Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Nineteen

Damon

In my yearswith the DEA, I had worked on cases involving some of the most terrifying drug importers and dealers you can imagine. Guys who had no souls, whose underlings regularly disappeared, never to be found again. Guys whose girlfriends and wives ended up in the hospital over and over again, or dead. Guys it took us years, and dozens of agents, to take down.

All things considered, it was easy to find one thirteen-year-old kid.

The car I’d seen belonged to Jaden Traeger, just like I’d thought. Jaden was twenty-one, old enough to buy liquor for his little brother and his friend. He regularly went on joyrides with Jonathan and Miles, apparently when Miles had told Andie he was innocently hanging out with his friends. The Traeger parents, realizing that both a former DEA agent and a former sheriff were breathing down their necks, coughed up the names and numbers of a few of Jaden’s friends. Said friends then coughed up some of the spots the kids liked to hang out.

I went to the hangout spots one by one, looking for Jaden’s car while Andie stayed home, trying Miles’s number over and over. It was pretty certain I’d find them at one of the places they usually went. The question was, why was Miles’s phone off, and why hadn’t he come home this time?

I got my answer when I pulled up to a lookout spot off a back road where kids sometimes hung out at night. It was dark now, and the air was chill, with a damp wind blowing down from the mountains. The only car parked in the lookout spot was Jaden’s.

As I pulled up, my headlights illuminating the clearing, shadows sprinted toward Jaden’s car. They were going to make a getaway. I pulled my car lengthwise across the lane, blocking the other car from leaving—a classic cop move. As I got out of my car, the shadows—there were three of them—changed course and sprinted off into the trees on foot.

I was about to chase them when I noticed a fourth shadow lying on the ground.

Miles. I was suddenly sure of it.

I ran to him, turning on the light on my phone so I could see him. It was the kid I’d seen at the gas station and the liquor store. Andie’s son. He was lying on his back, trying to get up and failing. Bottles were strewn in the grass around him.

He let out a moan as my light hit his eyes, and he tried harder to get up. “What the fuck, man?” he yelled at me, his teenager’s voice cracking and his words slurred.

Drunk. He was drunk. They’d been drinking, and the others—maybe more experienced drinkers than Miles—had bolted when they saw me coming. Miles was too far gone to run.

I approached Miles slowly—he wasn’t going anywhere—and squatted next to him, running my phone light up and down his body. No blood. No injuries that I could see.

“Are you a cop?” Miles said, slurring again.

I didn’t answer. “Are you hurt?” I asked him instead.

“Fuck you.” The words were defiant, but his voice was quavering and very, very afraid.

“Answer the question. Are you hurt?” I asked again.

“I’m fine.” It was half a question. His voice cracked again.

“Well, that’s something.” I patted his pockets—he tried to swat me away—and found his cell phone. It was dead. I flipped my phone light off and pulled up the keypad so I could call Andie. “Your bros ran off on you, man. No loyalty at all.”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

I tapped Andie’s number, then put the phone on speaker.

“What is it?” Her wild voice came on the other end of the line.

“I found him,” I said. “He’s fine. Say hi, Miles.”

Now the boy sounded panicked. “Is that my mom?”

“Miles!” Andie’s voice was shaking with relief and fear and anger and love. “Miles, what happened? Are you okay?”

Miles made a drunken, anguished moan, so I supplied the answer. “We’re out at the lookout point off Five Line Road,” I explained. “They’ve been drinking. Miles isn’t feeling too good.”

“Drunk?” Andie nearly shrieked. “He’s drunk?”

“I blocked Jaden’s car from leaving, but they ran off into the woods instead,” I said. “They’ll have to walk home. We’ll call the Traegers and let them know where their sons are. Or were. I don’t know who the other kid was. You can tell your dad to call off the hounds.”

“Granddad?” Miles cried. “You called Granddad?”

“Oh, my God,” Andie said.

“Granddad will kill me,” Miles cried again.

“I’m going to kill those Traeger kids!” Andie shouted. “And their parents!”

I sat, holding the phone, suddenly wondering how I’d gotten here, in the middle of this domestic drama. This really wasn’t my kind of scene. I stayed quiet as Andie yelled and Miles drunkenly despaired. Then, in the light from the phone screen, I saw Miles’s skin turn an alarming shade I knew all too well.

“Hold up,” I said to Andie. I pushed Miles’s shoulder so he was lying on his side. He started throwing up into the grass.

“I’m coming to get him,” Andie said.

“Good idea,” I replied, and she hung up.

