I knocked on Karsen’s door lightly and waited to see if she would respond. I kind of hoped she had gone to bed and forgotten about the scene from downstairs, but no such luck. I actually heard the lock on the door snick open. She was so scared that she had locked herself in her room.
“Hey. You all right in there?”
Her big brown eyes were so wide in her face it made her look like a cartoon character.
“I’m glad you’re home. Did you see the kitchen?”
I nodded and reached out to fluff her soft hair.
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it, sprite. I’ll get it cleaned up.”
She shook her head slowly from side to side and I saw her bottom lip quiver.
“Dad just ignored the whole thing, Brysen. He just shut the door to his office and let her rant and rave like nothing was going on. I screamed at him to help, but he just wouldn’t.”
Of course he wouldn’t. He was too busy locked away behind his door pretending like he didn’t have a solid hand in the steady decline that was going on inside the walls of this house. And we all knew the booze had to come in through the front door somehow. He was a master at turning a blind eye to his part in the devastation of this family.
“I think it’s hard for him. It just takes some time to adjust to a new way of living with each other.”
That was bullshit but I hoped Karsen loved me enough to let it slide.
“How much time? It feels like it has been forever.” She was preaching to the choir. It still felt like forever to her and she had me acting as a buffer between her and how bad things really were. She had no clue how long this year felt like to me.
“It’ll be fine, Karsen. Just finish your homework. Stay on top of your schoolwork so you can be valedictorian and get a full ride to college. Once you’re out there in the real world, everything that happens here is just secondary and you get to focus on building your own life the way you want it.”
I took a step back and gave her a sad smile. She reached out a hand and grabbed my wrist. Some of the sadness left her coffee-colored eyes and she grinned at me.
“So who was the guy?”
Ugh . . . she would have had to be looking out the window when Race kissed me.
“Just a guy.”
“Is he what came up after work?”
Oh, he had definitely been up, all right. I was going to need another shower, this one cold, if I had any hope of getting to sleep tonight.
“My laptop crashed and he tried to fix it for me. Remember Dovie? That’s her brother.”
Karsen made the “no way” face everyone made when I mentioned the relationship between Dovie and Race.
“He’s pretty.”
“Very pretty.” I couldn’t argue the fact. “He’s also really complicated, bossy, and I have zero time to try and figure him out. I’m gonna go stick my head in Mom’s room, so take care of business and go to bed.”
She let my arm go and muttered so softly I almost didn’t hear her, “Thank you for coming home.”
I knew she didn’t just mean today.
I felt my shoulders droop a little and yet another sigh rattle in my chest. It wasn’t like I had a choice. It was always one more mess to clean up and they didn’t seem like they were going to come to an end anytime soon.
Chapter 6
Race
I HADN’T BEEN ABLE to sleep for shit. Not with the taste of Brysen still on my tongue and the image of that car heading right for her playing in slow motion behind my closed eyelids. I was a numbers guy by nature and I hated it when things didn’t add up. Why would an innocent girl, a college student with no ties to anything scandalous or dangerous, suddenly be caught up in a threatening and scary situation? It didn’t make any sense to me, and there was nothing I hated more than not understanding the way things worked.
The wafting smell of strong coffee hit my nose and made it twitch. I had an arm raised up over my eyes and was sprawled uncomfortably on the couch, which is how I typically crashed out. I hadn’t heard anyone come up the stairs and figured the only two people who would venture into my sanctuary were my sister or Bax. I groaned and sat up to stretch out the kink that had formed a solid ball between my shoulder blades and blinked in surprise when I saw that my visitor was neither of the people I would’ve expected. I rubbed hard hands over my hair, which was sticking up everywhere, and yawned so hard my jaw popped.
“What are you doing here, Titus?”
The detective looked enough like my best friend that there was no mistaking they were brothers. Titus was bigger and his eyes were blue instead of midnight black, but he had the same hard, hewn face, the same constantly frowning mouth, and the same black hair. Titus was in his late twenties but he looked a little bit older and he always looked tired. He even had a small white spot of hair growing at his temple that had just appeared after the fateful showdown with Novak. Being a cop in this place was a thankless job, and it was starting to look like it was wearing on those already overburdened shoulders.
“What are you doing here, Race?” he asked.
He walked over from the tiny kitchenette and handed me a mug of steaming coffee. I looked up at him from under my eyebrows and didn’t answer the question.
“Didn’t I just ask you that? How did you get in?”
He snorted and took a seat on the only other piece of furniture that existed in the barren space.
“Bax is good at breaking and entering, but I’m better. Want to tell me that you have papers for every single one of those cars sitting in the garage and on the lot down there?”
I flashed him a grin and slumped back on the couch so I could rest my neck on the cushions.
“Do I need to? Have any of them been reported stolen?”
We stared at each other for a long, tense minute because he knew none of them were. That was the thing about taking a gambler’s ride, my clients were so far in it was easier to just let me have the car than it was to try and get it back. The vice would always win, and I would always break even.
