Hobbled (4 page)

And he knew it was true.

Danny had waited his whole life to be here with his father on a permanent basis, and look how he had screwed it up already. Tearing up the restaurant, costing his dad money, making him worry, getting him in trouble with the bitch in Indiana. Well, he hadn’t been blowing smoke up the old man’s ass when Danny promised him yesterday he would be good from here on in. Danny meant it. And he would start by taking advantage of his time under house arrest to get a few things done around the place. Things his dad had been putting off because he was so busy with work. That would be a nice surprise for the old man when he got back from his trip.

But first things first. Breakfast.

Actually, even
before
breakfast, came Frederick. The cat. Danny clomped his way to the kitchen and just as he was about to go through the door, he stopped. His jaw fell open. What the hell? Frederick was crouched in the middle of the dining room table eating a bird. A
big
bird. Like a condor. Well, no. More like a crow. But there were feathers and blood and bird guts everywhere. It might as well have been a condor. Or an emu.

Frederick must have grown tired of snacking on the whimsical writings of Mark Twain, and thought he’d partake of something meatier.

Danny threw his arms in the air and screamed like his Aunt Mildred did that time she caught him when he was five years old peeing on the Boston fern in her parlor. “Aarrhggh!”

Then he yelled. “Holy Mother of God! Get that thing off the table!”

Frederick just glared at him and growled, dead bird clamped protectively in his jaws, its poor little head lolling, sightless eyes looking nowhere. Frederick’s tail lashed back and forth, showing how pissed he was at having his fine dining experience interrupted. There was a bead of blood on his whiskers and a couple of bloody feathers dangled off his chin. Yuk.

“Git. Scram. Shoo. Beat it. And take that dead bird with you. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph Goebbels on a cross! What a mess. What a fucking mess!”

Tired of hearing Danny rant, Frederick finally stalked off, dripping bird blood everywhere and leaving a trail of sodden bloody feathers behind on the mahogany tabletop, all the while grumbling and growling and looking surly as hell. Nobody can look more pissed off than a pissed off cat. They’ve mastered the art of wounded dignity and elevated it to an art form. Like post impressionism, only angrier.

So Danny’s first job of the day turned out to be scrubbing bird guts off the dining room table. Not a propitious beginning to
any
day. Although it did keep him from thinking about sex for a while.

He was still fuming about the cat when he finally sat down to eat his own breakfast. A soup tureen full of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries. Just because a guy’s an adult and thinks about sex all the time, well, that doesn’t mean he has to eat like one. Danny figured Cap’n Crunch was good for him. It was practically gravel after all. It was so rock hard and crunchy it probably scraped all the tartar off his teeth like Milk-Bone biscuits do for a dog. And everyone knows that good oral care is essential to a healthy lifestyle.

Plus Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries tasted great, and he could get his required weekly allowance of sugar in three minutes flat. Saved time.

While he shoveled in the cereal with a serving spoon, he stared at the little portable TV perched on the kitchen counter by the sink. Too lazy to get up and change the channel, he was stuck watching a news report.

The Middle East was a seething hotbed of unrest, as usual. In Washington, the Republican senators were throwing darts at the Democrat president, trying to piss him off. Also as usual. The economy was struggling. The oceans were polluted. The price of gas was up. Diane Sawyer needed a haircut. And closer to home, right here in San Diego, someone had taken it into his head to knock off a succession of young men, murdering them and leaving their massacred bodies scattered around the city like so much jetsam. Citizens were up in arms, demanding the police catch the killer, and the police were up in arms, telling the citizens to get off their ass, they were doing the best they could. So far the body count was at four.

Danny watched it all, unconcerned, mindlessly consuming his cereal, and when the last Crunch Berry had gone the way of the dodo, he lifted the soup tureen off the table and tilted it in front of his face like a wash tub to slurp down the remaining quart of pinkish-greenish-yellowish sludgy milk still lingering in the bottom.

Aah. Breakfast of champions.

Sated for the moment, he sipped at a cup of instant coffee to help get the mail moving, since everyone knows a good bowel movement is also essential to a healthy lifestyle. Then, after the mail was moved, he planned to get to work around the joint fulfilling the promise he had made to himself to help his dad out with some of the stuff he had been putting off.

