“Yes, and today was Monday, and you still didn’t arraign him. You may find it amusing to hold a young man without reason for the weekend in the county jail, but I can assure you that I do not. First you stop him, no doubt doing a little racial profiling…then—”
Quinn grimaced. “Oh, come on, don’t go throwing around your big-city buzzwords in here. There was no racial profiling going on.”
“Then,” Lisa plowed ahead, ignoring his words, “you harass him, even though he had done nothing except have a broken taillight, making him get out of the car. You find an empty beer can in his car, which you had no right to search—”
“I didn’t search,” Quinn responded tightly. “It was in plain view on the floor. And it wasn’t empty.”
“Oh, right,” Lisa replied sarcastically. “It had, what, maybe a teaspoon of liquid in it? On the basis of that, you hauled him down to the jail. When was the last time you took a kid to jail for an MIP instead of just writing him a citation?”
“Last weekend,” he responded, crossing his arms across his chest. “This isn’t the big city, Miss Mendoza, and I take underage drinking seriously. My deputies and I don’t write a drunken teenager a citation and turn him loose on the road. I find it’s pretty effective with an MIP or DUI to have them come down to the jail and spend a while waiting for their parents to pick them up.”
Lisa hesitated, momentarily nonplussed by his response, then picked up on his last statement. “Benny Hernandez has been here quite a bit longer than a ‘while.’ Why weren’t his parents called to come pick him up?”
“Because his father skipped out before Benny was born, his mother’s in San Antonio living with her new boyfriend and his stepfather’s in prison in Huntsville.”
“Oh, I see. That makes Benny automatically a criminal, right? He’s got a crummy homelife, so the place for him is jail? His family is bad, so he is, too?” Lisa’s eyes snapped, and her body was stiff with anger.
Quinn Sutton’s eyes lit with an answering anger. He was also aware that the emotion in Lisa Mendoza’s face had stirred a primitive desire in him that was as strong as his anger. That fact irritated him even more.
“No, Ms. Mendoza,” he said, his voice clipped and precise. “As a matter of fact, most of the people in Benny’s family aren’t bad at all. His mother just has the world’s worst choice in men. One of her brothers, his uncle Pablo, has been in and out of jail most of his life, but the other two uncles are as honest and hardworking as anybody in Angel Eye. His grandmother raised Benny most of his life, on and off, and they don’t come any better than Lydia Fuentes. She’s the one who wanted me to haul him in!”
Lisa looked at him with great scorn. “So you’re saying that you arrested Benny and stuck him in jail for two days as a favor to his grandmother?”
“Well…sort of.”
Lisa simply gazed at him, eyebrows raised in disbelief. Quinn could feel a flush rising in his cheeks. He went on hastily. “This is a small town, Ms. Mendoza. We do things differently here.”
“I should say so if you arrest people and stick them in jail because their grandmother’s mad at them!”
“That’s not the way—”
“Look! I don’t care what way you do things here! And don’t try to con me with some lame story about his grandmother wanting you to arrest him. The fact is that you arrested Benny Hernandez without just cause, and you’ve been holding him without due process. If you persist in detaining him, I will obtain a writ of habeas corpus tomorrow to get him out, and then you and this county are going to be slapped with a big lawsuit for false imprisonment!”
Lisa stabbed the air with her forefinger as she talked, the force of her fury carrying her closer and closer to the sheriff until she was almost touching him with her punctuating finger. Quinn thought about wrapping his hand around her far smaller one and jerking her up against him, then silencing that berating voice with his own mouth.
That would be, he reminded himself, a good way to get his face slapped. Of course, it might be worth it….
They stared into each other’s face for a moment, poised on the edge. Lisa could see the red light burning in Quinn’s brown eyes, feel the heat of his body only inches away from her, and something in her wanted to lean forward that last little bit, to precipitate some final explosion between them.
His jaw tightened, and he stepped carefully around her, going to the door and opening. “Padilla!” he barked. “Go down and release Hernandez. His attorney is taking him home.”
Chapter 2
It was Deputy Padilla this time who escorted Lisa back to the locked double doors leading into the county jail. He spoke with the deputy inside, and a few minutes later, Jerry brought Benny Hernandez through the double doors, dressed this time in the usual jeans and T-shirt of a teenaged boy.
“Hey, you did it.” He smiled, looking a little surprised.
“Can I give you a ride home?” Lisa didn’t know whether the sheriff had literally meant that she would take him home. But in any case, she was a little curious to meet the young man’s grandmother—could the sheriff had been serious when he said the woman had asked him to lock up her grandson?—and she couldn’t imagine any place in this little town that would take her too far out of her way.
She drove through Angel Eye, following Benny’s direction. The courthouse sat in the courthouse square typical of little Texas towns. A few stores lined the other sides of the street around it. It was not thriving, but neither did it look as abandoned as some little towns she had driven through. Past the stores, the streets were lined with trees, obviously planted and nurtured by the people who had lived there in the past, for outside of town, the landscape boasted little more than bushes of varying heights, yucca, and prickly pear cactus.
It was actually a rather pleasant-looking little town, Lisa thought, though she could not imagine what it must be like to grow up here. She had noticed when she drove into town that the population was just over sixteen hundred people, a mind-boggling concept to someone who had grown up in Dallas. The number of students attending her high school had been more than lived in this entire town. She had thought Hammond was small, but Angel Eye made it seem a positive metropolis.
She had never dreamed that she would wind up here. A scholarship she had applied for and received in law school had stipulated that she must spend the first year after she graduated doing legal aid work at one of the Hispanic organization’s legal aid clinics. She had agreed readily to the terms, for she had already intended to use her law degree to help needy Hispanics. However, she had simply assumed that the work would be done in some large city, such as Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. It had never occurred to her that the position she would fill would be in Hammond, Texas, a town of little more than ten thousand people about an hour’s drive from San Antonio. She had been certain she had landed in an alien place when she drove down main street and saw that the only two national fast-food chains in town were lodged in the same building, sharing a kitchen and eating space.
The first month she had lived in Hammond, she had found herself making the six-hour drive back to her parents’ home in Dallas every weekend. Finally that had grown too tiring, and now, after two months, she was more or less resigned to remaining the rest of her year there.
“What do people do around here?” she blurted out, then realized a little
