Bending the Rules

by Susan Andersen

  “Yeah?” A little of the tension eased from his shoulders. “Over what?”

  She told him about it as they drove to the Fremont district, growing passionate about her mom’s blatant unfairness all over again.

  “She was wrong,” he said when she concluded and Cory felt a rush of warmth that he understood.

  “Still,” he added.

  “There’s a still?” She bristled. “Still what?”

  “Nothing.” But he immediately pulled himself higher in the driver’s seat and shot her a look that held an edge of hostility. “No, dammit, it’s not nothing. At least your mother sounds like she cares. Like she wants to protect you.”

  Well…sure. But that wasn’t the point. The point was—

  She blinked, realizing what he was inferring. “Doesn’t yours?”

  A bark of humorless laughter escaped him. “Mom cares about keeping her cushy berth with her rich new husband. I come in a poor second. Or maybe third, after her Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoon masseuse. She really likes those massages.”

  “She has a masseuse?” Cory slapped her own cheek, knowing that was hardly the important issue. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just never known anyone with one of those.” She studied Danny’s profile. “How long’s she been married to your stepfather?”

  “Don’t call him that,” he snapped. “Richie the Rich is no kind of father, step or otherwise. They’ve been married about six months.”

  “They’re probably still in the—whatchamacallit—the honeymoon stage. But I’m sure she loves you,” she added, because she truly couldn’t envision a mother who wouldn’t love her kid.

  “Are you?” He glanced over at her, then turned his attention back to the road, a small, bitter smile twisting the corner of his mouth. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

  But she felt him withdraw and reached out to touch his arm as he pulled up in front of the spectacularly painted building they’d come to see. “I’m sorry,” she said again, rubbing the knotted muscle beneath her fingers. “I’m obviously talking out my butt, since I’ve never even met your mom.”

  For a moment he merely gazed at her as if she bewildered him. Then the curtains came down in his eyes. “Forget about it, okay?” Averting his gaze, he looked past her to stare out the side window. “Look at this place! We gotta check this out.”

  The narrow lot alongside the building was full, so he took his foot off the brake and drove on. Finding a parking spot a block and a half away a few moments later, he wheeled into it.

  Feeling as if she’d somehow failed him, she climbed out of the truck and followed him back to the store or whatever it was. In silence they looked at the graffiti-like mural that covered two sides of its building.

  The more Cory studied it, the more enthusiastic she felt. “This. Is. So. Dap! Could we do something like this, you think?”

  “I don’t know. Fremont is a lot more laid-back than the neighborhood we’re doing. I don’t think they’d go for a straight graffiti mural, no matter what Ms. C. says.”

  “Maybe not like the front part,” she agreed. “But this side, with the mountains and totem and things—I bet we could get away with adding in some graffiti elements if we keep most of it Pacific Northwest–themed. We could do waves and fish and—”

  “Incorporate subliminal stuff,” he added, his eyes lighting up. “Subversive stuff within the bigger landscapes, you know?”

  “Tiny fairies,” she breathed.

  He gave her a wry look. “I was thinking more like little demons and shit.”

  “Well, you do your little demons—I’ll do my fairies.”

  They looked at each other. Laughed out loud. And exchanged high fives.

  “Let’s both draw up something to show Ms. C. with the general PNW theme,” Danny said. “This could maybe work.”

  “Yeah.” Excitement coursed through her. “It really could.”

  She glanced over at a black SUV that was cruising at a snail’s pace down the other side of Fremont Avenue. Even as she noticed it, the dark tinted driver’s-side window slowly lowered. “Hey, kids!” the man inside leaned out to say.

  Oh, shit, oh, shit. Her heart thundered and her legs momentarily froze. She knew that face; it had inhabited her nightmares since that night in the U district. She gripped Danny G.’s arm. “We gotta go,” she said quietly.

  “Huh?” He gave her a puzzled look.

  “Yo, you two!” Bruno Arturo called impatiently. “I’m talking to you. C’mere!”

