by Naomi West
“Hey!” Josh whined, his eyes snapping to my face. “I was watching that.”
“I’m sorry, but this is important. I need to talk to you, and I need you to listen.”
Josh wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve then got to his feet. “Alright, what do you gotta say?”
“Your father wants me to be your new babysitter. How do you feel about that?”
My heart twisted a little in my chest as those chocolate eyes of his lit up like a light bulb. “That sounds okay,” he whispered, his feet tapping the carpet with impatience. “Will you teach me more about cooking?”
“I can try,” I answer, a lancing pain in my chest growing as Josh stared down at his toes. I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, but whatever it melted my heart. “The only thing I ask in return is that you behave. If you do that, we will get along great. I’ll make you food and teach you what I can.”
Josh looked up at me, his little eyes narrowing. “Okay.”
I turned to Creed. “What’s my pay?”
He was staring at me again with that strange emotion in his gray eyes. I didn’t know what it meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. He named a price and I immediately shot back with a counter offer. The crooked smile on his face spread a little as he nodded.
“I’ll also need money for groceries. I’ll make sure he gets regular meals, homemade.”
Creed nodded again, so I squared my shoulders and kept going. “I want Tuesday evenings off and I won’t deal with dirty laundry.” My whole body shook as I met his eyes. Little pulses of fear shuddered through my veins as he studied me. I pushed it too hard; he’s going to freak out any second. Panic rose like bile in my throat, choking my air away.
But much to my surprise, he merely nodded again, that crooked grin spreading wide enough to show his teeth. “As you wish,” he answered with a mocking laugh as he turned and walked out of the door, slamming it behind himself.
My heart thundered in my chest as I fought to breathe. Why did I do that? Why did I push him?
I didn’t have an answer. But something deep in me stirred; perhaps I had just been playing the doormat this whole time. Maybe it was all an act.
Maybe I didn’t want to be that Ivy anymore.
“Can I turn the TV back on, Ivy?” a little voice said from behind me. I whirled to find Josh still standing there, waiting for me to do something.
“Sure, but don’t turn the volume up too loud. I’m going to go see what kind of food I have next door to cook. Are you hungry?”
He nodded so vigorously, he looked like a child-sized bobble head doll.
“What are your thoughts on spaghetti?”
Josh scrunched up his nose. “Is that some sort of vegetable?”
Chuckling, I walked over to the door. “No, it’s not. It’s a pasta.”
His little face went serious and his feet still as he considered my words. “Well, I will try it.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Heading back to my place, I picked up everything I would need, the spaghetti noodles, the cans of crushed tomatoes, and the mostly empty bottle of dried herbs. I frowned at them; when they were gone, I wouldn’t have the money to replace them unless I really got creative with coupons or something.
Maybe I’ll find something part-time I can do when I’m not with the kid. It wasn’t too much to hope for, hopefully. If I could work two jobs, pull in money twice as fast-- Well, I can worry about that when I get to it. For now, let’s get this pasta going.
I searched both Josh’s little kitchenette and mine, looking for basic ingredients to make the perfect sauce. There was a little fifty-cent can of crushed tomatoes in my kitchen that would make up most of the sauce along with some dried basil, garlic powder, and parsley. In Creed’s kitchen, I found nothing but beer and a salt shaker that was still half full.
Good enough for a sauce. I would have given anything for some ground sausage or beef to add to the sauce, maybe an onion, olive oil, and a handful of fresh basil leaves, but I would do the best I could with what I had.
I brought everything over to Josh’s, stepping around him carefully as he watched the TV. Then I got to work. As soon as the scents of the sauce started wafting around the little motel room, it drew Josh in, his little nose lifted into the air like a dog.
“I don’t know what this pagsgettin is, but it smells pretty good,” he said, jumping up onto a barstool and looking down at my simmering pot of sauce.
“Spaghetti, Josh, and please do not stand on the chair. If you fell over, you would get a face full of boiling water.” I smiled at him to soften the disciplining, hoping he would take better to it if I gave some reasons why he should be more careful. “Then you would ruin our dinner.”
Josh screech-laughed, his voice high-pitched and echoing around the tiny space. I felt like my damned ears were bleeding. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the dinner!” He hopped down from his perch and did a lap around the room, jumping over the bed and running across the carpet from one end to the other.
It’s amazing that the downstairs neighbors don’t bang on the ceiling every five minutes with this kid up here. Though with how he reacted when he heard me knocking on the wall, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve just given up and let him do whatever he wants.
Sighing, I kept at it, stirring and answering questions as best as I could. Soon, dinner was served, and the little guy slurped it up like it was his first meal in days. He ate two plates of it before returning to the TV. He even thanked me for the food as he wiped his red-stained mouth with the back of his sleeve.
I sat down on the bed next to him and we flipped through the channels for a couple of hours before the kid started yawning. I made him take his shoes off and crawl under the covers before he passed out.
