Deviant (4 page)

“You've got to work on a Sunday?” Danny asked.

“I do. The grand opening is in three weeks; you wouldn't believe the stuff that hasn't been done yet … I have to go. By the way, Jeffrey's under your bed.”

Danny looked under the bed and, sure enough, there was Jeff. “He must be freaked,” Danny said.

“He'll get over it,” his mom said, and left.

He heard her clunk down the stairs.

He looked out the window to see what kind of car she was driving. It had been so late, he hadn't even noticed it when she picked him up at the airport.

A brand-new Volvo XC90. Just like the ones that cruised the Strip on a Friday night. Cool. They really were moving up in the world.

Danny coaxed Jeff out from underneath the bed and set the cat next to him while he ate the cereal Juanita had brought.

It was Cocoa Krispies rather than Cocoa Pebbles, but that was OK; she'd at least made the effort to get his favorite.

Jeff meowed and Danny put a little chocolate milk on his spoon and let Jeff drink. He'd read somewhere that cats
couldn't digest chocolate, but old Jeff was so tough he could deal with anything.

“You could deal with a bear, couldn't you?” he said.

While Jeff curled into a warm spot on the bed, Danny finished the cereal and went for a brief reconnaissance of the house.

Upstairs there were three big bedrooms, two with en suite toilets, all of them with views. Just how much was Glynn paying her? Downstairs there was a gigantic living room with a panoramic view of the street and the mountain beyond, a dining room, a kitchen, and two more bathrooms. The house had been decorated in a kind of Western motif: paintings of cattle drives, lonely vistas, cowboys. There were mounted antlers above the stone fireplace and a couple of fake-looking Navajo sand pictures, which probably meant they were real.

There was a big spot where something was missing on the dining room wall, and a little detective work revealed it to be a painting of a noble savage–style Indian standing over a dead buffalo. His mother had placed it down in the basement. Was it offensive? Obviously to her, but Danny couldn't really see the problem. The Indian looked pretty bad-ass standing on top of the bison he'd just killed with a bow and arrow.

There was a small study and a bookcase that contained only phone books, a front yard where you couldn't do much, and a large back garden with a thin layer of snow on it.

The forest began right at the backyard fence. Danny opened the back door and examined the snow with his bare foot. He'd only encountered snow a few times in his life. He didn't like it before, and he doubted if he'd like it now.

In Vegas when snow fell, it disappeared soon after it touched the ground; it didn't generally lie around like this.

“Hmm,” he said, touching the stuff skeptically with his big toe.

He closed the back door.

He was still hungry. He went to the kitchen and after opening a million cupboards he found the Cocoa Krispies box and got milk from the refrigerator.

“Hello?” a voice said.

He turned. Much to his surprise, there was a girl standing in the hall. A scrawny character, about thirteen with short blond, spiky hair, a red dress, redder cheeks, a thick unzipped black coat, red tights, boots. If she'd been wearing a white dress, Aunt Isabella would have been crossing herself and muttering things about the faerie folk or La Llorona.

“Who are you?” Danny asked.

“Who are you?” the girl said.

“Danny.”

“I thought so,” the girl said dispassionately, and walked into the kitchen. Her eyes were the same green as the trees, and he saw that her crazy hair was actually a kind of brownish blond. The way she'd gelled it and spiked it up looked a bit ridiculous.

“So, who are you?” Danny asked, putting down the Cocoa Krispies box.

“Tony. Antonia, actually, but I like Tony. Whatcha eating?”

“Uh, I haven't totally decided yet, uh, Antonia.”

“Tony, please!”

Tony widened the fridge door and they both looked in. It was packed full of stuff. Sodas, fruit, eggs, cheese, candy bars. Danny grabbed a can of Dr Pepper and Tony got a gigantic bar of hazelnut chocolate that must have come from Sam's Club or Trader Joe's.

“Do you want a Dr Pepper or something?” Danny asked.

“Do you drink coffee?”

