Nicki looked at him, shocked.
“I care, Nicki. I really do. But he’d be no less dead if we’d hung around there. Don’t you understand that? It’d be different if we were patching his wound, or keeping him from bleeding to death or doing CPR or something. But dead plus one minute is the same as dead plus fifty years. We had to leave.”
“What about the old guy?” Nicki asked.
“What about him?”
“He thinks that we did the shooting.”
“All the more reason to get the hell out of there,” Brad said. “The tape will show it wasn’t us. That’ll be the first thing the cops look at, and when they see what happened, you’ll be off the hook. I, on the other hand, will be one giant step closer to getting nailed again.”
They fell silent. Nicki couldn’t clear the image of the dead boy out of her mind.
“Do you want me to drop you off and go it alone?” Brad asked.
Nicki looked at him, surprised. “No.”
“It’s getting a lot hotter than you signed on for,” he added. “I just thought—Well, I want you to know there’s no hard feelings if you want to just bag it. For you, this is like spring break. For me, it’s life and death. If they get too close—” He cut himself off before he said something he might regret.
The spring break line pissed her off. “Jesus, Brad, I’m dying. That’s not exactly a vacation.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “I just meant that the stakes are different for you. If this all goes to shit, you get to go home. I don’t exactly have that option.”
Nicki’s gut seized with the tone of his voice. There was a finality to it, a subtext that terrified her. “What are you saying?”
Brad returned his eyes to the road. “Forget it.”
“No, I won’t forget it. What are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you exactly what I said. I’m not going back to prison.”
“Neither am I.”
Brad kept his eyes on the road as he said, “It’s not the same.”
There it was again. “So, what, you’re going to kill yourself if the cops get too close?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s crazy, Brad. That’s totally insane.”
She saw the muscles in his jaw flex as he worked to swallow anger. “You haven’t been there, Nicki. You don’t know.”
“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” he snapped. “You think that because you’re sick, you’ve got the shittiest deal in the world. Trust me. It can get a lot worse than that.”
“Spoken like somebody who has a life ahead of him,” Nicki said. It was one of the most powerful lines in her repertoire, guaranteed to shut down an argument, the one verbal thrust for which there was no parry.
But Brad didn’t back down. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m already dead. Don’t you get it? My clock started ticking the second I walked out of prison. It’s just a matter of time. There is no transplant that can prolong anything for me. Today, tomorrow, next week, one way or the other, I’m dead.”
“But you can’t do that,” Nicki argued. “It’s too . . .” She struggled for the right word. “Easy.”
Brad laughed. “If it were easy, I’d have done it by now. I’d have done it after my first week in the joint. Killing yourself might be a lot of things, but easy isn’t one of them.”
Nicki opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. What was there to say?
“And you’re a fine one to talk about easy. If you believed the crap you’re slinging you’d be in a hospital, squeezing out every drop of hope. Yet, here you are.”
The words hit Nicki hard. She’d never thought about this adventure with Brad being a weird kind of extended suicide pact. Now that she did think about it, she didn’t like it at all. “It doesn’t matter for me,” she said. “I’ve got a year. Maybe. At best. It might as well be a week or a second. You could have another fifty, seventy-five years ahead of you.”
Brad scowled. “I think you really think that’s a good thing.” He looked at her. “I’m twenty-two years old, Nicki. Do you realize that if the State of Michigan has its way, I’ll be forty-six before I even get my first parole hearing? And nobody ever gets out on their first hearing. I can’t do that. I can’t.”
“Won’t,” Nicki corrected.
He shrugged. “Okay, I won’t spend the rest of my life in prison, just as I won’t sit here and argue the point with you. That’s not to piss you off, that’s just the way it is. You’ve never lived with that kind of violence, and until you have, there’s no way for you to understand.”
Nicki could tell from his body language that this discussion was over. Maybe the smart play for her really would be to just walk away. Brad was a criminal, for God’s sake. A cute criminal, and sweet and mostly kind, but everything about him was criminal. He stole cars, he lashed out at old men. He participated in armed robberies where people were killed. Having seen for herself how horrendous a thing that was to do, how could she possibly continue this way?
They were barely moving. All she had to do was open the door, and it would be all over. She wasn’t a prisoner. Pull the handle, open the door, take a step, and there you go. There was no way this could turn out well, not for either of them. If Nicki had a brain in her head, she’d get as far away from Brad as she could, and head on back to—
What?
What was there for her to return to? A hospital room and a pump in her gut? Slow death in a sterile room. Just like Mom.
“What are you thinking?” Brad asked, breaking the silence.
Nicki forced herself to look right at him as she answered. “You never laughed at me,” she said.
“Huh?”
She felt the heat rising in her cheeks. “I was trying to figure out a reason to stay here, a reason not to run back like a scared little girl.”
Confusion etched Brad’s brow. “When didn’t I laugh?”
“You know, back then. Back in the old days, when you lived next door and I was drooling over you. When I pretended to be so worldly, talking about things I thought would impress you, you never laughed. You could have. I was always afraid that you would, but it would have destroyed me.”
