t be sorry. That’s a lot to be proud of,” Charlie told her. “Listen, if your friend’s parents are willing to take you in, it might be that you can work out an arrangement without the courts getting involved.” “I’ve got money,” Flora said. “I can pay you.” Charlie wasn’t going to take money from a troubled fifteen-year-old. “It’s not about money. It’s about what’s easier for you. And for your grandparents. If this goes to court—” “I don’t mean that kind of money,” Flora said. “After my mama was killed in the car accident, the trucking company had to set up a trust to take care of me.” Charlie waited, but the girl didn’t volunteer details. “What kind of trust?” “It pays out for things like where I live and medical stuff, but most of it’s being held until I’m ready to go to college, only I’m scared it’s not going to be there when I’m ready to go.” “Why is that?” “Because Paw and Meemaw are spending it.” “If the trust says they can only use the money for—” “They bought a house, but then they sold it for the cash and rented an apartment, then they took me to the doctor and he said I was sick, but I wasn’t, and then they got a new car.” Charlie crossed her arms. “That’s stealing from you and defrauding the trust. Those are both very serious crimes.” “I know. I looked that up, too.” Flora stared down at her hands again. “I don’t want to get Meemaw and Paw into trouble. I can’t send them to jail. Not like that. I just want to be able to…” She sniffed. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I just want to go to college. I want to be able to have choices. That’s what my mama would’ve wanted. She never wanted me to get stuck where I didn’t want to be.” Charlie let out a steady stream of breath. Her own mother had been the same way, always pushing Charlie to study harder, to do more, to use the gifts of her intelligence and drive to be useful in the world. “She was good to me,” Flora said. “My mama. She was kind, and she looked after me, and she was always in my corner, no matter what.” Flora wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. I still miss her is all. I feel like I need to honor her memory, to make sure some good comes out of what happened to her.” It was Charlie’s turn to look down at her hands. She felt a lump in her throat. She had thought more about her mother in the last five minutes than she had in the last month. The longing for her, the desire for one more chance to tell her mother what was on her mind, was an ache that would never go away. Charlie had to clear her throat before she could ask Flora, “How long have you been thinking about emancipation?” “Since after Paw’s surgery,” the girl said. “He hurt his leg three years ago falling off a ladder. He couldn’t go back to work.” “He’s addicted to pain medication?” Charlie guessed, because the Pikeville jail was filled with such men. “Be honest with me. Is it pills?” The girl nodded with visible reluctance. “Don’t tell anybody, please. I don’t want him to go to prison.” “That won’t happen because of me,” Charlie promised. “But you need to understand that putting this in motion is a public thing. You won’t be a protected minor anymore. Court records are out there for everybody to see. And that’s not even the hard part. In order to prepare a petition supporting your request for emancipation, I’ll have to talk to your grandparents, your teachers, your employer, your friend’s parents. Everybody will know what you’re doing.” “I’m not trying to do it on the sly. You can talk to anybody you want to, today even, right now. I don’t want anybody to get into trouble, like go-to-jail trouble. I just want to get out so I can go to a good college and do something with my life.” Her earnestness was heartbreaking. “Your grandparents might put up a fight. You’ll have to be blunt about why you want to leave. You don’t have to mention the pills, but you’ll have to tell a judge that you feel they’re not good guardians for you, that you would rather be on your own than have to live with them.” Charlie tried to paint a picture for her. “You’ll all be in court at the same time. You’ll have to tell a judge, in the open, in front of anybody who wants to hear, that you are unable to reconcile with them and you don’t want them in your life in any capacity.” Flora seemed to equivocate. “What if they don’t fight it? What if they agree with it?” “That would certainly make things easier, but—” “Paw has other problems.” Charlie’s mind went straight back to the abuse issue. “Is he hurting you?” Flora did not answer, but she didn’t look away, either. “Flora, if he’s hurting you—” The door opened. They both startled at the furious look on Belinda’s face. “What are you two rascals doing hiding out in here?” She had tried to make her voice sound light, but there was no hiding her distress. “I’ve got a whole room full of girls