Hack, page 17
“For what, anyway?” I asked through a narrowed brow.
“Security. He and his brother do high-end, and I mean high, high-end security now.”
I let the envy fade away. In truth, I had always hoped Jackson would find a way out of Covington. He’d grown up in the building across the courtyard, and his shitty grades had never been enough to support his decent basketball talent. He’d been a local legend and hero, according to the other guys who had never escaped the concrete walls around the dark part of our city. But after high school and no college scholarship, his all-star status had become a lot less shiny. Leo’s offering was the first glimpse of a chance Jackson had to change his life after basketball.
I stood, only to crouch down in front of him in a squat. I frowned, but it was more resolve than sadness. “You should go. You should take Junior and Lisa and get the fuck out of here. There’s a line out of the door of desperate younger dealers and crooks who want to take our place.”
“What about you?”
I smiled. It was fake. “I’m a criminal. We all know that.”
“You’re not interested in redemption?”
“Not really. The high of stealing keeps me from chasing the other monsters.” I winked, but shit could go sour at any moment. Every member of the crew had a story of a friend who they never thought would be an addict but fatefully was. Not being that person was an intimate and unspoken goal for most of us who’d grown up in the projects. My family and neighborhood were full of examples, people who let the reality of their struggle settle too long in their bones—sweet, well-meaning human beings who wanted to escape one single time from their shitty life, then just ‘once again’ blurred to ‘once a week’. By the time they’d convinced themselves it was recreational, it was already a habit. And habit is the gateway to addiction.
I stood and offered Jackson my hand. We clasped, but before I added any muscle, I asked, “You tell the bossman yet?”
Jackson scrunched his nose and mouth together. “I was hoping you were going to do that for me.”
My laugh turned into a coughing fit and I let go of his hand and bent down, trying to catch my breath. I regained my composure. “Nah… If it comes from me, I’m a failure for not keeping you here. It comes from you, he’ll understand and probably even give you his blessing.”
I pulled him to his feet. He stepped back, crossed his arms and scanned my face. “What’s eating you?”
“It’s nothing. Probably a preliminary case of the heebie-jeebies. I’m on rat duty tonight.”
Jackson shivered. “Better you than me.”
“But I’m going to take M. Get her mind off shit. Her mom took her dog.”
Shaking his head, Jackson crossed the room to the massive leg press machine. As he adjusted the weight, he said over his shoulder, “That’s your date, man? Filling game rooms with rats? I know you get off on drama and shit, but I fail to see the intrigue and romance in that shit.”
“She’s gonna love it.” I hoped.
“Jesus and Mother Mary. If she loves that, Lisa is right. You two have each met your match.”
We finished working out. I showered, did a bit of recon for the night and found Anton on our couch watching a boxing match as I was on my way out of the door, my lucky baseball hat in hand.
“Hey, boss.” I thumbed over my shoulder to the door. “Just on my way to make a special delivery to those Jefferson Manor fuckers. Don’t think the high rollers from downtown are going to be interested in their secret locations tonight.”
Anton tipped his beer to me and said, “Nice work, Number Two. By the way, Jimmy is a great earner. Another stellar day for the newbie. If he keeps it up, he may just be third-floor material.”
“Earning is everything, right?” The slight sarcasm in my voice didn’t go unnoticed.
The bossman turned toward me and narrowed his eerie eyes. “Don’t go getting all jealous cuz I like a new guy. We both know the kind of money you bring in is nothing compared to the stupid shit we sell on the streets.”
He’d misread the snark and I was grateful. I didn’t give a flying fuck about Jimmy coming up in the ranks. Hell, it had been my idea. What had led to my small but still apparent lack of conviction was that I seriously wondered when the last time was that Anton had gone out and earned anything on his own. Sure, he sat down at the bench and flexed his muscle, but none of our regulars actually asked to buy from him directly. And yes, he did all the runs upstate and got the product, but that was the easiest fucking part of it. He had a house up there with a pool and total seclusion. It was like a vacation twice a month from the cesspool that was Covington Heights. It must be good to be king.
