Jump The Line (Toein' The Line Book 1) Read online

  Stoke wags the Twizzler. He’s again poised to mock Professor Levin. The string of candy looks limp and dangly, nota pretty image. “Nah,”he says, it’s not in your backpack.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I drop to my knees beside the desk, dig in my backpack for the blue rubber First Capital pouch with Omar’s deposit, his money. “It’s gone. Stoke, where is it?”

  Panicked, my heart thumping out of my chest, I shoot him a death’s head glare. “If you’ve taken that money—”

  “You forgot to wipe the pouch before you left your apartment this morning,”he says. “I worried Robin might’ve handled it last night when he came home and left his prints on it. Do we want the cops thinking Robin robbed poor old Uncle O.J.?”

  “N-no—”I say, truthful. “We don’t.”

  Robin has stolen from me before—to buy drugs. I wish I could say I’d be surprised if he did it again, but I wouldn’t. One thing puzzles me, though. I stare at Stoke. Didn’t he notice Robin never came home last night? Maybe he did. But who cares? I’m just glad I kept him out of Robin’s bedroom. And mine.

  “So I wiped the pouch clean for you. No sense making Robin’s fingerprints a gift for the LEOs, is there?” He looks pointedly at Detective Hawks’ note, laying face-up on my desk where I’ve forgotten it. Then he gives his hideous scarf an arrogant over-the-shoulder toss and says,“Blaze, I sense you’re angry with me, but if you’d studied for your crim quiz, you’d know all about trace evidence, like finger prints.”

  “I knowabout freakin’ trace,”I say, my voice a dry hiss. I hate him, but at the same time I feel like a jackass for thinking he’s stolen O.J.’s deposit, when he was trying to help out Robin, who never looks out for himself. I should be grateful, instead of pissed.

  “Just trying to help out your bro.”

  “Thanks, Stoke,”I say, butting my head with my hand. “Oh, crap!”

  “What now?”

  “I’ve got to be at work in half an hour,”I say. “I’m going to be late.”

  I work at Verbote Dental part-time to supplement my paycheck from Omar’s. The job’s easy, doesn’t require any thinking and, best of all, no physical activity, so I get rest. Some days I actually sleep at my desk.

  “Could you . . . make the deposit for me, Stoke? I’ve got to be at work by eleven. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you run back to my place and—?”

  “My lady, please. Have your way with me. I’m yours. Do with me as you wish.”

  Holding both ends of the scarf like two opposing tails of an orange and red ferret, he waves it, and with a swish-swish and a cackle he then gives me a courtly bow.

  “Go back to my apartment and get that deposit.” I hand him back my key, which I dug from his pocket before I left for class this morning. “And Stoke—?”

  “Yes, my lady?”

  “Do notimagine I’ll let you get by with not making O.J.’s deposit.” I load my recovered backpack onto my shoulder. “If you don’t come through on this, I’ll—I’ll make like Little John and pound your Robin Hood nuts into barley meade.”

  “Alaina,”he says,“I’m hurt. Seriously, I said I’d make the deposit for you, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t pout, Stoke. It’s unbecoming, like your ugly scarf. Just make the freakin’ deposit before I end up in prison.”

  Pouty look. Downturned lips. “When can I see you again? So I can get your apartment key back to you?”

  “I’ve got to work at Doctor Verbote’s and then go home and try to find Robin. Then I’ll probably have to be at Omar’s by eight,”I say, breathless with worry, exhausted from last night.

  “If Angie doesn’t show again tonight, maybe you should call in sick,”Stoke says.

  “I can’t. I really need the money.” But no matter what I do, I’ve got to get my apartment key back. I don’t want Stoke keeping it any longer than he must.

  His eyes light up with an inquisitive gaze. “Where isour dear brother, Robin Colby?”

  “I dunno, Stoke. In between being at work and hunting for him, I need to get a couple hours’ sleep,”I add, frowning. “Plus O.J.’s left a gazillion calls on my cell phone. I bet he wants me to dance my shift plus fill in for Ang if she decides not to show again.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “You make it sound easy. Like dancing a double shift two nights in a row, after going to class and working my part-time job at Verbote Dental, is a piece of cake.”

  He laughs, a grating cackle. “Not to sound cruel, but I believe in you,”he says, his sidelong gaze licking my body. “You’re wired with endless . . . energy.”

