Home Free (5 page)

“Okay.” He smiled a slow, wicked smile. “So.
What do you think would have happened in the gym today if your
brother hadn’t walked up?” He was looking in my eyes again, and I
was thinking maybe I’d been too hasty before. My dad was a
reasonable man.

“And we weren’t at school, surrounded by
people?”

He reached behind me and threw the deadbolt,
never taking his eyes off mine. “Yeah.” God, that voice.

I tilted my head up and flashed him what I
hoped was my most irresistible smile. “What do
you
think
would have happened?” Did I mention I was easy?

Two hours later, I was enjoying the coolness
of the tile floor on my back when I heard a car door slam.

“Shit, that’s my dad!” I jumped to my feet,
scooping up clothing and running to my room.

Danny tugged on his jeans, stuffed his
underwear in his pocket, threw his shirt on over his head and
sauntered over to the couch in the living room, sitting down with a
calmness that suggested he’d done this before. I was in my room
hyperventilating and trying, for the third time, to get the buttons
on my shirt to line up right when I heard the front door open and
close.

“Hi, Mr. Jordan.”

“Danny. Where’s Kevin?”

I smoothed my hair and walked down the hall
to the living room. Danny was sitting on the couch, reading some
book. He didn’t look at me.

“Hi, Daddy.”

My dad looked from Danny to me and back to
Danny. He finally turned to me. “What the hell’s going on? You know
you’re not allowed to have boys in the house when no one is home.”
He seemed kind of mad.

“He’s not my friend, he came over looking for
Kevin and I told him he could wait. I’ve been in my room doing
homework.”

“Alexis, you are not allowed to have boys
over when no one is here. What about that don’t you understand?”
Yep, definitely mad.

“But Daddy, he came over at quarter to seven,
and Kevin was supposed to be home by six-thirty, so if Kevin had
been here when he should have, I wouldn’t have been alone when
Danny got here and none of this would have happened. Kevin is
always
trying to get me into trouble,” I whined. I could see
Danny on the other side of the living room, stifling his laughter
behind the book.

My dad paused, then nodded. He turned to
Danny. “I don’t think Kevin is going to be able to go out tonight,
Danny. You better go on home.”

“No problem, Mr. Jordan. Sorry for the
trouble.”

“No trouble.”

I heard Kevin’s motorcycle pull up just as
Danny closed the front door. It took Kevin a couple minutes to get
to the door, so I knew they had stopped to talk. I was sure Danny
would never tell him what had happened, but I couldn’t imagine what
he had said. My dad gave Kevin what for and grounded him for the
weekend, and Kevin never even blinked. And he never said a word
about the kissing booth.

Suffice to say that Danny had known exactly
what he was doing, and probably could have taught the people at
Cosmo a thing or two. The good news was, I was sure I’d had an
orgasm. Well, several, actually. The bad news was, I was seventeen
years old and ruined for life. Two hours with Danny Salazar on the
floor of my parents’ front hall, and I knew no other man would ever
come close.

It was nine o’clock and Brian had finally
packed up his herd and left, but not before lecturing me on the
importance of adequate insurance and the value of installing a
security system, especially in a disadvantaged neighborhood such as
mine. My dad was snoozing in his hammock and my mom was in the
kitchen doing dishes. Kevin and I sat at the edge of the pool,
dangling our feet in the cool water. We were quiet for awhile.

“I didn’t know you still had a thing for
Danny Salazar.”

“I didn’t. I don’t. He just showed up out of
the blue this afternoon and it kind of threw me. I wasn’t expecting
to see him after all this time, since you never bothered to mention
he was living here again.”

“You’ve been married for five years, Alex. I
didn’t mention it because I guess I figured you were over your high
school crush.” He picked at some grease under his fingernails. “You
know Junior’s back in town, too.”

“Junior?”

“Mikey. Goes by Junior now.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Maybe in prison, a name like
Mikey gets you the wrong kind of friends.”

I wondered what kind of friends a name like
Junior got him. “What’s he like?”

