Unforgettable Heroes Boxed Set

by James, Maddie

  “I’m scared enough without your lecture. I do get it, okay?”

  A smile quirked his lips. Raising his face, he studied my ceiling for a few seconds. Then his eyes finally settled on me. Hunger swirled in their dark depths, and not for food, for me.

  My breath caught in my throat. The intense stare from his eyes struck me like lightning, and I felt tingling throughout my whole body. In a swift movement, he stood and the chair turned over. I stood as well. Stalking over to me, he stopped just shy of touching me. His breath warmed my cheek, the heat of his body radiated outward.

  Was he going to kiss me? He moved so that his mouth was near my ear. The hair of his beard brushed my cheek. What was he waiting for? What was he going to do? What should I do? Little stars danced before my eyes, and I realized I was holding my breath. I willed myself to suck in some air, and when I did, my breasts touched his chest. There were barriers of clothing, but in that moment it didn’t matter. I knew the second he felt me, because his breath hissed.

  His hands reached up and gripped my elbows, his knee pushed itself in between my legs.

  “Good. I want you to be scared. I want you to get it. But I don’t think you do. The men at the shelter talk about you. They wonder what you taste like.” His low voice reverberated through me. He paused and let that bit of information sink in. My heart skipped a few beats. “You should stop making yourself so available,” he whispered before stepping away, picking up the paper wrapped food, shoving it in his pocket, and letting himself out of my apartment.

  As the door clicked shut, I collapsed on the chair and let out a shuttering breath. My hand shook as I reached up to touch my cheek, feeling the slight scratchiness of his beard as if he were still here with me. Oh, wow, did he know how to leave an impression.

  I ran to the bathroom, stripped my clothes off, stood in the shower, and turned the tap on as hot as I could stand it. Did the guys at the shelter really say such things about me? Or was Eli just trying to get me to be more careful? As I soaped up, I gasped as a sudden realization hit me.

  I hadn’t given Eli directions to my apartment.

  Chapter Four

  On my way to do my mandated hours, I saw Yo-Yo about two blocks before the center. Aha! Yo-Yo, my Dancing Queen buddy. He stood next to two other people who, I was pretty sure, he had no business with, older teenagers. Dressed in the requisite pants around the knees, the two older boys wore baseball hats tilted to the left. I had learned the lopsided hat was a gang style. You know what too low pants and wrongly worn hats said to me?

  No fashion sense.

  They were smoking cigarettes. Mindful of Eli’s words about not making any pit stops. I nevertheless slowed my car down at the curb. I probably wouldn’t have stopped except for one of those boys was Paula’s shoe spitter.

  Uh-oh.

  I knew he was bad news. And even though Yo-Yo had yet to come on board with my taste in music, I still had some affection for the child. He hadn’t killed me when I tortured him with seventies music, so he had to have some good in him.

  I knew I needed to extricate Yo-Yo from these guys. Paula and Mr. Harvey had surmised Shoe Spitter was a recruit or a drug dealer. I had to get him away from Yo-Yo, but how?

  I wasn’t tough enough to scare them. Would appealing to them as adults work? Well, it was all I could think of. I stepped from the car and unknowingly shut the door on my broomstick skirt. I took a determined step toward the hoodlums, lost my balance, and fell. Of course, I tried to catch myself as I was going down, and one of my hands landed on a broken beer bottle.

  When the amber glass stuck into my flesh, I let out a screech that would have put any B-movie horror queen to shame. Managing to open the door and free my skirt, I realized my hand was bleeding.

  Immediately, I visualized dollar signs floating through the air because I had no insurance, and I knew I’d need stitches. Blood ran down onto my sleeve, and my motions had droplets flying everywhere, including my face. I wasn’t as drenched as Carrie was in her pig-bloodied prom dress, but the effect was similar.

  “Would you look at this?” I picked the broken piece out and gripped it.

