Scout took a bite of his croissant. “But we did,” he murmured softly. “There were lots of places we could have gone. We wanted to know where weshouldgo, and we ended up here. Was that what you did?”
Lucky thought of the series of poor life choices and coin flips that had ended up with him on the ferry for Spinner’s Drift. “More or less,” he said, not wanting to talk about it. Nobody believed him about the coin flips. And the people whodidbelieve him? Well, those were people he wished would forget his name.
But Lucky remembered the table, zooming around the square over the heads of the crowd as though it had been on rails, and wondered if maybe—just maybe—Scout would believe him.
“How did you do it?” he asked, taking a bite of his own croissant. “The table, I mean?”
Scout gave him a look of disgust, and Lucky sighed.
“Magic,” Scout said flatly. “Pure magic. Are we done now? Have I answered your question?”
Shit. Lucky had done this to himself, hadn’t he? First by being a rude asshole and then by not being honest when Scout had tried to speak from the heart. Gah! Lucky’s grandmother had tried to teach him better than that.
And maybe that was the place to start.
“My grandmother died,” he said baldly, leaping right over the dark, empty forest of grief that the words conjured in his heart. “Her name was Adele McPherson, but we all called her Auntie Cree. Anyway, my parents were bums, and Auntie Cree raised me, and then she died, and suddenly our walk-up in Philly was surrounded by every gangster in Southie who thought Auntie Cree would have wanted him to have it.”
“Oh,” Scout said, looking at him with compassion. “Wouldn’t she have wantedyouto have it?”
“Well, yeah!” Lucky had to give a bitter laugh. “That’s what I thought too! And… well, I have a little trick I do. It’s… it’s nothing really. Auntie Cree used to call me a lucky guesser. That’s why I’m Lucky, right?”
“Makes sense,” Scout said, and he was—oh heavens—turning those stunning cobalt eyes on Lucky and drinking in his every word. Lucky felt the lost month acutely. He’d been afraid, in a way. Not just of getting attached to Scout, but of Scout finding him… lacking in some way. Scout and Kayleigh were amazingly interesting, and Lucky? Lucky was a street rat with a little bit of shine.
“Auntie Cree thought so,” Lucky agreed. “I was going to junior college at the time, working toward the big leagues. I was going to move up to State at the end of this year, maybe get my degree, teach some school. She thought that was a real nice idea. She wanted me to have a safe place to do it.” He gave a shrug like the loss of her dream hadn’t hurt. It had been overshadowed by the loss of the one person in his life who’d loved him, anyway.
“So what’d you do?” Scout’s voice was still soft, like he was getting why this wasn’t easy.
Lucky blew out a breath, because this was by far the dumbest thing he’d ever done in his life. “Well, I pulled out my coin. It’s… well, Auntie Cree gave it to me because my grandpa gave it to her. It’s a silver Liberty Bell coin, and it’s heavy and old and sort of beat the hell up. But I… I’m really good at guessing with my coin, you know? So I pulled the coin out and asked it questions—you’ve got to choose your questions—but they basically led to which batch of gangsters would protect me and let me live if I gave them Auntie’s house.”
Scout let out a startled gasp. “You gave it to them?”
Lucky rolled his eyes. “Gangsters. I know you’re thinking Al Capone and shit, but this was… this was real. There’s all these mean guys with prison tats and semiautos sitting in my Auntie’s house getting gun oil on her damned tapestry couch saying, ‘Kid, we think you should give the house to us,’ but they’re all prepared to start shooting each other if I pick the wrong guy. So I let the coin pick the right guy, the one everybody’s afraid of, and he nods and tells everybody else to scram. Then he looks at me and my coin and starts asking me stuff about tomorrow’s horse races.”
“Oh no,” Scout said, and Lucky breathed a sigh of relief, because it looked like Scout could tell where this was going.
“I was right every fucking time,” Lucky told him. God, he hadn’t even told this toHelen.He’d just asked for a job and begged her not to ask for his real driver’s license. But here, with a guy who’d made a table fly—yes,fly, because that hadn’t been a damned trick—Lucky knew that if nothing else he had a believer.
