“Funny.”
I place Camden on speakerphone, so I can multitask. I’m slathering on some lemon body butter and continuing to keep an eye on the Honda from my window. It’s still light outside this time of year, so I’m hoping to catch a sighting of Mr. Mysterious before I head out.
I audibly gasp when I notice a hooded man, with an average build, walk across the street towards the car and then turn around and look directly towards my window before getting inside.
“Shit.”
Our eyes momentarily meet, and I try ducking down to shield myself from his view.
“What is it,” Camden demands to know sternly on the other end of the phone. “What’s wrong?”
Dammit, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing?”
“Calm down. It’s fine.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I swear. I was just getting dressed in front of an open window, and I think some weirdo saw me. It’s my fault. I should have had the shades down.”
There’s a moment of dead silence making me think momentarily that the call dropped.
“You don’t have any clothes on?”
“Uh, no, true detective,” I wisecrack. “I just got home from the gym. Had to take a shower before I go on this senseless, pointless mall run. Rome texted me the list of stuff I need to buy. It’s all for his new princess. Nothing to do with the club or a client.”
“Get on board, Jade, and stop giving him so much shit about it. She’s part of the package now. He’s in love. Love can be a good thing.”
“Oh, stop it. Love? He’s not in love. He’s just bored from banging socialites and actresses.”
“Such a cynic.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to speak on this topic. Since when have you ever been in love?”
“I’m in love every other night.”
“You’re so gross. I feel so buried beneath all of your crap right now, that I forgot the original nature of your call.”
“That mouth of yours. Does it ever shut up?”
“Never.”
“That’s what I thought. Listen, the original nature of my call as you so put it was to let you know that this is your day one as manager of the club, and I’ll be at your place in the next ten minutes.”
“I didn’t agree to become manager.”
“That’s not the way I heard it.”
“You guys suck.”
“Like I said, I’ll be at your place in the next ten minutes.”
“What in the ham sandwich for?”
“To take you to the mall and then from there we can head over to the Lotus. Your car is a piece of shit, and I know you’re not trying to Uber all the way to the mall. That’ll cost a fortune.”
“A cost that my employers will pay for, so what do I care?”
“I have a parts run to make over that way anyway. I’ll just come by and scoop you.”
I don’t want Camden to come to my house for a lot of reasons, but mostly because he’ll probably notice a strange guy sitting in a parked car in front of my window, and he won’t sit around and watch him like I’ve been doing. He’ll probably just go crack the windshield with a baseball bat or the butt of his gun and tell him to fuck off.
That’s one of the things that can be so deceiving about Camden. He can often be expressionless, quiet, pensive, but he’s also ripped, smart and dangerous as fuck. He can sit silently for hours on his computer and dig for information, but in the real world he has very little patience for people. He only wants to ask a question once. He only wants to explain something once. He only wants to deal with a problem once. And he doesn’t like mistakes.
“I’ll meet you near the mini-mart. The one on fifth,” I say hoping he’ll buy my bullshit.
“I can just pick you up at your house, Jade.”
“No, no. I’m on my way out the door as we speak. I’ll see you there in fifteen.”
“A minute ago you were naked by the window.” He sounds perturbed.
“I get dressed quickly. Mini-mart. Fifteen minutes.”
“You sure everything’s all right? If you lie to me—”
“Everything’s fine.”
“You’re so damn weird. Fine, I’ll see you in fifteen.”
I’m bent over outside of the front door of my apartment building, popping two pieces of spearmint gum, and lacing up my Converse while I get a really good look at the blue Honda. This close up I can see that Mr. Mysterious is in there. He’s in the driver’s seat, which is tilted far back, and there’s some sort of hand towel covering his entire face. As if he’s trying to keep the sunlight out of his eyes for a nap.
It’s going to drive me completely crazy if I don’t finally confront this guy. Hell, I actually took a day off of work to do it. Maybe he needs my help? So I start walking towards him. He must have been watching me the whole time or has some crazy peripheral vision, because he snatches the towel from his face and rolls down the window as I approach.
His face is blank.
Eyes kind of dead.
I can’t read him at all, mostly because he doesn’t want me to.
I quickly scan his face, as well as the interior of the car, for any signs of drug use or paraphernalia, but I don’t see anything. His skin looks clear. His eyes aren’t red. No pipes, blunts, rolling papers, or pills. He’s definitely not homeless, but there’s something about him that looks faintly familiar and not in a good way. I just can’t put my finger on what it is.
“What the fuck do you want?” Is the first thing I ask him. Hands on my hips. Attitude rolling off of me.
*Silence*
“What’s your name?” I try again.
Still nothing.
“Are you stalking me or something? Do you know who you’re fucking with?”
The stranger finally responds to my brief interrogation with a smirk.
“I know exactly who I’m fucking with,” he replies. “And it’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Barlow.”
That voice. I’ve heard it before.
