Black Jack: A nail biting, hair-raising thriller (Jack Ryder Book 4) (35 page)

I
drive
up in front of the complex where Joey has rented a small townhouse. I kill the engine, then look at Salter. His cheeks and nose are red from the exposure to the sun this morning. Surfing does that to you. Even if we slap on a lot of sunscreen before we go out. Our skin hasn’t been in this much direct sunlight for a very long time. I wonder how I all of a sudden have become this indoor person when I have always been the opposite. But the past many months, after Joey left us, I didn’t want to go outside. I wanted to hide from the world. I wanted to stay in with Salter and Snowflake and eat chips on the couch and feel sorry for myself. I still want that. Being fired hasn’t helped.

“Aren’t you coming in to say hello?” Salter asks.

Joey has heard us drive up and is in the doorway waiting for us. He is wearing a T-shirt and he is still in his board shorts. That is Sundays for you in Florida. I remember wearing nothing but my swimsuit all weekend. You might as well. It is so extremely hot, and either you are in the ocean or you are in the pool. There isn’t much time you spend dry on land in this place.

Joey looks devilishly handsome.

I bite my lip while staring at him from inside the car. I really don’t want to come in. I have so much to do.

“I just saw him earlier,” I say. “I don’t think…”

I have barely finished the sentence before Joey opens the door to my rented car and peeks in. “Are you coming, or what?” he asks Salter.

Salter jumps out. Joey looks at me. “Do you want to come in for a beer or something?”

I shake my head. “No. I was just…”

And there it is. The look in Joey’s eyes that I simply can’t resist. I miss him. I miss talking to him.

You can’t have a beer with him! He was a bastard, remember? He cheated on you!

“I- I-I have to go buy some groceries…”

Joey looks disappointed. “Oh. Okay. See you later then.”

I stare at him. Stare at those deep-set blue eyes. He doesn’t leave. It’s like he knows I am fighting within.

“Ah, what the heck. Just one beer can’t hurt anything. Lord knows I could use something after the morning we had,” I finally say and get out.

You have the spine of a worm!

It is true. I have no backbone. Not when it comes to Joey.

“Let me give you a tour of the palace,” he says, when I walk inside. The townhouse is a lot bigger than it appears from the outside. It has two nice bedrooms upstairs and a living room downstairs with a nice new kitchen. It is astonishing to me how much you can get for your money down here, compared to The Big Apple.

When he opens the door to the bedroom, a big black lab comes jumping out. It jumps up at me and I squeal in surprise. Behind it tags a small brown pig. I stare at Joey.

“Really?”

“They kind of came together,” he says.

“Like a package deal?”

“Yeah. Kind of. They grew up together at a farm in Fellsmere. A friend of mine had them, actually he used to live right next door, but he had to move to California. He was a drummer in a band and they had a breakthrough so he had to leave. He couldn’t take Bonnie and Clyde, so I said I would take them till he came back. If he ever comes back. Who knows.”

“Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Yes. One can’t live without the other. They need to stay together. What can I say? They keep me company when I get lonely down here. Besides, Salter loves them.”

I look at my son, who pets the pig on her head and kisses her. Bonnie returns the gesture with a series of grunts. Salter laughs. I don’t know what to think of this entire set-up. It is very far from the life we lived in Manhattan. But I can tell Joey enjoys it. He likes being back. It is like he is suddenly that same old Joey that I have known most of my life, the same Joey I fell in love with in high school.

He smiles. His white teeth light up his tanned face. He is in a lot better shape than before he left me. Probably all that surfing.

“So, how about that beer?” he says. “We can bring Bonnie and Clyde out with us in the backyard. They need some fresh air.”

S
alter plays with the animals
, throwing a ball around in the grass, and for the most part it is Bonnie who picks it up. I wonder if it is like in the movie
Ice Age
where the mammoth thinks she’s a possum and acts like one. Maybe Bonnie thinks she is a dog like Clyde. She sure acts like one.

“So, some day, huh?” Joey asks. “I can’t believe what happened to Jean. I keep thinking about it.”

I sip my beer. I grabbed a light one since I am driving after this. It feels good to be with Joey again, back in our old
hood
. Even though I still hate this place, it is kind of beginning to grow on me a little. If only it wasn’t combined with so much pain for me.

“I know. It’s crazy.”

“It’s all over the local news. They say she was stabbed in the throat with a pair of scissors, then bled to death. Can you imagine coming home and finding your wife like that? I would be devastated. I don’t know how I would be able to keep on living.”

Being still his wife, even if we are separated, it makes me feel flattered.

“He seemed pretty shaken. Have you heard from any of the others?”

“Alex called just before you got here. Danny is still at the police station for questioning. I can’t believe they can’t let a man grieve in peace. I mean, he just lost his wife. Give him a break.”

“But, they know Danny, right? He is, after all, captain at the fire station next door to them.”

“I know. They work pretty close together. They won’t give him a hard time, but still it must be so hard for him to have to go through the interrogation right away.”

“I’m guessing they need to. Because of the investigation,” I say, drawing on my experience from writing crime stories as a reporter. “It all needs to be fresh in his memory. Any little detail might help in finding whoever did this.”