back there with nothing to do but drink punch and talk about how dry my cake is.” Flora looked at Charlie. “It’s not what you’re thinking.” There was a note of desperation in her voice. “I mean it. It’s not that. Talk to whoever you need to. Please. I’ll make a list for you. Okay?” Before Charlie could answer, Flora left the bathroom. “What was that about?” Belinda asked. Charlie opened her mouth to explain, but she got stuck on Flora’s desperate tone, her insistence that what Charlie was thinking was not what was actually happening. But what if it was? If the girl was being abused by her grandfather, that changed everything. “Charlie?” Belinda asked. “What’s up? Why are you hiding out in here?” “I’m not hiding, I was—” “Did you throw up?” Charlie could only concentrate on one thing at a time. “Did you make that frosting from scratch?” “Don’t be stupid.” Belinda squinted her eyes, as if Charlie was an abstract painting. “Your boobs look bigger.” “I thought your sorority taught you how to deal with those feelings.” “Shut up,” Belinda said. “Are you pregnant?” “Very funny.” The only religious thing in Charlie’s life was the schedule by which she took her birth control pills. “I’ve been spotting for two days. I’m cramping. I want to eat candy and kill everything. I think it’s just a bug.” “It better be a bug.” Belinda rubbed her round belly. “Enjoy your freedom before everything changes.” “That sounds ominous.” “You’ll see. Once you start having babies, that perfect, loving husband of yours will start treating you like a milk cow. Trust me. It’s like they think they have something over you. And they do. You’re trapped, and they know that you need them, but they can walk away at any time and find somebody younger and tighter to have fun with.” Charlie wasn’t going to have this conversation again. The only thing that seemed to change about her friends with children is that they started treating their husbands like jerks. “Tell me about Flora.” “Who?” Belinda seemed to have forgotten the girl as soon as she left the room. “Oh, her. You know that movie we saw last month, Mean Girls? She’d be the Lindsay Lohan character.” “So, part of the group but not a leader, and not particularly comfortable with the meanness?” “More like a survivor. Those bitches are next-level cruel.” Belinda sniffed toward the handicap stall. “Did you eat bacon for breakfast?” Charlie searched her purse for some mints. She found gum instead, but the thought of the peppermint flavor made her feel queasy again. “Do you have some candy?” “I think I have some Jolly Ranchers.” Belinda unzipped her purse. “Ugh, I should clean this out. Cheerios. How did those get in there? There’s some mints. Oreos, but you can’t—” Charlie snatched the bag out of her hands. “I thought you couldn’t do milk?” “Do you really think this white crap has milk in it?” Charlie bit into an Oreo. She felt an instant soothing in her brain. “What about her parents?” “Whose parents?” “B, keep up with me. I’m asking about Flora Faulkner.” “Oh, well, her mother died. Dad, too. His parents are raising her. She’s a cookie-selling machine. I think she went to the ceremony in Atlanta last—” “What are her grandparents like?” “I’ve only been doing this for a minute, Charlie. I don’t know much of anything about any of those girls except they seem to think it’s easy to bake a sheet cake and throw a party for twenty snotty teenagers who don’t appreciate anything you’ve done for them and think you’re old and fat and stupid.” She had tears in her eyes, but she had tears in her eyes a lot lately. “It’s exactly like being home with Ryan. I thought it would be different having something to do, but they think I’m a failure, just like he does.” Charlie couldn’t take another crying jag about Belinda’s husband right now. “Do you think that Flora’s grandparents are doing a good job?” “You mean, raising her?” Belinda looked in the mirror, using her pinky finger to carefully wipe under her eyes. “I dunno. She’s a good kid. She does well in school. She’s an awesome Girl Scout. I think she’s really smart. And sweet. And really thoughtful, like she helped me get the cake out of the car when I got here, while the rest of those lazy bitches stood around with their thumbs up their asses.” “Okay, that’s Flora. What about her grandparents as human beings?” “I don’t like to say bad things about people.” Charlie laughed. So did Belinda. If she didn’t say bad things about people, half her day would be spent in silence. Belinda said, “I met the grandmother last month. She smelled like a whiskey barrel at eight o’clock in the morning. Driving a sapphire blue Porsche, though. A freaking Porsche. And they had that house on the lake, but now they’re living in those cinder-block apartments down from Shady Ray’s.” Charlie wondered where the Porsche had ended up. “What about