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I stepped out onto the porch and shut the door firmly behind me. “What can I do for you, Miguel?”
“I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Miguel said. “About your car.”
“Bad idea stealing cars,” I said, because I figured some kind of anti-grand theft auto PSA was called for.
“I guess so,” Miguel said, glancing over at the road, the big tree in front.
I waited, but the kid didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry to elaborate.
“Well,” I said, clapping my hands together, hoping Miguel might startle like a bird, “glad we got that sorted out—”
“I wouldn’t need to steal any cars if I had money,” Miguel said.
My jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
“I saw you on TV last year winning all that money,” Miguel said. My head cleared real fast. Extortion. This kid was full of surprises.
“I don’t want your money,” Miguel said. “I’m not here for that.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I want to learn how to do what you do,” Miguel said.
“Play cards?” I laughed.
Miguel nodded, not laughing at all. I laughed harder. The kid was serious?
“That’s a good one, Miguel. Seriously. But—”
“I already know how to play. I play online over at my friend George’s house and I win. A lot.”
“That’s great, but I’m not teaching you how to play poker. Juliette would have a fit.”
“She doesn’t have to know.”
I reassessed the kid in front of me. His dark eyes, past the scabby blood and bruises, were focused, smart and…very, very old.
A kid who’d never been a kid.
The sound of a car pulling around the corner, spitting gravel, ripped my eyes from Miguel’s.
The car was too far away to tell who it was, but suddenly the cherry top blazed once from just inside the windshield.
Juliette. Holy hell.
“Listen,” Miguel said. “Just let me come here after school, a few hours for a few weeks. That’s it.”
“That’s it?” I laughed.
Juliette’s car stopped in front of the house and she was out the door in a split second, marching toward us.
“Morning, Juliette,” I said, waving as though it was all no big deal, when under my shirt I had a good cold sweat going.
“We got a call saying some kid was snooping around here,” Juliette said.
Dad! He must have been peeking through the window, but what was he thinking, calling the cops?
“Sorry to call,” I said, falling in step with the lie because I had no choice. “I saw someone snooping around, I got a little nervous and—”
“You!” she said, sticking her finger in Miguel’s face, not even listening to my crappy cover-up. “You should be at school.”
“I show up like this and Ms. Jenkins has to call the social workers,” he said, and she took a deep breath, as if reassessing, and I got the sense that Juliette was flying blind.
“George is bringing me my homework,” Miguel said in the vacuum. “I told Ms. Jenkins I was sick. Don’t worry, Chief, I’ve got it covered.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“He came to apologize,” I said. “About the car. Very adult of him, if you ask me.”
Juliette watched me for a long time, her eyes unreadable. And I had the worst, the worst urge to reach over, touch her shoulder and tell her everything would be fine.
But I had the old man to hide, some stolen gems to find, a delinquent to get rid of and a whole lot of past experience that told me reaching out for Juliette only hurt in the end.
“Fine,” she finally said, holding out her arm as if to steer Miguel out toward her car. “You apologized. If you’re not going to be at school, you can come down to the station. Get to work cleaning cars.”
Miguel stepped away but glanced back at me. I tried hard not to see the desperation in Miguel’s old-man eyes, but then remembered that Miguel had a little sister.
A little sister he was trying to protect.
All too clearly, I recalled being sixteen and feeling sixty, trying to keep a little sister safe, keep her a child, when our entire world was conspiring to rip her innocence away from her.
And then there was Juliette, working so hard against a system set up to ruin kids like Miguel. And while I wasn’t about to teach Miguel how to play poker, I could find something to keep the kid busy a few hours a day.
I owed her that.
Before I could put the brakes on this ludicrous idea, I jumped right off the cliff.
“I think I figured out what you could do to punish Miguel here.”
“Oh, you did, did you?” Juliette asked.
“I did.” I nodded, not a single idea coming to me. “I had an idea.”
“Okay, so let’s hear it.” Juliette shifted her weight and the porch groaned. The sagging, beat-up porch. Where my ass got handed to me ten years ago. Where all my dreams of a different kind of life had died and I’d taken the way out with the least expectations.