  Adrenaline hit like an electric prod and Cory transferred her grip to Danny’s hand. “Move!” she snapped. “You don’t want to have a run-in with that guy.” She gave his hand a hard jerk. “Danny, come on!”

  She could only imagine what her expression reflected. Whatever was on her face, Danny took one good hard look and without exchanging another word, they both took off at top speed in the opposite direction from that in which Arturo’s car was pointed.

  Weaving their way through the streets in a circuitous route, they made their way back to Danny’s car. When he’d driven them out of the district via the Fremont bridge, he glanced over at her. “Man, you can run. Wanna tell me what the hell that was all about?”

  Oh, she did. She really wanted to unload her fear, to just dump it all at his feet.

  And yet…

  It wasn’t safe. Not for her, not for him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “So sorry I got you involved. Sorry I can’t talk about it.”

  He pulled his attention away from the rearview mirror to look at her again. Then he shrugged.

  “When you change your mind, you know where I am.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Twist-your-guts teen pathos and Jason. It was a freaking four-star day. Okay, so it actually turned out pretty good. But why does everything have to be so complicated?

  SONOFABITCH! Bruno drove the streets of Fremont for another twenty minutes. But the two kids had vanished.

  He kept shaking his head as if he’d taken a sucker punch to the temple. The boy he’d been hunting was a she? Who the hell would have guessed the kid was a mofo’n girl?

  Hell, he’d only rolled down the window to talk to her and the other kid in the first place because they’d been gawking at that bullshit graffiti building like it was the holy-fuckin’-grail or something. So he’d thought, Hey, good, maybe they know some of the local taggers and graffiti freaks. The fact that he’d been addressing the very person he’d been rousting every artsy-fartsy street kid he could find over, breaking a finger or two on the ones he’d thought were withholding information on the boy—girl!—never once occurred to him.

  There was no mistaking the way that kid ran, though. She had a way of picking up her knees and streaking from zero to sixty like some hopped-up horse out of the gate at Emerald Downs. The boy with her’d had longer legs, a longer reach and more muscle mass. Yet he’d barely kept up when she’d taken off, never mind come anywhere near passing her to take the lead.

  Giving up the search, Bruno wheeled out of the neighborhood and headed back to his own part of town. He didn’t know what the hell to do now. It shouldn’t matter that she was a girl—she was still the witness who could sink him with a single misplaced sentence.

  Yet…

  It did. He would rip the johnson offa anyone with the stones to actually say so to his face, but it mattered. He had a niece about that girl’s age, and now that he knew his witness’s gender, he could hardly believe he hadn’t cottoned to the fact sooner. Yes, the all-arms-and-legs gawkiness that he’d ascribed to youth was a characteristic that could be attributed strictly to a tender age—no doubt about it. But now that he knew what the hell he was looking at, recognition of the coltish stage little girls went through as they changed into young women nearly blinded him.

  Shit.

  Well, he’d hunt the kid down. Dig up as much information as he could.

  Then he’d figure out what the hell to do about her.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Jase
left the Harborview trauma center, where he’d been checking on the man who’d been shot in the jewelry-store robbery in the U district. The victim was still in a coma, and the doctors weren’t seeing imminent signs of recovery. Not exactly the news with which Jase had hoped to start his Saturday morning.

  Arriving at his SUV, he climbed in and consulted his notes for a second before putting the vehicle in gear and pulling out into the street. He was cruising down Yesler moments later when he saw an informant he’d been trying to track down for the past several days. He swerved his CR-V over to the curb half a block from where the mope was shuffling down the street.

  He had no sooner shoved the car into Park and was opening the door to go grab his snitch for a talk, however, when his cell phone rang.

  What was this, some cosmic conspiracy trying to prevent him from hooking up with this guy? Because this was the third time this week that something had come along to interfere.

  He glanced down at the phone’s screen. Seeing Poppy’s name, he scowled at the way his pulse immediately went ape shit.

