"Lawyer," I mouthed to Abby, who stood with her mouth agape next to the patrol car.

She nodded, crossing her arms protectively over her chest. In what was only the time span of a few short seconds, the look on Bee's face changed from an expression of concern one would expect to see from the wife of a man being dragged away in cuffs, to completely unreadable.

Her eyes glazed over.

Her mouth formed a straight line.

Bee was shutting down.

Fuck no.

No. No. No.

I'll take my girl angry. In fact, I liked getting her riled up from time to time. The way her eyebrows scrunched together when she's trying to yell at me for throwing my smelly fishing shirts in with the regular laundry is fucking adorable, and has resulted in me bending her over the washing machine on more than one occasion.

I'll take my girl sad. I'm a fucked up individual, and for reasons I'll never understand, the taste of her tears made me rock hard. Besides, when Bee was sad, which wasn't often, I could always crack a few inappropriate jokes and make her laugh her way back to happy.

I'll take anything my wife was willing to fucking give me, because the last thing I ever wanted was for Bee to crawl back into that fucking head of hers again and get lost under all the shit she kept buried in there.

At that very moment she was fading away before my eyes, but I needed her to be present, to be strong.

For Georgia.

For our family.

It killed me that I couldn't go to her, hold her in my arms and drag my Abby back to the surface, and, if necessary, I wasn't entirely against shaking the shit out of her until she refocused and emerged from the fog she retreated to when she just couldn't deal.

Dumb and fucking Dumber both drove off the same way they'd arrived. One at a time, tires spinning dramatically in the dirt, launching onto the street, their sirens invading every corner of the usually eerily quiet neighborhood. The wall of mangroves lining the road flashed blue and red as we passed.

Abby stood in the road and watched us drive off, her expressionless face shrinking smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until she completely disappeared from sight.

I could feel my heart twisting in my chest, and I made a vow right then and there that no matter what happened as a result of these charges, I was going to find my way back to Bee and Georgia as soon as I could.

Breaking out of prison couldn't be that hard.

We turned toward the Matlacha Pass, the only bridge that connected the rest of the world to Coral Pines. Once we were over the bridge, the sheriff spoke to my reflection in the rearview mirror. "Why is it, Jake, that you don't seem surprised that you are being charged with my nephew’s murder?"

I shrugged. "Well, it's been a while since I jaywalked."

The sheriff shook his head. "Touche, Mr. Dunn. Too-fucking-shay," he said, rolling the window down just a crack. He lit a joint he’d retrieved from the center console. "All I'm saying, son, is that I'm hoping they fry your ass real good, hope some skin head with a hankering for blondes makes you his new girlfriend." He held the smoke in his lungs, not even bothering to blow it out the crack in the open window as he finished his little villain speech.

Or was he the good guy, and it was me who was the villain?

The lines between right and wrong, good and bad, light and dark, were always blurred when it came to the comings and goings of the residents of Coral Pines.

You never knew who was going to save you.

Or who was going to kill you.

FOUR

In the back of my mind I always knew that no matter how careful I was, someday there was a possibility the shit I'd done would catch up with me in a very big way.

I knew that day had come when I found myself being led down a poorly lit concrete hallway wearing a scratchy orange jumpsuit, carrying an even scratchier blanket and pillow, into a cell much smaller than the new guest bathroom I'd just finished remodeling for Bee.

Inmates shouted over one another, their voices bouncing off the cement block walls of my cell, any one person indiscernible from the blended echoes of the masses. My eyes watered from the inescapable and overwhelming stench of backed up toilets and body odor.

Although my father had been dead over a year I could almost hear his 'I told you so's' from the grave.

Fuck you, Frank.

My mother, the eternal optimist when it came to me, used to tell me that the world expected great things from me, that my future held something terrific in it, and that someday I would realize my true potential. She usually gave me that speech while she was driving me home from the sheriff's station or from a stint in juvie.