Sweeter Than Sin (3 page)

She usually chased those pills with alcohol, ended it all up with sex. Sometimes not necessarily in that order. It didn’t matter as long as she got out of her head for a while. But the needles … no. She hadn’t been able to keep up with the needles, and after those first few guys she made everybody she slept with use a rubber, too.

She was looking for oblivion or death, but after she’d seen some sad souls wasting away from AIDS or other diseases, she decided that wasn’t the best way to die. If she needed death that bad, she could jump into the river. It would be a lot quicker and less painful in the long run.

While he continued to stare at her, his gaze considering, curious, she tugged her sleeves back down.

“You know the guy downstairs who runs the store?” she asked.

“Yeah. Your boyfriend. He’s a bruiser.”

She smiled, a little sadly. Deatrick wasn’t her boyfriend. For a while, she’d thought maybe she was in love with him, and for a very short while, they’d been lovers. But Deatrick liked fixing broken people, and once he’d helped fix her, she’d lost her appeal for him.

Even as the thought circled through her head, she felt ashamed. That wasn’t fair to him. The man had saved her life. If he hadn’t pulled her off the streets, she might not be dead, but she definitely wouldn’t be somebody who could stand to look at herself in the mirror.

“He’s not my boyfriend.” She shrugged and moved over to the beat-up couch. Dark hair fell into her eyes and she shoved it back as the broken-in cushions closed around her. The couch was about the best thing in this place. Her one contribution to this sad, safe little haven. Absently she tugged out the necklace she wore. Deatrick had given it to her all those years ago, back when she was still trying to find her feet. Find herself. She was still looking.

He had more faith in her than she did. Sighing, she rubbed her thumb over the message written on it. It had only one word.
Strength.

You always had the strength to survive, sugar,
Deatrick had told her when he gave it to her.
Don’t forget that.

Stroking the chain between her fingers, she studied Jock. He’d been a vet, served back in Desert Storm in the nineties. She knew that, knew his wife had cheated on him, gotten pregnant while he was risking his life, and when he came back she welcomed him home with divorce papers. He’d tried, he told Lana. Had tried hard.

But the job he’d landed dried up after a year.

There had been another one, but problems with post-traumatic stress started creeping in and the nightmares … He’d started self-medicating with drugs.

Compared to him, Lana’s nightmares were like a walk in the park, but she’d done the same thing. She understood just how tempting it was to self-medicate, to hide away in a fog of drunkenness or pills, how easy it was to silence the dreams when they screamed and raged.

But then it got to where the dreams screamed even louder and the blood shone redder and one pill wasn’t enough; then two weren’t.

Aware that Jock still watched her, she crooked a smile in his direction, her memory winding back down the road that had led her here. “Fourteen years ago, I tried to pick D.’s pocket.”

“Girl, that was a damn stupid thing to do.”

“Actually, it was the best mistake I ever made.” She looked down and studied the key, remembered. She’d seen the guy around. Deatrick was big, standing at six two, skin a deep, warm brown and black hair that he shaved every week on Thursdays. She’d seen him, judged him as a sap because he was always going around and handing out food to people on the corner. A sap with money, too, because she saw in the paper that he’d won some serious cash in the Lotto.

So she’d watched him.

Waited until she had an idea when he’d make his daily trip to the bank with the money from the store.

She’d bumped into him, had her fingers on the money pouch. Then he had one big hand clamped around the back of her neck.

Was wondering when you were going to try it, sugar,
he’d said, and his voice was sad.

She’d been so scared when he dragged her off the street and into the store, through a back door, though, not the front one, where people might see.

“He caught me,” she told Jock. “I wasn’t as clever as I thought and he was much
more
clever than I’d realized. He caught me and dragged me into the shop. You can probably figure out what I thought he was going to do. Instead, he dumped me at the big table in the back. You know the one. You’ve eaten there a few times.”

Jock looked down, plucking at a ragged hole in his jeans.

