Page 31 of Never Stay Gone
“Five minutes,” Shane breathed.
Moving away from Dakota felt like ripping off a scab. He felt the loss of Dakota’s body, his heat, his presence, like Shane had stepped off a cliff into nothing. He clung to the interview room doorknob and leaned in, stealing a second to close his eyes as Dakota slouched against the wall.Dakota.
Joey Carroll, Jessica Klein’s fiancé, looked up when Shane pushed through the door. Their eyes met, and Shane knew.
Joey looked like he’d fought the devil and lost. He clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating, and his clothes—hell, his skin—hung off him like he was the dead body, a corpse who’d crawled out of bed and pulled on pale flesh. His eyes were sunken orbs overflowing with a month’s worth of tears. His hands worked over the brim of his cowboy hat, mangling the felt edges until it was a lumpy mess. One boot tap-tap-tapped on the worn wood floor. He looked at Shane with pleading eyes, begging Shane to wake him from this nightmare.
Shane pulled out the metal folding chair beside Joey and sat down. He faced the man, balancing both elbows on his knees, his hands loose between them. Joey’s lip started to tremble.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Shane asked. He kept his voice soft.
Joey crumpled, folding both forward and sideways, falling out of his chair and into Shane’s arms. His knees hit the floor as he buried his face in his ranch-rough hands. His cowboy hat rolled into the corner, spinning on its twisted rim before falling flat. A wail ripped out of Joey, the sound of a man being torn to pieces, everything inside him shredding with the force of his anguish. Shane dropped to his good knee and rested his hand on Joey’s shoulder, squeezing.
The door behind him opened and closed. Dakota’s shadow spilled over Shane, and Dakota took up a silent post in the far corner. He kept his eyes down, not looking at Joey’s heartbreak or Shane’s comfort.
Eventually, Joey’s sobs turned to whimpers, and he sat back on his ass as tears and snot ran in rivers down his gaunt face. Dakota passed Shane a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. Shane pressed it into Joey’s shaking hands.
“Jessica, she—” Joey finally began. He tried and failed three times before he could get his voice to hold. “Her doctor told her she was probably never gonna have kids. She had that PCOS, they said. So’s we never bothered with no birth control, you know? I mean, if—” His face twisted again, and his shoulders shuddered. “If she did get pregnant, we’d be overjoyed. I wanted a bunch of kids. A whole heap of rug rats runnin’ around—but since she probably couldn’t have none, I accepted that. I loved her more than I wanted all them kids.”
His chin bobbed. Tears dropped from his nose and the stubble on his jaw. “We was together from seventh grade,” he breathed. “She asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and I thought I was the luckiest sumbitch on the planet. Thirteen years we were together. Do you know what it’s like to love someone for thirteen years?”
Silence, save for Joey’s snotty tears, his hiccuping whimpers. Dakota’s bootheel ground against the wood in the corner. Shane exhaled.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the baby a month ago, when you reported her missin’?” Dakota finally asked. His voice was rough but not hard. Resigned.
Joey shook his head. “We wasn’t tellin’ nobody. At least, not until— We was gonna tell people when she made it past six months.” His eyes closed. His hands shook. “We didn’t think it was real at first. We was so excited. I mean, over the damn moon. You’ve never seen two people happier. When she told me…” His eyes went soft, and he stared over Shane’s shoulder, seeing the past. “I screamed so loud the windows nearly broke. I thought I was dreamin’. I’d had dreams like that before, where she told me she was pregnant. I was pinchin’ myself for a month after. We bought all the books and was readin’ them to each other at night. I bought her all those baby vitamins too. I made her breakfast every mornin’ before she went to the office. The doc said it might not last, so we was so careful all the time. I swore I’d take care of her and the baby—”
Something cracked open inside Joey, and he sank into the darkness, sobbing as he curled to the floor again. Shane let him weep, let the minutes tick by. Dakota went in and out of the interview room, bringing bottles of water for Shane and Joey, then a box of tissues, then left and came back and took up position in the corner again, his face set and hard as he stared at the floor.
“I been prayin’ that I’d wake up from this,” Joey finally whispered. “I been prayin’, all damn day and night, that this is just some nightmare. That I’m gonna open my eyes and she’ll be right there. Her and the baby, and we’re gonna live our lives and be happy again.” His whole body shook. “I couldn’t say nothin’ about the baby. I couldn’t. I just wanted them to comehome.”
* * *
Brian offeredto drive Joey three hours to his parents’ small farm north of Pecos. He was in no state to drive, or even be alone. Shane spoke to Joey’s mother on the phone, breaking the news to her about her son’s heartbreak and how he was likely going to be in a bad way for a while.
He also had to tell her she had almost become a grandmother. She thanked Shane through her tears for taking care of her boy.
“Call me if you need anything, ma’am,” Shane told her. “You, Joey, your husband. Anything, anytime.”
“Thank you, Captain Carson.”
He and Dakota didn’t speak after Brian loaded the numb, pale Joey into the front seat of Brian’s cruiser and drove off. Dakota buried his head in his case file and started taping pictures to the wall in the department, scribbling details about the victims and the timeline they were building on sticky notes beneath each photo. Shane typed a quick update for Heath and then texted him to ask where he was.
No response. Which wasn’t entirely unusual. Heath often ended up in the far corners of the county, out of range, out of touch, for hours at a time. He’d told Shane and the rest of the deputies he would take the outer reaches and they could stick closer to the towns and highways. A few times, Heath took several days and patrolled the farthest parts of the county, camping out in his truck as he checked out the remote homesteads, abandoned mines, lost settlements, and empty desert. Most of the rest of the deputies were beyond thankful for that. Shane was jealous.
Dakota cleared his throat, the first sound he’d made since the last time Joey had fallen apart in Shane’s arms. He stood behind Shane’s chair, hat in his hand, staring at the ground. “Gotta get out to the truck stop. You wanna come, or want me to get it done?”
Having Dakota back in Rustler was like cutting his belly open and pulling his intestines out by hand. He was eviscerating himself every moment he spent with Dakota, but he couldn’t pull away. He never could. “I’ll come.”
The drive out to the truck stop was quiet, the occasional ticking of Shane’s blinker and Dakota’s grinding molars the only sounds audible in his truck’s cabin. Shane’s gaze strayed to the radio, but he left it off.
When they arrived, Dakota spent twenty minutes walking the perimeter, checking the outer lots where the long-haul truckers could park and sleep and then taking a spiral search route as he eyeballed the security cameras around the pumps and the parking lot adjacent to the convenience store and restaurant. “Lotta blind spots,” he said, frowning, when he and Shane met at the front.
Walking side by side with Dakota into the truck stop was like going back in time. They’d done the same walk countless times, heading for the trays of hot dogs or the pizza cooking under heat lamps, or grabbing chips and sodas while they talked about the game or homework or just stole secret looks and shy smiles over the displays. His days used to revolve around Dakota’s smile and whether they had been able to slip away in his truck. Maybe kissing, maybe making out, maybe simply being with each other. His days used to begin and end with Dakota.
And then they didn’t.
Shane trailed behind Dakota as he strode to the manager’s office. Heads turned their way, people staring at the Texas Ranger and the Big Bend deputy making their way through the truck stop. He nodded hellos to men and women he knew from Rustler, along with a few high school kids coming out for cheap eats, like he and Dakota used to do.
