Rastor (Lawton Rastor Book 2) (12 page)

It was Monday, and I was happy as hell. After two long days, I was finally getting the chance to win Chloe back. No matter what, I wasn't going to mess this up.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon when I pulled into her driveway. I'd called her at noon to finalize our plans, but what those plans were, Chloe still didn't know.

All I'd told her was to dress in casual clothes and to be ready to see something that I'd never shown anyone. Other than that, I'd been secretive for a reason. I didn't want her to worry. And I sure as hell didn't want her to cancel.

She'd be safe. I'd make sure of it.

I was just getting out of my car when the front door opened, and there she was, heading toward me. She wore jeans and a dark V-necked shirt. Her eyes were bright, and she was smiling.

It was a good sign.

But when she saw my car, her smile faltered. Easy to see why. The car was a beat-up brown sedan with a rusty front bumper and a dented hood. It looked ancient and ugly, something that belonged in a junk yard, not on the road.

When I met her on the walkway, her eyes were still on the car. "What's that?" she asked.

"Our ride."

"Oh," she said, walking with me back to the car. When we reached its front bumper, she gave the car a long, worried look. "You sure this thing runs?"

I grinned over at her. "It got me here, didn't it?" I flicked my head toward the passenger's side. "C'mon." I walked to the car-door and opened it. I waited.

Chloe didn't move. "How far are we going?"

"Not far."

She glanced back at her own car, parked in front of the garage. "Wanna take my car?"

I laughed. "Not a chance." For starters, she was my guest, not my chauffeur. But more importantly, there was no way in hell we'd be taking
her
car to the place we were going.

I owned a small fleet of cars. Every one of them looked a lot nicer than the one I was driving today. But I'd brought this car for a reason.

"Trust me," I told her. "It runs great."

She bit her lip. "I suppose you have a backup plan if we get stranded?"

"We won't," I assured her.

She gave me a shaky smile. "I must be insane," she said, finally climbing into the passenger's seat. I closed the door behind her, and walked around to get behind the wheel.

When I fired up the engine, she was studying the car's interior, as if unsure what to make of it. Her confusion was understandable. On the outside, the car was a heap. On the inside, it was vintage quality.

As for the engine, it was a nice, steady purr.

When I backed out onto the street, she turned sideways in the seat to face me. "Alright," she said. "You know I'm gonna ask, so let's just get it out of the way. Why this car?"

I put on my serious face. "What? You don’t like it?"

"Am I supposed to?"

She looked so adorable that I had to laugh. Returning my attention to the road, I said, "Alright, as much as I'd like to mess with you, I don't want you to worry."

Her tone grew teasing. "Too late for that."

"So here's the thing," I said. "Where we're going, I'd never take any of my other cars."

"Why not?"

"Because they're not as safe." I gave her a quick glance. "And since I've got you here, I'm not taking any chances."

"Oh come on," she said. "Be serious."

"I am serious. My other cars, they draw too much attention."

It was true. I loved cars, the faster the better. Even my basic black sedan wasn't all that basic when you considered the engine and its corresponding price tag.

She gave me a worried look. "I don't want to be mean, but this car? It'll get plenty of attention."

"Yeah? Well don't let the exterior fool you. The engine, along with everything else under the hood, is in prime condition. And it's fast too. A lot faster than it looks." I reached up and tapped the driver's side window. "And see this glass? Bullet-proof."

She laughed. "Oh stop it."             

"I'm not kidding."

"You serious?" she asked.

"Yup. And the wheels–"

"Don't tell me," she teased. "Also bullet-proof?"

"Not exactly. But close."

"Oh c'mon. How can something be sort of bullet-proof?"

"It's the way they're constructed," I explained. "Even if they're punctured, they'll keep going, at least long enough."

"How?"

"Polymer rings."

"What's that?" She paused. "Oh never mind. You're just messing with me."

No. I wasn't messing with her. And, once we got going, things would get a lot more serious. I glanced over at her and asked, "How good are you at keeping secrets?"

"Pretty good."

"Glad to hear it," I said. "Because I'm counting on that."

We'd been driving for a few miles when she asked, "Is this where you tell me where we're going?"

We were going to Hell, or at least some version of it. But I didn't want her to worry, so all I said was "Call it a trip down memory lane."

"C'mon," she said, "give me a hint."

I'd give her more than a hint. I pulled onto I-75 and eased into the fast lane, heading South. There was a road-sign up ahead.
Detroit, 20 miles.

