“Who’s Skinny and why does he want fifty bucks from you? Is he your dealer or something?”
“No.” She looked from side to side as if we were being watched then her eyes darted back to me. “He’s my pimp,” she whispered.
“Jesus Christ! What the hell have you gotten yourself into now?” I yell. I pause and wait for signs that anyone in the house has woken up and when I don’t hear anything I lower my voice to an angry whisper. “Why on earth do you have a pimp?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice cracks. “I don’t know where I went so wrong, Ray. I don’t know when I met him. I don’t remember agreeing to do the things I do. But I do them and it’s disgusting and I hate it, but he’s really going to kill me if I don’t bring him some money tonight.” Her head shoots up. “And that’s very judgey coming from you, Ray, Miss Teen Mom America, herself,” She hisses.
Stay strong, Ray. Remember, she’s a master manipulator. She needs help, not money. Both her compliments and insults are trying to play on my emotions, I remind myself, remembering what the articles said that I’d Googled over the last several months.
“I talked to your parents today. They said that if you go back to rehab and stay for the six-month program, you can come home when you’re done. Why don’t you just do that?” I ask her, hoping she’ll agree to go back again. But I sense that this time is different than the other times and deep down I know that this time she won’t be going back.
“I know, Ray. I just came from my parent’s house. And I agreed to go. I’m going. I just have to get Skinny off my back first and they won’t give me any money.” Just when I’m about to break, she sniffles and I spot a dash of white powder clinging to the inside of one of her nostrils. It reminds me again that every word out of her mouth is her addiction talking, not her. I know she hasn’t been home to see her parents. My room looks into their sitting area where both her mom and dad had been watching some documentary all night until they turned off the lights only an hour ago.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Fine!” She shouts, slapping her hand against the tree trunk. “But can I at least borrow your flashlight? It’s pitch fucking black out here and I can’t see shit. I left mine on the fucking houseboat.”
I walk over to my closet and pull out an old pink flashlight, the matching one to the package of two that we’d bought at a dollar store when we were in the fifth grade. We had made up our own version of Morse code and spent many nights sending light to one another across our yards, to one another’s windows. It wasn’t until another neighbor called the police and reported a possible prowler when we were forced to stop.
“Here,” I say, handing her the flashlight. She takes it and flips on the switch. When it doesn’t immediately turn on she pounds on the bottom with her palm until it comes to life. “You have what you want now. I’m leaving, Ray. You won’t ever have to deal with me again.”
“Wait! You just said you were going to go back into rehab. Why wouldn’t I see you again?” I throat tightens. I made a mistake. It doesn’t matter what she’s done. I can’t lose my best friend. She’s sick. She needs help.
She needs me.
“Because I told you, if I don’t have his money, Skinny is going to kill me.” She pulls her dark hoodie from her head and turns the flashlight upwards until her face is illuminated in the yellow glow. I gasp. Dark purple bruises are smattered across her obviously broken nose, both of her eyes are swollen, and one has a halo of yellow around it. The whites of her eyes are blood shot. The corners of her cracked lips are dried with blood. Her jaw is off-center.
She hadn’t been lying. Or maybe she had been but someone had obviously beaten her pretty badly. I am about to change my mind and open my mouth to tell her that she can have the money when she holds up her hand. “Never mind, Ray. It was nice knowing ya.” She turns off the flashlight and starts making her way down the tree, temporarily disappearing into the black backyard until her shadow emerges under the streetlight on the front walk. She turns and waves. “Bye, Ray,” I hear her say quietly, cutting through the silence of the night. There is a finality in her good-bye that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. She turns to leave but stops again and turns around.
“And Ray? Whatever you do, don’t trust the tyrant.”
Then I watch as my best friend turns back around again and walks away.
Maybe for the very last time.
I whisper back to her and can only hope that she can still hear me.
“Bye, Nikki.”
Chapter Seven
King
“What exactly did the fucking thing say again?” Bear asked.
“Here,” I said, flinging the envelope across the room. It landed on the floor. Bear reached down and unfolded the paper I wish I’d never received. He muttered as he read through the lengthy letter from the state informing me that since I didn’t qualify for guardianship of Max, that they would like to put her up for adoption. They’d already had an interested family reach out to her caseworker.
They’d already taken her from me physically, and now they wanted me to give them permission to give her to another family and strip the King from her.
It was the last fucking thing I needed.
Bear and I were delirious and running on only a few hours of sleep in a week. We’d spent a shit load of time running offense, actively searching for Eli. We’d been everywhere from Miami to Atlanta, but the guy was like a ghost. Every bit of information we received brought us somewhere he’d just left.
Sometimes we’d missed him by just minutes.
“Says here they can’t do shit without you signing off,” Bear concluded, flicking the letter with his index finger, tossing it haphazardly onto the coffee table.
“Yeah, but it’s also basically saying that if I don’t sign off she’ll be in fucking foster care until she’s eighteen.” I twisted the last piece of my tattoo gun in place. “Don’t know if I can do that to her, man. When I was a kid I would’ve given anything for my mom actually be a mom. Fuck, I would have given anything just to know who my father was.”
“But your mom was a fucking cunt,” Bear stated, “and now she’s a dead fucking cunt.”
“Her being a dead fucking cunt is the reason I don’t have my kid,” I reminded him, “and maybe she’s better off living with normal people who don’t have to worry about all this bullshit of killin’ or being killed.”
Bear rolled his eyes. “Bullshit. Killing motherfuckers is business. Ain’t got shit to do with family. What the fuck do they know, anyway? We’re lawless, my friend. Civilians can’t wrap their little fucking brains around what that means without getting their frilly panties in a fucking twist.”
“You do know that in the eyes of the MC I’m a civilian,” I countered.
Bear waved me off. “Just to my old man, and what the fuck does he know?”
I paused for a minute; before I shared with Bear something I’d never told anyone else. Even Preppy. “If I ever get the chance to be a real dad to Max…I’m going full civilian.”
Like you had to tell me. I fucking knew that shit. Let me know how your application to fucking DeVry pans out you fucking pussy, Ghost-Preppy taunted.
“You ain’t thinking clearly right now. We’ll get Eli all nice and dead and then you can think about what a dumb fuck you just sounded like when you informed me that The King of the Causeway is going fucking legit,” Bear scoffed.
I’d expected that answer from Bear. I knew he wouldn’t understand what lengths a person would go to for their kid, for their family. “You know how you would do anything for your brothers in the MC?”
Bear nodded. “For the MC. For you. Yeah, man. Anything. Steal, fight, maim, kill. Shit, I’d take a fucking bullet. I’d go back and take Preppy’s fucking bullet right now if I could.” I believed him, because Bear’s loyalties ran deep.
“Well,” I started, “those things are jack shit compared to what you would be willing to do for your own kid.”
It was Bear’s turn to shake his head. I knew he would never really understand what I’d meant unless he up and had a kid of his own someday, and that thought was laughable at best.
I rubbed my hand across the stubble on my jaw, which over the past week, had turned more beard than stubble. All I really wanted was to drag Pup into my bed and settle my face in between her legs for the foreseeable future.
But I couldn’t do that until we ended Eli.
The guy was smart. He liked his revenge slow, sweet, and torturous.
Torture is the word I would use to describe not being able to reach out to Pup. It was too dangerous. The last guy Eli set his sites on lost his entire family, right down to his second cousins before Eli finally put in an end to the guys misery of watching every he loved die off one by one.
“We’ll start back up in the morning,” I said, “put more feelers out there, see if we can get info from someone closer to him or his inner circle. Someone who will know where he is in present tense, not past.”