The Trouble with Paradise by Kyle Katrina

Author:Kyle, Katrina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Somewhere Books
Published: 2022-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After swinging by the Verizon store and activating Bo’s new phone, I drove him to the gym. There wasn’t a lot of discussion on the ride to either place, and Bo’s music selection was angrier than normal. But I let the emo tunes stream and let him stew and I kept quiet. He was, after all, justifiably mopey. His dad was dead, and his mom was a suspect. How much worse did life get?

There was also a selfish motive to my silence: I really didn’t know what to say to him. What was there to say? Until a couple of hours ago, I could have argued for his mom’s innocence. But now, not so much. Not only because she’d pointed a shotgun at me, thereby forcing me, however briefly, to re-assess my relationship with a higher power, but several other reasons to suspect her had come to light with that interaction.

For one, she had access to guns and was clearly comfortable using them. Stan and Jonathon had both been shot. Secondly, she owned a boat and had no alibi for where she was the night of the murder. And lastly, she had more than one ax to grind—getting banned from the yacht parties for drugs that may not have been hers, and for her kid getting dumped from the charity fight. To name two.

I parked in the gym’s lot and walked Bo inside. The gym was crowded with kids and smelled like carry-out Thai food that had been left out in the sun. Bo peeled off to the lockers and I went looking for Sugar Hayes. I wanted to give him a head’s up so if Bo seemed particularly unruly today, he would know why.

I found him near the fighting cage in the rear corner. He watched two scrawny preteens circle each other in the ring, each more afraid than the other to make the first move.

I stopped next to him. “Bo’s in the locker room.”

He took a toothpick out of his mouth and asked, “How’s he doing?”

“How much have you heard?”

He gestured to the room. “Just what the kids have been saying. None of it good.”

“It’s not good. They arrested his mom today. She’s a suspect in Bo’s dad’s murder.”

Sugar shook his head. “That family. Can’t seem to catch a break. Damn shame, too. His dad was trying.”

“You met Jonathon?” I asked.

Sugar nodded. “He liked to come watch his boy. But he always hung in the shadows. I guess he was afraid of embarrassing him. Teenagers can be real assholes sometimes.”

“Bo isn’t an asshole,” I said.

“No,” Sugar said, putting the toothpick back in his mouth, “he’s not. But lots of others are.”

I thought of that jerk-off from two days ago. The one with the Nate Seton fetish and the son who took Bo’s spot at the charity event. The son who’d made fun of Bo’s dad. I felt anger rising and I tamped it down.

“Did you ever talk to Jonathon?” I asked.

“I did. I told him what I told you.

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