Page 12 of Phoenix

“What’s going on?” Jule asked. Tyson grabbed him and started pulling. “What are you doing?” Jule tried to shake him off. “Tor!”

Another bang rang out.

“Jule, we need to leave.” Tyson snaked his arm around Jule’s waist and hefted him over his shoulder. He wasn’t taller than Jule, but he was built. Every time Tyson got locked up, he seemed to gain another ten pounds of muscle. They liked to joke that he kept getting caught as part of a workout plan.

“Ty, what the fuck? What’s happening? Where’d Tor go?”

Tyson took off at a run, veered around Jule’s father’s Mercedes, which was parked in its usual spot behind the house, down the side of the house, and over to the street. He ignored Jule’s demands and questions, yanked the back door of his car open, tossed him inside, and slammed the door shut. Before Jule could get his bearings, they were peeling away from the house.

“Where are we going?” Jule sat up and gripped the front seat. “Where’s Tor?”

“I’m taking you to your house.”

“What? No. Where’s Tor? What’s happening?”

“Shit just went really wrong. Really, really wrong.” Tyson slammed his hand against the steering wheel. “Fuck. Fuck.”

“Turn the car around.”

“No.”

“Ty!”

“Tor said to get you out and that’s what I’m doing.”

Jule would have jumped out of the car but the way Tyson was speeding and swerving through traffic made that impossible.They got to his street in half the time it should have taken, and Tyson slammed the breaks at the end of his block.

“I don’t want cameras picking up my car in front of your house. Get out and go inside now.”

“Not until you tell me what’s happening.”

Tyson turned around and his face was full of fear, something Jule had never seen and hadn’t considered possible. “Tor’s handling it and I’m going back to help him. Your job is to get inside your house and stay there. And you can never, ever tell anyone you were at the house. Ever.”

“Fuck that.” He felt his anger rising. “I need to help Tor. If you won’t take me then—”

“Jule!” Tyson shouted. He had never yelled at Jule before and the shock of it shut him up. “There isn’t time for you to freak out right now. If you want to help Tor, get into your house and keep your mouth closed.”

“Okay.” His stomach twisted but he opened the car door and climbed out. “Tell him to call me.”

Tyson dipped his chin. “Not a single word to anyone. No matter what.”

“Got it.” Jule closed the car door and walked to his house, hoping that whatever happened wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

Chapter 4– Age 18

“I promise you, we’re working on it,” said Charles Montez, the chief of the Phoenix Police Department.

He was sitting on their living room sofa. Jule’s father had insisted they buy it because it would convey the right message to guests and his mother had argued against it because it was cream and she was sure Jule would spill something on it and destroy twenty thousand dollars in twenty seconds. Jule hadn’t ever spilled anything on that sofa. He probably hadn’t ever sat on it. Unfortunately, Harold Sterling was no longer around to remind Barbara Sterling that he had been right.

“How precisely are you working on it?” his grandmother asked. “It’s been four months and you haven’t arrested the person who murdered my son.”

Jule had never been close to his grandparents, to anyone in his biological family really. But he felt sorry for them. His father’s death had hit them hard. Both of them seemed to have aged dramatically over the past four months. Jule, on the other hand, had been in a holding pattern. He still got up every day, still went to school, still came home, but he didn’t think about any of it, didn’t distinguish one day from the next. He was in a fog. And it wasn’t because his father was dead.

“It’s a very complicated situation,” the chief said.

“I fail to understand how the murder of the sitting attorney general is so complex that your department is unable to handle it, but if I need to make some calls to help you get motivated, I’ll do that.”

“We are handling it, Governor Sterling,” the chief insisted. It was always weird hearing his grandfather referred to that way because Jule hadn’t been alive when he had been in office, but in formal settings, that was what people called him. “We’ve formed a joint task force with the DEA and ATF.”