Joey shrugs. “I guess. I still think it’s inhuman.”

“I’m guessing there isn’t much we can do right now, is there?” I ask.

“Just be there for him,” he says. “Alex told me he had picked up Junior and that the boy was at Alex’s house now. He is going to pick up Danny as soon as he’s done at the station. Then I figure we all should go there.”

“Sounds like a good idea. I thought I might cook for them. I can throw something together for all of us and fill Alex’s freezer, so they have food for some days while Junior and Danny stay with him. It will be a few days, maybe more, before Danny and Junior can go back to their house again. Forensic work takes a long time.”

Joey looks at me. “You cook now?”

I put a hand to my side. “And why do you sound so surprised?”

“Maybe because in the fifteen years we were married, you never cooked.”

“That’s not true!”

“All right, you did cook a few times. A
few
times in fifteen years.”

“That was because I was always tired when I came home from work.”

Joey’s face turns serious. “Oh, yeah. That’s right. Your precious work. I remember that.” He’s eyes avoid mine all of a sudden.

My heart drops. I know I took him for granted back then. Since he didn’t work much, he had done most of the cooking or we had ordered in. I am not very good with compliments. Growing up in a house where compliments were something you had to work hard to get, it doesn’t come natural to me. I want to say something nice to him at this moment, but simply can’t get myself to it. I can’t get it through my lips. I am still so angry at him for sleeping with that girl, for leaving us. I am not sure he deserves a compliment.

“Well, I brought home the money, didn’t I?” I say instead. “I never heard you complain about that. Or maybe you did when you went to the coffee house?”

I immediately regret having said it when the words leave my lips. I sense how Joey almost jumps when I say it.

“Are you saying I didn’t work? You were gone all day long, every freaking day. Who picked up Salter? Who changed his diapers when he was a baby? Who took him to the park? Who was there when he took his first step? Who grocery shopped? Who washed and ironed all your little skirts so you could wear them at your fancy office? Huh? Who did all that?”

And there it is. We are right back where we started.

I put the beer bottle down on the patio table. “This was a mistake,” I say and get up. “Salter, give Mommy a kiss. I’ll be back to pick you up at four.”

A
lly is already happier
in Cocoa Beach than in any of the seven other places she had lived in. She never shows her parents, though. To them, she is still angry, slamming doors and yelling at them, but she has immediately fallen in. She has found her place hanging out with the girls from school. None of these girls are like any of the others at Cocoa Beach High, Ally soon learns. They aren’t the pretty ones; they aren’t cheerleaders or surfers or soccer players like the rest. They don’t care about good grades or pleasing the teachers. Instead, they skip school together, a lot, and go downtown to hang out on the streets. Their favorite thing to do is to yell mocking words at tourists. That is a lot of fun. If they see a tourist waiting for the light to turn green at a crosswalk, one of them will approach him while the others watch. The dare is to steal his wallet without him noticing it.

They have tried to get Ally to do it too, but so far she has refused. One of the girls, AK, soon starts to nag her about it, telling her that
you can’t just be a bystander
. You can’t just let all the others do the hard work while you have the fun laughing at it. Not in this group. They all contribute.

“Besides, it’s fun,” she says, while touching her Mohawk. “It’s like a drug. Once you’ve stolen your first wallet, there is no going back. You’ll want to do it again and again to feel the kick.”

A few days later, Ally volunteers herself, even though she really doesn’t want to. She isn’t sure she has it in her, and she is terrified of getting caught.

She walks up to a couple that are clearly tourists (fanny packs, T-shirts that say Ron Jon’s, that look in their eyes that tells you they have no idea where they are going). They are standing at the intersection at Minutemen, looking clueless, when the girls nudge Ally along.

Ally smiles kindly. “Are you looking for something?”

The man looks at Ally. “Yes. Yes we are. We want to find a nice place to eat. Do you know any around here?”

“Heidi’s just opened on the corner over there. I don’t know if it has good food, though,” she says, sounding nice and polite.

Meanwhile, the other girls giggle behind her as her hands creep into the woman’s purse and pull out a wallet. Ally’s hands are sweaty. Her heart is racing. She has never done anything like this before. Her hands are shaking heavily as she pulls it out and places it inside the pocket of her neon windbreaker that she wears backwards like
Kris Kross
. Her forehead is itching underneath her bandana.

“Thank you, dearie,” the woman says.

“You’re welcome. By the way…”

“Yes?”

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re fat?”

The woman looks at the man like she expects him to clarify what she just heard. “Excuse me?”

The girls are giggling loudly behind her now. It makes her feel strong and more self-confident to know they are with her. She wants to show them. She wants to earn their respect and her worth in the group.

“Did you just tell my wife that she is fat?” the man says.

Ally smiles like he has heard her wrong. “No, no, no. That’s not what I meant. I meant you’re
both
very overweight. You really should consider exercising or maybe lay off the donuts a little, huh?”

Ally pokes the woman’s belly, then laughs. “See. It’s not supposed to move like that.”

The man steps up. He gets threatening. Ally stays in position. It is all about not showing fear now. The man’s face turns red.

