Jackson Stiles, Road to Redemption (30 page)

The parking lot is empty.

More empty than usual, anyway.

The tiny hairs on the back of my neck are pricking at my skin. I have a terrible feeling, like the sinking feeling you get when you ask a question you already know the answer to, and you don’t like the answer.

I stare down the building before getting out of the car.

Okay.

Don’t panic.

I’m not gonna fucking panic.

I unlock the front door and open it. It’s different from the last time I found him here. When I knew someone was lurking in the shadows. Just didn’t know who.

Seems like a long damn time ago.

This time, I’ve got nothin’. It’s quiet. Too quiet.

“Stix.” So why do I even bother calling out to the kid?

Sparks of concern run under my skin.

I push that shit down because giving in to fear will make me lose focus. I lose focus, I lose Stix, and if I lose Stix, I lose any chance of making up for the fact that I’m, at the very least, partially responsible for the murder of his brother.

I take in a few controlled breaths of air and let them out slow. He’s probably back over in Homeless Town, USA.

Right?

I close the door behind me and call him while I check the street for any cars that look like they don’t belong here. Of course, I get the fucking voicemail.

“Kid.” My voice sounds jacked up. Stuck in the back of my throat kinda shit. “Call me.”

Maybe someone’s listening, maybe not. Better safe than sorry, though. And fuck them.

I wait for a good hour, during which I call Tricky Ricky, who has nothing for me. I check drawers and files to see if maybe Stix left me a clue.
Nothin’.
I pretend-read emails and listen to messages, hoping maybe he just got lost, or held up, or fucking had to pee. I don’t know.

By the time sixty minutes has painstakingly passed, I call him again.

Voicemail kicks in again, and I’m already out the door.

“I’m gonna assume you can’t answer for whatever reason. Or maybe you’re pissed off that I wasn’t answering earlier. I’m sorry about that. But, kid, answer the goddamn phone.”

He’ll call me back when he’s in cell tower range. Meanwhile, I should probably check Homeless Town anyway. Just to be sure.

X X X

I slow the car to a snail’s pace the closer I get to the neighborhood where I last connected with the kid.

Call it instinct, if you want. I call it self-preservation.

I park about three blocks away and hike it the rest. I find the same abandoned building he was in before and climb the stairs to the top. It’s empty.  I sit at a window that looks like it was shot out by something and check out the area below.

There’s no sign of Stix or anybody else for that matter. So, I check the time, even though I know for a fucking fact that it’s easily mid-afternoon. I take a seat on an old coffee table left here over the years, and I wait. Every nerve in my body tells me he isn’t gonna show, but I’m a thorough motherfucker, and I don’t wanna take the chance of leaving if Stix
might
show up.

Another hour of my day goes by, and there’s no sign of the kid. However, as I’m about to call it a day, an older woman with a guide dog steps out from between a couple buildings. I’m sure, to anyone else driving by,
if anyone was to drive by, that is
, she doesn’t seem off. To me, she seems highly out of fucking place, considering this is a homeless area, and the homeless, in general, don’t get guide dogs.

I watch her for a while out of sheer curiosity. I doubt I’m wrong, but you never know. It’s been known to happen.

Once.

Okay, three times.

She feeds some strays that come out of hiding, probably whenever they see humans, but not her dog. She straightens her pants like she can’t stand to be in this dirty ass outfit she’s wearing. Her head turns to her left then to her right before she talks to her wrist.

Bam.

Her stride is slightly faster than someone who might be blind when she heads back to where she came from. About a minute later, a car comes screeching out, and from behind the steering wheel, I see her remove the wig.

Him.

He removes the wig.

“The fuck?”

As I fly down the stairs, I wanna kick myself for not staking this place out from the Chevelle.

By the time I get to the car, start her up, and head in the general direction of my mystery man, it’s too late. He’s gone.

“Dammit.” I bang the steering wheel and try to think.

The trip over here wasn’t the biggest waste of my time, at least. While I don’t know much more than I did when I arrived, my gut tells me someone has the kid, and they were expecting me to come look for him.

As my heart rate begins to pick up, I reach for my lucky cig. When I pull it out, I tap it on the dash a few times. I stick it in between my lips and pull out the lighter I keep in the ash tray. I go to light it, but then I stop. Because motherfucker.

Mother.

Fucker.

How did I let this shit happen? Why am I still dependent on a fucking cigarette for some piece of mind?

I push the lighter back into its hole and toss the cig onto the backseat, unlit. I pull my phone from my pocket and call Green.

“Hola.”

“Hey, it’s Stiles.”

“Really, I didn’t know that.” Sarcastic little… “Smartass. Look, the kid’s gone.” No reason to put off the inevitable.

“What do you mean? Gone.”

“I mean fucking gone, Green.” Jesus.

“Again? Stiles—”

“I know, I
know
. And I don’t have a good feeling about this shit. We need to make something happen. Fast. Have you touched base with,” I shudder to even say the fucking name, “Anonymous?”

“I did. And I think something’s getting ready to go down.”

“What’s the deal?”

“I was told to meet his contact at some place called Dusk ’til Dawn tonight. And that I’d get my instructions then.”

“You don’t know who the contact is? Was it Walker?”

“No idea. He said I’d know. I have a sneaking suspicion this is some kind of test for me.”