  One of the boys—not Shoe Spitter or Yo-Yo, the third one, blew cigarette smoke in my face. I centered in on him.

  My ex-boyfriend had been a smoker. I’d put up with it out of my stupid misguided attempts of love and reforming the hopelessly unreformable. But after my arrest and such, I no longer tolerated cigarettes, and especially not smoke in my face.

  Reaching up with my Carrie hand, I pulled the cigarette from his mouth, and stubbed it on the utility pole behind me, then flicked it back at him.

  “I would appreciate you not poisoning me with your secondhand smoke.”

  He glared at me in response. My hand throbbed, and a sob escaped my lips. I turned toward the Shoe Spitter. Remembering how he had treated Paula in the alley, I cleared my throat and hocked a bit of phlegm in the vicinity of his shoe. It landed on his pants leg and brought forth a stream of obscenities from his mouth.

  I didn’t care. John had called me worse than that when I’d testified against him.

  Shoe Spitter thumped the other boy on the arm and nodded his head. They backed up a foot and started down the street.

  Yo-Yo and I watched them until they disappeared behind a building. I sucked in a couple of breaths to get a hold of myself.

  “I need to get to the community center.”

  “I ain’t old enough to drive you.” His shoulders slumped.

  “I’ll drive, but will you help me?”

  A long-suffering sigh escaped him. He trudged over to my car, opened the door, and collapsed on the seat. With my uninjured hand, I opened the door. I hated to get blood all in my car, so I pulled the hem from the bottom of my skirt and wrapped it around my hand.

  “Here.” I handed the keys to Yo-Yo as I entered the car. “Would you start the car?”

  Leaning away from me, Yo-Yo moved his arm as far as it would reach and inserted the key in the ignition and cranked the car. I got it. He wanted to be as far away from me as possible.

  “Put it in drive,” I commanded.

  And we were on our way. Somehow, I didn’t bleed to death by the time we got to the center. I opened my car door and, with my injured hand tucked in my skirt, I marched into the building.

  ****

  When I arrived at the center the next day, Paula was in the parking lot painting the side of the building. I saw Eli loitering near the entrance, but ignored him. I was determined to find out how he knew where I lived, but I had to be smart about it. The man didn’t volunteer information readily. With the hand incident, I hadn’t had a chance to work out a plan. I stepped from the car and approached Paula.

  “Grab a paintbrush, sister,” She greeted me.

  I looked at a rather impressive display of graffiti in front of me. I turned my head to the side trying to read. I knew it was writing, but the letters were inside each other and crowded together.

  Using my left hand, I picked up a paintbrush and began to paint. “I can’t read this. What’s it say?”

  “It says ‘trouble,’” Paula declared. She pointed with her brush. “See that?”

  XIII

  It looked like Roman numerals. I said as much to Paula.

  “You’re right.”

  “That’s impressive. They know Roman numerals.”

  “Thirteen stands for the thirteenth letter of the alphabet—M for Morte.”

  The Hispanic gang.

  “The mangy dogs are marking their territory, but instead of peeing, they paint.” Paula pointed to a symbol. “That’s their RIP sign. And this and this are initials—members of their gang who have been killed, probably in a fight.” Paula dipped her brush in the bucket of paint and covered the letters. The white didn’t quite cover it, but it didn’t deter Paula.

  “When did they paint this? Last night?”

  “No. It was some time after lunch.”

  It was only three in the afternoon
. “Wow. You guys really care about this building, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we do. And ain’t no bangers going to claim it or use it as a billboard. If any mess like this shows up, we stop everything and paint over it.”

  “Why the urgency?”

  “It’s a way the gangs pass messages, so we want to discourage any gang activity whatsoever. Also, if we leave it up, then there will be more graffiti. If we paint over it immediately, they’ll give up after a few tries. Some of the signs are threats that get people riled up, and then there’re fights and drive-bys. Mr. Harvey had a threat painted on his car by the Nights, too. That’s why he’s gone. He took the car to the shop so they can repaint it. Two signs by rival gangs in the same afternoon.”

