Page 50 of Shelter for Sharla

“No. No, I’m not. I need to get out of here.”

“Okay. Come on. You can wait out front while I go talk to the warden.” He let Cruz deposit him at the front doors by the desk, and as soon as Cruz was out of sight, he propped his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands.

“Hey.” He looked up to find a young guard standing over him. “You okay?”

“Not at all okay.”

“Got some bad news, huh?”

“Yeah.” Carter didn’t even know how to articulate what he was thinking and feeling.

“This place doesn’t help. First two weeks I worked here, I went home sick every day. It’s… a scary place to be.”

“I’ll say.”

“Do you need some water? Or a soft drink?”

“No, no. I’m fine. But thanks for checking on me.” Cruz appeared just as the words left Carter’s lips, and he stood to go.

They’d no more than closed the car doors when Cruz said, “You’re looking a little shaky, bud.”

“Iama little shaky.”

“And I know why. Let’s get the hell off the grounds and stop somewhere to talk.” Carter started the car, drove to the checkpoint, and cleared the gate. Two miles down the road, he pulled into the parking lot of a dollar-type store and stopped. “Talk to me, Carter.”

“God, Sharla and the kids… This is serious shit. The Italian really believes that somewhere in their home are the coordinates for the burial site. He wants them before anybody else finds them.”

“Yeah. That means he’s going to be rattling cages and shaking trees.”

“Yeah. And they’re the trees.” Carter ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “What do we do? Put them in protective custody?”

“So far, nobody’s hurt either of the kids or Sharla, or even attempted to.”

“But Tamara…”

“Tamara was an unexpected casualty. They didn’t want her dead; they wanted to use her.”

The sheriff shook his head in disbelief. “But in the meantime, as they looked for her, they poisoned dozens of college campuses with their rhetoric and drugs.”

“I think they’re probably using kids to move illegal firearms too.”

Carter’s eyes popped open even wider. “Holy shit. This is… Cruz, we’re going to need some help with all this.”

“We can handle it, but we’ve got something very, very important we’ve got to do first.” When Carter gave him a sideways stare, Cruz pursed his lips and set his jaw before he spoke. “We’ve got to find those coordinates.”

* * *

Cruz triedto make small talk all the way back to Kentucky, but Carter knew what he was doing and he was having none of it. He fucking well didn’t feel like talking. One thing was certain. If they could find the coordinates, unearth the money and the body, and expose the whole thing, the Italian would be in a shit ton of trouble. But they’d have another problem on their hands?full-blown, all-out gang war between Los Lobos andLaTana delLupo. What was the right choice? Find it all and expose the Italian? Or find it all, but suppress the information about the ring finger? Of course, letting the two gangs fight it out until they killed each other off was an attractive idea, but the collateral damage of civilian casualties would be huge, and they didn’t want that.

It was early Sunday morning before they pulled into Carter’s drive. Cruz had told him several times that they should stop and stay the night, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep driving, to get home, to check on Sharla, Chelsea, and Lionel. He’d talked to her and texted her several times, but he didn’t dare tell her anything. He also talked to Glen and asked him to keep watching her and to ask the Hopkinsville police chief to do the same. His friend assured him they would. That was the best he could ask for.

They headed off to bed. Carter could hear Cruz snoring even through the wall, but he couldn’t close his eyes. His mind was churning, thinking of all the info they’d gained, the crimes that had been committed, and the hatred between the two gangs. He had one small shred of hope. It appeared Estevez knew nothing about Imogen’s death or Sharla taking in Tamara and Lionel, and they certainly hadn’t told him. He knew those guys still talked to the outside, and the less the Italian knew about them, the better. It was bad enough that Angelico had found them. He was most certainly the one who was either following Sharla or had someone doing so.

By the next morning, he was a wreck. All he could think about was Sharla, Chelsea, Lionel, and their safety. That was what he really wanted to work on, but Cruz had other ideas. “Get hold of Sharla. We need to start going through her sister’s things.”

It took a trip to the hospital to pick up a key from Sharla, but by lunchtime, they had the lock off the self-storage unit and were loading boxes in Carter’s truck. They weren’t hard to spot?they all had Imogen’s name on them. There were about twelve of them, and it struck Carter as extremely sad that a life could be reduced to a dozen boxes.

It seemed hopeless. Nothing but random stuff filled the boxes, one box after another. There were a few ribbons and a trophy from high school, four high school yearbooks, and a box of pictures of all kinds. Carter sifted through them in the conference room of the department. There were kids, and he could tell they were Tamara and Lionel. There were also some pics of who he assumed was Imogen with Taliq. If they were wedding pictures, nothing formal had taken place. It looked like they were at a courthouse. Many were pictures of two young girls with an older couple, and as he stared at them, he realized it was Imogen and Sharla with their parents. God, Sharla looked just like her mother! And Imogen looked just like their dad. He thought for a few seconds about his own mom and how he needed to talk to her, to explain why he hadn’t introduced Sharla earlier and how it had all come to be, but that would have to wait. Finding what they were searching for, getting to the bottom of the whole thing, was all he had time to do. Theyhadto find those coordinates, but it was almost impossible with the wealth of pure junk they were going through.

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