Shameless (2 page)

He’d been booked into juvenile lock-up first thing this morning, after having spent most of the night at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue. He had yet to see his parents. His mom was probably wringing her hands with worry, but she wouldn’t make an effort to see her son. Not without her husband’s approval. And Harlan Everest would remain steadfast in his determination his son suffer the consequences of his actions.

A man tormented by the guilt of murder will be a fugitive ‘til death; let no one support him.

Those had been the first words out of his father’s mouth when Johnny called from the hospital last night to tell his parents about the accident. Scripture. Always scripture. Not, Are you hurt? or I’ll be right there. Nope. The senior Everest had been more concerned with his son’s spiritual salvation than his well-being. Just once, Johnny would love to hear, What were you thinking? or I didn’t raise you to behave that way, because that’s what a normal father might say to his son.

With Harlan it was always about instilling the fear of the Lord into his family to make them do what was “right” and “good.” It worked with Johnny’s mom — she was scared of her own shadow when her husband was around — and it worked with Johnny’s goody-two-shoes older brother. It had never worked with Johnny.

Until now.

Now he was afraid. He was scared shitless.

He and the girl, Sammy Jo, had been the only ones in the Mercury to survive the crash. The last he’d seen of her, she’d been lying on a gurney being loaded into a waiting ambulance. He’d been told she’d broken her back, but beyond that, he had no idea what happened to her. He made sure the cops knew she’d been an innocent victim in all this.

An innocent victim.

He swallowed and blinked back tears. She wasn’t the only one. The station wagon they’d hit had carried a family. A father and mother and two little girls. The father had been whisked away in an ambulance. The mother seemed okay physically. She’d sat in the back of a police car, crying. Even through the closed windows, he’d heard her wails of grief.

He still heard them, her screams of anguish as the medics removed the children’s bodies from the wreckage. Bright blue plastic sheets over the tiny mounds that used to be living, breathing beings.

Clenching his hands into fists, he rocked back and forth, tears oozing from tightly closed eyelids. He should never have suggested they steal the car. He should never have made the joke about Dennis, causing Morris to turn and miss the stop sign. It was his fault those kids were dead.

Sammy Jo survived because she’d been wedged between the seats on the floor. He didn’t know how he’d managed to live with barely a scratch. A stroke of pure luck, he supposed.

Luck. Right.

He sure didn’t feel lucky.

His dad’s parting words from the telephone call haunted him, would haunt him forever. The ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough. But if there is a serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye. His father may have mixed his scripture, but his meaning was clear. Somehow, sometime, Johnny would pay for what he and his stupid friends had done.

Forgiveness would be a long time coming… if ever.

The tears he cried that night weren’t for his dead friends. He cried for the little girls and their parents, especially the mother, whose wails still echoed in his ears. He cried for the girl, Sammy Jo, who had done nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, selfishly, he cried for himself.

Chapter 1

January—20 years later

Seattle Central High School was built when the area still had charm, when the houses surrounding it were new, and sagging gutters and rotted fences were the oddity rather than the norm. The school was two-storied and fronted with windows. It was an unusual day when at least a few of those windows weren’t boarded from some idiot throwing a rock through the panes.

Despite these problems, school officials and optimistic neighbors attempted to keep the grounds clean and graffiti free. Just this morning, the head custodian spent four back-breaking hours scrubbing fluorescent orange letters reading “EAT ME” off the cement walls of the gymnasium.

One building, however, was free of defacement. The weight room was a small, nondescript structure with gray metal siding and matching roof, and a little defacement might have been an improvement to its drab exterior.

Right now, the building’s metal siding reverberated and hummed from the music blaring within. While the rap artist’s booming words suggested pandemonium, the activity inside the facility was relatively structured and mellow. Spread throughout the room, doing various weight-training exercises, was a group that would do the staunchest supporter of the politically correct movement proud. The teenagers were a rainbow of cultural diversity in terms of race and gender. All of them had one thing in common, however. All were from broken home environments and doing poorly in school.

It was the intimidating presence of the two adults in the room that kept this colorful group in check. One of the  adults was Alex Drake, a gigantic black man with a barrel chest and thick neck barely contained in a white T-shirt. A crescent-shaped scar on his bald head shone like a glow-in-the-dark decal under the rows of bare light bulbs hanging from the rafters. If appearance was an indicator of approachability, he was the type of man you’d quickly cross the street to avoid. One look into those narrow dark eyes and you’d think this was one mean son of a bitch. Until you heard him laugh. Then those dark eyes crinkled at the corners and he’d emit a silly high-pitched sound out of place in a man half his size. Anyone who heard it couldn’t help laughing with him.

That was happening now. Something must have struck Alex funny, because he clutched his stomach and laughed so hard, the veins in his neck looked ready to burst.

The other adult present, a man whose own physique was nothing to sneeze at even though it was a fraction of Alex’s size, stole a quick glance across the room. John Everest smirked and couldn’t help chuckling as laughter erupted from the kids near Alex.

John turned back to the teenager he spotted on the bench press. “Three. Four. You’re doing great, Damian.” He hovered behind the weight bench as the  sixteen-year-old completed his repetitions. “Eight. Two more. You can do it. Don’t hold your breath.” Damian grunted, clenched his teeth, and pushed with all his might. John hooked his fingers under the bar and helped the kid finish his reps. “Nine. Ten. Good job.” He guided the bar to the rack and tossed the boy a towel. “That was 10 pounds more than last time.”

“No shit? I mean, no foolin’?” Damian swung his stocky legs over the side of the bench, looking at the weight plates attached to the bar. “Cool,” he said with a toothy grin, nodding his head in rhythm with the rap music as he headed to another station.

