Page 92 of Saving Wyatt

Two men dragged Wyatt out of the town hall, but instead of dumping him in the street, they shoved him in the back of a car and sped away, further and further into the unknown.

My hand slipped down from Warren’s arm to his hand, and we held each other as we watched his brother and the second love of my life get carried farther and farther away from us.

I hated this plan.

I hated this plan something fierce.

THIRTY-THREE

WYATT

Iblinked. Everything was blurry. A sliver of light caught my eyes just right, blinding me momentarily and making my vision even worse.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and when I opened them next, I found figures, dark figures standing in front of me. My arms throbbed. I tried to move them, but they were wound tight behind me. I was pressed firmly against a wooden beam that dug into my back between my shoulder blades, but I was alive. For now.

“You couldn’t let it go, could you?” someone said.

They sounded familiar, but even when I looked up, I couldn’t see very well. The two figures standing in front of me parted to the sides, one of them caught the light that shot through the ceiling, and I recognized him as Stretchy. Which must mean the other guy was Shorty.

A third man walked between them, approaching me. He looked rather short and a little round in the midsection, but still I couldn’t tell who he was.

I blinked again.

“You had to make a scene. You had to be the good guy, didn’t you?” said the middle guy, and this time I caught a bit of his accent and tone and flicked my eyes open as wide as possible, leaning in closer.

He helped me by taking one more step from total darkness to dim light, and my heart stilled for a second. My entire body froze as I looked back at the familiar figure. A man I’d known all my life. A man I called a friend.

“Hank?” I asked, still in disbelief, and he frowned.

“You’re a stubborn old man,” the police captain said and crouched down to eye level, making himself more visible in my worn eyes.

“Wh-what are you doing here? Why are you here?”

I looked around me. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was still dreaming. Maybe I was in the station and the rest was all in my head. Hank Mitchell couldn’t be working with the enemy. He was supposed to be one of the good guys. He was the head of the police department for crying out loud. He wasn’t a bad guy.

“You kept digging and digging, poking the bear like some sort of superhero. Are you happy now? You’ve gone ahead and pissed him off,” he said, ignoring my question, but he’d only gone and confirmed my worst fear.

I always knew there might be more dirty cops, more uniforms in Wilson’s pocket than just Bennet, the guy I had supposedly killed, but I never imagined it’d be the captain.

“How could you?” I shouted. “How could you work for that man? Have you no dignity? No morals?”

He scoffed. “Dignity? Morals? When was the last time they paid the bills, huh? Twenty? Thirty years ago?”

Bile rose in my throat, and its bitter taste in my mouth made me wince. “So you turn to crime? Really? How’s that going for you?”

Hank shrugged. “It’s going a lot better than you think. Or it was, until you came back and started digging your nose in our business.”

I shook my head. He might have confirmed himself a criminal, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails out of any of it.

“Your business was—is—hurting people. How could you go into business with a man like that? How?”

“You wouldn’t understand. We’re not all holy, like you, Wyatt. We don’t all have a cushy life⁠—”

“Cushy? What the fuck are you talking about, idiot! I was in the Navy. You think I made millions saving your asses from foreign threats? I had nothing. And thanks to you, anything I did manage to get is gone now.”

“So now you know how it feels to hit rock bottom.” He smirked.

“Rock bottom? You? You live in a fucking mansion. You’ve lost your mind.”