Page 314 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 2

Kaylah looked at her. Tabby’s jaw dropped. So did her stomach. “Wh-what? Oh my god, you took me for a ride on my birthday in a stolen car?!”

“I wanted tonight to be special!”

Tabby’s jaw dropped all over again. “Special?! We’re going to get arrested!”

From the backseat, one of the boys offered a nervous laugh. “That does kind of make it special.”

“Dude,” his friend said, and smacked his shoulder. “Not funny.”

Behind them, the cop car was right on their ass and, as Tabby stared in dismay through the windshield, in the distance she caught glimpse of another set of red and blue flashing lights winking in and out through the brush and rock that separated them. It had to be at least a mile off.

“We can outrun them,” Kaylah decided.

“No, we can’t!” Pointing through the windshield, she cried, “There’s a cop coming at us from up ahead, we got another behind us. Where the hell are we supposed to go? There’s no turnoff on this road. You’re going to get us killed, and I don’t want to be dead for my birthday. Pull over right now, Kaylah, or I’m never going to be your friend again!”

“Oh, you’ve been saying that since the third grade…”

Tabitha almost shoved out of her seatbelt as she grabbed her friend’s shirt, yanking on her as she bellowed, “I said. Pull. Over!”

Running through every swear word she knew, Kaylah made a face. She also took her foot off the gas and, flashing her blinkers, pulled the car half off the road, which was all the narrow roadside allowed for before it became the sheer rocky upward slope of an escarpment.

Kaylah got five years with an additional ten on parole for the grand theft auto, reckless endangerment, and evading arrest charges.

Tabby got three, with an additional three years’ parole, just for sitting in the car beside her.

What happened to the boys, she had no idea, but the last she saw of Kaylah was at the sentencing when she was carted off to one prison and Tabby to another, 360 miles south of home. They weren’t allowed even to hug each other goodbye, which just about broke her, but not as much as her father. He came to the trial every day. He listened with no expression on his face while she tried to explain what happened and how she didn’t know the car was stolen, and she’d tried to get Kaylah to stop. He came everyday all the way up to the sentencing, but halfway through it, he shook his head, got up and walked out.

That was the last she saw of anyone in her family. No one came to visit her in prison. No one answered when she tried to call on the phone. Although she sent hundreds of letters, praying her father or siblings might still love her enough to forgive her if only she apologized just right, no one responded, not even to say her mother would be rolling in her grave. Her father’s continued silence was devastating.

The time she spent in jail was the worst three years of her life. Or so she thought, right up until she was released.

They didn’t ship her 360 miles back to where she came from. They just put her on a prison bus and carted her off to the nearby town of Starvation, with the fourteen dollars she’d earned pennies at a time working in the laundry room, and an official note telling her where and with whom to check in once she reached the halfway house where she was assigned to stay until she was off parole. She had nothing, just the things she’d had on her when she was arrested—her purse, a dead cell phone without a charger, the clothes on her back, and the now worthless bank card that her father had shut off while she was locked up.

The prison bus dropped her in front of Buster’s Hardware, the biggest of the six businesses attached to this small town strip mall. Southern Utah was hotter than the northern part. As she stood with the heat of the late afternoon sun beating down on her shoulders, she studied the mall.

In addition to Buster’s there was a laundromat, a thrift store, a Dollar General, and two empty shops with For-Lease signs in the locked glass doors. Across the street was a modest grocery store and a gas station. The next block over was the sheriff’s office, with a white sheriff’s truck and two deputy cars parked in the gravel lot, and a town hall currently advertising sewing classes and both child and senior care activities. Every building she could see had the architectural earmarks of having been built in the 1800s, including the Dollar General.

It was the kind of small town that put out a hand-painted sign boasting of 362 residents, and probably repainted it whenever someone was born or buried, but left the three bullet holes shot through the a’s and the o of Starvation, as a decorative touch. A stagnating desert town full of nothing but red-rock dust and skin-roasting sunshine, with more abandoned buildings and houses than occupied ones, the only thing stopping Starvation from being a ghost town was the sure knowledge that no self-respecting ghost would stick around to haunt it. It felt empty, despite maybe the three cars in the grocery store parking lot and another five at the strip mall. No cars were moving, and the only person she saw was—her luck being what it was—a tall man in a long-sleeved beige shirt and military dark green pants getting out of the clearly marked sheriff’s truck in front of the station.

She stared at him as he sauntered up the three porch steps. Yup, he was country all right, unhurried in his walk, and if his clothes weren’t lying, as fit as any man she’d ever seen. His shoulders were broad, his hips lean, and even from here… yeah, nice ass.

He reached the top of the steps, passing into the shadow of the porch roof. One hand taking hold of the door latch, just as she was about to turn away, he paused and the grey cowboy hat on his shaved head swiveled around as he looked straight back at her.

The world’s tiniest firework pinged in the pit of her tight stomach, shimmering outward into a flower of pure nerves, cold anxiety and something else that flashed hot and low and which wasn’t at all what she was prepared to identify or deal with.

She quickly turned away. She’d had her fill of policemen anyway, and everyone knew small town cops were the worst. It’s where all the Barney Fifes came to pretend they were more important than really they were.

She flattened her lips, swallowing back the vitriol she was pretty sure she didn’t have a right to feel. Three years in prison followed by three years of banishment into the dust bowl of Utah could do that to a girl.

“This is a chance for a new start,” Miss Margo, the most motherly of all the prison guards, had said as she’d escorted Tabby through the process of leaving the facility. She’d stood with her as she’d collected her meager things from when she’d been processed into the system, and even walked with her out to the waiting bus. “Ain’t nobody got to make your choices for you, honey. Don’t you fall into that trap again, you hear me?”

“Yes, Miss Margo,” she’d obediently said.

And now here she was. In the middle of Starvation, her next ‘home away from home’ for another three years. She didn’t feel good about this place. This didn’t feel like a new start. To be honest, all she really felt was the same sense of dread and shame that had haunted her since her arrest.

She peeked back over her shoulder. The sheriff was still standing exactly as he had been, watching her.

Definitely a Barney Fife, she thought, frowning at him. Just what she needed next in her life. She turned all the way away, giving him her full back and reached into her pink plastic childhood purse to pull out the appointment card she’d been given. The address to her halfway home was on the bottom. She wasn’t sure where the house was, but it was on Main Street and so was she. She compared the numbers on the strip mall stores to the house number on her card. Crap. It was behind her.

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