Titus grunted and his eyes narrowed at me a fraction.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing, Race? How deep in this are you willing to go? If things go bad, do you think you can do what Bax did? Serve a nickel behind bars, let Dovie be out here on her own? Have you thought about an end game in all of this?”
I took a sip of coffee and shrugged. “Dovie won’t be alone as long as Bax is around, and I learned the hard way that even if I might have a perfect end planned out, the Point always has a different idea. I’m willing to go in as deep as I have to in order to keep someone like Novak from ending back up on top.”
“Doesn’t that mean you run the risk of becoming that man, Race?”
That was something I struggled with every day. How to get elbow-deep in the filth, get my hands dirty, and not let it change the man I was.
“Yes, but it’s a risk I have to take.”
“You know the trial for the rest of Novak’s crew is eventually going to start. What kind of witnesses are you going to make? Bax is still boosting cars, you’re running an entire criminal enterprise, and Nassir is so goddamn slippery that only an idiot would trust him. What happens when Benny and the rest of them get off and want the city back?”
The dig was not lost on me.
“Then they’ll have to take it from us, brick by brick.”
We stared at each other some more and his big chest rose and fell in a heavy sigh.
“Putting Bax in jail fucking sucked, Race, but I did it. I hope you know that if you step wrong—make one mistake—I’ll do the same to you and I won’t feel bad about it.”
I knew it. I counted on it. Knowing that a moral, righteous man had his eyes on me constantly was one of the safeguards I had in place to keep my soul from being tainted by the things I was doing.
“Fair enough. Why are you really here?”
He set the coffee down on the floor by his feet because I wasn’t even civilized enough to have something as basic
as an end table or a coffee table in the loft. He rose to his full and impressive height and meandered back into the kitchen area to grab a manila folder that I hadn’t seen before. He tossed it on my lap and pointed at it.
“Recognize either of those guys?”
I looked at him blankly, set my own mug of coffee down between my bare feet, and flipped open the file. A hard shudder racked my body and bile burned up the back of my throat at the first image that was on top of the papers in the folder. A body was broken and twisted. The neck wrenched around at an unnatural angle, the skin mottled blue with bruises and death. I had to blink a couple times to get my head to stop reeling and it took more than one deep breath before I could flip to the second image. Again, the body was abused, treated to a brutal beating, and this time there was a gory and gaping hole right between the sightless, staring eyes. I stared at the photos and tried to decide if it was better to lie or tell the truth. Considering this was Titus, the odds were he already knew the answer to the question he was asking me.
“The guy with the broken neck is a kid who lost his ass on a Texas A&M game a week ago. When I went to collect, he lost his shit and pulled a gun at a party full of people near the university. I took off before the cops showed up. The second guy got handsy with Honor over at Spanky’s, and the last I saw of him, Chuck had given him a very clear lesson on why that was a bad idea. He was still breathing when I left. Bleeding and missing some teeth, but most definitely breathing.”
I moved the gruesome images to the side and looked at the file underneath. Both men had been found within hours of each other, both behind different clubs that Nassir ran out of warehouses. I whistled out through my teeth and shut the top of the folder. Titus’s blue gaze was steady and focused on me.
“You don’t think I had anything to do with this?”
I asked it, but really it was a statement of fact. If he thought I was involved, then this conversation would have involved handcuffs not coffee.
“No, but I knew about the gun and the party, and the guy from the club tried to come in and press charges, but we took one look at the dancer’s face and sent him on his way. Plus Nassir is a lot of things, but a dumb-ass isn’t one of them. Leaving not one, but two bodies behind your own club isn’t something he would ever do. What it tells me is someone is trying to send you guys a message . . . one you’d best pay attention to. A few cars go missing, some money changes hands, all that is easy to overlook. Bodies start falling, people start dying, and that gets a lot harder for the law to ignore.”
I nodded numbly in agreement and rubbed the back of my neck with my hand.
“Any word on who might be trying to communicate this particular message?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Someone trying to test the limits of whatever kind of agreement you’ve worked out with Nassir? Someone angling to get you both out of the way? Someone with a grudge who thinks they can set you up? In this place, the suspects are always too numerous to name, so you better be playing the game to win.”
Well, losing wasn’t an option, and I only ever played to win. I got to my feet and stretched my arms up over my head. I groaned out loud when I heard my spine crack all the way down. Titus rolled his eyes at me.
“Why are you still living in this place?”
“Because I feel comfortable here.”
I was never going back to the palatial mansion my parents owned on the Hill. I wasn’t going to pretend like what I did had a place in the quiet burb like Bax and Dovie, and living in a run-down apartment was no different from crashing at the loft. Plus the security was better here.
“How can you be comfortable? You don’t even have any furniture. What do you do when you bring a girl over? Tell her to give you five minutes to get a rubber on and pull the bed out of the couch? Not even you have that much game, pretty boy.”
