“You could have let us know you had a way home,” Stephen said almost before the door was open.
“I told you when I’d be here,” Joey said.He’d added an hour and a half to the train’s arrival time.“You were trying to ambush me.Are you going to move, or would you like me to turn around and leave?”
Silent intimidation was one of Stevie’s favorite gambits.Grudgingly he stepped back half a step, and Joey didn’t move.He kept up eye contact until Stephen took another half-step.And then another.
He tried to draw a line in the sand, to refuse to go any farther, but Joey shook his head.
“Far enough back that I can’t smell your fetid breath, Stevie.This is going to be a short visit.”
With a growl, he took a full step backward and gestured grandly to the interior of the entryway.
“Come to the study,” his father said.“Leave your things in the hallway.Someone will move them to your room.”
Joey kept his duffel on his shoulder.“Nobody touches my shit but me,” he said.“And I’m going to the kitchen for something to eat.Whatever you want to say to me, you can say to me there.”
He removed his hat and gloves and tucked them in his coat pocket as he went.So far he’d gotten the physical intimidation and the subtle threat to steal his stuff to leave him stranded—a thing his father had tried before.If the past told him anything it was that his father was going to demand he return to the family business, threaten all his friends, threaten his family’s property on the reservation, and threaten his life if he refused.
Joey had locked up his grandfather’s property using his trust money and used it to house and fund a school—it was untouchable.He could kill the old man with a twitch of a knife, but chose not to so he could continue to livehislife the way he wanted to.And until now, until his eighteen months with the SCTF, he had avoided having any friends who could be harmed by the human cancer huffing behind him as he headed down the hall, ignoring the baroque gold-and-black decorations, the heavy blood-red carpeting and gold-tinted blue furniture, the oak trim that matched nothing, because his father, like Chester Schumer, had no sense of humanity in his décor.
He thought longingly of Gideon’s little apartment, of eating dinner on the floor by the coffee table, of the way Gideon had picked out each piece—often mismatched—lovingly, because he liked it, and was comfortable that his taste might not be anybody else’s.
He burst into the kitchen, badly startling this year’s cook.A new kitchen staff tended to rotate in, because Stephen Carlyle was an ass who thought everybody was trying to poison him and didn’t know the difference between homemade gravy and sauce from a jar.
“Uhm, Mr.Carlyle…?”
“I’m sorry,” Joey said bluntly.“I just arrived.Is there any way I can get a sandwich?I’ll make it myself so I don’t wreck your timetable.”
Gideon had taught him how to cook just a bit, and in watching him try to plan a meal in his tiny kitchen, Joey had learned the importance of not getting in a cook’s way.
“Not a problem,” the cook replied.He was a young man who might not have looked as frightened before he took this job, but who had definitely developed some prey responses since.“I… we have sourdough rolls, the usual condiments, meat, cheese—”
“Anything I can’t touch?”Joey asked kindly.
“The prosciutto and the hard cheeses?”the cook said on a gust of relief.“I had plans for dinner.”
“Of course,” Joey told him.“Any juice?”
“Orange and cranberry.”
“I’ll try not to leave you high and dry.”
With that, Joey turned to an unused counter space and spent five minutes assembling a sandwich with some chips he found in a cupboard, and a glass of OJ.His father, unmindful of the cook and a couple of assistants moving around trying to prep vegetables, stood in the center of the kitchen, arms crossed, until Joey took his lunch and moved out of the kitchen to the breakfast nook, just to get himself, his father, and his father’s fucking bodyguard out of the poor chef’s hair.
He sat down to his sandwich with a sigh of contentment.He needed food for fuel, and while his father might not know the difference between quality meats and Oscar Meyer,Joeydid now after eighteen months as Gideon’s partner, and he was super excited not to be eating reconstituted ramen or processed bologna.
“Joseph, are we going to talk?”
Joey swallowed a bite of a first-rate dagwood.“Thanks for the sandwich, Stevie.Merry Christmas.I’m not coming back to join the criming.I’m a Federal Agent now, and they won’t let me.”
Joey had his sandwich in his hands so he could finish it when his father ripped the plate out from under it and pitched it at the wall behind Joey’s head.
Joey ducked and took another bite of sandwich—after inspecting it for pottery shards, of course.He leaned his head back and shook out his hair, listening to a faint sandy tinkle, and he felt a trickle of blood down the back of his ear.But the sandwich was fine.
He swallowed.“That doesn’t make the job more attractive,” he said.
“I’m your father, Joseph.The job doesn’t have to be attractive.You took my money, youoweme your skill set for my business—”
“You took my real family away,” Joey said, and this bite had no joy in it as he thought longingly of his grandfather.“You isolated me in this hellhole and then sent me to military school.I lost years with somebody who actually cared for me because you thought I was a pretty trinket.I didn’t give ashitabout your money, but given that I inherited it legally, you better believe I used it.I also make my own.”He shrugged.“And my skill set?You’ve taught menothing.But would you like to know what I’ve learned in my new job?”He sucked bread off his teeth so he could give a pointy smile.“I’ve learned all the ways you broke the law tomakethat money.Think about that for a sec.”