the grandfather?” “I dunno. Some of the girls were teasing her about him because he’s good looking or something, but he’s got to be, like, two thousand years old, so maybe they were just being bitches. You get teased about your dad all the time, right?” Charlie hadn’t been teased, she had been threatened, and her mother had been murdered, because her father made a living out of keeping bad men out of prison. “Anything else about the grandfather?” “That’s all I’ve got.” Belinda was checking her make-up in the mirror again. Charlie didn’t want to think in platitudes, like that her friend was glowing, but Belinda was a different person when she was pregnant. Her skin cleared up. There was always color in her cheeks. For all of her prickliness, she had stopped obsessing about the small things. Like she didn’t seem to care that her watermelon-sized stomach was pressed against the counter, wicking water into her dress. Or that her navel poked out like the stem on an apple. Charlie would look like that one day. She would grow her husband’s child in her belly. She would be a mother—hopefully a mother like her own mother, who was interested in her kids, who pushed them to be intelligent, useful women. One day. Eventually. They had talked about this before, Charlie and her husband. They would have a baby as soon as they had a handle on their student loans. As soon as her practice was steady. As soon as their cars were paid off. As soon as her nerdy husband was ready to give up the spare bedroom where he kept his mildly expensive Star Trek collection. Charlie tried to do a running tally of how much the Emancipation of Florabama Faulkner would cost. Filing fees. Motions. Court appearances. Not to mention hours of Charlie’s time. She could not in good conscience take funds from Flora’s trust, no matter how much money was left in it. If Dexter Black paid his bill, that might almost cover the expenses. She heard her father’s voice in her head— And if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their tails hopping. Belinda said, “Why are you asking all these questions?” “Because I think Flora needs my help.” “Wait, is this like that John Grisham movie where the kid gives Susan Sarandon a dollar to be his lawyer?” “No,” Charlie said. “This is like that movie where the stupid lawyer goes bankrupt because she never gets paid.” 2 (#uc151f881-bb99-5208-8240-e9e9daae91c5) Charlie kicked the vending machine in the basement of the courthouse. The glass rattled in the frame. She kicked it again. The bright yellow pack of Starburst shook on the metal spiral, but did not drop down. Her shoe was already scuffed from puking in the bathroom. She raised her foot for another kick. “That’s government property.” She turned around. Ben Bernard, one of the lawyers from the district attorney’s office, trundled down the stairs. The collar of his dress shirt was frayed. His tie was askew. He studied the stuck Starbursts. A large sticker on the glass warned that shaking the machine could result in fines and possible imprisonment. He asked, “How badly do you want this?” “Bad enough to go down on you in the supply closet if you get it for me.” Ben grabbed the machine with both arms and gave it a violent shake. Her husband was no Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he was clearly motivated. It only took two attempts. The Starburst dropped into the hopper. He reached down and pulled out the yellow pack with a flourish. Charlie was game, but she warned, “I should probably confess that I had my head in a toilet twenty minutes ago.” “They put a lock on the door after the last time, anyway.” He pressed his hand to her forehead. “You feeling okay?” “I think it’s PMS.” She bit open the pack of candy. “Listen, I need to run a name past you.” Ben’s mouth moved as he chewed at the tip of his tongue. They had been doing their respective jobs for four years, but he was a prosecutor and she was a defense attorney; they still hadn’t quite worked out how to help each other while still maintaining their professional sides. “It’s not a criminal case,” she assured him. “At least, not my part in it. I’ve got a girl who wants to be emancipated from her guardians.” He sucked air between his teeth. “Yeah, it’s not a great situation.” Charlie tried to peel the wrapper off a red Starburst. “I was upstairs filling out a document request on a structured trust. The guardians are her grandparents. It sounds like they’re into some bad things.” He took over for her on the candy wrapper. “What bad things?” “Pills, I gather. And alcohol. And money from the trust. It sounds like they’re going to milk it dry before she’s of age.” “So, she can pay you?” “Ehn.” Charlie shrugged, giving what she hoped was a winning smile. Ben said, “Dexter Black.” “Not my client.” “Yeah, I noticed that when Carter Grail brought him into