The four boys stood in an awkward square, no one quite daring to make the first move, no one quite willing to speak.
Brayden Maxwell, who knew he was already the quietest of the bunch, couldn’t force even a single word. He just shifted from foot to foot, wishing he could get out of the monkey suit his mother had forced him to wear, lock himself in his bedroom and pound away on his drums. Problem was, earlier that week, the repo guys had come by and taken the drum kit. The TV and the new kitchen table, too, though the drums were the part that mattered most to Brayden. They’d been a gift from his dad. The last thing given to him before the always-laughing, always-joking, always-in-your-face man had died in the line of duty.
It was crap. Even at fifteen years old, Brayden could feel the unjustness of the situation. Three cops dead. Four kids—him and his little brother included—without fathers. No one to play catch with, no one to wink at and point out the pretty girls with.
No one to pay the damned bills.
He winced, thinking his mom wouldn’t appreciate his use of the word damned, even in his own head. Those kinds of things were important to her. Swearing, cheating and lying. All high on the mom list of punishable offences. Except right now...dropping a mental damned was the least of Brayden’s worries.
A year had gone by since the deaths of their fathers, and the man who’d done it all was getting off without a day served in prison.
It was why they’d gathered together today. To hear the announcement as it was made public. To stand by their moms—widows now, which seemed like a weird thing to call a bunch of women in their thirties—and watch as the infamous Freemont City Bomber walked out of the courthouse. It made no difference that his face was shielded from the cameras, his identity undisclosed because of his age. It was obvious what would happen. He’d return to his everyday life, while things for them would never be the same.
Brayden looked at each of the boys in the room, feeling the burden of being thrust into his role as their leader.
Anderson Somers was the kindest. The slowest to anger. The one whose intelligence sneaked up on you, every time.
Harley was Brayden’s own little brother. Not quite two years younger. Sensitive, prone to doodling and always empathetic.
Rush Stephenson was tall and wide and a year older than Brayden and Anderson. His temper was well-known, and it took little to fuel the fire.
Brayden, though, was the one with the most forethought. The one who reasoned things through and came up with the plans. The one who would gladly step up and take the blame when their shenanigans went awry.
Which is why they needed him to bring this plan to the table.
So he finally cleared his throat and said, “This isn’t a funeral.”
“Feels like it,” replied Anderson.
“Feels worse.” That one came from Harley, who looked down at his feet as he spoke.
It kinda killed Brayden to see that his brother’s confidence had been stripped away like that. To recognize that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t build up the kid the way that their father had.
Failing, he thought, with far more bitterness than any fifteen-year-old should.
He took a breath and said what they were all thinking. “We need to find out his name.”
Rush spit on the dusty floor. “Whoever he is, I’d like to wring his neck.”
“We all would,” Brayden said back. “But since you’re probably the only one who could reach his neck...”
“It’s not funny,” Harley told him.
Brayden sighed, lifted his fingernail to his mouth, remembered he’d promised their dad he’d stop chewing, then dropped his hand to his side. “I’m not making a joke. Not really. I want to take the guy out just as bad as Rush does. But Dad—all of our dads—would want us to do it the right way.”
“What’s the right way?” Rush sounded furious, as usual. “Weren’t you paying attention, Bray? The system failed.”
“It wasn’t the system,” Anderson interrupted. “It was a loophole.”
“A loophole?” Harley repeated. “What does that mean?”
“It means that murderer isn’t rotting in prison the way he should be,” Rush all but growled.
Brayden lifted a hand. “A loophole means that his lawyers are smart, and they found a legal way for him to not go to jail. For this anyway.”
Anderson’s eyes whipped to Brayden’s face. “You think he’s committed more crimes?”
Brayden nodded. “Don’t you? Someone living a straight life doesn’t just set off a bomb in a police station.”
“So what do you want to do?” Rush asked.
“I want to catch him.”
“Ourselves?” Harley said. “By the time we’re old enough to try, we’ll be too old to even do anything about it.”
Brayden fought an urge to give his brother a solid kick in the butt. “We’ll be in our twenties, not dead.”
There was a weird silence then, the word dead hanging in the air. Because people did die young. Their fathers were proof of that. Anderson’s dad, who’d still been a junior in high school when Anderson was born, had been just twenty-nine.
Finally, Rush spoke up again. “What’s the plan, Bray?”
Brayden managed a smile. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the tidy stack of pamphlets. He handed one to his brother and to each of his friends.
Anderson was the first to look up. “You want us to become cops?”
Brayden nodded. “I want us to become cops. And I want us to track him down and catch him.”
The room went silent again, and he was sure he could feel what each one of them was thinking. Rush would be bucking against the idea of working within the system. Anderson would be digesting the idea slowly, weighing the pros and cons. Harley would be hating it, thinking it was too far-fetched and too far in the future and too unlikely to succeed.
But it was his brother who spoke up first. “I’m in.”
Brayden couldn’t mask his surprise. “You are?”
“Yeah. Dad would want this.”
“I’m in, too,” said Rush at the same moment that Anderson chimed in with “It’s a good idea.”
Relief swept through Brayden. “All right.”
A final silence descended on them, brief this time. Then they all started talking at once. And none of it had to do with the stress and fear and sadness of the last year. It was as though making a plan—even one that extended so far into the future that it seemed like a dream—released all the tension. And for a while, at least, they could go back to being teenage boys.
Fifteen years later...
Reggie Frost pressed the wash button on the industrial-sized dish sanitizer, then looked up and sighed at the big old-fashioned clock on the wall at the Frost Family Diner. It wasn’t even eight at night yet, but she was already exhausted. And an hour behind schedule.
Two of the other servers had come down with the flu, so she’d pulled an open, then worked a crazy busy lunch rush, a sleepily slow dinner hour and was now doing a close, too. She was just thankful that Fridays were notoriously slow before the start of the summer tourist season. Any other day of the week, and she would’ve been stuck there for the late-night snack crowd, too. And a week or two from now, when Whispering