He turned away just then to grab at…Jesus, my eyes widened. He had a stack of cash in his hand, and he slowly fed it into a money counter. The machine counted every note, whooshing once again. When it finished, he grabbed that stack and placed it next to a row of more cash.
“What is going on?” I demanded, stepping closer to look at it.
He was counting more money, slamming one hundred dollar note after the next in a pile in front of him, whispering the amount. After a ridiculous number, he grabbed the pile and fed it back into the money counter. As it whooshed, he turned around to face me. His back seemed wide as the counter. I felt tiny in front of him. My eyes scanned him fast, completely taken aback by how big he was. He looked like he’d been living at the gym, or popping steroids, or something. He was as big as Conor, tall as him too. A pulse of nostalgia ran through me, like for a split second I was reminded of how physically big Conor was next to me.
But this wasn’t Conor. This was Max fucking Locke. This guy ate puppies for breakfast. His face was hardened. Conor possessed a cheeky tongue, whereas this guy probably severed tongues for fun.
“Why didn’t you turn to us?” he asked, admonishing me suddenly with a harsh tone.
I blinked hard, confused. “With what?”
“The letters.”
My heart instantly sank, and my eyes shot to the pile of papers. “You shouldn’t go through someone’s mail, Locke. It’s an offense.”
“Sue me.”
“Maybe I’d win, given your track record.”
His jaw ticked, and his eyes narrowed dangerously at me. “Still sore about his sentence.”
“Eight years, Locke. That wasn’t necessarily victorious.”
He crossed his arms, and a hand shot up to his mouth. His finger traced his bottom lip as he studied me before responding in that monotone voice. “Against my advice, he pled guilty. He wanted to punish himself. It was his choice, his prerogative. I can’t say I disagree in hindsight. The scene was grizzly, he could have stopped himself, and he knew it. Had we taken it to trial, I’m not liking the chances we’d have had a more lenient sentence, not to mention we’d probably still be going through the courts as we speak. It’s lengthy and messy, and I couldn’t necessarily paint a picture of a giving community figure with Conor’s track history of violence and criminality. He chose a quick open and shut route, and it didn’t make it to the front of the newspapers. For once, Conor didn’t put himself first.”
I mulled his words over. I had to stop giving Locke a hard time because I knew Conor was responsible for the swift sentencing. I was present, standing in the pew behind him at the court sentence. His appearance was haunting. Something about him was all wrong. He hadn’t looked at me the entire time. His face remained locked on the judge. There was a lost look in his eyes. His beard had been long and unkempt. His face was flat and unmoving. When the judge gave him eight years, the entire courthouse stood still, packed to the brim. Reid and his father weren’t far from where I’d sat, but I had made sure not to look at them to see their expressions. Nobody had uttered a word, but their eyes fell on Conor, waiting for his reaction.
Conor had given them nothing. His face remained unturned. I remembered my eyes welling. I wanted to reach out to him, to hold him and breathe him in. But when it was time to stand and leave, Conor remained distant. He glanced around the courtroom once as he exited the room, and his eyes found mine.
For a moment, it was just us. Tears fell from my eyes, and he…smiled. A brief peaceful smile, the same one he had flashed me on the driveway that day the world turned to shit. It was as if he was saying everything was going to be okay, that he was okay, that I was going to be okay. I understood the look of good-bye, the finality in his eyes before he tore his gaze from mine and disappeared from my view.
“Have you seen him since his sentence?” I asked as a wave of numbness ran through me, quieting the memory in its tracks before I lost myself to the grief.