LITMIR.BIZ

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pants pockets. “I do care. Funny thing, your brother’s arrest got me all interested in your fugitive daddy all over again. I’ve reassigned the case to Detective Terry here because he always gets his man, don’t you, Detective?”

      A muscle worked in the detective’s jaw. “Yes, sir.”

      Lucas smiled, but his eyes remained hard and cold. “So just in case this trouble that your delinquent brother’s gotten himself into happens to smoke out your runaway parents, Detective Terry will be watching. And if I hear that your brother does anything to violate his probation, I’ll nail his scrawny ass to the wall.”

      The D.A. walked away, his hard-sole shoes clicking against the floor. Carlotta scowled at the detective and he scowled back. “I know my rights,” she said with more confidence than she felt, pulling herself up to her full height, which, even in heels, brought her only up to the man’s chin. “Stay away from me and my brother or I’ll…I’ll…”

      “You’ll what?” he asked dryly.

      “I’ll sic your ex-lover Liz on you.” She smirked—ten points for her.

      But he barked out a laugh. “Lady, you’re way more scary than Liz, and that’s saying a lot.”

      She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t like the idea of you watching me.”

      “You’ll get used to it.” He gave her a little salute and walked away.

      7

      Wesley swung his legs over the edge of his bed, put on his glasses and stared in the predawn light at the empty wall unit where a dozen monitors, hard drives, routers, keyboards, joysticks and printers had once sat, all interconnected. Damn, the police had cleaned him out. They’d even taken his software cabinet, games and landline phones.

      He smiled to himself. It was a good thing that he kept all his good equipment at his buddy Chance’s apartment.

      He stood and stretched the kinks out of his neck, a bothersome side effect of spending so many hours bent over a keyboard.

      Whew. Thank goodness the business with the police had been settled yesterday in court. Liz Fischer was a godsend…and a hottie. Too bad a woman like her would never take him seriously—movies like The Graduate and PS gave guys like him false hope.

      Walking to the bathroom connected to his room, he rubbed his sore mouth, working his jaw. He wished he knew who had sent the guy who’d jumped him in the courthouse bathroom, but the thug seemed to prefer to talk with his hands. In truth, the guy could have been working for either one of the people that he owed—Father Thom being his biggest creditor. Then again, the guy robbing him could have been a coincidence.

      But he doubted it.

      The worst part was that he’d been carrying the fifteen hundred that Chance had paid him for deleting the speeding tickets—money he’d planned to take to Father Thom this morning. Instead, he’d have to scrounge together a few hundred from his various hiding places and beg for more time.

      He thought about showering, but decided that fresh deodorant and mouthwash would suffice. If he got the ass-kicking he expected from Father Thom’s thugs, a soak in a hot tub of water was probably in his near future anyway.

      He rooted around the floor for a cleanish pair of jeans and pulled a T-shirt from the laundry basket of clothes he hadn’t gotten around to folding. He dressed and shoved his feet into his old Merrell slip-ons, mourning his brown suede Pumas, and kicked Hubert’s decaying shoes near his trash can.

      In the fifty-gallon glass aquarium on the other side of the room, a mouse scurried around, terrified. A pang of remorse hit him and he walked over, unlocked the pin and slid the screen top aside. With a practiced hand, he captured the mouse and held it up by its tail.

      “Relax, buddy, you got a reprieve. Einstein must be fasting again.” He stared down at the black-and-gray spotted axanthic ball python, all six feet of his longtime pet coiled disinterestedly in a corner. “Finicky reptile, are you sure you aren’t female? Or vegetarian?”

      Einstein didn’t move, and would likely stay in his stoic position for the next several hours. The police search, with all the activity and noise, must have traumatized him.

      Wesley slid the cover closed, locked the pin, then returned the lucky mouse to a smaller container. Sometimes he thought that Einstein didn’t eat out of sympathy for his prey. When he did feed, it was as if he would begrudgingly relent, then coil around and squeeze his prey to death before it had time to react, and swallow it promptly, as if to get it over with. Carlotta thought the snake was a man-eater, but Wesley could barely get him to eat enough to sustain his monstrous size.

      Wesley sometimes wondered, though, what his pet could kill and consume if it were motivated.

      Hearing a noise in the hallway, Wesley frowned. He’d hoped to be out of the house before Carlotta got up, partly because he didn’t want to worry her, and partly because he didn’t want to face her. The fact that she wasn’t normally an early riser told him that she probably hadn’t slept well, and no doubt he was the cause. Frustration tightened his chest. He just needed some time and space to get things worked out with his creditors and to investigate his father’s case. Although he appreciated his sister’s concern, her hovering was making things more complicated.

      He made his way around the room and checked various hiding places—the hem of the curtain, the hollow leg of his metal bed, inside his worn copy of The Catcher in the Rye—and counted up three hundred sixty dollars.

      He heard a muffled voice and realized that Carlotta was calling his name. God, he hoped she hadn’t set the kitchen on fire again.

      He grabbed his backpack and stuffed his iPod, cell phone and money inside. Then he stepped out into the hall and closed his bedroom door. It was a house rule that his bedroom door be closed at all times because Carlotta lived in fear that Einstein would somehow escape his enclosure.

      “Wesley!”

      “I’m coming,” he yelled. But when he reached the living room, he stopped short. Sitting next to Carlotta on the couch was Tick, the tub of lard who had forced his way in the house last week and called Carlotta at work.

      “Mornin’, Wesley,” the guy said, smiling and patting Carlotta’s knee.

      Carlotta, clutching the newspaper, looked terrified. Tick must have been waiting for her when she stepped outside to leave for work. Fury balled in Wesley’s stomach—he wanted to kill the guy. He had always wished he was big and beefy like Chance, but never more so than at this moment.

      “Leave her alone,” was all he could say.

      “Where’s the money?” Tick asked.

      Wesley pulled himself up to his full height. “Maybe you can tell me.”

      Tick laughed. “What are you talkin’ about?”

      “I was jumped yesterday. Guy took all that I was carrying. I figured it was for Father Thom.”

      Tick wagged his fat head. “Nope. Must have been someone else you owe.”

      Wesley couldn’t tell if he was lying—but then, did it really matter?

      Then the man’s eyes grew mean. “So like I said, where’s the money?”

      Wesley reached into his backpack. “After yesterday, three-sixty was all I could get together.”

      Tick laughed. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”

      Wesley extended the money and, as he hoped, Tick lurched to his feet to count it. “This ain’t enough, Wesley. Father Thom gave me strict orders not to leave here with less than a grand. You don’t want to get me in trouble with my boss, do you?”

      Wesley swallowed. “No. But you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.”

      Tick grinned. “Sure I can.”

      “Wait

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