I gestured toward the sign. "You haven't guessed?"

Her voice grew wary. "Detroit?"

"Yup."

She hesitated. "Which part?"

From the look on her face, she knew which part, so I kept on driving, letting the question slide into the background as traffic ebbed and flowed around us.

I was a car buff. Maybe it was the Motor City connection, or maybe it was the fact that growing up, decent transportation was hard to come by. During the whole reality show thing, I'd spent a lot of time in L.A., where foreign cars were the norm, not the exception.

Not so here. And not in my own garages, come to think of it.

In the shadow of Motor City, American cars still ruled the roads. But the roads were pitted, and too many of the cars riding on them were old, beat up, or covered in rust.

In a weird twist of fate, these old beaters were the cars that no one messed with, either because there was nothing on them worth stealing, or because their owners had nothing left to lose.

In my own beat-up sedan, I might be confused for one of those guys. But that was the whole point, wasn't it? I wanted to blend, not draw attention to myself, or even worse, to Chloe.

When I pulled off at the usual exit, I tried to see the city through a stranger's eyes. Some parts weren't so bad, but others, well, they weren't the kinds of places you wanted to be found after dark, or shit, during the day under the wrong circumstances.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Chloe taking it all in. Silently, she reached for the door lock and gave it a push. Funny, it was already locked. She pushed it again, probably not even realizing what she was doing.

It wasn't surprising. A rich girl like Chloe, what would
she
know about the deep parts of the city, where door locks wouldn't save you if your car broke down.

I had a loaded gun in the glove compartment and another one under the seat. But she didn't need to know that, because it would only get her thinking, and not in ways that would do me any favors.

We drove a few miles on Woodward, and then I turned off on a familiar side street, and then another, heading deeper into the guts of the city. Some streets were alright, but most of them weren't. I saw the usual boarded-up shops and burned-out buildings, along with houses that had been vacant for longer than I'd been alive.

I tried to make a joke of it. "Welcome to Zombieland."

Chloe gave a shaky laugh, but said nothing as the scenery changed with every block. We saw big, brick buildings with broken windows and vines creeping into the vacant spaces. We saw buildings that were gutted, and others that were still whole, but rotted with decay.

Silently, I drove past the spot where I'd stopped just a couple of nights earlier to have that not-so-friendly chat with the guys in that trunk.

The streets were quiet, with random, beat-up cars parked crookedly along the curbs, and discarded garbage littering the shoulder.

On the next block up, we passed the old party store where one of my friends had been killed in a drive-by, except he wasn't
really
my friend, because at his funeral, I learned he'd been dealing drugs to my mom on the sly.

Then again, it wasn't exactly a rare thing. Maybe I couldn’t blame the guy. He was a seller. She was a buyer. Maybe it all evened out.

In a low voice, Chloe finally spoke. "Zombieland. Or a war zone."

"Yeah. And we lost."

She looked around. "Where is everyone?"

"Moved, holed up inside, still asleep. Hard to say."

When I turned onto the street where I'd grown up, I tried to see it through Chloe's eyes. The homes were small,
really
small. Some were burnt. Some were boarded up. And some were missing patches of siding, porch rails, and even their front doorknobs.

Inside, I knew they were missing other stuff – copper pipes and plumbing fixtures, because that was the way it went around here. If it wasn't nailed down, it was gone by sunrise. And even if it
was
nailed down? Well, that was no guarantee.

From the passenger's seat, Chloe spoke in a quiet voice. "Is this where you grew up?"

"Almost. It's a few blocks up." I gave her a sideways glance. "We're gonna stop. But don't roll down the window, and don’t open the door."

She tried to laugh, but didn't quite make it. "Trust me. I wasn’t planning to."

A few minutes later, I stopped in front of the narrow two-story brick house that had once been my home. Even now, it hurt to look at the thing. Yeah, there had been some good times, but not as many as there should have been – and not only for me.

I flicked my head toward the place. "My grandma's house."

Looking at that familiar house, I tried to laugh, but didn't quite make it. "Nicest one in the neighborhood."

It was an old joke between me and my sister. The neighborhood, like countless others in the city, was a festering boil on the ass of Detroit.

I looked around. As long as I'd been alive, the neighborhood had been this way. But I'd seen pictures – old pictures, where respectable-looking men drove respectable-looking cars to what had been a respectable working-class corner of a growing, industrial city.