“I don’t know. He got out around the
beginning of the year and pretty much took over the gravel yard.
The old man’s been wanting to retire, and I guess Junior was the
only one of the kids who wanted it.” That made sense. Alejandro and
Louie only had daughters, and I couldn’t see them messing up their
hair and nails breaking peoples’ kneecaps and disposing of dead
bodies, or whatever it was the Salazars did for the mob. And Danny
had never been interested in taking over the family business. “I
see him and Danny around town sometimes. Seems like they get along
okay.”

“Hunh.” Danny had never really talked about
his brother, so I didn’t know what kind of relationship they’d had
before. I knew he used to visit him in jail once a month or so,
until he left for college, anyway.

I saw a light go on in the adjoining back
yard and looked at Kevin. He shrugged and made the
beats me
face. I tiptoed over to the fence and squatted down to peek through
a knothole in time to see Danny pull a bench up to the picnic table
in his parents’ backyard, open a bottle of beer and sit down. I
froze for a second when he looked straight at me, then relaxed when
I realized his super human powers didn’t include x-ray vision.
Nobody else was there.

I returned to the pool. Kevin was looking at
me, waiting for a report.

“It’s Danny, he’s having a beer,” I
whispered. “He doesn’t live there, does he?”

“No, I think he lives in that condo complex
over on McKinley. Did you tell him you’d be here tonight?”

“Yeah, but I’m not up for another round. You
go over there and see what he wants.”

“It’s not one of the mysteries of the fucking
universe, Alex. He wants to have a beer.”

“No, besides that.”

“A million dollars? World peace?”

“Very funny.”

“He wants you, Alex, you’re all he’s ever
wanted and now that you’re here, he’s simply overcome with emotion
and can’t bring himself to profess his undying love because you
might not feel the same way, and that would be the end of him, and
he’d just wither away and die, his corpse sitting there on his
parents’ picnic bench rotting and stinking up the
neighborhood.”

“Butt-head.”

Kevin rolled his eyes.

“Go over there and have a beer with him and
see what he says about me.”

“Jeez, what are you, twelve? Why don’t you
get Pauline to pass him a note?”

I kicked my foot up, splashing him, and
started whining
please
. He groaned and I knew he would do
it.

We went inside to say our goodbyes to the
folks. My mom insisted on giving me a casserole that she’d probably
made when she thought I was dying. I hate casserole, but I wasn’t
in a position to be turning down free food, so I thanked her and
walked out front with Kevin. The night had cooled off considerably
and was approaching tolerable. I gave my brother a hug, thanked him
and got in the Element to go home. He hopped on the Deuce and
roared around the block.

I woke up with my chest tight and my heart
pounding. It took a second before I remembered I was in my new
house, and another second to realize I had been jarred out of a
nice naked dream by the ringing telephone. I glanced at the clock.
Good grief, two-fifteen. I snatched the phone up before it could
ring again.

“’Lo?”

“Alex, it’s Kevin.” I hung up. A second
later, the phone rang again. I didn’t need to know what Danny had
said about me quite this urgently. Tomorrow - well, later today -
would be soon enough. I picked up again.

“Call me tomorrow.”

“Wait, don’t hang up. I need to come over. I
just got out of jail.”

I sat straight up. “You what? What the hell
happened?”

“I’ll be over in ten minutes. I just didn’t
want to scare you by showing up without calling first.”

I got out of bed and went to wait for him in
the living room. Then I squeaked back to the bedroom to put on some
sweats because I didn’t think my brother needed to see what I
looked like in my Victoria’s Secret string bikinis and baby tee.
Probably nobody needed to see that. I went back to the living room
just as I heard the bike pull into my driveway. I opened the door
and let him in.

“Thanks.”

“If you were in jail, didn’t you need bail?”
I cringed, thinking of him calling Brian for bail money. He’d never
hear the end of it.

“Didn’t get arrested, just taken in for
questioning. We can’t leave town, though.”

“We?”

“Me and Danny Salazar.”

It was two-thirty in the morning, and I was
having a bitch of a time making sense of everything, and Kevin was
giving me the story in little bitty pieces. I needed a drink. “Do
you want a drink?”

