18. Arrested
Arrested
NORA
Travis was discharged after eleven days.
The crew set up a rotation. Someone was at Travis's apartment every day, helping with whatever he couldn't manage one-handed. Cooking, cleaning, errands. Knox took two mornings a week. Wyatt and Andy covered weekends. Greene and Carl filled in the rest.
On days the crew was on shift, Travis took an Uber to the ER and asked Lori to redress his burns. His left arm was still in a cast, and the burns on his neck were impossible to reach on his own. Lori cleaned them, applied fresh gauze, checked the healing, and sent him home. He came back every time.
It became routine. Travis would show up, Lori would take him back, and twenty minutes later he'd walk out with fresh dressings and something to say about whatever she'd told him while she worked. She'd roll her eyes at the nurses' station after he left, but she never handed him off to anyone else.
"Avery, bay six needs a repeat CBC and a chem panel before I round back. Results to me directly."
"Yes, Dr. Sullivan."
He moved on to the next chart. I drew the labs, labeled the tubes, sent them to the machine, and updated the order in the system. When the results came back, I paged him, gave him the numbers, and waited while he reviewed them.
"Good. Keep me posted if anything shifts."
That was it. That was how it worked between us now. He gave orders, I followed them, I updated him on the patient's progress. Nothing beyond what the job required. After the dinner at his house, after what I overheard in the library, I stopped expecting anything warmer.
"Look at them."
Gracelyn held her phone out to me across the break room table.
On the screen were four kids lined up on a concrete path outside a school building.
They were smiling so hard their faces looked ready to split.
Each one was dressed in a different traditional costume, bold colors and embroidered fabric, some with woven sashes, one of the girls in a dress with wide butterfly sleeves.
"These are your siblings?"
"All four of them. It's Buwan ng Wika. The schools celebrate it every August. The kids dress up in traditional Filipino costumes and do presentations about the culture, the languages, the history.
" She zoomed in on the youngest, a boy of about seven in a barong with sleeves that went past his fingertips.
"That's Jun Jun. He told my mother the barong was too itchy and he wanted to wear a basketball jersey instead. "
I laughed. "There are so many different costumes. Are they all Filipino?"
"They're all Filipino, but they're from different regions." She scrolled to a closer shot of the oldest girl, who wore a long skirt with geometric patterns in red and black. "That's my sister Mary Joy. She chose Cordilleran weaving because she studied it for a school project last year."
"That's beautiful."
Gracelyn looked at the photo once more, then locked her phone and slipped it back into her scrub pocket.
I watched her put the phone away with a smile still on her face. Four siblings, all in school, all dressed up and proud of where they came from.
That made me think about Ian.
School started in a few weeks. The last time we talked about it, he said he would think about going back. He never brought it up again, and I let him not bring it up because I was afraid of what the answer would be.
My phone buzzed on the table. I glanced down.
"Andy?"
"Nora, I need you to come to the precinct."
Her voice was calm, but it was her detective voice. Measured, controlled, professional.
"Is everything okay?"
"Nobody's hurt. Ian is here and he needs you. I'll explain everything when you get here."
My stomach dropped. "Andy, what happened?"
"Just come, Nora. I'll be here when you arrive."
The drive took twenty minutes. The parking lot at the precinct was full, so I parked across the street. My hands were shaking when I pulled the keys out of the ignition.
The front desk officer pointed me down a hallway.
Andy was waiting at the end of it, standing outside an office with her badge on her belt and a folder in her hand.
She looked like she did on the floor at CCMC when she came in for a case.
Professional. Composed. Except her eyes were softer than that.
"Andy?"
"Nora."
"What happened?"
"Gang Crimes executed a search warrant on Rudy's Auto Shop this afternoon. The shop was running a chop shop operation. Stolen vehicles, VIN tampering, trafficking in stolen parts. Everyone on site was arrested."
I heard the words. I understood them individually. They didn't form a sentence that made sense.
"Ian was on site when they went in. He's one of the arrestees."
The hallway tilted. I put my hand on the wall.
