Bastard.
I felt like my eye sockets were filled with cotton. I told Cole this when he asked how I was doing.
“How’s your rear end?” he asked. “Sore?”
“No.”
“Bruises?”
“No. Was that your goal? To bruise my butt?”
He raised a brow at my tone. “If it’ll teach you not to get in the car with Benny again.”
My turn to raise a brow. “You really don’t like him.”
“If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t either.”
“I don’t need to know anything more to dislike him. Not like Donnie DeMarco,” I mentioned my long ago ex-boyfriend, who I was pretty sure now worked for the mob.
Sure enough, Cole glowered.
“Never mind.” I took a sip of coffee, and kept my eyes on the table. “We need to talk.”
“We do. How much do you remember from last night?”
“All of it. You know everything I’ve done. You caught me doing most of it, and the rest Mr. Roberts told you.”
“So that’s it?” His gaze was hard.
“Yes.”
“Well, then you have two options.” He set the coffee cup down. “One is I take you down to the station, charge you. I’ll ask Mr. Roberts to press charges, and he will. You’d be wise to plead guilty. The judge would sentence you. You might get some jail time. Your mom will go to a nursing home?—”
“What’s the second option?” I interrupted.
He fixed me with a stern look and continued. “The second option is unique, but you won’t like it any more. There’s no jail time, no reporting the crime. Mr. Roberts trusts me to handle it, and I said I’d do my best. It’s up to you, though.”
I wanted to know what option two entailed, but couldn’t help asking, “Why would he do that? Why would he tell you everything and ask you for help?”
“Because he knows I care about you. When you got back from college, I checked in on you from time to time.”
“You did?”
“Yes. I would’ve gone to you directly, but ever since the rock incident, I knew you weren’t speaking to me.”
“The rock incident?” I asked, startled. Then I remembered. “Oh yeah.” When I was fourteen, and hanging with a crowd slightly older, some people thought it would be cool to sit at an overpass and throw rocks at cop cars. I wasn’t involved, until I heard that Cole had caught some of them, but the only kid who got in trouble was the one who lived in the trailer park. I’d been reading Malcolm X, and went and screamed at Cole for discrimination.
“I called you a racist.”
“It was unfortunate that the only kid I caught with a rock in his hand was Winston. And that the driver only accused him of throwing rocks, and not the white kids.”
“You made an example of him. I didn’t think it was fair.”
“It wasn’t fair,” Cole said, surprising me. “I wanted to charge all of them as delinquents. The sergeant wouldn’t let me. I decided that day to become sheriff.”
I blinked in surprise.
“But Winston did okay,” Cole continued. “The group home was better than his family home.”