  I feel my hands twitch with longing, the urge to choke. “Can’t you tell I’m freakin’ tired, Stoke?”

  “I’m sure,”he says, and then changes the subject. “So where’s our airhead friend, Angie Miller?”

  “I dunno,”I say. “And she’s no airhead.” She is, but he’s not cutting on my friend. Ang’s probably holed up in the dorm with her new boyfriend, but I don’t tell Stoke. I hate his veiled innuendo—you’re wired with endless . . . energy—his probing gaze, the way he acts like he gets to pick who I’m friends with, especially Ang. He doesn’t like her. The feeling’s mutual. Ang hates Stoke.

  We walk down the hall. I’m feeling ready to kill, edgy. Why can’t Stoke and Ang get along? Why can’t Robin grow up? Why can’t I bring someone home to meet Berta Colby? Why can’t my family be freakin’ normal?

  Instead of killing Stoke or calling the FBI on Robin, or even reporting my mom to the DEA, I do what friends do best: I complain. “Now I’ll have to miss my dance class. I get one class to do what I love, one freakin’ hour and a half to dance. But because my infant-brained brother decides not to come home—”

  Oops! Did I just give myself away? Let Stoke know I’ve not seen Robin?

  What good does whining do? I’m not going to be able to squeeze in my ballet class this afternoon. I groan. Yet another missed class, yet another bad grade to add to my crashing GPA. Before it’s over, my four-oh will be down to a two-oh, then a one-oh, then an oh-who-gives-a-fuck‘cause it’s time to drop out.

  “Between working at Verbote’s plus hitching a ride to Omar’s, if I go to work tonight, I’ll be lucky to stay on my feet,”I say, feeling zombified and worrying what I’ll feel like by this evening if I have to work Ang’s shift. “Plus, I’ve got to hook up with Robin—somehow—before the cops find him.”

  “What has our dear brother done now?”

  “Nothing,”I say, weary and no longer caring if Stoke knows Robin wasn’t at my apartment last night. “Leave my key under the mat in front of my apartment door.”

  “Not smart,”he says. “Gimme a better spot, one that’s safe.”

  “I can’t afford the Ritz like you, Stoke. That’s the only spot there is. Leave my key under the mat?” Headsmack! Here I am being rude again. “If you think it’s not so safe at my place,”I say, cracking a weak joke,“then invite me to yours, so I can see it before we get married.”

  He laughs. Stoke gets my sarcasm, one reason I hang with him. I’ve never been invited, but he and I joke about his off-campus apartment in a crack house being“the Ritz.” He calls it the honeymoon suite.

  “Call me Heff,”he says, swirling his ugly scarf. Stoke claims his bizarre outfits make him look like Hugh Hefner. More like Charlie Manson, I think sourly and then tell him so.

  “I’m much prettier,”he says, cackling.

  The second Stoke taps the elevator’s down button, I lunge for the stairs. “See ya. Gotta get to work.”

  “Better call that cop before eleven,”he yells down the hall as I retreat. “Don’t want him making you do the perp walk in front of our fellow classmates, do we?”

  I stop. Turn. How’d Stoke know what the message said?

  “Where’s my note? Oh my God! Where’s my freakin’ note?”

  Stoke shrugs, acting like he hasn’t read it.

  “I’ve forgotten it in the classroom,”I say, taking off runni
ng back for my note, images of myself—not all bad—cuffed to the cop. He’s taken me to some deserted spot, preferably a beach with a soft comfy sand dune. We’re kissing and then he . . .

  “God,”I yawn, sprinting. How can I even thinkabout him right now? I’m sleepy. That’s the answer.

  In two seconds, I’m back in my classroom. My note’s pinned to my desk with a Twizzler. Stoke’s scrawled“breakfast”across it, along with a smiley face and several hand drawn hearts. I grab the candy and nosh. Stoke’s a meddler, and it’s creepy what he said last night about my looking scrumptious half naked and then, again this morning when he snarked about my being“wired with endless energy,”but he’s my protector. He takes care of me and Robin.

  “Stoke,”I say, closing my eyes and enjoying the sugary burst of fruity flavor against my tongue,“I could careif you’re a serial killer.”

  “Good to know,”he says.

  I jump and nearly pee my pants. “Good gawd,”I say, using one of my mom’s favorite redneck expressions, but my least favorite. “Stoke, don’t sneak up on me like that. You scared me shitless,”I squeal, breathless.