“Why. You little…”

He swings out his hand with the intention of slapping her face, but Ally ducks and he misses. Instead, she throws a punch as hard as she can and knocks the air out of him. He gasps and bends forward, then falls to his knees. The woman lifts her hands in the air and screams.

“Help! Police! Help!”

Ally stares nervously at the man and realizes what she has done. Then she looks at her girls for approval. They all laugh. Especially AK seems captivated by the situation. She walks up to the man, who is still on all fours, and kicks him in the stomach. The man screams in pain. Ally looks at him, terrified.

What have I done?

“We gotta go now,” one of the girls yells. “We’re attracting too much attention.”

The girls take turns to throw one last punch each into the man’s stomach before they flee the place.

While running, Ally is happy to realize she now has the approval of the group. No one will ever question her again. Not only has she convinced the girls that she is capable of almost anything and getting away with it, she has also discovered a new side to herself.

I
cook all afternoon
, much to my stepmother’s irritation. I am making a mess of the place, and when she peeks in now and then, she does nothing but send an annoyed sigh my way before she leaves, and soon after my dad comes into the kitchen and tells me to remember to clean up after myself.

That little spectacle goes on for a few hours, while I create so many dishes I could open a restaurant. Cooking helps me relax; it makes me forget all the bad emotions, all the frustrations from arguing with Joey again. Even all the sadness from knowing my brother might end up in prison, along with the sorrow from knowing Danny lost his wife in such a brutal manner last night, and the worry that Salter will never want to live with me again. I try not to think about it, but I am certain that he will choose his dad over me, and then what do I do?

There is a lot going on inside of me, to put it mildly. And the cooking takes all that away for a few hours. It makes me clear my mind. It is my yoga, my meditation, if you will.

Around four o’clock, I take the car to pick up Salter. I take both him and Joey with me to Alex’s place. We don’t speak to one another the entire drive there, only Salter babbles on about how he and his dad went fishing in the river and he almost caught a rainbow trout, but it got away from him, and how he wishes he could do that every day.

“That’s great, honey,” I say, not really listening. My mind is elsewhere. I am thinking about the argument and the emotions that have once again been ripped up between Joey and me. I am beginning to long for Manhattan and my quiet life up there. Except I don’t look forward to facing unemployment with no money in the bank. I am spending the last of my savings on Blake’s lawyer, and I don’t like to think about what is going to happen after that.

“Could you help me with the food?” I ask both of them, as we park the car in front of Alex’s beach house on 7
^th
Street. He can peek over to my dad’s house on the other side of A1A. It was a little overkill to drive there, but there is no way I could have carried all this food.

It is amusing that Alex now actually lives on 7
^th
Street. Growing up, we always made fun of Alex because he lived on 6
^th
, whereas the rest of us lived on 7
^th
. We would always tease him—lovingly of course—and call him an outsider, a loser, since he wasn’t a real
7
^th
Streeter
. Living on this street now means he is almost a neighbor to Sandra, which to me is a little odd. He and Sandra used to have a thing for each other back in the day. I wonder if they ever think of each other in the same way they used to. I never understood what went wrong with them, why they didn’t end up together. They were so perfect for each other, and we all thought they would become a couple, but it never happened.

I am about to ring the doorbell, my hands full of lasagna and burritos, when Joey walks in front of me, grabs the handle, and opens the door.

“Around here, we just walk in,” he says. “But I guess you’ve forgotten about that. Or maybe you’re too tired or too busy to care?”

Ouch!

I think long and hard for a comeback, but unfortunately I have never been fast at those things. I can always come up with something a few days later, something real clever and witty, but never in the moment. I often wonder if people will think it weird if I call them a few weeks later and give them the line.

Joey walks inside. Salter and I follow. Everyone is there. Alex, Sandra and her husband Ryan, Marcia and four kids I assume are hers, since they look just like her. Danny and Junior are there too, and even Chloe.

“Mary!” Alex says. “I want you to meet my wife, Maria.”

“Nice to meet you,” I say and smile at the woman in front of me. She is short and has long black hair that she obviously dyes. She has pretty blue eyes. She seems nice. I guess I could approve of her for Alex, even though I always wanted him to be with Sandra. Alex is a sweet guy. He needs a sweet woman.

“I would shake your hand, but…well, they’re both pretty full, as you can see.”

“Where are my manners?” Alex says and grabs the food out of my hands.

“I made some for tonight,” I say, “and then a lot for the freezer. You know, for Danny and Junior and all of you. To help you out.”

“That is very nice of you,” Maria says with a smile. “Here, let me take the rest.” Maria grabs the dishes Salter is carrying.

I look at all the familiar faces and feel slightly emotional. It has been a long time since the crew was back together. I miss every one of them, but at the same time seeing them again, together like this, overwhelms me with a deep sadness as well. I am not sure I can cope with it. I am suddenly not sure I am ready. The thing is, I am not sure I will ever be.

I spot Danny and walk up to him, drawing in a deep breath. I have to get over myself. This night isn’t about me or how I feel. It is about him and his son and being there for them, no matter what. That’s the deal with friends, right? They are there for you no matter what.