“So what’d you do?” Scout asked.
“I….” Lucky shrugged, not sure if he could ever convey the hopelessness of those few months. “Well, for one thing, I got to stay in Auntie Cree’s house. I mean, Scaggs Cawthorne didn’t give a fuck if I kept my room—he and his boys got the rest of the place, and they didn’t treat it bad, you know? They even fucking vacuumed. But God. Every morning, he’d call me down and we’d do the ponies. And every night, Scaggs would call me in and give me a cut. And tell me not to leave town.”
“You were trapped,” Scout said, reading the situation the same way Lucky had. “How did you get out?”
Lucky shuddered. “Well, word was getting around about Scaggs’s secret weapon with the ponies. He was taking his drug and gun money and tripling it every day. And he knew how the coin worked. I couldn’t even try to lie to him, convince him it didn’t work anymore, my luck had run out. And the coin—it doesn’t work for anyone else, only me. So one day, I was trying to get to the grocery store. I wanted to make my grandma’s brisket in the worst way, you have no idea. It was like the coin was itching in my pocket to go get a brisket and salt water. I was sitting in the back of the bus, and I heard these two goons talking about how they were going to hit Cawthornethat fucking night. I had a pocket full of cash to go to the market—and more, because, I’m telling you, I’d been looking for a way to get out of town since this whole thing began. Anyway, I got off the bus at the market, caught the next bus that took me down to the train station, and I just kept on going. I don’t think a soul noticed me going out of town, but I had to leave everything behind. My money, my clothes, shit my grandmother left me.” He tried not to let his voice shake. His grandparents’ wedding rings—he’d wanted those. Not that he’d ever marry a girl, but… but they’d meant something to him.
“I’m sorry,” Scout said softly. “That’s hard. Did you hear what happened?”
Lucky grunted. “Yeah, I heard what happened. A rival gang took out Scaggs is what happened. A bunch of dead people and shattered glass in my Auntie Cree’s living room. But one of his gang must have squawked about me when he had a gun to his head, because two days later, my coin, it starts getting hot in my pocket. I’m on the train heading west because I’ve always wanted to go to Disneyland and that’s all I’ve got to go on. My coin isliterallyburning a hole in the pocket of my jeans, so I get up and move to the bathroom so I can flip the damned coin in the stall and start asking it questions to figure out what the damage is. While I’m in there, I hear two guys outside my stall, and they’relooking for me. I guess someone’s got a witchy sister or brother or something who did a spell and rolled the frickin’ bones, and they were told to take the train west. So I pull out my coin and ask it if I should go back north. No. East? No. West some more? No. South? And it comes up yes. I’m surprised. I start trying variations—southwest? No. Southeast? Yes. So I make my way down here, coin flip by coin flip. I’ve got to tell you, I had to ask the damned coin if I’d get busted picking certain pockets, you know? And I felt bad. I felt like shit because my parents were street junkies, and they stole from fuckin’ everyone. I swore I’d never end up like them. But every time I even thought about slowing down and getting a job, the coin would get hot, until… well, I ended up here.”
“Wow,” Scout said, sounding a little stunned. “All of that? You don’t talk to me for a month, and you tell me all of thatnow?”
Lucky felt stupid. So stupid. “I… look. I get the feeling you… that table, man. Watching that table today. I know all of Marcus’s tricks, right? And you’ve been getting better at them, but some of them, like the tower-of-crap thing he does with putty? You made that stay upright yesterday in the middle of a gust of wind that blew some guy’s toupee off and massacred a nice woman’s weave. And I thought, ‘Naw. Couldn’t be.’ But then I saw that table today and….” He shrugged, out of words. “I thought, you know… the coin thing. You’d believe me. Maybe you’d understand.”
Scout blew out a breath, stood, and paced to the edge of the clearing to look out of the underbrush to the great ocean.
“I wonder who Tom was,” he murmured, just loud enough for Lucky to hear.
Lucky scrambled at the change of subject and then took a breath. Scout was doing what Lucky had done—rearranged his thinking about someone he’d already dismissed. It had taken Lucky a month. The least he could do was to give Scout a few moments.