“Okay.” I breathe out.

D to D isn’t exactly what I’d call a family place, if you know what I mean. More like a
keep secrets from your family
kind of place. A cheaters club, if you will.

“Guess we’re having ourselves a date night.”

Yay.

X X X

As the sun sets, I destroy the bug Green and I discovered on Frodo and do another sweep of the apartment, including any and all electronics, to make sure nothing else has been compromised.

It’s clean.

Later, I finalize some details with her via phone. She needs to get herself set up in a hotel while she figures shit out with the apartment, and I needed to take the shower I missed this morning when my day went to shit.

Shittier than normal, that is.

We have a couple hours or so before we need to be at D to D. There’s not much else I can do for Stix right now but cross my fucking fingers that he’s still alive.

“If whomever I’m meeting sees you─” Green warns me not to be conspicuous tonight.

Like I’m gonna be conspicuous. Ha.

“I know, I know.”

“And don’t─”

“Kick the guy’s ass before we get a confession. I know, Green. I’ve been doing this a whole hell of a lot longer than you, if you remember correctly.”

“I just want to make sure we actually get this guy, Stiles. If─”

“Hold on.”

A knock at the door catches me off guard. When I check the curtain to see who’s paying me a visit in the middle of this fuckery, I’m taken aback.

That shit doesn’t happen, often.

“I gotta go, Green.”

“Okay, let me know when you’re ready.”

“Will do.” I end the call.

Relax.

And open the door.

“The fuck, Dad?”

“About time you answered the door.”

He’s not drunk, but he’s been drinking. I’m speechless, for lack of a better word.

At first, he doesn’t move or speak other than the growl he just shot at me. He just stands in my doorway.

He’s kinda fucking pitiful-looking, which is weird.

I’ve seen him drunk and sober over the years. He’s got two looks. Happy, which has not been apparent in the past ten years or so, and angry. Never this. Never anything, really.

Has he been crying?

I don’t say a word. I mean what the hell am I gonna say?
Hey, Dad, looking dismal
. All I can do is stand here and wait, confused as hell.

Dad’s expression changes after a few minutes of this shit from that pitiful thing I mentioned to thoughtful, then to determined.

He takes a huge gulp of air and blows it out, then pushes passed me.

“She left me.”

The words cause a blip in my thought process for a heartbeat or two, then I catch up and close the door, following him into the apartment.

“No shit?”

He throws a bag down onto the couch, and sits next to it. I prefer to stand.

“Good for her.”

Frodo waltzes in from the kitchen. Dad sees the old feline and scowls down at him.

“When did you get a cat?”

The old feline hisses and arches his back at my father. Essentially confirming every thought I’ve ever had toward him.

Dad gives me a glassy-eyed look, silently asking,
what the fuck did I do?
To which I shrug.

“What can I say? He’s very intuitive when it comes to reading people.”

One of the reasons I’ve kept him around for so long.

“He’s a cat. He has no brain.”

“Which is more than I can say for most humans.”

Dad huffs and slumps backward onto the sofa, like a ruined tree branch might fall into a river. Heavy and nothing but dead weight.

He opens the bag up that he’s carried in with him and pulls out a Miller High Life. He opens it and stares at it. Then sets it down without taking a single sip. It reminds me of how I interact with the cigarette on occasion.

Where is that thing, anyway?

Dad doesn’t look like he’s planning on going anywhere. This makes me twitchy like a motherfucker.

Places to go, murders to solve.

I shut my eyes. I can’t think about that shit right now.

“What are you doing here, Dad?”

He frowns at the carpet. “Nowhere else to go, I suppose.”

I rub my face in frustration. “What about Nick’s? They like you there.”

He waves a hand at me. “He’s got kids. A life.”

Meaning I don’t.

You see where this shit is going, right?

And they wonder why I never make it home for get togethers.

“You can’t fucking stay here.”

He can’t. Period.

“Coulda gone to Mikey’s if he was still around. Mikey would have me.” It’s a low mumble but I hear it. I always fucking hear it.

“Seriously? You wanna go there?”

“What?” He shoots out a defensive scowl toward me.

“You can’t go one fucking day without reminding someone, anyone who’ll listen, that he’s gone. And why.”

“Better than trying to forget him altogether, eh, Jackie?”

“Don’t fucking call me that. He’s the only one who got to call me that.”

“Him and Nick.”

“Yeah, Dad, him and Nick.”

“Maybe if you knew how to control that temper of yours, he’d still be around to call you Jackie.”

“Fuck you.”

“Excuse me?” His head spins around in a circle as he tries to break bad with me. I can’t really bring myself to give a shit that Ma would probably kill me if she knew I was talking to him like this but ya know what?

This shit’s overdue.

“I said fuck you.
Dad
.” Were the jazz hands necessary? Maybe not, but fuck if sometimes he doesn’t bring out the drama queen in me.

“Because maybe if you hadn’t fucking intimidated the kid into doing every fucking thing
you
wanted him to do, he wouldn’t have followed me out that night in the first place.”

“And directly into oncoming traffic.”

Like I haven’t read myself the riot act over that a million times already.

“It was a goddamn accident.” I try repeating the words Green told me last night. The same ones Nick drills into me. They sound hollow. Empty.

’Cause it really doesn’t fucking matter if it was an accident or not.