  But he hadn’t spent a lifetime staying on top of his emotions for nothing. Wresting back control, lowering his heart rate by sheer willpower, he hit the talk button. Barked, “What?”

  “Jason?” she said, her voice a stroke that went straight to his—

  Uh-uh. No, sir. Straightening in his seat, he grasped the fabric near the crotch of his slacks and adjusted it with a yank. What was he—seventeen? Dammit, he had to get out, go to a bar, one of these nights. He didn’t know why he kept putting it off. It had been way too long since he’d been with a woman.

  Other than her, that is. And since that hadn’t had a real satisfactory conclusion—“What do you want?”

  “A civil greeting would be a start,” she murmured. “Or, barring that, you keeping your word. But I guess avoiding me these days takes up all your time.”

  She had that right. Not the keeping-his-word part—he’d more than honored his part of a bargain he’d been coerced into making in the first place. But avoiding her? Oh, yeah. “This is probably gonna come as a shock to you, sweetheart, but I’ve got this job that the taxpayers actually expect me to perform to justify the paycheck the city cuts me every other Friday.”

  “You’ve got a commitment to these kids, too,” she snapped. Then her tone softened. “Sorry. I’m sorry.” She sighed. “Believe it or not, I didn’t call to bust your chops. If you really don’t want to be part of the project any longer, I’m through fighting you over it. But Henry didn’t show up this morning and I’m worried.”

  “He probably got a better offer than slapping paint on buildings for you.” But Jase shifted uneasily. Because all three of those kids had stuck with their obligation a helluva lot better than he had ever expected. And Henry’s old man sounded like a piece of work. He blew out a breath. “All right. Give me his address. I’ll swing by his place.”

  “Thank you. This was the day we were going to start doing the fun part. I can’t imagine him missing it, even if he did pretend it was a great big pain in his behind.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” But he shook his head at her unrelenting faith in the teens she taught. “The address?”

  She rattled it off, and he wrote it in his notebook, along with the name and location of the coffee shop where she was waiting with Danny and Cory. “When I know something, you’ll know something,” he said curtly and snapped his phone shut.

  His informant was no longer in sight and it turned out Henry didn’t live that far away, so within ten minutes Jase was knocking on the youth’s tenement door. He didn’t really expect an answer and was surprised when Henry himself pulled open the door.

  The kid looked equally surprised to see him. “Shit,” he muttered in disgust. “It’s you.”

  “You were expecting the blonde herself? Ms. C. tells me you stood her up.”

  “So she sent out the big dog to haul me in? I thought you didn’t like us anymore—we ain’t seen you around much. Whatza matter, Ms. C. wouldn’t let you into her undies?”

  “Don’t make me hurt you, kid.” He wished the words back the minute he saw Henry wince and gentled his tone. “Everything okay with you?”

  The boy’s chin shot up. “Macadoodledandy.”

  “Then let’s go. They’re waiting for you at the Fremont Coffee Shop.”

  Henry’s narrow shoulders hunched in. “I ain’t going.”

  “Why not?” He studied the boy for bruises but didn’t see any. Not that that meant a helluva lot—Henry was covered from neck to ankle in baggy black clothing.

  “I don’t wanna, all right?”

  “Ms. Calloway says this is the fun part.”

  He scowled. “I did what I was supposed to do. I painted all those fucking walls to cover the tagging. I’m done.”

  “There’s just one problem with that,” Jase said softly, because he could see that the boy was genuinely upset. “Ms. C. said to fetch you. So fetch you I gotta do.”

  “I can’t draw, okay?” Henry yelled.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “She says this is s’pose to be the fun part and let’s do some art, but I’m not like Danny G. and Cory. I can’t draw.” He snatched up a brand-new-looking sketch pad that had been under a tin of colored pencils and thrust it out at Jase. “She gave us each one of these and said to work up some ideas for the wall. But I can’t.” He whipped the cover back, showing Jason the ragged edges where page after page had been ripped out. “I got ideas, but I can’t draw ’em!”