I helped Miles to his hands and knees as he threw up again. Then I turned my phone light back on and tilted his head back, pushing his eyelid up and shining the light into his eyes. His pupils looked normal.

“Did you take anything other than alcohol?” I asked—the question I couldn’t ask him in front of his mother. She’d been through enough.

The fight had gone out of the kid, and he shook his head. The motion made him throw up again.

“Jesus,” I muttered. I let him finish, then helped him to his feet and walked him far enough away that neither of us was in his puke puddle. He’d obviously had a lot of alcohol, especially for a kid who wasn’t experienced and weighed maybe eighty pounds. But he’d thrown up so much now that he’d be less sick in the morning. For as long as he lived, he’d probably never drink rum again.

There was a low wooden fence at the entrance to the lookout point, but Miles couldn’t balance enough to sit on it. No way was I putting him in my car so he could puke on my upholstery. “Sit,” I told him, and arranged him on the ground like a marionette, his back against the fence and his spindly legs in front of him. The breeze blew against his pasty, sweaty skin, wafting the smell of vomit away from me.

“Who are you?” Miles asked, his words slightly less slurred.

“My name is Damon,” I told him. “I work for your mother at the bar.”

“Like a bartender?”

“No, like a security guy.”

“Did you work for my dad?”

“No, I showed up after he left.” I may as well be honest. “I knew your dad when he was DEA. I worked with him.”

“You’re DEA?” He looked so panicked he might cry.

“Relax,” I said. “If you aren’t cooking meth or dealing fentanyl, you don’t have anything to worry about. Now it’s your turn to answer questions. Have you ever been drunk before?”

“Not really?” He said this as a question, as if I would know better than him. “The guys give me a few beers once in a while, but tonight Jaden had rum. Please don’t tell my mom I told you that. Please.”

He was still trying to cover his ass. I should probably be mad at him—he’d worried the hell out of Andie, and probably her father, too. He’d been idiotic and irresponsible, and he was still trying to hide things from his mother.

But I looked at Miles, and I knew that kid. He was me. Andie had said his grades were slipping and she was worried. This kid had grown up with Terry as his dad, until Terry bailed on him and turned his world upside down. He was in a bad place, and the kids he was hanging out with were no help.

So yeah, I felt for Miles. But just because he was going through something hard didn’t mean there were no rules. There had been no consequences for me when I was his age, and I’d gone straight off the deep end into alcohol, drugs, and fights with my brother that landed him in prison.

“I saw you shoplift at the gas station,” I told Miles. “I also saw you outside the liquor store with Jonathan while Jaden went in to buy. You’ve been lying to your mother for at least a month, probably longer. Tell me how long.”

I watched his skinny chest rise and fall as his alcohol-muddled brain tried to come up with an answer. “You saw that?” he said weakly.

“Yeah, I did. I know that things are screwed up, but you need to get your shit together. Otherwise things are going to get real hard, real soon. And I don’t mean that your mother is going to ground you. I mean that you’re going to get fucked over, and it will be your own fault.”

He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I like Jaden and Jonathan. They’re my friends.”

“Sure they are. They’re on their way home now without you, and if this ever comes up, they’ll say they never met you.”

Miles rubbed his eyes harder. “Everything sucks,” he said with all the drama of a drunk person and a thirteen-year-old combined. Then he started talking.

Most of what he said, I couldn’t follow. There was something about a test that freaked him out and he thought he’d failed it. Something about a friend of his who had just gotten his first girlfriend and didn’t want to hang out with Miles anymore. A convoluted story I couldn’t follow about the football team, which Miles wasn’t even on—he’d failed the tryouts. His father leaving with a girlfriend and not wanting to talk on the phone. His mother snooping through his stuff and accusing him of stealing cigarettes from her purse. Like when he’d thrown up in the grass, Miles tossed up everything that was on his mind in a single run-on sentence of word vomit that went on and on.

I sat in silence, letting him get it out. He didn’t seem like a bad kid; he was just crushed with anxiety and apparently didn’t think he could talk to anyone about it. So I let him talk.

He was winding down, his speech slowing with exhaustion, when headlights appeared and Andie’s car pulled up.

“Miles!” Andie’s voice cracked as she got out of the car and ran toward us. Miles looked scared, but Andie dropped to her knees and put her arms around him, squeezing him close without another word. His body stayed stiff for a second, and then he relaxed, leaning his head on her shoulder.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” he said.

She hugged him tighter.

I watched them for a moment. Then, without a word, I got up, got into my car, and went home.