Chapter 8
“Dalton, son, today is the Sabbath, and I know that means something to you because you’ve attended church with your family every Sunday since your oldest was born. What today is not, is the day to test me. Had a bad night and I’m struggling not to take my frustrations out on others.”
Roan glanced at Santiago, then turned her gaze back to Dalton, her weapon drawn.
“Put down the knife and let Mercy go,” Santi ordered.
“To hell with you and her on the goddamn Sabbath, Satan Stillwater. Where were you when she was fucking Tommy Lewellen with my damn kids in the house!”
“I didn’t, I swear!” Mercy cried out.
“Shut up!” Dalton screamed like a mad man, tightening his arm around her neck, the tip of his knife moving closer to Mercy’s swollen belly.
Santiago advanced slowly, arms up and spread wide, to show Dalton he wasn’t a threat.
“You know Mercy loves you and your kids. You harm her, you harm your unborn son, and for what?” he asked, moving closer.
“Tommy Lewellen? No woman wants Tommy Lewellen, the man’s a leech and a user and if I were to bet money on it, I’d say he’s the one that got you hooked.
Now you’re out here paranoid and threatening the life of the only woman who’s loved you; who’s treated you with any kindness.
She’s had your back when half the town refused to believe there was any goodness in you. ”
The abuse Dalton experienced as a child was a secret to no one. After his mother and father were hauled off to jail when he was eight, he was placed in the care of his uncle two towns away.
Dalton swallowed, blinking, as if fighting to see the situation clearly.
He began to tremble and the arm around Mercy’s neck loosened as the knife moved away from her protruding stomach.
Just as Santiago moved close enough to take the knife away, the rumble of a loud motor could be heard moving up the dirt road.
Roan cursed and Santigo glanced over his shoulder to see Tommy Lewellen’s souped-up blue pickup come to a stop next to the cruiser.
Almost convulsively Dalton’s harm tightened around Mercy, but this time it seemed protective not possessive. It was Mercy’s response, the way her light brown hands took hold of Dalton’s dirty pale arm with both hands, holding on to him as if for protection rather than fear.
He looked at Roan and nodded slightly. She shifted position to cover Dalton and Mercy as Santiago moved toward the newcomer.
“Lewellen, get back in your car and head to wherever you need to go that’s not here. We’re handling this.”
He flashed back to the moment he said similar words to another interfering pain in his goddamn ass.
His level of irritation rose twofold at the thought of the woman.
“Don’t mean no trouble, Sheriff,” Tommy drawled, looking at Dalton as if he were something pitiful. “I’m just here to offer support to a friend in need.” Tommy’s gaze turned to Mercy. “We don’t want poor Dalton to do something stupid and harm our sweet Mercy, do we?”
From the corner of his eye Santiago saw Dalton’s knife rise, the blade now pointing in Tommy’s direction.
A familiar revulsion rose in his throat.
He’d witnessed shit like this play out all over the world.
Someone in a position of power—be it soldier, politician, crime lord, spiritual leader—would see something, or someone, they wanted and threaten annihilation of everything that man or woman held dear if that person didn’t hand over whatever it was they wanted.
In this situation, Tommy likely befriended Dalton, preyed on his trauma and insecurities, and in his more vulnerable moments offered the numbing effects of drugs.
Once he was addicted and financially strapped, Tommy went after what he really wanted, knowing the man Dalton was before the drugs had the physical strength and mountain knowledge to have buried Tommy in undiscoverable scattered graves all over the mountain.
“Help me out a minute will you Mercy?” Santiago asked. “Will you let her do that Dalton?”
Dalton closed his eyes and shook his head, lowering it to rest on the top of Mercy’s thick head of black hair. “I can’t let her go, Sheriff. I know I’ve made some mistakes, but Mercy and the kids, they all I got.”
“And I’m not saying you gotta lose’em, but some things, Dalton…some things you hold the wrong way and you break’em forever. Right now though, all I want is to hear from Mercy.”
“I don’t want to lose you, baby,” Dalton whispered more to himself than any one of them. “All the goodness in my life I got because of you.”
“Baby, it’s okay,” Mercy said, rubbing Dalton’s arm. “If you can’t trust my word, at least trust the sheriff.”
“I do trust you Mercy, I trust you with my life. It’s just that I’m not—”
“Not the man you once were. We all know that, Dalton,” Tommy said, moving closer.
Santiago maneuvered around until Dalton and Mercy were to his left and Tommy to his right.