“He gave me one meal. Just like I gave you. After that, everything he gave me, I had to work for … just like you have. And now you’re getting the chance he gave me.” As his eyes jerked up to meet hers, she said quietly, “He’ll give you one month to get clean. That’s what he gave me. One month, Jock. He’s got friends who can help you through it. After one month, if you use, you’re out. And he’ll know. Deatrick always does. If you use, you’re gone. If you steal—”

“I’m not a thief,” Jock said quietly, and the pride in his voice was unmistakable.

She smiled at him. “Then you’re already doing better than I was.”

Standing, she reached into her pocket and held out the keys that Deatrick had given her all those years ago. “So it’s your call. Do you want the chance he gave me?”

“What’s the catch?” Jock watched her suspiciously.

“There isn’t one,” she said honestly. The weight on her shoulders felt a little lighter as she saw the glimmer of what might be hope in his eyes.
A difference,
Lana thought. It wasn’t saving the world, but she could still make a difference. It was the only thing that kept her sane sometimes.

“It’s possible one day you’ll have to leave—or you’ll want to.” She looked around, fought the sting in her eyes as she rose and moved over to stare out the window at the bustling life of the city. The noise of the L filled the room and she rested her head on the window, listened to it one more time. “If you leave, you can maybe find somebody to pass this on to, like I am. Or you can let Deatrick do it. He’s good at it. The only thing you have to do is work for what’s being given to you.”

Jock took the keys, his eyes lingering on her. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Sure.”

They both knew she lied. And they both smiled.

She walked out of the room with just the clothes she’d bought for herself over the years and the key hanging on a chain around her neck.

It was harder than she’d thought it would be.

And one of the hardest things was the first stop she had to make … saying good-bye to the man who’d pulled her out of hell.

CHAPTER THREE

“I’ll tell ya what, Preach, that place is going to take a little more than a hammer and nails and a few more boards to fix it up.”

Adam joined Noah Benningfield at the edge of the property and stared up at the house. For years, the people of Madison had just called this house the old Frampton place.

Generally, people avoided it. Unless you were a kid … then you might come out here on a dare. Or at least lie and pretend you had.

Plenty had lied, because they all knew if Judge Max had caught you hanging around this place he
would
call the cops, he
would
press charges and your parents would
not
be able to talk him out of it. Judge Max wasn’t a bad guy, but he had a pretty straightforward sense of right and wrong. The
No Trespassing
signs were clear enough in his mind.

But then he’d managed to sell the house.

It wasn’t much of a house now, though.

Adam rubbed his jaw, careful to avoid the burns along the right side of his face. They were healing, as were the ones on the outer part of his right arm. He’d received them when he tackled the boy who’d set the fire.

There was still a huge, gaping hole in the side of the house. Police tape surrounded the property. It had only been ten days since the explosion that could have killed Noah and his new fiancée.

If Adam thought about it for too long, he just might get sick. Easier to joke about it.

“I don’t know.” Noah slanted him a look, and there was a glint in his eyes that said he understood. He shrugged and reached up, scraping at the stubble that darkened his face. “I’m pretty good with a hammer and nails. I’ll grab a few rolls of duct tape. Duct tape is always good.”

They both laughed. It felt good to laugh.

They hadn’t done enough of it the past few weeks, and that was a fact.

There wasn’t going to be a whole lot of laughing in the near future, either. Not for Adam, not for Noah. Hell, most people in town had taken this like a punch to the face.

Every time Adam closed his eyes, he saw that fire. He closed his eyes and he remembered a chat between a couple of kids.… That fire had
led
to this. It could have been so much worse. Noah could be dead. Trinity could be dead. That kid of hers—funnier than hell and whip smart—he could be left without a mother. Yeah, it could be worse. But this was still pretty bad.

“The town is better off, I think,” Adam said abruptly, folding his arms. The wind kicked up off the river, blowing his hair back from his face. He needed to get it cut, and he probably would remember … in another month or so. For now, he had his hands full, running short staffed at the bar, covering some extra nights at the forum while Noah dealt with everything he needed to do for a shotgun wedding.