Anton glanced over me and said, “Have Jackson set up a game for tomorrow night. Can we still use your cousin’s back room?”
The knowledge that Jackson would be long gone by tomorrow gave me drip of power that I didn’t normally surrender to. “My cousin wants me there. I’ll set it up.”
“We have dinner with my mom. You’re my distraction, remember?”
Jesus, the way he made it sound was as if I was meat being fed to the tiger while the zookeepers cleaned the cage. “I can do both. And I’ll take Jimmy. It will be good for them to see a new face with an old one. You know, new branding after they thought we were a bit trigger happy.”
Anton mulled over my suggestion. I had to be there with my cousin to assure all was smooth with a new location. And he couldn’t go against me taking Jimmy after he’d just sung his praises. But behind his light eyes, I could see him working all the angles. As he nodded his head, it affirmed he’d landed on the most obvious outcomes. I’d never led him down the wrong path before. Why would I start?
I was almost out of the door when he said, “Just a reminder that you sleep here.”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it.” I closed the door behind me and headed halfway down the hall to Marigold. I tapped in the code and the door popped open. She was exactly where I’d left her, except she’d drank three more sodas. The empty red-and-white cans lined the coffee table, each one slightly bent and deformed.
Her head bopped in little movements and tinny guitar sounds escaped her headphones. I smiled and walked over to her. The background of the laptop’s screen was black, but a rainbow glowed with random letters and commands. She was into the thousands with her lines. She’d been busy.
I grabbed her shoulders like the boogie man and she leaped out of her skin.
“Jesus Christ.” She cupped the headphones and pulled them off with a gorgeous evil eye.
“You need to change. All black. And some pants. It’s rat time.”
“That all sounds ominous. I’m on a massive roll here. I should keep going.”
No, she shouldn’t. She needed real crime, first-hand bad behavior. It would be a Band-Aid to her emotional day—a sort of revenge, except the victims were strangers. I took the laptop off her thighs, closed it, then set it and the headphones on the coffee table next to the abandoned evidence of her caffeine and sugar high.
“Trust me. You’re going to like this.” The devious grin on my face spread to her own.
“You keep saying ‘trust me’ like it’s going to happen. But you’re right. I could use a break. So fine…rat time it is, whatever the hell that means.”
She stood and I swatted her adorable ass as it passed by. “Hurry up. The rodents are waiting.”
She looked over her shoulder. “You have mental problems.”
I shrugged. “You keep saying that like it’s going to change something.”
Chapter Twenty
Marigold
The cool night air was a welcome change from the normal heat. A fog had settled over the city hiding the moon. Streetlights glowed and a black van idled on the street across the courtyard from Covington.
Rafa took my hand and I clasped back, even though I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the significance. But after the day I’d had, the small reassurance of not being alone—even if temporary—was welcomed.
A skinny version of Rafa with the same beautiful eyes hopped out of the driver’s side of the van and lit a cigarette. He crossed his feet at the ankles, leaned against the van and took a long drag. His gaze followed us, and when we reached the vehicle, he wiped his lower lip with a tattooed thumb.
Rafa release my hand and man-hugged the guy who I assumed was his cousin…because everyone was his cousin.
“This is M. She’s going to ride along. M, this is Diego.”
Diego gave me a quick hello nod then looked back at Rafa. “Only you would bring a girl along for this shit.” He flicked the rest of the cigarette into the street and it landed in a pothole. “Come on. I haven’t fed them since you called. They’re ready.”
We circled the van and I climbed into the middle of the bench seat. I was the meat of the Brazilian boy sandwich, and yeah, it was a nice distraction. Rafa had showered since I’d last seen him and his fresh scent so close to me was sending tingling naughty thoughts to all the best places in my body.