I set out two beers and made two peanut
butter, jelly and potato chip sandwiches on white bread. We sat on
barstools at the kitchen counter and ate our sandwiches, washing
them down with the cold beer. I kept taking peeks at Kevin while he
wasn’t watching. He looked like hell, as pasty white as the bread
and sort of shaky. Something very bad had happened tonight. I
wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but somehow I felt responsible since
I was the one who had sent him over to Danny’s in the first
place.

He finished his sandwich and looked at me. He
took a deep breath. “Okay, here’s exactly what happened.”

The gist of the story was that he’d gone,
like I asked, over to the Salazars’ to have a beer with Danny. They
were having a good time, reminiscing about baseball and high
school.

“Did he say anything about me?” I asked.

Kevin glowered. “This is about me,
remember?”

I let him continue. A little before eleven,
Danny’s cell phone had rung. He said a couple of words, then hung
up. He told Kevin it was some guy named Tom Jenkins who wanted to
talk to Danny in person about Junior, and that it would only take a
few minutes.

“Why did he have to talk to him right then?
It’s the middle of the night on a weekend.” You don’t have to watch
Law and Order
to know something sounds off.

“Danny said Junior was in negotiations with
Jenkins, who owns the body shop next door to the gravel yard.
Junior wants to expand. Anyway, apparently they’re supposed to
close the deal first thing Monday morning, and Danny thought
Jenkins might be getting cold feet. He wanted to help Junior out,
so he said he’d meet the guy at the body shop.”

They figured they’d go by the shop and then
go on over to Blondie’s for one last beer before calling it a
night. They took the bike, Kevin driving and Danny riding on the
back. The body shop was dark when they arrived. Kevin stayed with
the bike while Danny went up to the office. A few minutes later, he
came back. He told Kevin that the door was unlocked, and he’d gone
inside, but the lights weren’t working and he couldn’t see
anything, and no one answered when he called out, so he left.

They both had a bad feeling, and Danny pulled
out his cell phone to call the police.

That’s when the building exploded.

“Okay, let me get this straight. You were
with Danny for about two hours before this guy Jenkins called,
right?”

Kevin nodded.

“And in all that time, he didn’t mention me
once
?”

“For crissake, Alex, this is serious.”

I sighed. It was serious all right. And the
explosion thing was pretty bad, too.

Kevin didn’t feel like going home and being
without an alibi some more, so I gave him a pillow for the couch.
The AC still wasn’t working, and it hadn’t dipped below eighty
degrees inside, so a blanket wasn’t necessary. I went back to bed,
only to lie there for hours, incapable of sleep, trying to figure
out if I was more worried about the fire or the fact that Danny
didn’t find me mentionable.

When I got up at seven, tired and cranky,
Kevin was already gone. I went outside for the paper and tripped
over a giant black cat curled up on my doormat. It didn’t exactly
cross my path, but still, stepping on a black cat probably didn’t
qualify as good luck. It didn’t get up, just rolled its head back
and looked at me through half closed eyes, and I got the distinct
impression that it thought I was an idiot. I had news for it. The
stupid thing was sleeping on the wrong front porch, and there
wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to put out a bowl of water or
kibble for it. That was Debbie’s gig, not mine. I stepped over it
and got the paper. I could have saved us both the trouble. There
was no article about the fire. The Sun-Herald isn’t exactly the New
York Times, or even the Los Angeles Times. Anything that occurs
after about eleven p.m. won’t make it into the next day’s edition
of the paper. Except, of course, local high school sports scores.
The Friday night football game could last until three in the
morning, and the editors would hold the paper to make sure the
score made it to the front page.

I went inside and started a pot of decaf and
grabbed an energy bar, which I ate in the shower. It got a little
soggy, but that didn’t seem to affect the flavor. It still tasted
like gritty papier-mache. Don’t ask how I know that. I threw on a
pair of paint-splattered shorts and a Pittsburgh Steelers t-shirt.
I hate the Steelers. I have no idea how I came to own a Steelers
t-shirt, but when I became aware of it, I began using it for all
the filthy jobs around the house. Once I learned to change the oil
in my car, just so I could further deface the shirt. Unfortunately,
the damn thing was indestructible and showed virtually no signs of
wear.