I remembered Grandma's photo albums, filled with all those snapshots – the men coming and going, the women, watching their children play on the front lawns and ride tricycles up and down the smooth sidewalk.

Now, the sidewalk was cracked and pushed up at odd angles by trees that were long gone, just like the working men and their working-class families.

These days, nobody around here worked – some by choice, and others, because the factories were gone, and the schools were either shuttered or shit.

Growing up, I'd had a front row seat to all of its ugliness. And every year, it just got worse – the people, the streets, the houses, everything.

If something broke, no one fixed it. If shutters fell off, they'd lay in the mud or snow until someone walked off with them. For what? Who knows?

Nobody painted. Nobody repaired anything. And nobody one gave a rat's ass one way or another – I tried to smile – except for Grandma, who'd cared until the very end.

I took a long, hard look at the house that I'd grown up in. I tried to see it through Chloe's eyes. Construction-wise, it was the same as both houses on either side – narrow, with two-stories and a decent porch.

But if you looked hard enough, you could see the differences. Grandma's house was just a little nicer, a little fresher-looking, and a little more like a real home.

Sometime in the past couple of decades, the shutters had been painted, along with the porch. The shrubbery might be overgrown, but at least it was there – unlike the other houses that had no landscaping at all.

At one time, there had been flowers, too. In the spring, Grandma used to plant them – big orange Marigolds where it was sunny, and small white Impatiens for the shade.

Funny to think I remembered their names, just like I remembered standing by my grandma when she planted them year after year. While she planted, I'd hand her the flowers one-by-one, and then water them afterwards.

It wasn't because it was fun – although, if I were honest, it wasn't so bad. It was because of the other thing – the danger of letting my grandma kneel there without anyone watching her back. Around here, bad things could happen when you did stuff like that, as a neighbor lady the next block over had discovered the hard way.

And then, there'd been the hassle. I recalled this neighbor kid who lived three doors down – a kid named Duane who'd called me a pansy-ass, and worse, for touching the flowers at all. The grief hadn't stopped until I'd handed him his ass one night in July, and then threatened to take a shovel to his face if he bothered me or my Grandma, ever again.

That was how long ago? Maybe fifteen years?

I heard myself say, "She loved that house."

Chloe paused. "Is she, uh–"

"Still alive?" I shook my head. "No. She died a few years ago. I grew up here though."

"Just you and your grandma?"

"Sometimes my mom lived here too. But most of the time–" I shrugged. "She was off doing other things."

"Like what?" Chloe asked.

I heard myself laugh, a quiet, bitter sound. My mom had done a lot of things, and not many of them involved taking care of her kids. "Drugs, mostly. My grandma, she was a school teacher at St. Mary's. She always said she should've done better, especially with Mom being her only kid."

I looked ahead, feeling myself drift back in time. "But I dunno. Mom was just wild, I guess."

"Like mother like son?"

"No." I turned to look at her. "I'm
nothing
like her." My jaw tensed. "She
never
looked out for us, never gave a shit one way or another what happened to us when she was off doing fuck-knows-what."

Chloe shrank back in the seat, and I felt instantly ashamed. Chloe wasn't my mom. She didn't deserve this shit. With an effort, I softened my voice. "Sorry."

"It's alright," Chloe said. "You said 'us'? You mean you and Bishop, right?"

I shook my head. Back then, it would've been nice to have a brother, someone else to watch my back. But that came later. Some might say it came just in time.

"No," I said. "I didn't even know about Bishop 'til I was a teenager. We're half-brothers. Same dad, different cities."

"So how many kids did your mom have?"

"Two. Me and a sister."

"Where's your sister now?" she asked.

"College out East. Working on her master's in social work."

"And your mom?" she asked.

"Dead."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said.

That made
one
of us.

Into my silence, Chloe asked, "How?"

"Overdose. Finally. Best thing she ever did."

And it would've been even better if she hadn't chosen to do it right in front of my little sister.

I looked over at Chloe. Her look said it all. She was horrified, not only because of the way my mom had died, but also because of my attitude.

Nice people pretended. I wasn't that nice.

But I wanted Chloe to understand, so I said, "I know what you're thinking."

Obviously, she thought I was heartless. In some ways, I guess I was. But I'd brought Chloe here for a reason – to see the real me, where I'd come from – and maybe, show her why I wasn't always the most civilized guy on the planet.

In this neighborhood, too much civility could get you killed – or worse, get someone in your family killed.

Chloe's voice was carefully neutral. "I'm not thinking anything, just taking it all in."