“Where to first?” His cousin put the van into drive and check the side mirror as he pulled out into traffic.
Rafa dug out his phone from his back pocket, brushing his opposite arm against my chest with the movement. He checked the screen. “Closest one is twenty blocks down and seven over. There’s a window in the alley that opens to the shitter. We can dump two cages there.”
Oh. When he’d said ‘rats’, he’d mean rodents.
I turned to him. “You’re going to infest someone’s place with rats?”
“Big, hungry rats,” Diego said with a childish grin.
The devious beauty in Rafa’s twinkling eyes somehow made him more everything—more handsome, more dangerous, more wonderfully sick in the head.
“Why?” I asked.
“I want their clients to be happier somewhere else.”
“That almost sounds like customer service.” I winked at him. Why did I wink at him? I turned back to face forward, a small, warm flush spreading from my neck to my cheeks. Real, icky crime was too much fun. I practically bounced in anticipation.
Diego drove us down a small backstreet and parked per Rafa’s instructions. We all exited the cab and Rafa led us to a small frosted and dirty window next to the ground. He crouched down and held out his hand. Diego dug a pen-like tool out of the pocket of his cargo pants and handed it over. A slice and gentle tip of the glass later and Rafa had successfully cut through half of the window without a sound.
His cousin circled the van and opened the back doors. They made a quiet squeak, but it wasn’t the metal on metal scraping that got my attention. Within seconds, Diego was around the side of the van carrying a wire cage full of rats. Their tails swung back and forth and their fat, dark gray bodies pressed against the square wires. My stomach clenched and my saliva turned sour. The rats made quiet airy sounds as if they were anticipating the work ahead of them with precise pleasure.
My skin crawled when I locked eyes with a particularly snarly looking one. Yeah, any client was going to be happier any-fucking-where else. Distaste and admiration for the slimy, dark beast mixed in my tight stomach. They were big rats, but on the scale of dog and cat, they were still smaller. How they managed to get a world full of people to despise them was worth a nod of respect.
Rafa’s cousin set the cage in front of the window. He’d put work gloves on. It wasn’t his first rat rodeo.
“Tilt it down,” Rafa instructed with a gentle calm, as if he’d done it a thousand times. Maybe he had. Diego lifted the edge of the cage closest to the van and Rafa unlatched the trap door. The rats tumbled down, only a slight thud confirming their landing. The men repeated with a second crate, and not even five minutes after we’d arrived, we were backing out of the dark street and headed to our next location.
The second place required Rafa to pick two locks, one from the outside storage entrance and the other into a pristine room with a poker table in the middle. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that breaking and entering was a new aphrodisiac. Diego opened a few cans of tuna and tossed them in various directions before he and Rafa simultaneously opened cages and backed out of the room as quickly as they could. I’d waited in the doorway under the mental pretense of being a look-out.
Rafa held the empty cage and lifted his eyebrows as he passed by me in the dimly lit hallway. He and Diego loaded the back of the truck, and once again we were on our way. An electricity buzzed between the three of us, our dirty deeds almost done. The filth of it all was enchanting. Plus the margin of profit was probably through the roof. How much would a bunch of sewer rats plus the cousin’s labor for two hours cost, anyway?
Budget smart crime. Brilliant.
Our final destination was going to be trickier. Downtown had more crowds, more eyes. But Rafa had a plan for that as well. He paid off a doorman as Diego wheeled a trolley with the cages that were covered in a dark blanket through the front fucking door. I stayed on the street, still thinking I had some kind of job that was helping them, noting how smooth it all was.
In some ways, Rafa and his cousins were just like those underground, discreet, underestimated creatures. They were everywhere and only annoying when they came to the surface. It was quite a network, once I thought about it.
“All set.” Rafa smacked me on the back and the three of us headed to the double-parked van. We drove to Covington without a second glance behind us. It had been that easy.
“You’re a much better sidekick than Jackson,” Rafa said, after his cousin left us on the street opposite the courtyard.