“Tommy, you’ve been warned. You come any closer and you will experience some immediate, real-life consequences.”
Tommy stopped abruptly.
“Dalton, I’m gonna talk to Mercy a little bit, and unless your intention is truly to hurt her, I need you to toss the knife.”
Dalton tossed the knife away as if it burned and from behind, wrapped both his arms around his wife. “I was never gonna hurt you, Mercy. I just wanted the truth.”
“That’s a backward ass way to get the truth,” Roan snapped, retrieving the weapon, gun still at the ready.
“I’m sorry Mercy. He just got in my head and stayed there even when he wasn’t around. When Junior said he saw y’all kissing on the mouth the way mommies and daddies do—”
Mercy pulled away from him, her tawny skin red with emotion.
“Go ahead and tell him Mercy. You can’t protect him, the kids, and yourself. Let’s see if he can once again be the man you need him to be.”
Mercy swallowed as she looked at Dalton.
“I tried to be understanding. You were so excited to have a friend with money who accepted you, seemed to look out for you. He talked you into leaving your mechanic job at Simon’s to be a service manager at his cousin’s shop.
..then you started partying with him and his friends, coming home high, and all of a sudden me and the kids weren’t your first or even your second priority.
You walked out on us and left the door open for the very devil.
That kiss you’re all riled up about was him trying to force himself on me…
and now you tell me our son saw that!” There was anger mixed with her tears.
“You simple lying bitch,” Tommy said flatly.
“I might be simple in my needs, and I have been known to be a bitch on a few occasions, but I am Kevon Douglas’s daughter, and I’ll whoop your sorry ass now like I did then!”
Poor Dalton looked so confused. It was like he was waking up to a strange new world.
“What happened after you showed him, in the most appropriate way, to fuck off?” Santigo prompted.
“He gave me eight days to the minute to change my mind. If I didn’t, Dalton would lose his job and maybe accidently overdose in his grief, he said.”
“You’re panicked and desperate, Mercy. I know that’s how you need to spin what we were doing so that your husband won’t toss you out, but it’s a lie and you know it.
You’ve been begging me for months to take care of you in a way that Dalton couldn’t, so don’t act like you’re the victim and what we were doing wasn’t 100 percent consensual. ”
Tommy had only lived at Shrouded Lake for the last year and a half, so he didn’t know the degree to which, before going to his uncle’s, Dalton had been feral.
Santiago could see the rage crawling through the haze of Dalton’s addiction. Santiago was of two minds: he could step aside and do the just thing, let Tommy really get to know Dalton; or he could do the legal thing and arrest Dalton and Tommy.
He sighed and reached for his handcuffs.
“Dalton you’re going to jail. Mercy, do you want to at least file charges against Tommy?”
“Yes, Sheriff. I do,” she said firmly, then turned to Dalton and slapped him hard enough to knock his ass straight back to reality.
“I’m going to my momma’s and I’m taking the kids. If you ever—”
“I won’t baby; I wouldn’t ever hurt you.”
“But you did Dalton, long before you threatened me with that knife,” she cried. “You get right and be a better man than you were before all of this or I promise you’ll never see me and the kids again. I love you, but it’s time for you to love yourself more than me or anyone else.”
She walked back into the house and closed the door.
It was hard to look at Dalton then. He looked at the house like the starving beat-up pup he’d once been. When he lifted his head to look at Santiago, there were tears in his eyes.
“I’m going to jail?”
“Yes son. You held a knife on your pregnant wife; there’s gotta be consequences for—”
Dalton ran forward, and Santi cursed. For a minute Santiago thought Dalton was going for his truck. He didn’t want the headache of chasing down a man high on who knew what, and if Dalton got past them, he could hide out months if not a lifetime in these mountains.
Unfortunately for Tommy, Dalton wasn’t trying to escape.
Santiago and Roan looked on for longer than appropriate as the man beat the living shit out of Tommy.
When Santiago stepped forward, Dalton stood and held his arms out, quietly allowing Santiago to cuff him and place him in the back of the cruiser.
Roan rolled a half-conscious Tommy onto his back and cuffed him as well.
“We’re going to hell,” Roan said after securing Tommy in her vehicle.
Santiago nodded. “We’ll likely get fired first.”
He was becoming too comfortable with the possibility.
“I talked to Sonny this morning,” she said.
One of the last times Santiago had seen Sonny, it was under similar circumstances. Unlike with Dalton, Sonny’s behavior had felt like a betrayal.