the office for a talk. Any idea when he’s going to pay you?” “Babe, if my clients paid me, we’d probably end up taking a long vacation to somewhere like Costa Rica, and you would get really sunburned, which raises your risk for melanoma, which is the deadliest form of skin cancer, and then I would have to kill myself because I can’t live without you.” “Okay, that makes a lot of sense.” Charlie could see that he was trying. “I’m not one hundred percent certain that she’s not being abused.” “Shit.” “Well, she didn’t tell me that she was being abused. She actually denied it, but…” Charlie shrugged again. She wasn’t clairvoyant, but she’d had a bad feeling when she’d heard Flora’s denial. There was a fleeting look in the girl’s eyes, like she had been trapped in a corner and didn’t know how to get out. “Even if it’s not true, she’s in trouble, and I feel like I have to at least try to help her.” Ben didn’t hesitate. “Then, either way, I have to support your decision.” She had no idea how she’d managed to marry such a wonderful man. “We’ll pay off our student loans one day.” “With our social security.” Ben held up the candy. Charlie opened her mouth so he could drop it in. He asked, “What’s the girl’s name?” “Florabama Faulkner.” His eyebrows shot up. “Seriously?” “Kid never had a chance.” Charlie chewed the Starburst a few times before sticking it up inside her cheek. “Grandparents are raising her. She gave me their names, but I got their address from the Girl Scout rolls.” “That sounds vaguely illegal.” “I took a pledge to be a sister to every Scout, so it’s basically like spying on my sister.” “I’m going to distract you with my hands while I try not to think about you wearing a Girl Scout uniform.” Ben took out the tiny spiral notebook he always kept in his suit pocket. He showed the cover to Charlie: Captain Kirk looking serious about some Starship business. He edged the compact pen out of the spiral. He thumbed to a blank page. She said, “Leroy and Maude Faulkner. They’re living down from Shady Ray’s.” His pen didn’t move. “In the cinder-block apartments?” “Yep.” “That’s a bad place to raise a kid.” “They used to live on the lake. I’m assuming that trust fund mixed in with their addictions made it easy to make some bad decisions. Belinda says the grandmother showed up in a Porsche once, stone drunk.” “What kind of Porsche?” Ben shook his head. “Never mind. I get what you’re saying.” “Flora wants to go to college. She wants to make her mom proud, to honor her memory. That probably won’t happen if she stays with her grandparents.” “Probably not.” Ben scribbled the names and closed his notebook. “Word around the office is the entire apartment building is under surveillance. The cops are being really secretive about it, but I saw some photos on the wall in Ken’s office. Addicts live there along with a handful of terrified, law-abiding citizens who can’t afford better. There’s a meth lab in the vicinity.” “They can’t find it?” Meth labs were usually found in trailers or recently blown-up basements. Ben said, “I gleaned from the photos that they think whoever is cooking the meth is doing it out of the back of a panel van.” “That sounds stupid and dangerous.” “The cops will catch them the minute the van explodes.” He tucked the notebook back in his pocket. “You sure you’re okay?” “Just thinking about my mom a lot. Flora’s mother died when she was young. It stirred up some things.” “What can I do to make you feel better?” “You’re doing it.” Charlie stroked her fingers through Ben’s hair. “I always feel better when I’m with you.” They both smiled at the corny line, but they both knew that it was true. He said, “Listen, I know I can’t keep you away from those apartments, but don’t go there alone, okay? Ask to meet them somewhere neutral, like for coffee at the diner. Whatever is going on at that place has to be dangerous. The county wouldn’t be spending the money for surveillance otherwise.” “Understood.” Charlie smoothed down his tie. She could feel his heart beating beneath her palm. She pressed her lips to his neck. The skin prickled to attention. She traced her mouth up, whispering in his ear, “I promise you’ll get a rain check on the supply closet.” “Chuck,” he whispered back, “this would be so hot if you didn’t have puke in your hair.” Charlie swung by the house to take a shower and change before going to the cinder-block apartments. She had indicated to Ben an understanding that she should stay away from the place, but Ben probably knew that Charlie wouldn’t stay away, so going there was actually living up to a long-held promise in their marriage: the promise that she would do whatever the hell she wanted. She was happy to exchange her grown-up, career-day clothes for jeans and one of her Duke Blue Devils basketball T-shirts. Considering how much she and Ben owed the law