"He's okay, Nora. He's not hurt. Because he's a minor, they separated him from the adults. He's in juvenile holding. I called you as soon as I saw his name."
"How long has he been here?"
"A couple of hours. They're still processing the adults. Ian's been cooperative. He hasn't said much, but he hasn't given anyone trouble."
I pressed my back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. The fluorescent light above me buzzed and flickered at one end.
Rudy's. The shop where he said he was learning a trade. The job he was so proud of. The money for the new shoes, the button-down shirt, the dinner at Aurelio's. All of it from stolen cars.
The cut on the back of his hand. Two inches, jagged, scabbed over. Caught it on a fender at the shop. I'd sat across from him at Aurelio's and looked at it and told myself my brother wouldn't lie to me.
"Can I see him?"
Andy nodded. She led me down another hallway to a door with a small window. She stopped with her hand on the handle.
"Nora." She looked at me. "Go easy on him."
She opened the door.
Ian was sitting at a table in a small room with cinder block walls and no windows.
His hands were folded in front of him. He was wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing the last time I saw him.
The same new shoes. He looked up when I walked in, and for a second his face opened, relieved, grateful, like a kid who'd been waiting for someone to come get him.
Then he saw my face, and the relief drained out of his.
Andy closed the door behind me. I heard her footsteps move down the hallway.
I sat across from him. I looked at my brother. My seventeen-year-old brother, sitting in a room at a police precinct because he'd been arrested in a raid on a chop shop. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to scream at him. I sat there and did neither.
"How could you do this?"
He didn't answer.
"How could you let yourself get involved with people who steal cars for a living? People who strip stolen vehicles and change VINs and sell parts they don't own? How could you let them pull you into this, Ian?"
"They didn't pull me into anything. I chose to be there."
"You chose to commit felonies?"
"I chose to work."
"That's not work. That's a crime. You could go to prison for this. Do you understand that? VIN tampering is a felony in Nevada. You're seventeen years old and you have a felony arrest on your record."
His jaw tightened. "I know what I did."
"Did you lie to me about the fire?"
He went still.
"I asked you. Before you started at Rudy's, I looked you in the face and asked if you knew anything about the kids who burned our house down. You said no."
He didn't answer. That was its own answer.
"How long did you know?"
"I didn't know when you asked me." His voice was quieter now. "I found out later. After I started working there."
"And you didn't tell me."
He looked at the table.
"Explain it to me. Because I don't understand how my brother ended up sitting in a police precinct because he was helping people steal cars."
"Don't talk about them like that."
I stopped. "Excuse me?"
"You don't get to talk about my friends like that. You don't know them. You don't know anything about them."
"I know they got you arrested, Ian."
"They didn't get me arrested. They gave me a place to go." He was looking at me now, and something in his face had shifted. The relief was gone. The guilt was gone. What was left was anger, and it was pointed directly at me. "You were never there, Nora."
The words hit me like a wall.
"You weren't there when Mom started using.
You weren't there when I sat at the kitchen table begging her to stop, and she looked right through me like I wasn't even in the room.
You weren't there the morning I woke up and went to her bedroom and she wasn't breathing.
" His voice cracked, but he kept going. "You were at school.
And then after she died, you were at work, or in class, or picking up another shift, and I was in that house by myself. "
I couldn't speak. I couldn't move.
"Jesse was there. Jesse's brother was there.
Those guys you're calling criminals were the ones who showed up when I had nobody.
They walked me to school. They checked on me after school when nobody else did.
They sat with me when I didn't want to be alone in that house.
" His eyes were wet but his voice was steady now, like he'd been carrying this for years and had finally found the door.
"So don't sit there and tell me they're bad people.
They were there for me when you weren't."
I sat there.
Six years. Doubles, night classes, bills paid before anything else, food in the house, clothes on his back, a light left on in the hallway so he wouldn't wake up scared.
He was right that the house was empty. He was right that I wasn't in it. I was working. I was always working. I had to be. But knowing why didn't change the fact that he was alone.
We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything.
I didn't know what to do.