Before he finished the coffee, however, the phone rang. Probably his dad, checking in.

Danny picked up the phone. It wasn’t his dad. It was his mom. As soon as he heard her voice, he felt his heart sink into his lower colon like an anchor gurgling its way to the bottom of the ocean after being tossed over the side of a boat. Christ.

His mom was frantic. He wasn’t sure why. Danny’s crime had been committed a week ago, and the judge’s proclamation had come down three days after that. It was a little late to get all riled up about it now.

“My poor baby! I knew I shouldn’t have let you move away and live with that man in the city.”

“You mean Dad?”

“Oh, don’t call him that. Gerald is your father. You know that, baby.”

Gerald was the putz she’d married. Danny hated Gerald. Gerald was an asshole. “No, I don’t know that,” Danny said, his voice turning to steel. “My dad is my dad. As far as I’m concerned, Gerald is nobody.”

“Oh, you’re breaking my heart, Danny!”

“Maybe it’ll heal.”

“Why are you being so mean? It’s that man, isn’t it? Leaving you all alone with that horrible thing strapped around your ankle. How could he do that? And how’s your leg? Does it hurt, baby? Is it uncomfortable?”

“It’s fine. What do you want?”

“I want you to come home. As soon as your house arrest is finished, I want you to come home.”

“I’d rather set myself on fire.”

“Oh, you’re breaking my heart, Danny!”

“Yeah. You said that already.”

“Gerald wants you home, too.”

“He probably needs somebody to scoop cowshit out of the barn. He never wanted me for anything else. Unless he wanted a punching bag. He used me for that a couple of times.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is, and you know it.”

“He’s sorry, Danny. But sometimes you would try the patience of Job, you’re so headstrong and so—”

“I’m hanging up now. I’m not coming back to Indiana. Ever. I like it here with Dad. And Dad likes having me here. I’m an adult now. There’s nothing you can do about it. So get off my ass, and get off Dad’s ass, too. You’re driving him nuts. Good-bye. Have a nice life. Or not. Tell Gerald to—”

And he hung up the phone, leaving it up to his mom’s imagination to decide what Danny wanted her to tell Gerald to do. Whatever it was, she’d probably be smart enough to know it wasn’t something genteel. More like cramming a fence post up his butt. Nothing genteel about that.

Danny resolutely ignored the pang of guilt he felt for speaking to his mother like that, although the bitch deserved it, and to push it out of his mind completely, he took a peek through the kitchen window toward the back fence. He remembered how those blue jeans had clung to Mr. Childers’s ass the night before, and how that little patch of fuzz just above the swelling of the man’s butt drew Danny in like a magnet. Jeez, it was sexy. Then he remembered Mr. Childers stopping what he was doing and looking around as if he thought maybe someone was watching him. Danny could feel the blood rushing to his face, thinking about it. Thank God the man hadn’t spotted Danny snooping on him through the fence. Talk about embarrassing.

Danny made a vow to himself that he would never again peek through the back fence at Mr. Childers. It was just too dangerous and too potentially humiliating. Nope. The next time he wanted to take a gander at the next-door neighbor’s delectable forty-year-old ass and fuzzy chest, Danny would do it from his upstairs window with the binoculars. In the dark. He could see better from up there anyway.

With that resolution out of the way, Danny set out to do some actual work. It was a beautiful Southern California day. Sunny. Not too hot. A perfect day for some manly yard work.

He slipped a sneaker on his right foot, a plastic bag over the cast on his left leg, and then as an afterthought, he slipped another plastic bag over the right foot as well, sneaker and all, so as to protect the ankle monitor from grass cuttings. After securing the garbage bags with rubber bands, he stared down at himself. Lord, he looked like a fool.

Well, maybe the neighbors weren’t up yet. Or maybe they had all gone to work. Or maybe no one would notice him. Or maybe there would be a total eclipse of the sun and it would be so dark outside no one would be able to see any farther than the nose on their face and therefore wouldn’t notice the weirdass guy mowing the lawn and trimming the hedge wearing trash bags on his feet.