“Yeah?”

As Noah looked over at him, Adam jerked his shoulder up, tried not to let Noah look at him too closely. “Yeah. How much just downright
messed-up shit
has been tied to this house?” Adam lifted a hand and ticked the events off, one by one. “Frampton murders his wife, beats her to death with his own hands—that’s been what, fifty or sixty years? Old Max probably put himself almost in the poorhouse trying to keep this place up and nothing ever came of it. Turns out those sick fucks were using this as their playground while they hurt kids.” Rage boiled inside Adam, an ugly, nasty brew that made him want to hurt anything and everything. But he couldn’t. If he gave in to that fury, he was going to lose himself; he knew it. He had come too close to that edge before. He couldn’t go risk coming that close again. He might never come back. Hard to balance on that sort of precipice when there wasn’t much on this side to hold him steady. Once the red had cleared from his vision, he continued. “This is the place where something happened to Lana. To that kid David. Maybe even his folks. We don’t know. We’ll never know. Maybe it’s one of them that was found down under the floorboards, maybe not. Trinity moves in here and she has an absolutely
brilliant
start to her new life here in Madison, right?” He ticked off another finger. He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around how awful it must have been, crashing through rotting floorboards and coming face-to-face with a dead body—the skeletal remains had been down there who knows how long.

Bile climbed up his throat as images tried to shove their way into his mind.

Lana … it’s Lana.…

No. Absolutely no,
and he wouldn’t let himself think about it, either.

Forcing himself to go on, he said, “Then, after
all of that,
two kids nearly get themselves
and
you
and
Trinity killed. Yeah, the town is better off.”

He kicked at the dirt. “We should tear it all down; that’s what we should do.”

A caustic voice added, “Salt the earth?”

Adam closed his eyes.
What the hell.
Sometimes he thought God was mocking him, throwing this guy in his path all the time. The man standing on the walk wore simple clothes—most of the Amish did. He had the typical ugly-ass haircut, although he hadn’t grown out the beard that a lot of the men from that lifestyle did. Might be because he wasn’t married. Adam thought the beard went with marriage but he wasn’t sure. Apparently none of the women could tolerate the bastard. Which just showed how smart the ladies were.

Caine Yoder was nothing but a grade A asshole.

As he joined them, Adam bared his teeth in a mockery of a smile. “Nice seeing you here, Caine. Hey, it’s Sunday. Don’t you have church or something?”

From under the brim of his hat Caine studied Adam for a long minute. Then Caine looked at Noah and nodded. “I wanted to talk to you, see if they ever told you what happened.”

“What happened?” Noah rubbed a thumb down his cheek. “Well. I was upstairs…” He pointed in the general direction. “And two kids outside decided to try and torch the place. They didn’t know we were inside. That pretty much sums it up.”

“Does anybody know why?”

Adam snorted and then turned, reaching in through the open window of his car. The car was his baby, the one and only thing he took pride in, a classic rebuilt ’68 Corvette that had belonged to his dad. Adam had had to finish the restoration himself after his dad’s death and it had taken him three years to even be able to
do
it, but it was done now and the car was his.

The morning paper was in the backseat. Grabbing it, he shoved it toward Caine and then went back to staring at the house. “If you folks would actually
read
shit from time to time, you might know why, Caine,” Adam said.

“Oh, we read.”

Adam slid Caine a narrow look. Caine gave him a patient, polite smile, but his eyes seemed to say,
Fuck off
.

“Yeah? What have you ever read besides your Bible?”

“Well.” Caine took his time, acting like he was thinking it over. “I like picture books. The ones with the really bright pictures and the cute little kids. And sometimes, I like mysteries. There’s this one … with a bunny. All the vegetables in the house are mysteriously turning white. You ever read that one?”

Adam had been the butt of more than a few jokes in his life. He had no doubt it was happening again, but he had no idea just what Caine’s game was. Adam opened his mouth to fire something back at Caine, but before he could Noah stepped between them.