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“I’ve had to sell her twice,” I said. “When I lost it all. I sold her so I could have food to eat. A roof over my head.”
“But you’ve got her now,” Miguel said.
“Yep, each time I bought her back for about double what I sold her for. Suzy’s cost me a fortune.”
“Why didn’t you just buy a new car?” Miguel asked.
“She’s a reminder.”
“Of what?” Miguel said.
“That being a gambler is no way to live.”
“I don’t get it,” Miguel said. “You’re rich as hell.”
“Right now,” I said. “I could go back to Vegas and lose it all tomorrow. And probably will.”
“But you’re good.”
“That’s not a guarantee of anything,” I said, the truth undeniable. “I’ve beaten the best players in the world and I’ve been beaten by grandmas playing with their pensions. Being good doesn’t mean anything against luck.”
“I still don’t understand what’s wrong with teaching me a few tricks. It’s not like I’m asking you to teach me how to cheat.”
“That’s good, because I don’t cheat.”
Miguel kept working on the porch, hopefully thinking about his career options and not how he could steal Suzy again, and I went back to my paper.
The sun had dipped down below the chimney and that’s when Juliette usually came around to pick up Miguel.
I braced myself for the other part of my day.
The Juliette part.
Equal measures torture and bliss.
Her voice, both soft and rough, like rubbing up against velvet the wrong way, had the ability to make Miguel jerk upright, all but saluting.
Made parts of me want to salute, too.
She barely talked to me on Tuesday which maybe I should have expected, but I sort of thought she’d go and talk to her Dad. It had been a weak move, cowardly to blame that old man for the decision I made, but she didn’t know the whole story.
It felt like it mattered.
Yesterday she’d worn a green jacket with khaki pants that made her legs look a mile long. The color of the jacket made her eyes more green than brown and they practically glowed against the gorgeous brown of her skin.
Today I was hoping for a skirt. A short one.
No matter what, she was beautiful and real and so full of hate toward me it made my skin hurt just being close to her.
“Excuse me,” a woman’s sharp voice said from behind me and I turned in my chair, shielding my eyes from the remaining daylight.
A woman stood there, a black shadow against the low blaze of the setting sun, but I could tell already that she was the kind of woman that made my balls curl up into my belly for warmth.
“Can I help you?” I asked, standing up to face the older woman, hoping, truly hoping, this had nothing to do with my father.
“My name is Nora Sullivan. I’m from the Beauregard Parish Office of Community Services.” She pulled a card from the front pocket of a charcoal pantsuit that made her look like a big gray box and handed it to me. “I’m looking for Miguel Pastor.”
I took the card, my neck tingling, a terrible foreboding that what was happening here was bad. Very bad.
All I could do was stall, so I took my time reading the card and then shoved it in my back pocket.
“I’m Tyler O’Neill,” I said, getting my hand crushed in the woman’s vice grip. “And Miguel is—” I turned back around but the porch was empty, the crowbar lying in the grass.
Miguel was gone.
“Not here at the moment,” I said quickly, panic beating its wings against my chest.
“Our office got a call that he is usually here after school in some kind of community service capacity. And that there was some concern about the boy’s recent experience with local police.”
There were a few times in my life when I was literally struck dumb. This was one of those times.
“You really need to talk to Police Chief Tremblant about that,” I said lamely.
“So I’m gathering,” she said. She checked her watch and pulled out another card. “I’ve left her a message at the station, but I’m on my way over to Calcasieu DOC. If you see her, can you have her call me?”
“You bet,” I said, perhaps a bit too eagerly. Nora Sullivan watched me with cagey dark eyes. Eyes that had seen every trick in the book.
I felt about thirteen again.
Nora nodded and left, crossing the wide front lawn to her sedan parked at the curb. I waited until she was gone before running through the house, yelling Miguel’s name.
No sign of the kid. Not even Richard had seen him.
I grabbed my phone and dialed Juliette’s number with fingers that shook.
JULIETTE
“He’s gone?” I asked on Tyler’s front lawn.
“I turned around for a second, I swear.” To his credit, Tyler looked a bit freaked out. Wild-eyed and worried, which wasn’t helping the state of my nerves. If Tyler O’Neill was worried, the world was about to end. “He must have run when he saw the social worker coming.”
