Page 100 of Necessary Cruelty

Thirty

“Oh, hell no.”

I hold the dirty receiver away from my face so it won’t touch my skin, but Zion’s voice is still loud enough to practically burst my ear drum.

Visiting Zion at the Justice Center is even less fun than I thought it would be. Luckily, they haven’t transferred him to the county jail because he’s underage, but this place still sucks. I spent an hour in the visitor’s waiting room watching the parade of stricken family members come in and out, trying not to cry from the stress of it all.

My idiot of a brother should be grateful he isn’t completely on his own.

“You really don’t have a choice,” I reply with an aggrieved sigh. “Unless you want to spend all of your best years behind bars.”

“So I should just trade one prison for another?” Zion glares at me through the thick glass separating us, his anger and frustration palpable.

Those are the emotions he uses to hide his fear.

“It’s more like private school than a jail. You’d be able to get your diploma and take some college classes. Might even be the best thing that ever happened to you, if it gets you out of Deception.” I can’t decide which of us I’m trying to convince. The thought of sending him away makes my heart ache, but I can’t consider the alternative. “You might even like it, everyone else there will be a juvenile delinquent.”

He makes a rude sound with his mouth. “You mean the kind who shoplift from fancy department stores to get back at their rich absentee parents? Where do I sign up?”

“If you don’t take the deal, then you’re going to adult prison. You really expect me to believe the people in there are any better?”

Zion shakes his head. “My crew is at county.”

“Your crew is why you’re here in the damn first place.”

“I told you these charges are trumped up. I’m innocent.”

“And since when does that ever matter for people like us?”

I read the whole story on my phone during the ride back to Deception. Three masked men burst into the Gas and Sip, demanding all the cash in the register. One of them pistol-whipped the cashier and the gun went off, killing the poor guy. All three of the suspects fled the scene, but a witness caught the license plate of their getaway car. That car was picked up a few hours later with four people in it, Zion included. My brother swears up and down that he wasn’t in that convenience store and had no idea what they’d done when he hooked up with his friends later in the night. The police maintain that he could have been in the car to act as a getaway driver, which would make him just as culpable.

Someone has to go down for this. The Deception police aren’t exactly motivated to look any further than my brother and his shitty friends. Even I wondered if Zion could have been involved when I read the story. The only thing that makes me believe him is that he has never been able to lie to me, even when we were kids.

Living in a place like the Gulch turns everyone into something dark and twisted eventually. You either become the aggressor or just more collateral damage. If Zion weren’t sitting behind this glass now, something else would have brought him here eventually.

Zion curses into the phone. “This is bullshit.”

“And if your crew is so tight, why aren’t any of them saving you from this? If they know you weren’t there, why not just say so?”

“Because that would mean admitting they were there. Don’t be an idiot.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Which means they’re okay with you going down for a crime that they committed. These definitely sound like true friends to me. Remind me to put them on our Christmas card list this year.”

He just shakes his head, looking defeated. “You just don’t understand how this works.”

My brother looks like shit, though I don’t tell him that. His eyes are bloodshot with dark circles underneath, like he hasn’t slept at all since he got here. Maybe he hasn’t. A splash of blood stains his beige jumpsuit right on the chest, like drips from a nosebleed. It makes me wonder if someone has roughed him up, which might explain why he doesn’t want to talk.

“I understand that you have a chance to save yourself. And nobody else is stepping up to do it.”

His fist grips the receiver on his end, so hard that I wonder if the plastic will crack. He slumps against the wall beside him. “You don’t know what they’ll do to me if I talk.”

“I know what will happen if you don’t. According to Vin’s uncle, they have enough evidence to nail you to the wall. There won’t be any walking away from this, no matter what happens.”

“Vin, huh?” Zion’s glare is strong enough to peel the paint from the walls. “He already managed to worm his way into this, I see. Guy works fast.”

I haven’t told him about the marriage, mostly hoping it never comes up at all. By the time his sentence is served, a year will be long past and I can pretend that Vin Cortland never existed.

“Without Vin, there wouldn’t be any deal at all. Don’t be stupid about this.”

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