school, she was surprised they hadn’t been forced to wear sandwich boards until the loans were paid off. The time was close enough to lunch for her to be hungry, so she ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and half a bag of Doritos while she dialed into the messages on her office phone. Charlie had a court appearance Friday and there was a last-minute motion to be filed. A judge was asking for a brief on a point of law that would not help her client. And because her life wasn’t difficult enough, she had a call from her credit-card company that was likely not a warm thank you for being a valued customer. Charlie searched the filing cabinet and found the previous month’s bill, which, according to her handwritten note on the statement, had been paid a day late, but that didn’t usually warrant a call. They were fifteen hundred dollars away from their limit. Charlie called Visa on the number from the message. She was searching her wallet for her card when her cell phone rang. She kept her home phone to her ear while she answered the other one. “Miss Charlie,” Dexter said. “Please don’t hang up.” “I think you meant to call Carter Grail.” “Come on, now, don’t be like that. You told me to call the dude.” “Because you owe me two grand.” Charlie listened to the Visa hold Muzak, a sax rendition of REM’s “Losing My Religion”. Dexter said, “Lookit, Miss Charlie, I’m’a pay you Tuesday.” Charlie thought of Wimpy, who was always offering to pay people on Tuesday for a hamburger today, and then she realized that she was still hungry. “Dexter, I’ll be really happy if you pay me, but I can’t give you any legal advice until you do.” “But, lookit, it’ll help you, too, ’cause like I said, I get paid, then you get paid.” “I’m not allowed to bargain with you like that. It gives me a vested interest in the outcome of your—shit.” Her Visa card wasn’t in its usual slot in her wallet. “Miss Charlie?” “I’m here.” She rifled her wallet, her stomach in free fall until she found the Visa crammed between the dollar bills in the folded part. The YWCA bathroom. Her purse spilled onto the floor. Flora must have put the card back in the wrong place. Dexter said, “I just need you to tell me can I do this thing I’m gonna do, and would I be okay if I didn’t do the thing, like, exactly, because see, the person I’m dealing with, well, shit, let’s just say they don’t play.” “I can’t negotiate for you in bad faith.” Charlie saw the trap she’d walked into, because now she was giving him legal advice. “I’m not negotiating for you, period, Dexter. I can’t tell you how to break the law. And if I was your lawyer, I couldn’t put you on the stand knowing you were going to lie, and I couldn’t allow you to sign a plea deal knowing that you intend to obfuscate.” “Obfuscate,” he repeated. “Yeah, I know that word from TheX-Files. Did you see that episode? Dude stuck this metal thing up people’s noses and sucked the color outta their skin.” “Teliko,” Charlie said, because her husband was a geek and they had every season of The X-Files in both VHS and DVD. “Dexter, is there something that I can help you with that won’t involve me breaking the law, or advising you on how to break the law, or wasting the minutes on my cell-phone plan, or all three?” “Uh…” Charlie yawned. She suddenly felt exhausted. “Dexter?” He waited a few more seconds, then asked, “What was the question again?” Charlie hung up her cell phone. Static filled the home phone at her other ear. The recording advised her that her hold time to speak with a Visa representative was only sixteen more minutes. Charlie put the phone back on the hook. She jammed the Visa bill into her purse for a later follow-up. She looked at the couch and thought about how nice a nap would be. And then she remembered Flora’s situation. Charlie’s calendar was generally full, but she had kept today light because she’d planned on an assortment of eager Girl Scouts wanting to ask her tons of questions about how to make their lives as awesome as Charlie’s. If she was going to figure out how to help Florabama Faulkner, today was the only day she could do it. She grabbed the Doritos on the way out the door and drove with the bag between her legs, carefully handling the chips, making a mental list of things she needed to do. First, she would talk to Flora’s grandparents and see if the situation was as bad as the girl claimed. The question of abuse was still unanswered. Maybe Flora had been honest in the bathroom and there was nothing untoward going on. Or maybe she was willing to sacrifice the truth in order to keep her grandfather out of jail. Or maybe Charlie had watched too many made-for-TV movies. Whether it was pills or neglect or abuse, the fact that Flora was actively working to keep her guardians out of jail said a lot about the girl’s character. Next on the list, she