  “They wrote on his car?” I asked in disbelief.

  Paula made an affirmative sound.

  “Why would they do that? Write on somebody’s car? That’s awful.”

  “It’s a bad sign. A new recruit, one of our kids probably.”

  “Oh, no, Paula.”

  “Yep. Mr. Harvey’s going by the school to see who was out today. That’ll narrow down the suspects.”

  “What will he do, suspend the kid from the center?”

  “Oh, no. We do that, we’ll lose him for sure. No, we’ll surround that kid until he thinks he’s a wiener in a corndog.”

  “Was the threat against Mr. Harvey?”

  Paula didn’t answer.

  “Do you know?”

  Paula glanced toward me and my bandaged hand. She jabbed her brush over a busy section of writing. “There wasn’t a name. At least not a proper one,” she finally replied.

  Hmm. I was sorry to know I had missed seeing Mr. Harvey’s car. I wanted to know what ‘Crazy Bitch’ looked like in gang-script.

  Mr. Harvey confirmed my suspicions when he came to the center an hour later in an unfamiliar car. Feeling like a student sent to the principal’s office, I sat in front of Mr. Harvey’s desk while he studied me.

  “Feeling better?”

  Though he hadn’t been here yesterday when I came in, he had heard about my injury.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “I fell, cut my hand, and Yo-Yo helped me get here.”

  “Huh.” The way he said it told me he knew there was more to the story, and he wanted to hear it.

  I squirmed. “I may have offended some of the Nights in the process.”

  Mr. Harvey leaned back in his chair. “Abigail—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, but I saw those boys with Yo-Yo, and I knew I needed to get him away from them.”

  Cocking his head, he studied me. “When you serve your hours in Clavania, you leave and go back to your side of town. Yo-Yo is still here when you’re sleeping in your nice, quiet neighborhood. He doesn’t need you to make a scene on the street with him. How else could you have handled the situation?”

  “Not falling on my butt and stubbing out one of their cigarettes on a light pole?”

  Mr. Harvey shook his head in a way similar to my dad. “Next time, don’t intervene. Come here and tell me what you saw. Let me handle it.”

  ****

  Despite the writing on the wall, and on Mr. Harvey’s car, no one had tried to kill me in the three days since the graffiti had appeared. I figured it was just Shoe Spitter or his colleague blowing off steam and got on with my work. My assignment at the center was to help the kids with the talent show they’d been preparing for. All of the acts had to be approved by the talent show committee consisting of Lola and me. Lola was another volunteer at the center who worked three afternoons a week. She isn’t quite five feet tall with laughing brown eyes and a sense of humor to match.

  We had nixed the latest lyrics from Rub ‘em Raw, a band of four twelve year old boys who slinked away to do some rewrites, when I spotted Eli through the window.

  “I’ll be right back.” I stood up and walked toward the door.

  “Okay, little one.”

  I shook my head at her endearment. I towered over her by almost a foot. I think her nickname for me was her way of establishing dominance. That was fine with me. I didn’t want to be in charge. There was a lot less stress that way.

  Walking down the hall and out the door, I turned the corner of the building to find Eli in his usual loitering spot in the parking lot leaning on the broom I had given him after his last one had been stolen. I walked with purposeful steps. Time to find out how my closeted knight knew my address.

  “Hi, Eli.” I gave him my best bedroom gaze. He shifted his eyes away from me and toward the street.

  Coward.

  I sidled up to him. “Have I thanked you for saving my life the other night?”

  “You fed me in your apartment. That’s thanks enough.”

  “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  He cleared his throat, picked up his broom and swept.

  “I saw an ad for a bus boy at Gatsby’s. It’s minimum wage, but in two months they up the pay.”

  “Not interested.”

