Prodigal

Chapter 32

32

Adam remained chest to chest with Luther’s brother. He might not be able to fight worth a damn, but Luther had to hand it to the man: Adam had heart.

Two ass-whoopings in a day would be a bit much for me. He wondered if he was going to have to break them up.

“What do you mean, you got a tip?” Adam asked, eyes shifting to Luther but holding his ground.

Luther hesitated, but knew—whether anything came of the tip or not—word would be around Cold Springs by dinner anyway. “Someone saw a van they didn’t recognize yesterday. It’s gone now, but we’re sending some people to check out the scene. Adam, could you excuse us?”

Adam gave Leslie a dirty look, then said, “Sure, Luther,” and went on his merry, hobbling way. The man looked even worse than he had a few hours ago.

“Says he fell in the shower,” Leslie volunteered, following Luther’s eyes.

“Is that right?” Luther scanned the empty room out of habit before nudging his brother down the line of tables toward the exterior wall with its tall windows. They were all closed, and Luther leaned his head against one for a moment, watching a young woman dressed like it was summer enter the convenience store down the street. “I don’t know why you’ve always got to make such an ass of yourself.”

“What?” Leslie protested. “You’re the one that told me to keep an eye on Rutledge.”

“Not by picking a fight with him, I didn’t.”

Luther reckoned that his brother protested entirely too much. Nothing was ever his fault, and everything came as a surprise. He had the righteous indignation of a preacher in the pulpit, sermonizing to an empty church on Super Bowl Sunday.

At the moment, Les was shaking all over—just a little, like a shimmy on a bad quality video—and Luther wondered if it was purely from adrenaline. The man’s hair was standing up straight and his body odor was for sure something interesting. “Put your hat back on. You look like a doofus. Worse than Adam in his silly blue pants.”

Leslie slapped his hat back on his head like a petulant child.

“This tip they got was over by state park land,” Luther said, surveying the empty room.

“Oh, yeah. Where at?”

“Almost to the top of the mountain, the pull-out near that old cabin DNR keeps talking about tearing down. Did y’all search there?”

“Of course we did,” Leslie said, glancing at the maps next to them. As if he needed to. And as if any of them showed the area they were talking about.

“Les, look at me.” Luther wanted so badly to grab his brother by the face, but figured that’s when someone would walk in to check on them. “You searched the cabin, or you just half-ass cruised around it?”

“We didn’t get on our hands and knees and search it top to bottom, but we went in,” he said. Then, less defiantly, he admitted, “I opened the door and went in enough to see there wasn’t anybody there. Nobody else went in.”

Luther put one hand on the edge of a table, wrapped his fingers around and squeezed until he could swear he felt the metal bend. He didn’t speak until he’d stopped imagining it was his brother’s throat.

“You think they’re gonna find anything when they search it?”

“How the hell should I know?” Leslie asked.

Luther squeezed the table one more time, with feeling. Leslie noticed, and the younger brother instinctively crossed his arms in front of his soft stomach.

“I’m asking,” Luther said, in his most patient voice, “if they’re gonna find anything of yours when they search it.”

“No… hell, no! There’s nothing to find. I told you, I’m not into that anymore. I’m done.”

“Okay,” Luther said. He didn’t really believe his brother, but it was hard enough for Luther to keep his own nose relatively clean. He couldn’t work miracles on Leslie, too.

He turned to leave, but Les caught his arm. “Wait,” Leslie said. “There’s something I need to tell you, too.”

Luther felt a pang when Les quickly backed up, out of range. He told himself it was because of their dad—the twitchiness—but he knew that wasn’t entirely true.

“What, Les?”

Les looked around, but more as if he were working up his nerve than anything else. A couple of men passed by on the far end to exit the building, but the brothers were still alone in the assembly room. Les scratched his neck, and then finally, with no other way to put it off, said, “They know I had s*x with Dorothy.”

“What? When?”

“What do you mean, when? The time at the tavern when you beat the crap out of me, that’s when. The slut must’ve told somebody.”

Les made a choking cough, and something flew from his mouth. His head barely made a sound when it slammed against the heavy windowpane. It took Luther longer than it should have to realize he’d put it there.

“You mean the woman you had to rape to have s*x with you? That slut?” Luther asked, hands around his brother’s throat.

“I didn’t rape her, but if I did, you covered it up,” Leslie croaked.

Luther released Les’s throat, and looked at his own shaking hand. What the hell was going on? How had it come to this? It was as if the whole damn town had gone crazy. He flexed his hand to get the tightness out. “It was a long time ago.”

“Eleven years and nine months, to be exact,” Les said, rubbing his throat.

Now it was Luther’s turn to stare, uncomprehending.

Finally, Les said, “I just heard JJ tell the Sheriff I might be Rachel’s long-lost daddy.”

A rapist daddy kidnapping his natural child: now that was a scenario law enforcement could sink their teeth into. Luther sighed.

“Uh-huh. Just let that one sink in for a minute,” Les said. He bent down and picked up a piece of sticky, wet candy from the floor, using a dark green wrapper he pulled from his pocket. “JJ also told him you knew about it.”

Sonuvabitch… Luther thought back to what he’d said to JJ in the corridor, about Dorothy and Otto, about being objective when it came to people in the community they thought they knew. He almost had to laugh at how well JJ had taken his words to heart. It’d be a lot funnier if he weren’t a short step away from losing his job, and his brother two steps away from prison.

He’d figure something out.

“All right,” Luther said, and pretended not to notice that Leslie flinched as he patted his arm. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“You still want me to keep an eye on Rutledge?” Les asked.

“Sure, from time to time. If you can keep that temper under control,” Luther said, and waited for his brother to say something stupid.

He didn’t. There were limits even to Leslie’s stupidity.