“Sure,” he lied, wondering how to make it. Something to do with the French press, he thought. “Are you sure you don't want a Dr Pepper? There's a six-pack in there.”

“No, thanks,” she said disdainfully.

Coffee, he thought. Hot water and crushed beans? His mom took instant, but Walt had a whole complicated system. He lit a ring on the stove, filled the kettle, and put it on it. Meanwhile, Tony had spied Sunflower lying on the table. She picked it up.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

Danny's brow furrowed. There was a possibility that girls in Colorado might not like boys who painted one of Van Gogh's sunflowers on the deck of their skateboard. In fact—like the girls in Vegas—there was a possibility that Colorado girls might not like skateboarders at all, that they
considered skateboarders on the dork side of the great dork/cool-guy divide.

“Um,” he said, grabbing a coffee mug from an empty shelf and trying to clean dust out of the bottom of it.

Tony put the skateboard on the table deck-side down. She spun the plastic wheels with one of her fingers.

“Can I have a glass of milk?” she asked.

“Instead of the coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“Great, sure.”

Danny sighed with relief, turned off the gas, and poured milk into the coffee cup. She came over and took it from him.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

“So you live here in Colorado now,” she announced rather than asked.

There was no point denying it. “Yeah,” Danny said.

After two more slugs of Dr Pepper he was completely awake but he was still a little reluctant to ask where she lived, in case the answer was inside the mountain or Aunt Isabella's Land of the Faeries or something.

“Can I have a piece of that chocolate?” he asked as a way of placating her. It wasn't a traditional method of warding off La Llorona but you tried anything in such cases.

“My mom got you this,” Tony said, passing him the bar.

“She did?”

“Yes. She sent a gift basket. Welcoming present when we thought you were all coming. But just your mom came.
My mom says you're going to be living here now and that you're going to be going to our school.”

“Does she now?” Danny said, snapping off a square and putting it in his mouth. It was hazelnutty and good.

Tony grabbed the chocolate back. “Yeah, she does,” Tony muttered, rather savagely biting into the chocolate bar instead of breaking a bit off.

“What else does your mother say?”

“She says your mom is going to be working in that Indian Casino they're building.”

“That's true.”

“Most people round here don't like that casino.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The kitchen didn't have anyplace to sit. Danny pointed at the living room. “You wanna take a seat in there?”

“OK, but at some point I should be going back. I don't really know you or anything; you could be like one of those people from
America's Most Wanted
for all I know,” she said, sitting at the large oak living room table.

That made Danny a little annoyed. It rubbed him the wrong way, especially considering the fact that only a few hours earlier he'd been waiting for Walt outside a holding cell at McCarran Airport. “Hey, I didn't ask you to come in. In fact, I didn't even hear you knock,” he said.

Just then Jeffrey wandered in and began rubbing himself against Tony's legs. She bent down and stroked him, and like the traitor he was he began to purr.

“You've got a cat,” she said.

“Don't let anyone ever tell you you're not observant.”

“He's kind of a bit squirrelly-looking.”

Danny was incensed. “He's a tough street cat! I found him in the Tropicana Wash.”

“He's cute. And he doesn't look so tough to me,” she said, stroking his belly.

“He killed a snake once,” Danny said, increasingly annoyed at Jeff's purring.

“You're going to hate school,” she said, apropos of nothing.

Danny didn't like conversations where people jumped around so much. It was like reading the spam comments on his YouTube skateboard channel. Half of them didn't make any sense; they should have just held their breath and their keystrokes.

“Why am I going to hate school?”

“You just are,” she said with real satisfaction.

“Maybe I love school.”

“No, I can tell, you don't. And certainly not this one.”

Her face had a pale, slightly asymmetrical, weird quality to it. She was definitely pretty, but not in that obvious American way, that way you saw at the beauty pageants at Mandalay Bay.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, catching him looking at her.

“Oh, um, nothing really. I like your hair.”

“I like your board,” she said.

“You do?”

“Tell me about it?”

“Do you skateboard?” he asked quickly.

“No.”

He shook his head. “You wouldn't be interested.”

