I felt my middle tighten at his words.
“You still live with your dad, kid?” I asked, feeling sorry for the kid now that I’d heard a little about his situation.
“I live with him as far as the school knows,” Bryan hedged. “Why?”
“Because you’re what, seventeen?” I asked.
He nodded.
“You can emancipate yourself,” I suggested. “Get yourself away from here. Away from your father’s toxicity.”
“I’m going to jail, dude,” Bryan countered. “What’s it matter if I emancipate myself? You a lawyer or something?”
I nodded. “I am.”
He rolled his eyes and turned back to Flint.
“I wasn’t really going to hit her,” he grunted. “I changed my mind at the last second. That’s why you were able to stop me.”
Now that he explained it like he had, I had to agree.
Had Bryan wanted to hurt her, he would have. We’d been across the room at the time.
Flint made a disagreeing sound then crossed his arms over his chest.
Flint’s K-9 partner, Dooley, sat down blankly staring right back at the kid, as if he was only waiting for an excuse to attack.
I almost wished he would.
“There, you see?” Carmichael said, unaware of the volatile stare down between Flint, Dooley, and Bryan. “No harm, no foul.”
“Carmichael,” Flint replied stiffly. “Don’t you have a class to teach at the gym in a couple of minutes?”
Carmichael cursed. “Shit, yeah. I do. Camryn, can I hitch a ride with you? My car is low on gas, and I don’t think I’ll have time to stop for any.”
“Of course,” Camryn agreed, realizing what Carmichael didn’t. “Let’s go.”
Carmichael, for some reason, gave me a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t hurt him.”
I wouldn’t hurt him. But I wouldn’t stop him from getting hurt, either.
“Leave your keys and we’ll bring your car to you,” I suggested, holding out my hand.
She reluctantly pulled her keys out of her pocket and handed them to me.
“Don’t do anything stupid with it like you did last time,” she ordered.
Her idea of ‘stupid’ was actually me getting the car detailed. But Jesus, there was only so much of her car I could take. Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure how she lived like she lived.
Where her house and yard were immaculate? Her car was a completely different story. It was like she lived out of it.
Gatorade and water bottles littered the floor. Protein bar wrappers. Clothes. Shoes. Groceries that she hadn’t gotten around to bringing inside.
If you could dream it, you could likely find it on the floorboard of Carmichael’s car.
“He probably wouldn’t have enough time to get it cleaned anyway,” Camryn laughed as she latched on to Carmichael’s hand. “Let’s go. Bye, baby.”
Flint gave a chin lift but kept his eyes focused on the stupid kid in front of us.
“What were you not saying?” I asked, fully aware when someone was lying or holding back from me.
I was a criminal defense lawyer. I knew things that most people could only dream of.
I knew without a doubt when someone was lying, which was why I did the type of job that I did.
I would not be the man that got criminals off the hook. I got innocent people off the hook.
There was a major difference.
Take the case that I just finished working, for instance.
There was a young man that happened to be in the wrong place at the very correct time. He saw something he shouldn’t have seen—i.e., someone getting killed—and he’d gone to the police with it.
Only, the cop that he went to happened to be dirty. Or, at least, the lead detective on the case was dirty. Fast forward a year, and that young man was serving a life sentence for cold-blooded murder thanks to a cop and a justice system that failed him.
When his family had come to me, I’d done my level best to figure out everything for them.
And what I had found had led me to a very small potatoes crime syndicate that did business in our area. Business that consisted of some white-collar crimes, no small amount of murder when people got in their way, and a couple of very high-profile businessmen that didn’t like when the spotlight was put on their business.
“Umm, nothing?” Bryan hedged, kicking the dirt with his foot.
“Listen, kid,” Flint ordered. “This is going to go a lot better for you if you just tell us what’s going on. Right now, you have sympathy for how you were raised on your side. You weren’t given a good hand in life. I know that. You know that. The system failed you. But, just sayin’, if you force my hand because you don’t tell me everything that’s going on, you’re not going to like where you end up. Most likely, you’ll be charged as an adult. Most likely, you’ll be spending some hard time in jail for the assault of a teacher. Most likely, you’ll ruin any and all chances that you ever had at making a life for yourself. I don’t want that for you. Carmichael doesn’t want that for you. And it just so happens that I have a really good lawyer right here that’ll be willing to help you if you need it.”
Bryan’s shoulders slumped.
“Dammit,” he grumbled, throwing his head back on a groan. Then he looked around to see whether there was anyone close. “They follow me.”
Flint stiffened. “Let’s go back into the school.”
I walked back into the school with them and walked with them to Flint’s office that was just a bit farther past the theater building. When we got there, it was to find barely anyone left in the school. The only person that we passed on the way was a janitor that was too busy wiping ‘fuck you Coach Duff’ that’d been spray painted on a set of lockers.
“Who’d Ezra piss off?” I wondered idly.
“Coach Duff banned a couple of seniors off the baseball team this week because he found them trying to assault a girl,” Bryan murmured. “Fuckers.”
My eyes met Flint’s over the top of Bryan’s head.
This kid was actually a pretty good kid. You couldn’t fake sincerity like that. I could tell that Flint understood that just by the look on his face.
“What were they doing?” I asked.
“They were trying to fu—uh, have sex with her, in the locker room. She wanted it, but she didn’t want to do it there. You know? When they told her she was doing it there, she freaked out. That’s about the time that Coach Duff came into the room and caught them,” he answered. “He suspended them on the spot from the team. And they’re seniors, you know? They’re pissed as hell because this was their year to be seen by scouts. So, they’re doing damage to show how pissed they are.”
I looked at Flint. “You know that happened?”
Flint nodded. “Dealt with that this morning, actually.”
“Good,” I grumbled. “They shouldn’t get to play after that anyway. They suspended from school, too?”
“Indefinitely,” Flint confirmed. “They’ll now be getting GEDs or going to an alternative school. They won’t be coming back to Gun Barrel High.”
“Good,” I said as we turned the corner to head into Flint’s office.