LITMIR.BIZ

      THREE

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       The crew lived in a house that had lain empty for too long.

      Finders keepers—and all that shit.

      They’d just taken up residence and no one had tried to move them out.

      The whisper was the old guy who’d lived there had died and his son was doing a seven stretch, so no one would be coming home soon.

      Black said he’d been given the okay to crash there, but Black was full of shit. Still, no one came looking to collect on any bills, and the neighbors steered as clear as they would have if it were a crack house.

      Pappy had never lived there. It had been important to him from day one to be independent. His crib might have been nothing more than a one-room bed-sit above a takeaway, but it was his one room. It gave him a sense of who he wanted to be.

      Most of the floor space was taken up with books, pieces of discarded computer equipment recovered from dumpsters, along with a few more expensive kits boosted from electronics stores. While the others had gone for plasma TVs and stereo systems, he’d always had an eye for top-of-the-line computers.

      He was self-taught, but that shit just made sense to him. It was a gift, but he knew that there was a lot more he could learn with the right sort of teacher. That was why he wanted to get himself out of this place. Funny thing was, there was more money to made by being legit than there was from a life of petty crime, and with that money there was a different kind of life, a different kind of respect.

      People made a lot of noise about respect. Most of them didn’t know what the word meant.

      Pappy did. He wanted people to look up to him because they thought he was a golden fucking god when it came to what he did, not like they looked up to Black because they were afraid to look down while he pissed on their feet. It was a different kind of power.

      It was the same with the girls, but in a different way.

      Some of them were attracted to Black and the crew who surrounded him because they sensed his power. Some of them were drawn in by danger and the drugs—they went hand in hand. Some came for the cash, literally. So as it was stuffed into their thongs they’d moan and writhe and press up against the hand that fed, faking just how fucking hot the whole lie was. It was a house of lips, lies, and hips, and without Black it would all come tumbling down. He was the glue that stuck it all together.

      Pappy walked through the front door, one pretty-looking bitch hanging off his arm. She was only there because Black had put her there. Pappy hadn’t seen her before, and really wasn’t in the mood to find out who she was. She clung to him like a clam. Black had no doubt promised her a snatch full of cash if she was nice to him. Nice. Right.

      Tonya was different; she was with Black because she wanted to be, not because of what she got out of it in return. At least that was how it looked to Pappy.

      She’d hung around with the crew for a couple of years. All too often she was stoned and barely able to walk on her impossibly high heels. Maybe that was how she survived. Pappy might have had a dream, but there was no guarantee someone like Tonya had one.

      Or hell, maybe she had one once upon a time, but gave up on it along the way. The hood wasn’t exactly a place of fairy tales. Still, Pappy liked her, and if he’d been her fairy godfather he’d have wished her a better hand in life than the one she’d been dealt.

      She hadn’t always been like this; everyone had a time before, a time when they still thought that anything was possible. Maybe that was why she treated him and Black differently than the rest of the crew. They went back. They remembered a time when she had still been all pretty and virginal and sang gospel in the church choir.

      That was before her mother had died and she’d been passed from one relative who didn’t really want her to another, until she found herself with an uncle who thought that putting a roof over her head allowed him some God-given right to stick it in her like any God-fearing fucker would. So, yeah, maybe she’d had a dream before. It wasn’t impossible, just life and a fat bastard had fucked it out of her.

      Black had a dream too. Or so he said: fast cars, speedboats, a fucking Miami Vice soundtrack playing in his head as a beautiful bitch sucked on his cock. That was his version of heaven.

      Looking at Tonya just made Pappy all the more determined to hang onto his dreams.

      Once they were gone, they’d be impossible to find again.

      He looked at his watch. Three thirty.

      The first bus out to Detroit left at seven. He was going to be on it.

      “I thought you were splitting, Pappy,” Tonya said. She slurred her words a little. Her eyes were glazed. It was a permanent state of affairs.

      “Soon enough,” Pappy replied.

      “He don’t want you to leave, you know,” she said, like it was some great secret. “Fool needs you around more than he can say.”

      The thing was, after today it didn’t matter what Black wanted anymore. It was all about what Pappy needed from now on.

      It had to be.

      Someone passed him a bottle of bourbon.

      He sank down onto a leather sofa. The stitching sighed—it had seen its best days end with Reagan.

      Despite everything, he felt comfortable here. Sometimes home didn’t have to be home. Sometimes it just had to be a good, safe place. And this was as good a place as any to spend his last night in town.

      And no matter what else, Black knew how to party.

      Someone turned the music up. Bass drove the rhythm—hard, pounding, incredibly sexual. This was the music of life. This was the hammer of life. Raw. Primal. The words bled into each other and he could imagine the guy, oil-slick skin, tats like tribal markings, girls coiled like snakes around his well-defined physique.

      Pappy lost himself in it for a moment, grateful to forget the failure of the day. The music grew louder. He closed his eyes, felt his body shake with it. Sometimes he couldn’t express himself—he wasn’t good with words, he couldn’t say what he wanted to, not in the same way he could put something into a computer and make the thing dance to whatever tune was in his head. He wasn’t a words guy. But sometimes he could imagine himself up there, the guy behind the mic rapping out from his soul, reaching people. Making them understand. And then there were days like today, when getting wasted seemed like the best fucking idea in the world and a viable way out that didn’t involve applying to some IT department in some school where his gang tats wouldn’t serve as a reference.

      He

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