She broke off an impossibly big chunk of chocolate and shoved it in her mouth. “Tryyyyyy meeeee,” she said, and scooted the chocolate bar back across the table.

Danny laughed. “You're pretty funny,” he said.

“To look at,” she added, and he laughed some more.

He flipped the board over. “Nevada Skateboard Company, 2008, polymer wheels, wood deck, stainless-steel ball bearings and supports, only a few hundred ever made before the company went bankrupt. Five hundred bucks apiece, but I got it eighty percent off. Perfect balance, bump grips, an eight-inch-wide—”

“What's that picture?”

“Oh, I did that myself, it's not very good. I used to do art. It's one of Van Gogh's sunflowers, you know? But actually I kind of called the board Sunflower after a Beach Boys album. Walt's into the Beach Boys. They were a group from a million years ago and he played it all the time and it got into my brain or something.”

“Who's Walt?”

Danny shook his head. “Stepdad, I guess.”

She nodded sagely. She understood. Her parents were
still married, but many of the kids at school were from separated homes. She didn't want to pry further, but Danny offered the information anyway. “They're married and everything. Two years now. At the Little Chapel of the West if you can believe it. That was horrible … Anyway, they're married. But they asked me if I just wanted to keep Mom's name and I said yeah. So that's why she's Juanita Brown and I'm Danny Lopez, before anybody talks or says anything or, uh, anything.”

He'd said all this very quickly and now he paused to take a deep breath.

“Well, I suppose it's my turn,” Tony said. “I'm from the Springs, born and bred. My dad works at NORAD, in Cheyenne Mountain; my mom's an admin assistant for Focus on the Family. My dad's also an elder over at the Faith Cathedral, but I don't think he gets paid for that.”

“NORAD—that sounds pretty cool.”

“Yeah, I guess, I don't know. We're not allowed to go there. Oh, I have a sister, like a big sister, she's eighteen, Alexa, she's cool, she's in college. Kinda near Vegas, actually. Arizona State. And I have a cat called Snowflake. My grandparents live in Texas and Florida and I snowboard. So I'm sort of a board chick too, but the mountain bullies are such dicks. I kind of think of myself as a hippie surfer girl without the ocean, you know?”

Danny didn't know, but he nodded anyway.

“Your English is pretty good,” Tony said.

“WTF? So's yours,” Danny said furiously.

Tony looked embarrassed. She covered her mouth and swallowed a big chunk of chocolate. Her cheeks were burning. “I didn't mean anything by that, it's just that, I don't know, I never met anybody whose mom was Mexican, that's all.”

“My mom's American. Her dad was a Cherokee, and his people have been here for ten thousand years. And my grandma's from Texas, so don't start any of that crap with me.”

Tony reached across the table and grabbed his hand. Her fingers were tiny, cold, delicate.

She squeezed his palm. “I'm really, really sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. That was a dumb thing to say. It's pretty white-bread around here, worse than the Springs even. I don't know what I was thinking.”

The green of her eyes wavered in front of him for a second or two and then melted his resistance. He knew that sometimes he was a bit too quick to fly off the handle.

“
De nada, ese,
” he said.

“What does that mean?” she said suspiciously.

“It means ‘it's chill, sista.'”

She let go of his hand and stood up.

“Good, OK, well, now that I've checked out the scene and alienated you forever, I have to go back. This is an unofficial scouting mission on your family, unsanctioned by the rest of the street, but I must deliver my report before church.”

“What are you going to tell them?” Danny asked.

“What else? The truth. You're into heavy metal, devil worship, and you have dug a portal to hell right here in the living room.”

Danny smiled. “Don't forget the human sacrifices.”

“Human sacrifices, check.”

“Which house do you live in?”

“The one on the other side of the road. The pink monstrosity,” she said, pointing to a newish McMansion almost exactly like the ones you'd see in Seven Hills. Four or five bedrooms, triple garage, black Tudor-style wood boards over pinkish white stucco.

“That is a big house,” Danny said with mild satirical intent.