  He had a rhythm with the broom. The brush of the straw against the pavement gave me tingles. He had strong hands. He’d held me in them in the pantry. He’d kept me alive and safe. My eyes focused on his hands grasping the wooden handle. Veins stood out against his skin.

  “Why not? You can do there just what you do here and actually get paid for it, Eli. How can you beat that? If transportation is a problem, I bet between me and some of the volunteers at the center, we could get you there whenever you needed.”

  Sweep. Sweep. Sweep.

  “I don’t want a job, Abigail.”

  “Just try it. What would it hurt?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  He moved away from me leaving a clean trail. This was so ridiculous. Who cared how clean the parking lot was? Where was he when Michelangelo had been here a few days ago and sullied our lovely building? I marched over to him.

  “How did you know where I lived?”

  The broom paused for a half a second, then continued. Sweep. Sweep.

  I stood in front of him and grabbed the broom. He didn’t try to prevent me from taking it from him.

  “How did you know?”

  He looked down at the ground. “I found out.”

  “Why?”

  No answer.

  “Are you stalking me?”

  “Define stalking.”

  “Following me. Spying on me.” How could he do any of those things? He didn’t have access to a car. The only thing he seemed to have was a broom. I never even saw him with a duffel or a shopping cart.

  “If I say yes, are you going to report me?”

  “Eli, you don’t have to sneak around. You could have stayed at my apartment the other night. If you want to see me, knock on the door.”

  He cursed and spit. “Don’t invite me to your house. How have you survived to twenty-four? How?”

  “How do you know how old I am?”

  Eli shook his head. He turned on his heel and began to walk away.

  “If you want to know something about me, just ask. Don’t sneak around and don’t Google me. I hate that,” I yelled to his departing back.

  I marched to the entrance of the center and left Eli’s broom next to the door as I entered. Oh, that man infuriated me. I knew what he had done. He had gone to the library and used one of their computers to find out more about me. I had been in the library more than once when a homeless guy had come in to surf the net. I’m not sure how they get the privilege as I had to provide my home address to get my library card, and I have to put my card number in the computer before it will let me have Internet access. Could you have ‘Under the 13th Street Bridge’ as your home address? I wondered.

  I must have had steam coming out my ears because when I walked in the room, Lola studied me.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Who?”

  Lola’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and she gave me a toothy grin. “You know wh
o. Eli. I saw you out there. Sparks were flying off you two like a tire rim going eighty.”

  “I think he Googled me.”

  “So what? I Googled you, too. Want to get in my face and heave those breasts at me?”

  “I wasn’t heaving anything, only raising my voice a little.” Okay. A lot, but I wasn’t going to admit it.

  She harrumphed me. “Chica, you never going to get a man by yelling at him.”

  “He’s homeless, Lola. I want to help him.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want your help.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Maybe what he says is true.”

  I sighed. I didn’t understand why anyone would want to live that kind of life. “He could be so much more.”

  Her kind eyes soothed me. She patted the chair next to her that I had vacated earlier, and I sat down. “They all can be so much more. Don’t give up. Maybe you haven’t offered the help he needs.”

  The image of him and me in my apartment filled my mind. The fear, and if I admitted it, the attraction pulled at me. What if he had kissed me next to my dining room table, instead of whispering threats in my ear? What if he had stayed with me that night? What if we’d ended up in bed together? That moment had been so charged with adrenaline that it might have been a possibility. And when we’d been holed up in that closest, I’d been afraid, but I’d also felt something else. Something for Eli. Desire. I was a little ashamed of myself for thinking about sex with him. It seemed to me your basic necessities were air, water, food, and shelter in that order. Sex seemed to be no higher than five. If I decided to get it on with the broom guy, it stood to reason I needed to address the basic necessities first. Air, no problem. Drink and food I had taken care of on more than one occasion. The shelter thing was more complicated, though I had just told him he was welcome at my home. If I wanted for Eli to have a permanent home, then I needed to secure him a job. And he had just told me in no uncertain terms he didn’t want one.