“Hey, Ivy?” Josh asked, just as I started gathering up my stuff from dinner to go back to my motel room.
“Yes, Josh?”
The kid clutched the covers to his chin, his little face a screwed up. “Will you stay until I fall asleep?”
“Of course I will, kiddo,” I whispered, trying to swallow the tears that pricked the corners of my eyes. He’d sounded so lost and brittle. “I’ll sit here and watch TV until you’re sleeping. Deal?”
The little dark-haired boy nodded, a smile on his face. “Thanks, Ivy.”
“No problem, Josh.”
So I sat down on the edge of the bed and stayed until he could no longer keep his dark eyes open anymore.
Chapter Ten
Creed
Trouble was brewing.
I could feel it more than see it; there was something in the way the dealers were talking circles, the way they wouldn’t quite look me in the eye. They were hiding something, and I didn’t like it.
“So, are you going to tell me what I want to hear, Donovin, or are we going to have start over from the beginning?” I asked, pointing to the black eye that was already darkening on his ugly mug. Donovin looked like a bulldog decided to stand up and wear clothes that didn’t fit. He even had the jowls for it.
“Sorry, man, s-sorry. I- I- I--” Donovin stuttered over his sentence, his mouth moving faster than his drug-addled brain could keep up. He was a shining example why you weren’t supposed to play with your own product; there was a chance you could end up on the other end of the transactions. “There’s just talk. Talk that Devil’s Edge is making- make- ma-ma--” he said, then swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat like a bouncy ball. “Making! Bad deals. Real bad ones. Cartels and heroin with a capital H. Bad- bad- bad new- news.”
I stared down at Donovin as he wiped the dribble of blood that had slipped out between his lips. “What are people saying about it, Donovin?” I asked, my patience with his wandering eyes and stuttering growing thin. I needed answers and this guy needed rehab. Badly.
“They are thinking of hitting b-b-back real hard. Hard. The word on the street is there’s an unwritten agreement. You know, no big men. No big deals. N-n-no, you know,” Donov
in said, scratching the skin off of his arm without noticing. Long, red marks appeared on his arm, filling slowly with blood.
“Hitting back,” I repeated, my stomach dropping down into my feet. We’ve always all agreed to keep the cartels out. Keep them out of our territory to keep things safer around here. The gangs in this part of town have always had tentative peace of sorts. If our goal was to have the others getting together to fight against us, then Kelly has succeeded.
I pushed Donovin back against the brick wall behind him. “You need to get cleaned up, man. Find yourself a hospital or something and get cleaned up, before it’s too late.”
I turned and walked away, every step as though I was walking across broken glass. This deal and Kelly’s pride were going to get us all killed. The cartel would be here before I could do anything to stop it. There would be contracts signed in blood, and I, recently demoted to street sweeper from security, would be able to do nothing to stop its destructive momentum.
And it’s Ivy’s fault I got demoted. If I was being completely honest with myself, Ivy had nothing to do with the fight in the diner that got me into so much trouble. Not a single thing. But I didn’t want to be honest with myself; it would bring up too many questions I didn’t have answers to. Questions about why I’d risked my position and being caught by the cops for her.
I put my hands in my pockets as I walked away from the alley where I’d left Donovin. The air was getting progressively colder, running from autumn into winter faster than I could deal with. I hated the cold. My fingertips felt frozen as I started down Fifth Avenue, huddling under my black leather jacket. The skies were thick with gray clouds, the rainwater that still sat in the streets slowly turning to ice. I headed back to the corner where I’d parked my bike. Fifth was the place where all of the riffraff gathered; when one wanted to find a hooker or some drugs, they came here. It was where I came for information.
And the information I’d found today wasn’t good news.
Revving up my bike, I mounted up, glancing around to take note of all of the cars around me without thinking. Then I was off, cruising down the street at exactly the speed limit. I had too much to do today to risk a run-in with the cops; even a simple speeding ticket could be a disaster. This cartel deal needs to stop. Kelly needs to be stopped.
It was a mutinous thought, but it was the only course of action that would save the Devil’s Edge. It was either stop the Boss or be crushed between the wall of Kelly’s pride and the grinding stone that was the clans that surrounded us.
I hurried back to the Devil’s Edge, taking a long, meandering route. Once I was sure no one was following me, I sped up a little, my bike pointed like a beacon toward the Edge’s hideout.
The old warehouse looked smaller on the outside than it actually was inside; it was a sort of optical illusion the Boss’s previous Boss had worked hard to achieve. It needed to look as little like a hideout as possible. It was a short, metal structure with few windows and even fewer doors (that could be seen from the outside, at least). It was a safe structure; there was nothing to set fire to on the outside that would burn, which I liked, and the walls were filled with steel beams. The building was nearly impenetrable to everything but explosions.
I slid up to the hidden door along the eastern wall and knocked, walking my bike with me into the darkness of the inside.