He was wrong. I had more than enough game to sell that and anything else I wanted to pretty much any chick who came along. The problem was there hadn’t been anyone in longer than I wanted to admit that I was interested in trying to sell anything to. Except for Brysen, and with her, man, I didn’t need a bed, didn’t need much of anything to get the mood going. Just the flutter of her eyelashes and the way her pretty mouth pouted and curled and I was ready to make things happen on the drop of a dime. If her phone hadn’t rung yesterday, there was a good chance I would have christened my bathroom floor in the most spectacular manner.
I snorted at him and reached for the pair of jeans I had discarded the night before.
“Why do you care where I’m crashing? Bax is playing domestic house cat, he has a good life and a good girl. Are you trying to turn me into your pet project now that your little brother has his life all figured out?”
He swore at me and stalked to the opening that led to the hallway over the garage. He looked at me over his shoulder with a scowl.
“I know you aren’t a bad dude, Race. Your life got fucked, but that’s not anything different than happened to the rest of us. Yeah, it had to do with the choices you made, but I respect that you were doing what you felt like you had to do in order to keep your sister safe. I just wonder how long you can be a guy with dirty hands who still claims to want to live a clean life.”
I didn’t know the answer to that, didn’t really know that it was possible either, but I was going to give it my best shot to make it happen.
“I wash my hands when I get home, Titus.”
He barked out a bitter-sounding laugh. “I wish it was that easy.”
I followed him to the top of the stairs and asked as an afterthought, “What would you do if you had a friend you thought might be being stalked?”
He stopped and turned on the stairs to gaze up at me.
“Why do you think that?”
“She’s been getting weird text messages, and last night someone took aim at her with a car. She’s just a normal chick. Goes to school, lives out in the burbs, kinda by Dovie and Bax. She even lives at home. This is not a girl who should be feeling threatened and scared. It doesn’t have a place in the kind of life she’s got going on.”
Concern flashed across his face. “She got a wound-up ex or something you can look into?”
I shrugged because I didn’t know if the pissed off TA or legion of spurned suitors really counted as being wound up enough to be dangerous.
“I don’t know. I have a guy who owes me a favor or six keeping an eye on her for a minute, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t add up to me, and that means it’s going to bug me until I get it all figured out.”
“You need to be looking out for yourself. Add a pretty girl in the mix and you end up with a weak spot anyone from a million miles away can see. Just ask my brother.”
“I dunno, Titus. Bax got wrapped up in Dovie and suddenly cared enough to take on the entire world for her. Seems to me that when you add a pretty girl into the mix, that’s when you give a dangerous man something to really be dangerous for.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Maybe. If you get any solid info—a name, a number, a license plate on the car—give me a holler and I’ll see if I can run anything down for you.”
I told him thank you and watched him disappear into the bowels of the garage. I was sure he was making a mental note of all the plates on the cars so he could run them against any that were reported as stolen. Titus was a good man, but he was a cop first. He might let Bax and me slide without any hard proof, but if we ever gave him a reason to, he would have no issue putting both Bax and me behind bars, and I knew that in his mind he would be doing it for our own good.
I trudged to the shower of doom and decided after a restless night full of sexual frustration that it was going to be ice cubes and not fire today. The way my neck creaked and cracked really did give testimony to the fact that maybe I should look into getting a bed for the place. And the truth of the matter was, I knew, just knew, things with Brysen and me were far from over and I didn’t want to be the schmuck trying to put the moves on her in a place tha
t had one chair, a foldout couch, and only a bottle of Scotch in the freezer. She deserved better than that. I could offer her better than that, but then what? She would leave and I would have to pretend like I wasn’t living this life where I was constantly on the alert, constantly thinking twenty moves ahead.
Really, one of the reasons I was living so sparsely, so unfettered, was because I knew what it was like to lose everything. I had had all the opulence, all the material things that any one person could want in order to live a materialistic and wasteful life. Losing that hadn’t hurt nearly as much as realizing that the family, the illusion that provided it all, was just made of smoke and mirrors. My dad was an attempted murderer and his hands were just as filthy as my own. My mom . . . well, I didn’t know how complacent she was about everything, and I made a conscious effort not to really find out. I still had one parent I could stand to be in the same room with, not that my father allowed it. Ever since he had disowned me, my contact with either one of them had been limited to a few one-word text messages.
When you didn’t have much, losing it didn’t seem that bad.
I got dressed for the day, shoved a stale bagel in my face for some energy, and made my way down to the garage floor. I wanted to swing by Nassir’s and see what his take on the bodies was. If we had a common enemy, we needed to put our heads together and figure out who it might be. Plus it was fight night this weekend and I wanted to know what the odds on his fighters were. Nassir never did anything as simple as let two equally matched men go at each other; he always had a trick up his sleeve to make things more interesting, and now that we were in business together, I had to know just what those tricks were so I could make sure the lines and the odds on each fighter paid out to the highest potential.
Bax was talking to one of the legitimate mechanics that he had working for him. The actual garage operation since he took over had become a viable moneymaking venture. No one knew old muscle cars like Bax, and the product he was cranking out was unparalleled in quality. He didn’t need to be helping me out on the side like he was, but I was grateful he did.