“This is a high-price reward for showing a little restraint.”
Nicki was getting to the difficult part. “That’s just part of it. You were the boy of my dreams.”
Brad grew uncomfortable, shifting in his seat.
She went on, “I used to do those crazy things, like writing my name as Nicolette Ward, and I used to hate myself for it, because I knew that nobody as gorgeous as you would ever think twice about me.”
He groaned, “Oh, God.”
“I know. It was puppy love. But even after you left, I used to dream that we’d get married and we’d go on long drives, just the two of us.”
He shifted uncomfortably again.
“This is the dream,” she said. “Silly, huh?”
Brad didn’t know what to say.
“Too much information?” Nicki ventured.
He answered, “No! I guess maybe I’m just not all that comfortable with the idea of being ‘gorgeous.’ ”
They shared a laugh. “Your turn,” Nicki said. “What happened to your parents?” The question seemed to startle him, so she added, “I know your mother’s in jail, but I don’t know anything else.”
He quipped, “I guess that jail thing is the family business.”
“What did she do?”
“She sold drugs to the wrong guy. Sold a lot of them in fact, got hit on a federal beef and sent up for like, forever.”
“Oh, that’s awful.”
“Last time I saw her, I was eight. I never did know who my dad was. I don’t think my mother did, either. At least she couldn’t narrow it down to one paying customer.”
Nicki gasped. “You mean she was a pros . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.
“Prostitute? No, she was
a whore. A crack whore at that. I don’t remember a single day when I could look in her face and not see her stoned. She decided to keep me around for the welfare money. She got a check every month to take care of me.” He scoffed. “Now, there was money well spent.”
“She spent it on drugs instead?”
“I don’t know what the hell she spent it on.” As he mined deeper into the memories, Brad’s tone hardened, and the muscles in his jaw flexed. “But it wasn’t on dinners and birthday cakes, I can tell you that. Neighbors were the only reason I didn’t starve to death. They fed me and the other stray cats. All of us alive because nobody got around to putting us in a sack and drowning us in the river.”
It was an image that hit Nicki hard. No wonder Brad had learned how to hot-wire cars. No wonder he could compartmentalize his thoughts so well.
“When they first arrested her, I was scared to death,” Brad continued. “I didn’t know what would become of me. I didn’t know where I would live, or how I was going to do anything. I mean, my mom wasn’t good for anything useful, but at least she was there, you know? At least there was another heartbeat in the room at night. But then this nice social worker—her name was Alice—took me away from our apartment, and put me in this group home, just for one night. She actually stayed in the room with me.
“Alice settled me down by telling me how they’d get help for Mom, and how they’d get all the drugs out of her system so she could be healthy again. And in the meantime, I would be sent to live with some other really nice people. You know? Like, I was going to be taken in by the Brady Bunch or something. I had these images in my head—I mean, really, this is how I thought—I had these images in my head of me tossing a ball around in some front yard somewhere, hanging out in the neighborhoods where kids like me never had a chance in hell of living. It was like I’d get this really big jump start on my life. And then, after Mom was healthy again, she’d join us, and everything would be just like it was on television.
“Then I hit the first foster home. Nice enough people—I mean, they fed me and didn’t scream at me—but they were both four hundred years old and smelled like dirty underwear. That’s what I remember most about them, seriously. They smelled like dirty underwear.”
Nicki laughed. “How pleasant.”
“No, it wasn’t. I stayed there for a few days, I guess, maybe a few weeks, they all run together after a while. They drove me to a new school where I’d never been before, with kids who only knew that I was somebody’s foster. That meant I was fair game for anything anyone wanted to do. Who’s gonna complain to the principal, right?”
“What, did they beat you up and stuff?”
“Only at the beginning. This ‘nobody cares’ shit cuts both way, you know? It wasn’t like I was gonna get in trouble at home if I got expelled from school. There’s nothing like getting beat up a few times yourself to teach you how to beat the shit out of others. I was never in one school long enough to have any friends, so it was fine with me to have only enemies. Just so long as they were all scared shitless of me. In the long run, it’s easiest to have one really nasty, nose-crushing, ball-busting fight at the beginning, so that everybody knows to stay the hell away from you. When you’re the new kid and you’re nice, people just think you’re a pussy.”
“So, how many fights did you get into?”
Brad launched a bitter laugh. “Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. How many days are there in a school year? Times how many years in school. I was the baddest guy in the building, all the time. It was the way I survived.”
A station wagon on their left was pacing the Sebring as the traffic crept along, its turn signal blinking relentlessly. When Brad paused to let a space open up in front, the guy behind them blasted them with his horn. Nicki spun in her seat and gave the guy the finger.
“Way to go,” Brad laughed.
“Fastest finger in New York.” She let a moment pass before pressing for more. “What happened to you after you left the Bensons?”
Brad didn’t want to go there. “You want the first day or the second?”
“There’s a difference?”