Glancing around to see who needed his help, John noticed Brian on a bench in the corner, separated from the rest of the group as usual. He was one of the newer members of the after-school program, having joined just before Christmas. So far, he had yet to open up to anyone. He’d apparently spent much of his life moving from one bad situation to another with his heroin-addicted mother and her string of scuzzy boyfriends.

Brian stretched a leg out in front of him and rubbed his hamstring. He glanced up as John approached, his green eyes flat and expressionless, as if he didn’t give a damn about life or anybody in it.

John recognized that look. He’d had it perfected by Brian’s age. The kid had the whole tough guy routine down pat, from his shaved head to the gold skull earring dangling from one earlobe. He wore baggy sweats hung low on narrow hips and his pale upper body was bare except for the tattoo of a woman’s well-endowed breasts painted over his left bicep.  His build was lanky and lean, what some people would call scrappy. All the more reason for the bad attitude.

“Pulled your hamstring?” John asked. The boy reminded him of himself at that age — gawky and self-conscious, using a hard-ass attitude to hide his insecurities.

The fifteen-year-old shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Can you put any weight on it? Can you stand?”

Brian winced but was able to support his weight. “I’m fine.”

Sure you are, tough guy
. John knew better than to make a big deal about it, but he needed to know how serious the injury was. “Try bending your leg, lifting your heel toward your butt.” The boy followed his directions. “Hurt?”

“Maybe.”

“Hmm. Probably just a minor pull. How much were you lifting?” He glanced at the bars on the machine then picked up Brian’s required exercise log from where it had been tossed onto the floor. “You increased your poundage by almost 50 percent since last week. No wonder you pulled something.”

Brian sat on the bench. “Thought I could do it.”

John bopped him over the head with the soft-covered journal. “No more than a ten-percent increase next time, okay, sport?”

Brian shrugged again, but the corners of his mouth tugged upward. Not quite a smile, but close.

John dropped the journal onto the bench. “I’ll get you some ice.”

He threaded his way through the weight equipment toward the first aid kit. He side-stepped Tanya, who danced in front of the stereo. One of the original members, she didn’t seem to take the program too seriously, never doing much in the way of participating. Once or twice, he’d caught her staring at Alex with a dreamy expression. With her reputation for banging bad boys, he figured the girl hadn’t had many positive male role models in her life — specifically black role models — and she was perhaps a bit star-struck.

He rooted through the gym bag and pulled a crystallized ice pack from the first aid kit. He headed back toward Brian.

“Here,” he said to the boy. “Lie on your stomach.” He twisted the ice pack, breaking the crystals. The bag chilled in his hands. He draped a towel across Brian’s skinny leg and placed the cold pack on the towel. “Keep it there until you can’t stand the cold any longer, okay? Then I’ll show you a couple of easy stretches you can do at home to loosen it.”

Across the room, Alex clapped his hands. “Okay, everyone. Cool down time.”

John turned the stereo down a few decibels, wresting a dirty look from Tanya, then joined the group as they gathered on the mats in front of the mirrors.

After the kids had gone, Alex asked, “Sherlock Holmes find anything yet?” He gathered the CDs and shoved them into a gym bag.

“He found her.”

“Serious? Where?”

“Here in Seattle.” John’s body tensed just thinking about it, about her. “He’s got pictures even. I’m meeting him on the waterfront tonight.” Grabbing a towel, he wiped down the benches.

“I still can’t believe you hired a private detective.”

John shrugged. “Sunday was the twenty year anniversary of that night. I’ve always wondered what happened to her.” Even after all this time, he wanted to know she was all right. He
needed
to know that.

“You know what they say about curiosity and the cat.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

A light sprinkling of rain dusted them as they left the building and headed toward their cars. The late afternoon sky darkened with clouds and night. A distant whistle echoed from the nearby gymnasium, and car stereos and teenage laughter flitted to them from the student parking lot.

“The kids all seem to be making progress,” Alex said, his breath fogging in front of his face.

“Mm. I’m worried about Brian though. He’s not warming to anyone.”

“He reminds me of someone I once knew — a skinny little runt with an attitude the size of Mount Everest — excuse the play on words.”

Alex was the only one who could get away with such a comment. John’s past wasn’t something he was proud of.

After the accident, the DA had been antsy to prosecute someone. Since John was the only survivor besides Sammy Jo, who was innocent of any wrong-doing, he’d been the target.  He wound up in a boys’ home for three years — the same home as Alex. He’d been scared to death of Alex at first, a tough-looking black giant from one of the meanest gangs in South Seattle. Alex did his best to bully him those first few weeks, but John had become a master at not showing fear or intimidation, so Alex finally bored of him. Eventually, they’d become friends.

He glanced at Alex. They’d come a long way since then. Each had a lot to be proud of. Alex was a retired NFL lineman and now managed John’s downtown Seattle gym, and was part owner of several others.

Most rewarding though, for both of them, was their work with these kids.

They reached their cars and disarmed the alarms. The simultaneous beeps screamed through the cold air. Just then, a not-so-distant gunshot rang out, the eerie sound echoing over the rooftops of the surrounding neighborhood.

He glanced at his friend. “Is that what I think it was?”

Alex nodded from the driver’s side of his black Firebird. “Not quite music to your ears, eh?” They both frowned.

For a few moments, the area was silent except for the rain tinkering against their cars. Then, just as suddenly, it was back to normal: the echoing dribble of a basketball in the gymnasium, a radio blasting in a car from the other side of the parking lot, a wailing siren on unseen streets.