“Do I know you?” I ask looking around. Worried that I may have fallen into some sort of trap.
“No, but we have someone in common.”
“Who could we possibly have in common?”
“Someone who’s lived a lifetime of regrets.”
That could be a zillion people. I don’t have time for a fishing expedition.
“Not interested.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m so sure, dude.”
I turn to walk towards the direction of the mini-mart when the stranger calls out.
“Even if it’s my brother, Tyson?”
Nine
Jade
Five Years Ago
WHACK!
He hit me.
Hard.
I quickly placed my palm across the left side of my face. My skin felt tingly, was hot to the touch, and I swear to God for a few moments I really thought that I could hear bells ringing in my ear. It hurt like hell, but before I took too much time to wallow in the intensity of the searing pain, I lifted my head back up, remembered the girl my mother raised me to be, and promptly kicked my boyfriend Tyson in his nuts.
I’m pretty sure I heard him yelp the words “you bitch” on his way down, but the point was he was on his way down to the ground. Right where he belonged. I was in no fucking mood to fight with him that day.
I had just gotten a call from my little seventeen-year-old sister asking me for a referral to a gynecologist. She wanted birth control. I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend. I felt like dog crap. I was doing a horrible job of being a role model for Jana. My mother was probably rolling over in her grave.
“Are we done?” I asked a moaning Tyson.
He was such a whiner. I didn’t even kick him that hard. Then I realized that he must have been high. And when he got high on junk like ecstasy, his dick always got hard, which made the kicking
of his balls even more painful. Great for me, but not so nice for him.
“Not by a long shot, bitch.”
I really got annoyed then, because I knew him calling me a bitch meant that he was ready for a knock down, drag out, reality show like sparring match. Which would mean that part of my face was going to end up a nasty shade of purple by the end of the night, and I’d have to dig into my makeup kit once again. A kit filled with theatrical face cover. Cover that I paid a lot of money for, but couldn’t really afford, so I only wanted to use it if I absolutely had to. I know. That line of thinking was totally fucked up, but I was young and dumb and had no one telling me any better.
Tyson hit me that night, because I dared to ask him if he took the forty-five dollars that was in a sealed white envelope inside of my underwear drawer. At the time I was working as a waitress, and had been saving the money to buy a gift for Jana’s eighteenth birthday. It was a lot of money to both of us back then, and his response to my question told me everything. He had stolen the money, and it wasn’t too difficult to see why. He had bought drugs with it. Something his miserable ass had been doing more often than not, but I had been too stupid to jump ship before it got completely out of hand.
I met Tyson when I was just fifteen years old. I had been outside with some friends from the neighborhood for practically the entire morning. It was hot that day. Humid, swamp like heat. So we took a ten-minute bus ride to the local mall and wandered in and out of stores all day to keep cool.
He was working as a stock boy in the Hallmark card store when he stopped me dead in my tracks while I was looking at the Christmas in July display. I was examining figurines. I loved those things. They reminded me of my mother and my nana. Two women who lived for Christmas, two women whom I loved, and two women who were long gone from this earth by then.
“You going to buy that?” he asked me.
I knew he wasn’t old enough to be the manager or even assistant manager of the store, so I gave him a little attitude, because basically I thought he was an ass for assuming that I was a thief or that I was too broke to buy one crappy figurine.
“What business is it of yours?”
“I spent all morning putting those on the shelves in a very specific order.”
I looked at the display.
Then at him.
“They don’t look like they’re in any sort of order to me.”
“Well they are.”
“Come on, Jade, he’s so rude.” My girlfriends cackled as they pulled me out of the store.
“But so hot,” one of them said loud enough for him to hear.
“See you later, Jade,” he said to me smiling as we walked away. Giving me an exaggerated finger wave. I thought he was funny, and I smiled back. Then we left.
After another thirty minutes of window-shopping, we decided to visit the food court and grab a slice of pizza. It was there that one of my neighbors, Mrs. Sanchez, approached our table while we were eating. It wasn’t uncommon to see people from the neighborhood at the mall, so I didn’t think anything of it at first.
“Jade?”
“Oh hi, Mrs. Sanchez.”
“Hey, babe. Uh, when was the last time you checked in at home?”
“Not since earlier this morning, why?”
“Well, hun, I think your dad’s been at it again.”
“Really?”
I was so embarrassed. I could have crawled under the table. My girlfriends knew nothing about my shitty life at home. Now they were getting an ear full.
“Yeah, so your sister is at Linda O’Neal’s house. You may want to get home. I think she’s a little freaked out.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Sanchez. I’ll get home right now.”
“Do you need a ride? I just have to grab something out of Macy’s and then I’ll be ready to go.”
“Thank you anyway, but I’m fine.”
Most of my teenage moments were cut short and ruined because of my father. Mall visits. Phone calls. Hanging with friends. And forget about boys. Even when we were very little my father wouldn’t have ever won any sort of dad-of-the-year award, but he was all my little sister Jana and I knew, so to us he was like Superman and Spiderman rolled into one. What we were too young to realize back then was that my mother was the glue that held our little family together, and once she died, our fractured unit fell completely apart.