would need to get some idea of Nancy’s living situation. That was the name of the girl whose parents had offered to take in Flora. Charlie had their address courtesy of the list Flora had made at the Y this morning. The last thing on the list was to talk to Flora’s boss at the diner to make sure the girl was gainfully employed. Or maybe it wasn’t the very last thing. If there was extra time, she could make some calls from home to interview a few of Flora’s teachers. Charlie had cut her teeth working juvenile cases. She knew that teachers saw a hell of a lot more than the average person in a child’s life, even the parents. That was a lot to fit into one day, but talking to people, sussing out the truth, was the hard part. The rest was just paperwork. Charlie felt her stomach rumble. She felt sick, but she also felt hungry. She did the math again in her head, reminding herself that her period was due any minute now, that the spotting and the cramping and the soreness in her breasts and the PMS-induced hunger were all pointing to the same damn sign they pointed to every month. She ate a handful of Doritos as she passed an open semi-trailer filled with chickens. The chickens stared at her, but Charlie’s thoughts were squarely on what Belinda had said about how being pregnant changed everything. Charlie supposed that was the point, that things changed when you had a baby, but from what she had noticed, it was like any big life event: either it brought you closer together or it pulled you apart. Ryan, Belinda’s husband, had done a tour in Iraq as some kind of technical support person. So, he’d been in the desert, but not in the middle of combat. For a while, it seemed like he only came home to yell at the television set and make Belinda pregnant. War had changed him. Not just war, but the niggling suspicion that the war he was fighting was more like running in quicksand. The sense of futility was only part of the problem. The other part was the nature of his extended deployments. His long absences had given Belinda time to get used to making all of the decisions. When Ryan came back with different ideas about how things should be run, the tension had spilled over into every aspect of their marriage. To Charlie’s thinking, their main issue was usefulness. Both Belinda and Ryan wanted to have a purpose, to give their family direction, and both of them were making each other miserable because they couldn’t share the responsibility. Charlie laughed at her Oprah-esque observation. She had to blame her mother for this line of thinking. Charlie’s childhood had been shaped by her mother’s constant refrain— If you’re not being useful, then you’re being useless. Was Charlie being useful? Flora was so eager to carry out the life that her mother had envisioned. Charlie felt that same sense of urgency. Was she honoring her mother? Did her life have purpose? It sure as hell lacked focus. She’d been so zoned out that she had passed right by the cinder-block apartments. “Shi-i-i-it,” she drew out the word as she glanced behind her, catching the two-story building in her side-view mirror. She pulled a wagon wheel of a U-turn across the empty four-lane highway and pulled up at the two-story cinder-block building tucked down in a ravine behind a long stretch of busted guard rail. To her surprise, she saw that the apartments had a name. A discreet sign welcomed visitors to the Ponderosa. Ropes twined around the border in homage to the Bonanza TV show, but this was no place for Little Joe to hang his hat. Unless he wanted to crack open a light bulb and smoke a bowl. The majority of the parking spaces were filled with beat-up old cars; not a good sign, considering most people should be at work this time of day. She drove to the end of the parking lot on the off-chance she would see the Porsche that Belinda had told her about, but Charlie’s three-year-old Subaru wagon was the sportiest car around. She took a space near the exit, thinking that was smart in case she needed to make a quick getaway. She remembered what Ben had said about the building being surveilled. It made her feel safer, knowing that some cops, somewhere, were watching her back. Or, if you looked at it another way, they were watching her go into a place known for drug traffickers and junkies. Charlie stared up at the sad, squat building. Twelve units total; six on the bottom, six on top. Cinder-block walls painted a dull gray, a rusty railing lining the second story, rotted-out wooden doors with faded plastic numbers, a low roof with a rotting overhang. Every door had a plate-glass window next to it, and every window had a whining air conditioning unit underneath. A steep pathway led to a filthy-looking pool. Unlit tiki torches circled the chain-link fence. The place reminded her of the airport motels her mother had forced