All Shook Up by Susan Andersen Page B

it back in its stand on the end table. “Can’t sleep?”
    “I hadda pee.” A huge yawn escaped him. “Then I heard you talkin’. I thought someone was here.”
    “I was just talking to Char.”
    Tate nodded and yawned again.
    “You ready to go back to bed?”
    “Uh-huh.” He shuffled in front of her down the short hallway to his room. A moment later he climbed onto the mattress and flopped down on his back. He immediately rolled onto his side.
    Dru pulled the blankets up around his shoulders and leaned down to give him a kiss. “’Night, sweet pea. Luva-luva you.”
    “Love you, too, Mom,” Tate murmured. Before Druhad straightened, he was once again sound asleep.
    Leaving his door open a crack, she went back into the living room. She flipped on the television to a Seattle channel for the news, but after hearing about an oil spill in the straits, the mutilation of a horse in Arlington, and the death of a cashier who had been shot during a convenience-store robbery last Tuesday, she snapped it off again.
    She had problems of her own. Hearing those cheery little tidbits didn’t help.

5
    B utch hung up the phone receiver and threw himself back on the couch. Taking a pull from the beer bottle in his hand, he thunked his feet on the coffee table. Gina always went ballistic when he did that, but she wasn’t home to see him, so what the hell.
    Where the fuck was J.D.? The man Butch had shot in that farcical robbery last Tuesday had died yesterday, and his alibi was out doing God knew what, God knew where.
    Dammit, how was it possible for everything to turn to shit so freaking fast? It wasn’t like he’d meant to shoot the guy or anything—that old pistol had been in his glove box for years, stuffed under wads of fast-food-joint napkins. It was the last remaining link to his wild-child years, and he’d kept it around not because he’d ever expected to use it, but for the protection it represented.
    He hadn’t set out to knock over the convenience store, either. He’d just been so damn tired of being broke and having to listen to Gina rag on and on about what a deadbeat he was these days, and why the hell wasn’t he out there beating the pavement looking for work now that Lankovich, that crook, had closed his doors. So sheer impulse had made him dig the gun out of the glove compartment when he’d stopped at the store for a six-pack. Damned if he was going to beg his old lady for beer money again.
    He hadn’t intended to actually use the gun, but the idiot behind the counter just had to play hero. It was his own damn fault Butch had to shoot him; anyone with half a brain knew you were supposed to just hand over the money. But nooo, he’d argued about it in his lousy English; then he’d reached under the counter. Hell, how was Butch supposed to know a gun hadn’t been under there? That’s what anyone would have thought—and there was no way in hell he was gonna let some minimum-wage-earning towelhead get the drop on him.
    Even so, he hadn’t meant to squeeze off a round. But Jesus, not one frigging thing had gone the way it was supposed to go that afternoon, and his finger had simply convulsed with nervous tension against the trigger. The next thing he’d known, the guy was spinning backward and collapsing against the shelves of cigarettes behind him. And there’d been blood—great fucking amounts of bright red blood—all over the damn place.
    Now he had to do something about J.D., before J.D. heard about it and got it into his head to do something irretrievably stupid. The more Butch thought about it,in fact, the more he realized that whatever he ended up doing would have to be permanent.
    Shit. It gave him a headache just thinking about it. They’d been buds forever, him and J.D., and he liked him; he really did. But J.D. had always had that inconvenient moral streak running through him. Butch laid the blame for it on the old broad who’d taken him in that one year. But the bottom line was that