Whiskey River Runaway by Justine Davis

Author:Justine Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tule Publishing
Published: 2017-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

A murder.

Damn.

True sucked in a breath. Jack had only confirmed she was not wanted for a crime, but as a witness to a felony, and that he’d sworn his cousin to silence until they got it straightened out on this end.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice made harsh by his thoughts.

“What more is there?”

He’d never anticipated what she would sound like if she ever did finally break. Now that she had, he knew that even if he had anticipated he could never have guessed how it would make him feel. She was staring down at that rug on the floor as if the random pattern held the answer to all the world’s mysteries.

“Start,” he suggested, “at the beginning.”

She laughed, but it was a harsh, bitter sound. “The beginning? That would make for a long, stupid story.”

“You’re not stupid, Hope.”

“I just make stupid decisions.” He didn’t think he was mistaking the self-loathing in her tone, but he didn’t want to derail this now that she was finally talking by trying to convince her otherwise.

“What decision started this?”

“I thought I could save someone.”

“Who?”

“Kim. My best friend.” She grimaced. “Or at least, she had been. Since elementary school.”

“She changed?”

“After we graduated high school, she started hanging out with people I didn’t like or trust. And after a while I did, too, because I was afraid if I didn’t I’d lose her.”

“But you were right about her new friends?” He wanted her to keep going, although he was fairly sure of the answer.

She nodded. “It took me a while to realize they were. . .essentially a drug ring. And I didn’t know it, but I’d already lost her.”

“She was using.”

Hope nodded, and every slumped line of her body screamed her sorrow. It made him ache inside in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time.

“I tried to get her away from them, but she just got mad. And so did they.”

“They were her source. She didn’t dare alienate them.”

Her head came up then. “That’s what I finally figured out. But I was young, full of being a brand new adult. I thought I could still convince her, to get away, to get clean, so I stuck it out. For nearly a year.”

He noticed she was running a finger over the tattoo on her wrist. “Is that when you got that?” he asked, nodding at the circlet of markings.

She grimaced. “They made me, before they’d let me even talk to her. On my eighteenth birthday. Kim already had one. They all had them. Said I had to prove I belonged.”

“And it marked you as one of them, to everyone else.”

Her gaze flicked to his face, then away, as if she found it too hard to look at him and keep talking. “Yes. I didn’t realize that then. Like I said, stupid.”

“Naïve, maybe.”

She let out a harsh laugh. “To the point of—Never mind. All that matters is Kim wouldn’t listen. Then I thought about going to the police, telling them what I knew. By then I’d seen some stuff, knew some of the dealers, some of the stash locations.

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