them to stay in every vacation because they were cheap and close to mass transportation. Charlie’s clearest memories of Disney World were her night terrors that the wheels of an airplane were going to hit her head while she slept. “What do you think we’d get in the lawsuit?” her father had asked when she had shared with him the reason for her screaming. Charlie pulled her purse onto her shoulder as she got out of the car. Hot air hit her like a slap to the face. She was sweating by the time she turned around and locked the car door. The smell of fried chicken, pot and cat urine—which was either from a bunch of cats or from a bunch of meth—stung her nostrils. According to the Girl Scout roll, the Faulkners resided in unit three on the bottom floor, smack in the center, which was probably the worst of all worlds. Neighbors on each side, always waiting for the other shoe to drop upstairs. As she walked across the parking lot, she heard the distinct bass of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-A-Leek”. Earring in her tongue and she know what to do with it… The music got louder as Charlie navigated the broken sidewalk. With my eyes rolled back and my toes curled… “Ugh,” Charlie groaned, repulsed by the words and also irritated that she knew them by heart. She hated to trot out one of those in my day sentences, but she could still remember how reviled Madonna was for singing about her feelings of renewed virginity. Without warning, the music stopped. The silence tickled the hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck. She had the distinct feeling of being watched as she walked along the uneven path to unit three. The wooden door was warped, painted a dark red that did not hide the black underneath. She raised her hand. She knocked twice. She waited. She knocked again. The curtains rustled. The woman’s face behind the glass looked older than Charlie, but in a hard way, like the few years had been spent on a construction site or, more likely, in prison. Her eyeliner was a thick black line. Blue eyeshadow. Heavy foundation reminiscent of the coating of Doritos dust on Charlie’s steering wheel. She wore her shoulder-length bleached blonde hair in a “Barracuda”-era Nancy-Wilson-style feather. She saw Charlie and scowled before closing the curtains. Charlie stood on the hot sidewalk listening to the air conditioning units grumble in the quiet. She looked at her watch. She was wondering if she had been given the brush-off when she heard sounds from behind the door. A chain slid back. A deadbolt was turned. Then another one. The door opened. Tendrils of cold air caressed Charlie’s face. The whining a/c competed with OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” playing somewhere in the darkened room. The woman at the door was wearing jeans and a cropped red T-shirt with a Georgia Bulldog on it. A half-empty bottle of beer was in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Her fingernails were filed to long, sharp points, the polish bright red. She reminded Charlie of the trashy Culpepper girls who had relentlessly hounded her throughout high school. The woman had that look about her, like when the shit went down, she was ready to scratch out some eyes or pull out some hair or bite down real hard on an arm or a back if that’s what it took to win the fight. Charlie said, “I’m looking for Maude or Leroy Faulkner.” “I’m Maude.” Even her voice sounded mean, like a rattlesnake opening a switchblade. Charlie shook her head. There had to be two different Maudes. “I mean Flora’s grandmother.” “That’s me.” Charlie’s chin almost hit the ground. “Yeah.” She took a hit off her cigarette. “I was seventeen when I had Esme. Esme was fifteen when she had Flora. You can do the math.” Charlie didn’t want to do the math, because grandmothers had buns and wore bifocals and watched Hee Haw. They didn’t sport cropped shirts that showed pierced navels and drink beer in the middle of the day while OutKast played on their boom box. Maude said, “You gonna keep wasting my air conditioning or you gonna come inside?” Charlie stepped into the apartment. Cigarette smoke hung like dirty yellow lace in the air. There was no light except for what came in through the slim part in the curtains on the front window. Brown shag carpet cupped the soles of her sneakers. The cluttered kitchenette was part of the living room. The bathroom was at the end of a short hall, a bedroom on either side. Clothes were everywhere, unopened cardboard boxes, a sewing machine on a rickety table shoved against the wall by the kitchen. A large television set was jammed into the corner by the front window. The sound was muted as Jill Abbott screamed at Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/karin-slaughter/last-breath-a-novella/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.