Read Broken: A story of hope and forgiveness Page 30

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  “Who?” Charles said incredulously into his cell phone, shocked beyond belief. He was standing just outside a coffee shop near the on-ramp of Interstate 35 on the outskirts of Darkwell. It was the day after the boys’ trip to the jail. He had left them and the rest of the family back at the hospital while he did some more investigative work in Darkwell—despite his fraternity connection to the boss, Sheriff Anderson’s underlings were not being very helpful over the telephone. He smoked a cigarette for the first time in more than a year while checking in with his office, using his cell phone just outside the entrance to the restaurant. Smoking was a previous nervous habit he didn’t mind picking up again, at least for now, as long as no one else found out about it. He managed to buy the pack of cigarettes at the gas station just before they stopped for lunch while Max and Nolan waited for him in the car. Neither yet knew he had done so, and he intended to not let them know anytime soon. His intent was to take a few drags from the cigarette, then crush its tip on the sidewalk just before he walked back into the restaurant, killing his smoke breath with one last gulp of his coffee. A little less than an hour had passed since his unfortunate confrontation with Brown, and he noticed the hand holding the cigarette still shaking due to the adrenaline the revelation had dosed throughout his body.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” he said, immediately sticking the cigarette’s filtered end back in his mouth and sucking in a much deeper dose of smoke and nicotine than he had since lighting it up a minute or so before. The hand holding the phone to his ear started to shake, too.

  “I’m afraid not,” Becky, his secretary, replied. “It looks like he really screwed up this time.”

  “You don’t understand,” Charles replied. “That’s the guy who hit Robert. I just found out yesterday.”

  “Oh my gosh,” she gasped.

  “So it’s a jail visit he wants,” he said, calmer now, as a wry and almost wicked smile etched itself onto his face. His hands stopped shaking as his mind began to churn. While he was still personally devastated at the role he played in his grandson’s accident, he couldn’t help but feel anger toward the man who was directly responsible: the drunk who plowed the car into Robert’s young body. As he had these thoughts, he had taken a few more drags from his cigarette, enough to burn off a fourth of its end.

  “You still there?” Becky asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied, startled out of his deep, dark thoughts of vengeance and justice, things defense attorneys weren’t supposed to think about. “I’ll give him a jail visit he won’t soon forget.”

  “Charles,” Becky said. He knew she sensed his intentions; she had been around him too long to not. “Am I gonna regret telling you about this?”

  Becky had been Charles’s secretary/legal assistant for the last fifteen years of his thirty-year legal career. She was in her mid-fifties, a tad over five feet tall, and a little overweight, but otherwise an attractive brunette, though much of her hair’s darkness came from a bottle, which covered up a substantial number of gray hairs. Widowed at the age of forty-nine, she still had one college-aged son at home with the last of her three daughters married off and living in Kansas City, Missouri, for most of the past five years. Regardless of her status as a mother (none of her kids had children yet, so she was not yet a grandmother), much of her satisfaction came from her association with Charles Fleming; the legal community believed that Becky was a big reason for Charles’s sterling reputation. And that impression was absolutely true. He never missed a hearing, and it was Becky who made sure of it.