  “Good gawd?” His black eyebrows arch above deep brown eyes. “How very Goshen, Ohio, Blaze.”

  “More than you know,”I retort. “So long. I gotta catch my bus.”

  Chapter 11

  The lumbering Cincinnati city bus rocks me to sleep, but then when it stops I jerk awake. Typical of my life. Start. Stop. Going nowhere.

  Depressed, I know I need more than sleep, but same as always I keep telling myself I’ll be okay. If I can just get through this afternoon and then tonight—if.

  One more day. One more hour. One more class. That’s how I’m living my life.

  You’ll be okay, Alaina. You’ll be okay. It’s been my mantra since I was a little girl. Fearful it’s not working any more, I chant it without thinking. I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.

  The bus dumps me at my stop. An upscale Yuppie takeover, Hyde Park looks so clean, so different than my run-down neighborhood. I have classmates from here. They eat herbed tofu, never study, and bitch all the time. Mom’s so angry I put a cigarette hole in her cashmere sweater. Barkley’s Beemer’s in the garage. Imagine! We had to take mine.

  Do I feel sorry for them? Hell, no. I scrounge up food wherever I can, however I can. The closest I’ve been to tofu is the soy bean fields that run for miles outside my hometown of Goshen.

  So I don’t care for the little whiners, or for Hyde Park, their posh home base.

  Forget them. I’ve got my own problems. They don’t include choosing which tofu brand to eat, and I’ve never owned a car or seen the inside of a Beemer.

  Racing up Echo Street, I think of my immediate problem: Detective Hawk’s ultimatum. Call me before eleven. If I don’t, will he cuff and drag me from Verbote Dental? That scenario’s hard to wrap my brain around, except for the part about being cuffed. Hmmm.

  I’m suddenly making up fantasies about him and busting butt getting to my day job, when I get this weird feeling. I glance over my shoulder. What? Am I just tired? Hallucinating?

  When I whip my gaze around and stare back toward the bus stop, I see the blur of orange and red scarf, a familiar, scruffy-looking little figure disappearing between two bungalows.

  I look again, double checking. Was that Stoke? What’s he doing here?

  Feeling paranoid, I stop and stare up and down Echo Street. Nothing. Just a double row of Volvos and Beemers parallel parked across the street from each other, like coaches awaiting Cinderella, or maybe, the ugly step sisters, the little Hyde Park whiney heads I envy.

  Feeling silly for being paranoid, I make it to work.

  * * *

  Verbote Dental’s lodged in a modern building, but it wears the foreboding face of the house in Psycho. Its front covered with last season’s dead vines, it frowns down the crumbling front steps, its façade so grim you’d think Norman Bates lives here. Far as I know, he might: Verbote is one wicked-eccentric guy, an older version of Norman.

  But do I care? Not as long as my paycheck doesn’t bounce.

  Climbing the steps leading up from the street, I take the sidewalk around to the rear entry, barely avoiding the prickly grasp of dead holly bushes. Trudging around the building’s side, I toss what’s left of Stoke’s Twizzler into the bird bath, its base cracked, skeletons of last year’s leaves buried under a thin sheen of ice in the bowl. I tell myself,“I’m not littering. Even the birds here are malnourished. They need fed.”

  Like I do, I think, wishing I didn’t feel so love starved, so lonely. I’m sick of not having anyone. Every time I see one of my Hyde Park classmates on campus, she’s hanging on a cute new guy. Seems like the whiney-head rich girls always get the prince. It’s been this way forever, even when I was in high school. Am I jealous of their charmed lives? Hell, yeah. Why else would my brain be off its track over the cop? Why else can’t I get my mind off him?

  “You’re desperate, that’s why,”I tell myself. Worse, I’m desperate and poor. What chance do I have with someone like—him?

  Daydreaming about Detective Hawks, I trip on a slab of sidewalk heaved up by winter ice and nearly turn my ankle. Picking myself up, I glance over my shoulder and toward the street.

  “Gah!”

  Another red and orange blur. I’m sure I saw it this time. But when I brush myself off, I again see nothing. Frustrating. If he’s following me, Stoke’s not making O.J.’s bank deposit like he promised. He’s my friend. I want to trust him, so I don’t waste time wondering why he’d be following me. He’s my protector, my Robin Hood. He’s also flat out weird, no two ways about it.

