Crocus by Amy Lane

Author:Amy Lane [Lane, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-64080-635-1
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

THE PLOWS had just cleared the roads as Eamon pulled up to the same neighborhood that had seemed so terrifying the night before. In the daylight, Larx could see Berto and Jaime’s little house and the crucial outbuilding across a snow-covered yard and up a hill from the perfectly maintained log-cabin-style house where Eamon parked.

Berto and Jaime’s house looked old—a classic small ranch house, probably bought to fix up, with yellowing stucco, chipped on all the corners—but Larx could see signs of life: new gutters, bright and shiny, new roof tiles, unstained raw boards replacing some of the weathered, warped boards on the porch. Old, but with new life—the potential for one, anyway. There was also a small greenhouse, hastily erected—with what were probably exactly five marijuana plants as well as some cooking herbs and maybe a flower or two—attached to the back of the house.

“Did you keep the greenhouse going?” Larx asked, thinking of poor Berto, pulling the tatters of his safety around him in the house that night.

“Yeah,” Eamon said. “I went in after cleanup—Tane asked me to. That kid—he’s going to need a lot of help. He was sort of fragile to begin with, you know?”

Larx sighed and tilted his head back. “I do now. I didn’t before. I… I hadn’t met Jaime before Monday. Without Aaron’s call, I wouldn’t have known him. Wouldn’t have known Candace either. Just luck.” God. “If I’d been their teacher—”

“You wouldn’t have been Isaiah and Kellan’s when they needed you. Don’t go second-guessing yourself, Mr. Larkin. I can tell you the one thing I know for sure about your place in all this.”

“What’s that?”

“I wouldn’t have had Nobili in my car looking for a missing teenager if I told him there was money under the seat.” Nobili—Larx’s predecessor—seemed remarkably unlamented, and not just by staff. “He wouldn’t have called that kid to his office in the first place—and he damned sure wouldn’t have been a friend to Jaime or Berto. You just keep on doing what you’re doing. Like I said—law enforcement isn’t what’s gonna unfuck the world.”

It was all he had.

Together they got out of the car, zipping up their coats and pulling on their gloves for the trip from the SUV, past the two cold troopers doing watch in the driveway, to the front door.

The thin woman with hurriedly twisted dyed pink hair and dead eyes did not look happy to see them.

“Did you people kill my husband now?”

“I don’t know,” Larx snapped. “Has he molested any more fourteen-year-old girls?”

Candace Furman’s mother gaped at him. “What in the hell—?”

Larx scowled at her but spoke to Eamon. “You didn’t tell her? Nobody told her what this was about?”

Eamon shook his head. “No, sir. We were waiting for CPS—and they’re on their way—but, well, officers in the hospital, dead racists with guns, and snow.”

Larx took a deep breath and tried some compassion. “Do you care about your daughter, ma’am? Even a little? Because we’re trying to find her, and at this

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.