  And it was eating him up, Jase saw. He rubbed his temples. “Okay, let me think about this.” Doing so, he came to the only possible conclusion. “I have to call her.” “No!”

  “It’s better to tell her straight up what’s going on, Henry. She’ll handle that a helluva lot better than you just blowing her off. You agree that she’s a pretty nice woman, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said fervently.

  “Then you gotta trust her. It’ll break her heart if you up and disappear on her. She was really worried about you, you know. That’s why she called me. Plus, you think she’ll just give up on you? The woman is a pit bull—once she gets something in her head she doesn’t let loose until she has what she wants. So let her help us figure this out. Because, trust me, she won’t just say ‘oh, well’ and walk away. She’ll hound you till your ears bleed. And you might as well save yourself that, because in the end, kid, you will rejoin the fold.”

  “Fine,” Henry muttered, hitching a shoulder as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. But he turned aside to swipe the heel of his hand over his cheeks.

  Pretending he didn’t see the tears the boy was mopping up, Jase walked to the far side of the small living room and called Poppy.

  She exclaimed in distress after he explained the situation to her and said in a low, fierce voice, “You tell that child we can fix that. I can’t turn him into Rembrandt—or even Gary Larson—overnight. But I can walk him through some basics and there are other options for this project besides the actual drawing. I’ll prep Cory and Danny. You just get him down here.”

  Pocketing his phone, he turned back to Henry. “She said everything’s going to be all right. Grab your stuff. Apparently Ms. C.’s got a muffin with your name all over it.”

  Prepping or no prepping, he was impressed with the other two teenagers when he and Henry arrived at the café a short while later. They didn’t jump all over the kid for holding things up the way teens could do, but instead simply moved over to make room for him at the table.

  Then he recalled the boys’ horror the day Cory had her meltdown. They’d asked him, of all people, how they should act around her and had actually followed his suggestion that they refrain from commenting on it unless she brought it up first.

  Apparently these kids had each other’s backs.

  “Check this out,” Cory said and flipped open her sketchbook with one hand as she reached for Danny’s with the other. The two started pitching their Northwest-themed
graffiti idea so fast and furiously, half the time they both talked at once.

  “So?” Cory demanded when they finally stopped to draw a breath. “Brilliant, right?”

  Henry stuffed an oversize bite of muffin into his mouth, then buried his nose in the glass of orange juice Poppy had placed in front of him. But if he hoped to avoid the conversation, he didn’t know teenaged girls.

  Or any woman, for that matter, Jase thought wryly.

  “So?” she insisted, giving him a poke. “This is where you’re supposed to say, ‘Brilliant, Cory.’”

  “What do you care what I think?” he muttered. “Looks to me like you and Danny got it all figured out and it’s not like I got sumthin’ to contribute. I don’t even know how to draw.” His thin shoulders hunched up under his ears.

  “You know how to color, though, right?” Danny said easily.

  Henry nodded slowly, losing a fraction of the tightness gripping his narrow frame.

  “This is going to be the biggest project any of us have ever done,” the older teen said.

  “No kidding,” Cory agreed.

  “And it’s going to take all of us. So how about Cory and me and Ms. C. do the drawing and you and Detective de S. help with coloring it in?”

  Wait a minute. Jase mentally jerked upright. How did he get to be part of this equation?

  Danny stole a pinch off Henry’s muffin and popped it in his mouth. “And were you paying attention to the part where we’re gonna hide trolls and stuff inside the bigger picture?”

  “I’m gonna do fairies,” Cory interjected.

  Danny gave Henry a look. “You see what I’m dealing with here, bro? We need more man-stuff to counterbalance her girlie influence.”

  “Hey!” she protested.

  Henry sat a little taller in his chair. “Lizards,” he said emphatically and turned the sketchbooks around to study the drawings more closely. “Lizards are cool and come in all shapes and sizes, from those little rock ones to Komodo dragons.”