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Didn’t matter. He was hooked, and he’d caught up with her twice more at the lake, bringing his own ratty towel and stretching out beside her as she pretended to read. Maybe she was really trying. But her gaze kept straying from the pages of the paperback, a battered copy of a Stephen King novel, to the lake, where the water shimmered under the harsh sun. Boats, sometimes pulling skiers, cut through the clear water, engines churning, frothy wakes widening behind them. Swimmers kept closer to the shore, Moms with toddlers or teenagers hanging out in packs.
Remmi came alone, most of the time.
He liked that.
In fact, he liked her.
And it surprised him.
She was, after all, jailbait, or so he’d thought. She couldn’t be sixteen, despite the car. She was kind of on her own, helping out with her infant siblings, working at a burger joint, and waiting for school to start. And she liked computers, was kind of a geek when it came to the net, something that was completely foreign to him.
Yet, he’d felt a kinship with her, as if they were both some kind of misfit. He was out of high school and fast running out of options, his job as the clean-up guy on construction sites a dead end. His life at home the same. He needed to move on. But tonight?
Remmi.
He felt a jolt of anticipation fire his blood and mentally kicked himself when his thoughts took him to imagining her warm lips and soft body. Shit, what was he thinking?
Nothing good.
Then again, not so bad.
Oh, hell, who knew? Maybe he was making a bigger deal of it than it was, but say what you will, hadn’t she agreed to meet him tonight? In a park not far from the edge of town. They planned to go dirt biking in the desert. Alone.
Despite the fact that he was supposedly grounded.
By his stepfather. Ike Baxter, a big, burly guy with swarthy skin, a thick salt-and-pepper flattop, and eyes drilled deep into his skull, seemed to think he could tell Noah just exactly what to do. If he ordered, “Jump,” Noah was supposed to respond, “How high, sir?” Yeah, right. Ike could go jump into the deepest lake around, preferably chained to a cement block. God, he hated that miserable son of a bitch. What his mother saw in him escaped Noah.
But there it was.
And the big jerk-wad had grounded him because his “chores” hadn’t been done in a timely fashion, the task in question being setting fence posts in cement-like soil after a ten-hour stretch at his job. Well, screw that.
“Shit,” he said, and swiped at the sweat running down his face. Mad at the world, Noah eyed the stucco house with its cracked walls and missing roof tiles. Even though he knew it was near-suicide, he considered “borrowing” the crappy Yamaha motorcycle on which Ike was forever tinkering. The dirt bike was a beater, circa 1968, in Noah’s opinion, but something the old man treasured and called “classic.” Noah snorted his disdain at Ike’s lofty notion of the relic. Still, the bike still had some kick in it, and he needed to get out. Now. While he could. Cora Sue, his mother, was MIA again, probably down at Slaughter’s, sipping vodka, getting wasted, and trying to forget the landscape of her pathetic life. As for his old man? Ike had taken off an hour or so ago, but not before rattling off a list of chores for his stepson, an edict reinforced by a threat that, if he failed to get them done, he’d be grounded “for the rest of the month, maybe more. We’ll see.” Who knew when the fucker would show up again? As if Noah cared. Ike Baxter was a hard-ass son of a bitch who didn’t like his wife’s “snot-nosed smart-mouthed jackass” any more than the jackass liked him. Yeah, Stepdaddy was a real dick-wad. Too good for Cora Sue, but she gravitated to losers, one after another, including his biological old man, who’d done a quick vanishing act before he was born. Never had he met the “sperm donor,” as Cora Sue had so appropriately named Ronnie Scott, though she’d chased him rigorously and futilely for child support that never appeared. The only help she’d ever gotten from Noah’s dad was in the form of Ronnie’s widowed mother, a religious nutjob who had taken care of her grandson while Cora Sue waited tables at one of the smaller casinos just off the Strip.
The last Noah had heard, dear old Dad was banging out license plates or doing laundry or some other menial labor while serving time in prison in California. Noah didn’t know which lockup housed his father, and he didn’t much care.
With that thought, he jogged to the hovel of a house, where his room consisted of an attic space that was hot as hell in the summer, colder than a well digger’s butt in winter, and tight enough that he could stand only under the crown of the roof. His bed was a sleeping bag tossed over a mattress lying on a plywood floor, but there was a window, and through that small pane of glass, he could view the stars at night and watch the sun come up each morning.
And neither Ike nor Cora Sue bothered him in the attic; they pretty much left him alone.
Things could be worse.
Then again, they could be a whole lot better.
The sun was hanging low in the sky as he hurried up the dilapidated steps to the porch. Roscoe thumped his stubby tail, and Noah, in a hurry, gave the old shepherd a quick pat on the muzzle before crossing the dusty floorboards and opening the creaking screen door. He stepped into the house and found the single key dangling from a nail pounded into a post near the back door, snagged it, started outside, then hesitated. Knowing he was crossing a line, he walked through the kitchen and down a short, hot hallway, where pictures of Cora and Ike’s wedding, at one of the local drive-through chapels, were posted. Ignoring the shots of his younger, happier mother and the man who would become his tyrant of a stepfather, he slipped into the second bedroom, which was now Ike’s den. Unerringly, Noah went to the heat vent behind the scarred metal desk, removed the vent’s grimy cover, and stuck his arm down the dusty hole to a spot where the vent bent back under the house.
His fingers scraped not one, but two plastic bags, and he withdrew the first to find a wad of cash. The other small sack was either more money, which was unlikely, or Ike’s stash of “feel-goodies,” as he referred to the weed and ecstasy and whatever else he’d scored and hidden away. This one was enough. From the looks of it, there was nearly a grand hidden inside the first bag.
After pocketing the plastic bag and replacing the vent, he headed for the attic stairs and climbed the steep, ladder-like steps to his “room.” Once there, he went to his own hiding spot, a board near the only vent in the ceiling; he slid it out of place and reached beneath the convex arch of a roof tile. He retrieved a sock holding several hundred dollars. Not enough to start a new life, but when added
to the money he’d taken from Ike, he should do all right.
Maybe.
He didn’t take the time to think it through, just backed down the staircase, and headed outside, the screen door banging behind him, Roscoe giving up a disgruntled “woof.” Noah didn’t bother with the steps, just took a flying leap off the porch and ran across the parking area to the shed, another one of Ike’s private spots.
Inside, the shed was an oven, stifling and breathless.
A wasp buzzed angrily near an umbrella-shaped paper nest tucked in rafters low enough to touch; the building was small and compact, not quite as large as a single-bay garage. Weathered siding smelled of oil and dust, mingled with the lingering scent of stale cigarette smoke from stepdaddy’s last Camel straight. Tools lined the walls, and motorcycle parts were strewn on a bench that ran along one side of the shed, beneath the single window, where cobwebs and grime covered the small panes. The Yamaha was propped against the far wall, and without a second thought, he rolled it out of the dingy building, down the short ramp, and onto the sparse gravel of the parking area between the sagging garage and the back porch.