Okay, so I was kinda excited to be a criminal sidekick. That was the first thing that ran through my warped brain. “Why’s that?”
“He fucking hates rats.” Rafa’s face fell. “Guess that won’t be a problem anymore.”
We crossed the street and I asked, “What do you mean?”
After a sigh and a glance to the bench where Jimmy was the one in charge, Rafa said, “Jackson, J.J. and Lisa are leaving Covington. Stay here. I need to make an appearance.”
He walked over to the bench and went through the formalities of saying hello to those in his favor and eyeing those he was suspicious of. I hadn’t observed much of the crew together but one thing struck me. The guys liked Rafa, wanted to be his friend. They feared Anton.
With a tight grin and his arm hooked around my shoulder, we entered the building. Rafa punched the call button to the elevator.
“I have to stay at my place. So…”
I smirked. “So if I want to hang out with you, that’s where it’s happening?”
A middle-aged woman with dark hair exited and gave Rafa a careful glance. He pressed into my shoulder blade without returning eye contact to her and we rode up to the third floor in silence.
With every step I took to my new apartment, my new life, the solitude of what I’d chosen hit me. There was no more Spock. And even though my parents and I secretly wondered if we’d hit a wall one day, the finality of it was much heavier than I’d allowed myself to realize until I was faced with spending the night alone.
Because, truth be told, the last time I’d been officially alone had been that storm all those years prior. I stood in front of my door, staring at it while the voices in my head taunted my foolishness, my recklessness. Those hypocritical whispers that some days encouraged aberrations and other days mocked me for being weak and stupid.
The rats had been a welcome distraction, but the cold truth sat in front of me like an iceberg. I was small, I had nothing and I only had myself to blame.
“Ugh, fine.” Rafa’s sharp voice broke through my mind’s wicked chatter. “I want you to come over. Jesus, you can be stubborn.”
I blinked a few times, hoping the darkness wouldn’t follow me down the hall, then turned to him. “I mean, I don’t want you to be all lonely without me.”
“Whatever.”
We shoved and fake-hit each other down to his door, and once inside the empty apartment, I escaped him by plopping down on their lush couch and reaching for the remote.
“I gotta rinse off. Fucking rats.” Rafa shivered a little, the first sign that he hadn’t had nerves of steel from his vandalizing. “We can figure out food when I’m out of the shower.”
“Okay.” I waved him off and flipped through the channels.
With the spray of the water in the distance, the solitude of the moment crawled under my skin, not unlike how the rats were probably worming around their new homes. I stood, and before I realized where I was headed, I’d shucked off my boots and thrown them at the foot of Rafa’s massive bed.
My clothes followed in a messy trail leading to his bathroom where the door was open a crack. The rolling steam was the perfect cloud to capture any doubts or nerves about what would happen next.
Rafa scrubbed his face behind the fogged glass of the open shower then caught my eye. His gaze trapped me, locking a part of my spirit with his.
“I think I need a rinse, too,” I said in a small, confident voice and stepped into the shower.
His naked body shimmered and little streams of water traced the deep lines in his chiseled torso. A need swirled inside me, a call only he could answer. I placed my hand on his chest where he had a detailed and colorful butterfly tattoo—a soft image on a rough body.
Rafa’s eyes flittered as he took a breath.
But before I could question our gentleness, before I could realize what I was asking of him, his lips were on mine and I was against the cold tile wall next to the large, round faucet. His hands framed my face as our tongues twisted in desperation. Rafa rubbed against me hard, my back scraping against the sharp joints in the tile.
Frantically, he grabbed my ass and I hopped up, his erection already prodding between my open legs. I wrapped my arms around his neck and we spun. He carried me to the sink, all the while the shower filling the room with more and more steam.
The cold hit the back of my legs but I couldn’t stop kissing him. Any time he pulled away, I tugged him closer. I needed him closer—all of him, taking all of me.