"Let me ask you something," I said. "Your brother. He's thirteen, right?"

She nodded.

"Well, I'm the oldest," I said. "My sister, she's maybe three years younger than me." I couldn’t help but smile. "Probably about your age, come to think of it." I felt my smile fade. "When she was thirteen, Mom tried to sell her."

Chloe grew very still, and her face froze in a carefully blank expression. "What do you mean?"

I gave her a serious look. "You know what I mean."

She blew out a long, unsteady breath, but said nothing.

So I went on. "That's when Grandma kicked her out for good, told Mom if she ever came back, she'd be dead before she hit the door. And Grandma meant it. She never said anything she didn't mean. She had this old Remington. She was a hell of a shot too. Took me deer hunting up north once."

Chloe gave me a faint smile. "She sounds like an amazing person."

"She was." At the memory, I felt some of my tension slide away. "She'd been a widow forever too. I never knew my grandpa. Neither did my mom, come to think of it. He died in some factory explosion a month after she was born. So I guess my mom didn't have it so good either."

I shook my head. "Anyway, even with Mom out of the house, I couldn't let the thing with Kara go. I mean, what kind of man does that? And why the hell should he get away with it? So I ask around, and I find out who the guy is."

"Then what?" Chloe asked.

This is where things got dicey. But I'd brought her out here to be honest. For better or worse, I needed to go through with it. "Then," I said, "I go after him."

"So were you what, about sixteen?"

"Yup."

"So what'd you do?"

I still remembered that night. It's not like I put a lot of thought into the plan, but I hadn't been completely stupid about it. "I showed up at his house, knocked on the door, all nice and polite. And then, when he answered, I beat the piss out of him. The guy was in I.C.U. for a week."

"Good," Chloe said.

"Oh c'mon," I said, trying to smile, "no warnings about vigilante justice?"

She shrugged, and something in her eyes made me wonder if she was thinking about her own brother. That night in the hospital, she'd talked about him a lot, sounding more like a mom than my own mom ever had. She looked out for the kid. I could tell.

Chloe glanced toward the street. "At least you didn't kill him."

"Yeah. But it didn't end there. The guy was a city councilman. Had a wife, a couple of grown kids." I heard the sarcasm in my own voice. "A regular pillar of the community."

"So he pressed charges?"

"Yup."

"What were they?" she asked.

"Attempted murder."

Her voice was quiet. "Wow."

"Yeah." I shrugged. "But hey, it was true, right?"

"You wanted to kill him?"

"Wouldn't you?"

She gave it some thought. "If you really wanted to kill him, you would've grabbed the gun. Right?"

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe, shooting the guy seemed too easy."

"But with what happened to your sister, I mean, that had to count for something, right?"

I gave a bitter laugh. "Not when Mom wouldn't testify. And Kara, she didn't even know about it. And I was damned determined to keep it that way."

I looked over the street, littered with garbage, potholes and overgrown weeds. "And let's say the thing with Kara got out. She'd be the girl who almost got molested by some forty-year-old. School was hard enough already. She didn't need that."

"What do you mean?" Chloe asked.

"Our school? It was the worst in the district. But it was the only one we had. And Kara and me, we got enough shit already because of the way we talked."

Chloe shook her head. "I don't get it."

"Like I mentioned, Grandma was a teacher. English mostly. And she didn't put up with any sloppy talk."

"You mean swearing?"

"Or bad grammar."

"But that's a good thing," Chloe said.

"Yeah, well people didn't like it, especially other kids."

"Why not?" she asked.

I looked around, taking in the destruction around us. The streets were empty, but I'd be a dumb-ass to assume that no one was watching. I had to stay focused.

"Wherever you live," I said, "you gotta fit in, right?"

After a long moment, Chloe nodded.

"Well, we didn't fit in," I said. "It was a problem."

Funny, it was different problem for me than it was for Kara. My problems, I could solve with my fists – or whatever else I might be carrying. With Kara, it was a different ballgame. There was only one way she might fit in – and it wasn't something I was willing to let happen.

I looked over to Chloe and added, "And the older we got, the bigger the problem."

"So what'd you do?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I learned to blend. Or when I couldn’t, I learned to fight."

"Well, you sure learned that good. But what happened with that councilman?"

"Officially, I was a minor. But at first, the guy worked like hell to see me tried as an adult."

"At first?" she said. "So he changed his mind?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Now,
that
was complicated.