Without Mercy - Lisa Jackson [1]
“Damn,” she whispered, wiping her face, the vestiges of her ever-recurring dream slipping back to the dark corners of her mind. She glanced at the clock and groaned, realizing with a sinking feeling that she’d forgotten to reset her alarm.
Rolling off the bed, she disturbed her cat that had been sleeping in a ball on the second pillow. He lifted his gray head and stretched, yawning to show off his needle-sharp teeth as she snagged her bathrobe from the foot of the bed and threw it on. She didn’t have time for a shower, much less a jog.
Instead, she threw water over her face, tossed a couple of extra-strength Excedrin into her mouth, and washed them down by tilting her head under the faucet. After yanking on jeans and an oversized sweatshirt, she found an old Trail Blazers cap. Then she searched for her keys, scrounging in her purse and in the pockets of the jacket she’d worn the day before.
Her cell phone rang, and she found it plugged in to the charger on the floor near her bed.
Flipping it open, she saw Shay’s face on the small LED screen.
“Where are you?” her sister demanded.
“I’m on my way.”
“It’s too late. We’re almost there!”
“Already?” Jules tugged on one sneaker as she glanced back at the clock. “I thought you were leaving at nine.”
“The pilot called. There’s a storm or something. I don’t know. He has to fly out earlier.”
“Oh, no! Make him wait.”
“I can’t! Don’t you get it? She’s really doing it, Jules,” Shay said, and some of the toughness in her voice disappeared. “Edie’s getting rid of me.”
That was a little overly dramatic, but so was Shay, through and through.
Jules finished lacing her running shoes. “Then tell her to wait.”
“You tell her,” Shay said, and a second later Jules heard her mother’s voice say, “Look, Julia, there’s no reason to argue with me; this is beyond my control. I told Shaylee that she has to go whenever the pilot can fly her safely to the school, and he says they need to go earlier because of the storm.”
“No, Mom, wait. You can’t just send her to—”
“I damned well can. She’s underage. I’m her guardian. And she’s got a court order. We’ve had this conversation before. Let’s not re-hash it.”
“But—”
“It’s either this or juvenile detention again. This is her last chance, Julia! The judge ordered her to make a choice, and she, smart as she is, took the school. It was also her choice to hang out with that criminal and take part in a crime. Her boyfriend wasn’t so fortunate; he didn’t have a rich father to get him a lawyer. Dawg will be going to prison for a long time, so your sister should count herself lucky!”
“Just wait!”
The connection was severed, leaving Jules to worry from the middle of her messy bedroom. She couldn’t believe her mother was actually shipping Shaylee off to a distant school for troubled teens, one that was in the middle of no-damned-where. She flew out of her condo and waved to Mrs. Dixon, her neighbor, as the woman carried her wet newspaper into her unit.
Once inside her old Volvo, she drove toward Lake Washington and the address she’d gotten from Edie earlier, the spot from which Shaylee was to be picked up by seaplane for her ride to Blue Rock Academy in southern Oregon. Edie had given Jules the address the day before.
Jules floored it.
However, the freeway was a parking lot, and the latest traffic report blaring from Jules’s radio didn’t make her feel any better. Apparently everyone who owned a car in the state of Washington was sitting on the I-5 freeway in the drizzling rain, as evidenced by the line of blazing taillights stretching ahead of her Volvo. Jules peered wearily past the slapping windshield wiper as the traffic crawled north. Still fighting a headache, she drummed her fingers on her steering wheel and wished she knew a faster way to get to Lake Washington.
She’d battled rush hour down in Portland, Oregon, when she’d worked at Bateman High, but since losing her teaching job last June, she’d been spared the annoyance of