  “Whatever. Fucktard,”I growl, more irritated with myself than Stoke for fantasizing over the cop—and liking it.

  What did it mean, the way he looked at me, sucking space in Omar’s like he owned the place?

  “Stop it! Stop. Stop. Stop.”

  I can’t believe I’m feeling like this over someone I saw once, a LEO, no less. Yet it’s there—my attraction. I like the way he stood in Omar’s, even the way he came running for me, looking like if I kissed the skin on his tanned neck I’d taste sea salt and something else, something haunting—I can’t figure what—but strong and magnetic.

  Feeling not the slightest bit guilty for taking liberties with his body, I imagine us on the sandy beach I’d conjured earlier, his body pushing into mine. What would he be like?

  Wildass ocean wave. Huge. Wide open. Indomitable. He’s whispering. We’re kissing. His voice mixes with those heavy waves crashing against me. “Alaina, I’ve brought my velvet-lined cuffs,”he says. Cufffffffs. The waves’ susurrus mix with his strong voice. Feeling secure, his willing prisoner as he locks me in his velvet cuffs, I go soft and jellyfish squishy and continue my imaginary ride on the big Nordic wave—

  Then I stop fantasizing and get scared. What if he asks me on a date?

  Fact: he won’t.

  Fact: even if he does, I can never—ever—take him home to meet Berta Colby.

  My world’s reality, my past, settles over me in black waves, drowning my fantasy.

  I’m back home in Goshen, playing in Mom’s front yard. Knick-knacks from yard sales she holds to get money to buy drugs fly across the ground and land in heaps against the trailer’s tattered plastic skirt. Poor unsuspecting garage sale junkies don’t know their“steals”are goodies from Berta’s burglaries. Our front yard also doubles as a junkyard for motorcycle parts from mom’s biker boyfriends. No grass grows there in summer; in the winter, the place is a bare mud hole.

  I sigh and tell myself to quit acting stupid. Even if I had a snowball’s chance, he wouldn’t want me, not if he met my family, the Goshen Colby crime gang.

  I inhale, sucking myself into my mental safe spot, where soccer moms bake birthday cakes instead of pot brownies, my mom’s favorite recipe. In this space, I forget I’m the Goshen gimp—Crip. Forget I’m a Colby. But even here, I can’t forget that gaze flashing over me, the way my flesh
betrayed me, turning goose pimply over a LEO.

  Whoa! Alaina Colby, you’re letting your imagination get way out of hand.

  It’s unfair the way he’s gotten under my skin. He saw me half naked and now he wants me to roll over on Robin? “Stop this,”I tell myself. “You’re late. You’re going to lose your job.”

  The thought of not being able to pay my bills, not being able to take care of Robin, hurries me along. I avoid the barberry bushes lining Verbote’s crumbly sidewalk. They’ve survived another Ohio winter, but will I? My birthday’s next week, but is anyone remotely interested?

  No. Not one person in this whole damn world cares about me.

  I pull open the door to the rear exit of Verbote Dental and step inside. Then I turn and walk back outside, my instinct still pinging me hard. Hurrying back around to the building’s front, I stand for several seconds, gazing up and down Echo.

  Why would Stoke be following me?

  “He wouldn’t,”I laugh. “Dummy.”

  Inside, the warm air jerks me back to earth. I give myself a good talking to. Stop imagining things. You’re not being followed. But I ignore my self-talk.

  Someone is definitely following me.

  Chapter 12

  The woman drives like a zombie. If I wasn’t in a hurry, I’d ticket her. Shoulders hunched over the steering wheel, she’s easing the big Volvo station wagon from the parking spot I want. Deciding she needs a little help, I give her back bumper a gentle nudge.

  “Christ!”DeeDee yells. “Aidan! What’re you trying to do? Kill her?”

  “Not a bad idea.” Keeping my eyes on grandma, I wait for DeeDee’s lecture. A former stringer for the Enquirer, she fancies herself a news hound. I’m onto her, though. Squishing grandma—Cop Shoves Elderly Woman to Her Death with Cruiser—wouldn’t rate a headline.

  On the way here, DeeDee’s been picking my brain about the case. I admit she rubs me the wrong way, but I hate my lack of self control. I know she knows how she affects my libido, so I give her credit. She asks questions. She’s persistent.

  At some point, I owe her an official briefing on how we’re going to move the case forward.