Or maybe he’d simply have to abide looking like a fool. Period.

It was just too bad his dad had bought
pink
trash bags.

Regardless of all that, it actually felt good to be doing physical labor. The last thing he had done lately that was truly strenuous was flip over that frigging ice machine. Those things are heavy. Danny thought he might have even pulled something in his back when he did it, but there never seemed to be a good time to complain about that. People seemed more concerned with the damage to the ice machine. And the fact that he had actually broken his leg during the commission of his crime. As the judge had pointed out, Danny was not only inconsiderate and hot-headed, but clumsy on top of it. Then the judge had snickered and shaken his head and wiped a couple of happy tears out of his eyes, which still brought a blush of shame to Danny’s cheeks when he thought about it.

Damn judge.

Danny had plenty of time to think about stuff while he mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges. It was while he was edging the sidewalk that a couple of kids went by on skateboards and one of them screamed out, “Ooh, I like your pink leg warmers!” referring to the garbage bags Danny had strapped around his feet.

Being an adult now, Danny did the only mature thing he could do under the circumstances. He gave the kid the finger. The boys roared on past on their skateboards, hooting with laughter, both of them shooting a finger back in return. Ah, youth.

Danny saw a couple of faces poke around curtains in nearby windows, but he ignored them. He went about his work, trying to be as thorough as he could. He wanted his dad to be pleased with the way the yard looked. He was very, very careful not to pass the nightlights he had poked around the perimeter of the lawn the night before, delineating his green-light zone. The last thing he wanted was for the neighbors to enjoy the sight of twenty squad cars screaming up to the house and a shitload of cops hauling Danny off to the hoosegow, kicking and screaming, just because he had overstepped the limits on his ankle monitor.

While he was thinking about that, Danny had another thought. He suddenly realized his dad wouldn’t be back for three weeks. Three weeks! The grass would be all grown back by then. Even the hedges would look ratty again in three weeks’ time. Danny would have to do the work all over again for his dad to see the results of his labor.

Well, poop. He stopped what he was doing immediately.

Danny gathered up all his equipment—lawn mower, edger, shears—and stored it back in the basement. He peeled off his grass-splattered garbage bags on the back stoop and tossed them in the trash. He went inside, showered, did another round of headbanging to style his hair after climbing out of the shower, swiped another streak of deodorant across his armpits, and donned a clean pair of shorts and a clean shirt. He ignored the urge to beat off and ate lunch instead. Frederick sat at the other end of the table, watching him. The cat had cleaned the blood and feathers off himself since the last time Danny saw him. Danny supposed he would be running across a desiccated pile of bird bones and feathers sometime soon since he didn’t know where the cat had finished devouring the poor beast, but Danny would cross that bridge when he came to it. In the meantime, he accepted the uneasy truce between himself and Frederick and even gave the cat a little smile and a finger waggle of greeting when he saw it watching him.

The cat yawned and walked away. Hmm. Maybe all wasn’t quite as forgiven as Danny thought.

Danny cleaned up his mess from lunch, parked himself in the recliner in his room, and after digging around inside his cast for five minutes with the curtain rod trying to appease an itch that was apparently unappeasable, he finally conked out and slept the rest of the afternoon.

It wasn’t until later, when the day was long over and the moon was high and most of the city was sound asleep, that things got interesting.

Danny couldn’t know it at the time, but his life was about to change. For better
and
for worse.

The “better” part would be great. Phenomenal. Better than he could ever have imagined.

The “worse” part would suck. Big time.

I
T
WAS
two in the morning when headlights swept across Danny’s bedroom walls, jarring him awake. It must be Mr. Childers. Sometimes the man stayed out late, maybe because of a night job; Danny wasn’t sure. Mr. Childers’s driveway was situated so the headlights of his car were aimed right into Danny’s bedroom. Especially if Mr. Childers backed into his garage like he usually did.

But the headlights were on the wrong wall for it to be Mr. Childers. Mr. Childers of the nice ass. Mr. Childers of the nice patch of fuzzy hair situated at the base of his nicely muscled back between the two butt dimples on
top
of the nice ass.