“What’s up, Creed,” someone in the dark said as a greeting. “The Boss is out, but Patrick is in; he’s taking reports if you’ve got anything.”
Some of the tension in my shoulders loosened. If I could bring it up to the second-in-command instead of right to the Boss, I might get a bit of a better reaction than if I went through an intermediary. Patrick would know how to bring this to Kelly. I don’t think the Boss wants to hear anything I have to say right now anyway; he’s still mad about that fight in the diner…
Patrick was in his “office.” It was towards the back of the giant warehouse structure, a little partitioned-off section of the hideout that was filled to the brim with welding tools and large pieces of steel. Patrick was a very interesting man; he was old enough to be my father and then some. Patrick had seen some things in his long life. He was one of the few guys who could pull off the clean-shaven look and still as look grizzled and tough as a cheap steak.
He stood up from his crouch near a particularly tricky-looking piece of art he was constructing. Patrick’s job around this place was mostly to make replacement parts for the bike on top of his second-in-command duties; however, in his spare time, he would make sculptures of metal and glass melded together to look like animals and people. A statue of a wolf stood in front of him, the paws and head still separate from the body. It was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I had ever seen, and I stared at the pieces in awe for a few silent moments.
“You look like someone spit in your cereal, boy,” Patrick said after a minute without even looking behind him. His voice was muffled by his welding helmet, but it still sounded rough like sandpaper and severe as heart disease.
“I think someone has,” I answered, sitting down on one of the benches nearby. Patrick pulled off his helmet, his salt-and-pepper hair tumbling in sweat-stained curls down to his shoulders. His tanned face was wrinkled and rough, interrupted with hard-looking white lines of cuts and fights long past. I started to tell him about the news I’d found on the streets around Fifth Avenue, giving him names and specifics. The news wasn’t good. A grim sort of picture built up in my mind as I continued, giving Patrick all of the information I’d dredged out of the cesspool that was Fifth. “Overall, the news isn’t good. There’s a lot of whisperings of a hit here; the other clans aren’t looking kindly at the Boss breaking faith with them. Our oath is our bond, and they have a notion that Kelly’s deals with the devil are breaking that oath.” I shrugged, trying not to sound too opinionated on the subject. “I don’t know about all that, but I do know trouble is coming; the Boss is stirring up a hurricane with his deals, and I’m not sure we’re quite equipped to handle whatever is coming.”
Patrick sighed. There was no one in the immediate area to hear us talk, but he lowered his smoker’s voice anyway, his black eyes narrowing. “Do you think this deal with the Cartel is a good idea, Creed?” he asked, his gaze staring into my eyes, unblinking. I fidgeted a little under that gaze.
“I’m not sure I have the authority to have an opinion about it, Patrick,” I answered carefully. I’d already been demoted once today; another reprimand would draw all sorts of unwanted attention my way.
He chuckled darkly, crossing his big arms over his chest as he leaned back on the heavy work table in his office. “So eloquently spoken; you spend too much time trying to avoid trouble.”
“I have my family name to thank for that,” I snapped back, my eyes blazing. “My father being a troublemaker got him murdered. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, and I’m being watched all the time.”
Patrick pursed his lips as he nodded. “You’re probably right. Hello, Poppy.” Patrick’s gaze slid from mine, coming to rest on something behind me. Everything in him softened for a second, his eyes warming.
Glancing back, I saw the object that had drawn his attention. Pearl. Pearl had been with the gang since I could remember. She was pretty in a way most women that ran with the pack couldn’t look after so many years. The strain and stresses of being with a gang hadn’t left a mark on her pretty, clear-skinned face. Her tattoos were freshly re-inked, making sure the ink didn’t bleed and fade. Even her white-blonde hair was still as white as snow instead of tinting yellow around the edges. I had no idea how old Pearl was, but she was older than me and much younger than Patrick. But that didn’t stop them from partnering up for life.
Pearl stepped past me with a wink and a grin, going to wrap her thin body around Patrick’s like a snake. “With expressions like those, you must be speaking of this cartel nonsense,” Pearl whispered, her expression full of contempt. “It’s a fool’s contract, for sure. This is not going
to end well for any of us.”
Patrick sighed, wrapping his right arm around her waist. “I don’t know, Poppy; the revenue will significantly increase the legitimate front of the Devil’s Edge. It might just be the last financial push we need to get us making enough money to go straight. If we survive all of the dust-ups with the rest of the clans, as soon as Kelly’s out of the picture.”
I snorted. “That old man will never die, Patrick. Not unless we get fed up with his bullshit and put two into his brain.”
“Not a bad thought,” Pearl said, her face a little serene considering she was talking about murder.
We were all silent for a second, all of us trapped inside of our own thoughts. But then Patrick seemed to shake himself out of it, returning his grave attention to me. “So what is this I hear about you getting demoted for starting a bar fight for some waitress’s honor?”
“Is that the story they are spreading around?” I rolled my eyes. “What a joke.”