Luke hadn’t noticed. He was too busy playing what had happened at Shannon’s apartment over and over in his mind. During the next commercial, Terri folded her arms and leaned one hip against the bar.
“Heard you used to be a real bad boy around here.”
Luke laughed humorlessly, thinking there wasn’t anywhere else in the world where that mattered except in this town. “Yeah, I was a regular juvenile delinquent.”
“Not that I hold it against you. I used to be a little wild myself before I came to live here.”
“Yeah? Which town did you tear up?”
“Past history,” Terri said. “I’d just as soon keep the details to myself now that I’m living here in Disney World.”
Luke nodded. He didn’t blame her. He’d caused plenty of havoc in Rainbow Valley. If he could find a way to make people forget everything that had happened back then, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
He took a long drink of his beer and watched the Rangers struggle through the top of the ninth, but he was having a hard time paying attention to the game. He was starting to reconsider the way he’d behaved tonight, coming out of that bedroom and flaunting his presence in front of Shannon’s mother like some angry kid who needed to push people’s buttons. What had he gained by doing that? The satisfaction of making Loucinda North’s jaw drop?
“Speaking of kids,” Terri said, “did you see the Pic ’N Go?”
“What about it?”
“Somebody nailed it. Nice graffiti job. No gang signs, but plenty of dirty words. Poor Myrna must have had a heart attack when she saw it.”
Luke shook his head. Myrna had more than she could deal with already. The last thing she needed was to have the side of her building look like a New York subway station.
“Does the sheriff know who did it?” Luke asked.
“I imagine he’ll round up the usual suspects.”
The usual suspects. Luke had definitely been one of those. If a leaf so much as fell off a tree unexpectedly, he got blamed. That had infuriated him back then. But the rationality of adulthood had taught him that a person was judged by his actions, and his actions had been worse than most.
Luke downed the last of his beer, then set the bottle on the bar. “Do you ever think about the stuff you did when you were a kid?”
“What do you mean?” Terri asked.
“Have you ever wondered what the hell you were thinking?”
Terri shrugged. “Kids do shit. That’s just the way it is.”
“Not all kids.”
“Nope. Just the ones with nobody to teach them any better.”
Was that why he’d done the things he had? Because nobody was around to teach him any better? If so, what was his excuse for what he’d done tonight?
If he’d been smart enough to stay put in Shannon’s bedroom, they’d be in bed right now taking each other to heaven. Instead he was sitting on a barstool in a deserted honkey tonk, drinking his troubles away, and Shannon was going to have to deal with her mother. Why the hell had he done that to her? Because of some eleven-year-old hurt he couldn’t get over?
He watched the rest of the game. After the Rangers lost, he tossed a few bills on the bar, said good-bye to Terri, and left the building. By the time he got into his truck to head back to the shelter, darkness had settled over the highway. A few minutes later, he approached the Pic ’N Go, its lights shining brightly through the night. He wheeled into the parking lot, where he brought his truck to a halt and stared at the wall that faced the highway.
“Well, shit,” he muttered.
Terri was right. In red and black spray paint, somebody had filled that wall with the kind of sentiments nice people didn’t even whisper, much less permanently apply to the side of a building. Luke had stopped there yesterday afternoon and hadn’t noticed it, so the place had probably been hit last night.
He pictured a kid zooming into the parking lot at midnight, leaping out of his car with a couple of cans of spray paint, and going at it. After a six-pack of beer and an hour or two of anger seething inside him, it had probably seemed like the only thing he could do to release some of the fury and frustration that lived inside him every minute of every day. With every slash of spray paint, he spelled out harsh, angry words