My father always had a drinking problem, way before my mother’s death, but she knew how to shelter us from it. Protecting us from his tantrums. Shielding us from embarrassing moments. Making excuses for him that little girls believed. Holding the family together.
She went to work.
She paid the bills.
She checked the homework.
She talked to the teachers.
She cooked the meals.
She cleaned the house.
She did every damn thing. So when she died quickly and ruthlessly from ovarian cancer, needless to say, everything fell completely apart in our home. My father’s drinking dramatically increased and with it so did his tantrums and his black outs.
He usually got really drunk Friday nights after work, which is why I would never make plans on Fridays, but then he’d sleep in most of the day Saturday. So that’s why I thought it would be safe to hang out at the mall for a couple of hours during the early day.
Usually on a Saturday, he’d be in bed sleeping it off, and my sister would be on the computer looking at Disney shows for half of the morning, so I figured no one would even miss me for a couple of hours. I just wanted to hang with my girlfriends and be a normal teenager for once. Not stay in the house all day to keep an eye on him and my sister. I hated that that’s what my life had become. I never asked for the responsibility. I resented that it had been thrust upon me. And I missed my mother desperately.
It was just my luck that when I let my guard down, for just a moment, my father had to go and have another tantrum. Tossing furniture around the living room like a lunatic. Then passing out on the couch with the front door open, but the screen door locked, so that the whole block could peep in and see him passed out in his underwear.
Luckily Jana knew the routine. When Daddy starts acting like a crazy person, run downstairs and get out of the house through the basement door. Then off to one of the neighbors.
We verbally ran through it a million times with each other, and we actually had to do it together several times, but she never had to get out alone. So not only was I pissed that my father caused all this drama and embarrassment, and that I wasn’t there to protect my little sister, but now my friends were looking at me as if I was the most pitiful person on the planet. Mrs. Sanchez said all of this in front them as if it was common knowledge that I was the daughter of the neighborhood drunk. As far as I knew, they didn’t know anything about my life at home. At least that’s what I liked to believe back then.
I remember throwing on my suit of bulletproof emotional armor and acting like what she said didn’t faze me one iota. The last thing I needed was this story getting back to school. I didn’t want pity, I didn’t want anyone’s intervention, and I didn’t want advice. I just wanted to be left alone to handle it myself.
“Um, guess I better head home early.” I remember saying casually as I took another bite of pizza.
“Of course, girl.”
“Buses run every fifteen minutes right?”
“Yep. There will be another one any minute.”
“Cool.”
Then he came over.
If I could go back and tell my fifteen-year-old self to run like hell, I would. I should have gotten up from that table and taken the bus, but I didn’t.
“I’ll take you home,” Tyson said.
I stared at him quietly, not knowing what to say. First of all, he was older. If he was driving, he was too old for me. Secondly, I knew better than to take a ride from some strange guy, but I wanted to get to Jana. Ms. O’Neal would no doubt be pumping her for information about our father, and our home life, and she w
as only eleven. She would eventually crack under the pressure. And if that happened, the entire neighborhood was going to know what was going in our house. Perfect way for child protective services to get in our business, and neither of us wanted that.
“Don’t you have a Christmas display to fix?” My friend Tyra asked him with a tinge of teenage sarcasm.
“I just got off work, and it sounds like your girl here needs to get home sooner rather than later.”
He looked at me. “So what’s up? You need a ride?”
“Okay,” I blurted out in response. Somewhat tongue-tied. Not really thinking about the consequences of my actions. I was blinded by my budding teenage hormones plus a strong desire to get home to my sister.
Even in work attire, Tyson looked liked he just completed an X-Games competition. Motor biking. Skateboarding. Extreme skiing. He just had that look. A slim but fit build. Assorted tattoos. A bleached blond faux Mohawk. Not to mention that he had to be three or four years older than me. A total turn on for a fifteen-year-old girl looking for any excuse to rebel against her father. Her life.
Back then I didn’t have a cell phone. That was a luxury that we couldn’t afford. So I promised my friends that I would email them when I got in the house. Knowing good and well it was probably likely that I wouldn’t be able to send them much of anything. When my father had a tantrum, he tended to gravitate towards the electronics, and we only had one old desktop computer. My mother’s. Although I prayed that it had been spared his wrath.
As soon as we got into the car, Tyson asked me if I needed a little something to relax before I dealt with my father. I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but I assumed it was an alcoholic drink. That’s what my father said on many occasions when he poured himself a scotch.
“I just need something to relax, peanut.” My father’s nickname for me.
“I don’t drink,” I told Tyson firmly.
“I don’t mean alcohol. I’ve got a little Oxy.”
“What’s that?”
The King Brothers Boxed Set Page 7