Brad considered changing the subject, and then just went for it. What the hell. “The Bensons were fed up with me. All of the foster families got fed up with me. It’s my special gift. But giving the devil his due, they did keep me for almost two years. That was, like, eight months longer than anyone else. Anyway, the burglary beef was the final straw, I guess, and your father’s never-ending desire to make his house a convent. Since I was seventeen then, just a few months from official sorry-pal-you’re-on-your-own emancipation, the social workers didn’t want to endanger another family by putting me in with them, so they sent me to another group home.”
“A detention center?”
“Not really, but it might as well have been. Nasty-ass place. One thing for sure, I wasn’t the baddest guy in the house anymore. There, I wasn’t even in the top ten. So, after one night, I said screw it. I packed my stuff into my school backpack, walked out the door in the morning, and never checked back in. I lived on the streets after that.”
Nicki looked horrified.
“It’s not that bad,” he said, shooting her a smile. Then he had to hit his brakes hard to keep from hitting that station wagon, whose driver had finally decided to move over.
“It has to be scary,” Nicki said.
Brad shrugged. “You learn who to stay away from, and who you can trust. I’ll tell you what surprised the hell out of me is that there really is a homeless community. Just like you get to know people in your neighborhood because you go to the same clubs or the same church, us street bums do okay taking care of each other.”
“How did you live? On handouts?”
“I wish. You see, that’s what the smart ones do. You can make a pretty decent living panhandling if you’re not one of the drooling crazies. My age kinda worked against me there. People look at a homeless guy who’s sixty and they feel sorry for him. Try that when you’re a teenager, and you just get a lot of lectures about your work ethic.”
He intercepted the look that flashed through Nicki’s face.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” He laughed. “You’re one of the lecturers.”
“Well, why should you get handouts when you’re perfectly capable of working?”
“What was I going to do? I couldn’t put my hands on a school transcript if I had to, so I can’t even qualify as a high school graduate. If you pick the right street corner, you can get double minimum wage, and you don’t have to clean baby vomit off the fast food booth.”
“What about your dignity?”
This time, the smile erupted into a laugh. “Okay, well, there are early casualties to certain lifestyles. My dignity stopped being important around the time when my mother started screwing strangers in our living room.”
“God, that’s awful. So, how did the prison thing happen?”
“I was stupid. Begging bored me. It might keep food in my belly, and a buzz in my head from time to time, but I gotta tell you: It’s really freaking boring. I needed a business to get into. Something I knew how to do.” He glanced over at Nicki and waited for her to connect the dots for herself.
“Drugs?”
“Bingo. The family business. You know what they say. Do what you know. So, I did.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”
“I was in the game for precisely one day.”
“You’re kidding. Why?”
“My very first customer was a cop.”
“No way.”
“I swear. I walked right up to this guy, offered him a nickel bag, took his money, and then every cop on the planet swooped down on me.”
“You were in Michigan then?”
“No, that was in New York. Rikers country. Anyway, I didn’t have to do much time. A few months, and then a long probation, which I promptly ducked, but nobody seemed to care.”
“Getting away seems to be another one of your special gifts
.”
“Well, I certainly hope so. I never want to do anybody harm. I never really want to get in trouble. It’s just that whenever I see an opportunity, I somehow get involved only on the dark side of it. Everybody dreams of being an entrepreneur, right? I just chose a bad product.”
“That happened to be illegal.”
His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Look who’s sounding like a prosecutor.”
Nicki blushed.
“All the really profitable stuff is either already taken, or it’s illegal. And I didn’t have a lot of seed capital, as they say.”
“You don’t even sound repentant,” Nicki said. Her tone was leaden with accusation.
“About what? Surviving?”
“About being irresponsible.”
Brad laughed. “Oh, responsibility. And who are we supposed to be responsible for? Do you think that old Chas back there felt responsible for earning money for college or for a new car, and then ended up bleeding to death on a cold floor? Life isn’t about responsibility, Nicki. Life is about living, and doing whatever it takes to make sure you end the day the way you want to end it. It’s why I’ll never go back to prison. You own nothing in that place, not even your life. Every day in prison is just another routine, highlighted by psychos who want to stick you with either a knife or a dick.”
Nicki listened to his rant, mesmerized not so much by his message as by his commitment to it. It’s what she liked most about him; loved most about him. He lived in a world where there was no doubt. You decided what you were going to do, and then you did it; if that pissed people off, then too bad for the pissed-off people. She marveled how anyone could talk about things that were so clearly wrong, yet make them sound so right. Every time she tried to form an argument in her head, it ended up sounding like an empty platitude.
“So, now you know what an asshole I am,” Brad said, breaking yet another thoughtful silence. “You still up for the weird adventure?”
She looked at him long and hard, searching for the hint that he was something other than what he portrayed himself to be. What she saw was a little boy in a man’s body, a kid who never discovered his own childhood and instead constructed a world where breaking laws was fine so long as you broke them for the right reason. He was Robin Hood meets Peter Pan. She had no business staying here with him. This was the road to ruin, the road to hell.
Time to Steal Page 6
