Breaking the Rules (20 page)

She tried to back away, but Greg ordered, “Freeze—the pair of you delinquents!” and Ben was there, next to her, keeping her from retreating farther.

“It’s probably not loaded,” Eden said to her brother as she looked down the street. Didn’t it figure? Now that she could have used a little police backup, the police car was out of sight. “He probably doesn’t have any ammunition. Let’s just get out of here.”

“He does,” Ben said as Greg ordered him, “Into the house, young man. Now.”

“Even if he does, he’s not going to shoot me.” Now it was Eden’s turn to try to hold Ben back, because he clearly believed that that gun gave Greg the upper hand. “He’s not going to shoot anyone. Seriously, Ben, let’s just turn around and run!”

“Get into. The house,” Greg said to Ben.

“He lives with me now,” Eden said.

“Benjamin, I’m counting to three …”

“I would think you’d be happy,” Eden said, “to no longer have the responsibility and expense—”

“He
is
my responsibility,” Greg said. “And I owe it to him and to God to undo the damage caused from all those years of living with
you.
”

“Yeah, right,” Eden scoffed. “Like I made you touch my boobs, every chance you got. Like you weren’t going to try to sell my baby to the highest bidder—”

He looked at Ben. “One …”

“Don’t you dare go into that house,” Eden ordered her brother.

“Two …”

“He’s not going to shoot me!”

“I
will,
” Greg countered. “A trespasser, breaking into my home—in the company of a stepson who recently attacked me? Oh, I’ll shoot and I’ll shoot to kill, and it’ll be your word, Benjamin, against mine—and my vast array of bruises.”

“He’s not going to do it,” Eden said, holding tightly to Ben’s arm.

“Just watch me,” Greg said, using both hands to steady the weapon that he had aimed at Eden’s chest.

And Ben obviously thought Greg capable of murder because he pulled away from Eden and headed up those stairs, even as he started to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Boo-Boo,” Eden said, trying to pull him back, “don’t do this!”

But he jerked himself out of her grasp and went past Greg through the door and into the house. And when she tried to follow him, Greg refreshed his grip on that pistol, aiming it now at her face.

“Don’t tempt me,” he snarled.

And didn’t
that
sum up the two awful years that Eden had lived in the same house as this broken wreck of a man. In his eyes,
she’d
tempted
him
. Just by existing, by breathing, by being alive. And he’d relied on his god to lead him from temptation, putting too much faith in the misguided belief that God would do all the work for him. Surely God would have stopped his straying hands if God really wanted to …

Eden now froze, because part of her
did
believe he just might pull that trigger, because her mother’s fourth husband had never been able to resist temptation before. So she stood there and watched, helpless and filled with anger and frustration, as Greg stepped back into the house and slammed the door in her face.

Izzy had just woken up from a seven-hour nap in the parking lot of a McDonald’s and had finally left the outskirts of Las Vegas proper when Dan Gillman called.

“Where are you?” Gillman asked, no
Hey, how’s it going?
No nothing. Just
boom
. Demanding question, delivered with typical Gillman
whatever you’re doing it can’t be as important as what I’m doing
attitude.

“Why the hell should I tell
you
?”

If Gillman noticed the hostility and frustration in Izzy’s voice, he didn’t comment. Of course he probably didn’t notice, because he didn’t see Izzy as anything more than a royal pain in his ass. He didn’t give a shit about what Izzy might or might not be feeling.

“Because if you’re in Vegas,” Gillman said, “I could really use some help. I was just on the phone with Eden—the shit’s hit the fan with Ben and Greg. Greg’s got a weapon—sounds like some kind of small-caliber handgun—and he threatened to shoot Eden if Ben didn’t do what he said.”

What the fuck …? Izzy turned his steering wheel hard to the right as he hit the brakes and pulled off the road in a spray of gravel and dust. And okay. Maybe what Dan was doing
was
more important than what Izzy was doing.

“I’m close enough to turn around and be back in town in minutes,” Izzy told the other SEAL as he pulled a youie and reversed his tracks, pushing the little rental car way up over the speed limit. “In fact, I’m already on my way. Is she all right?”

“I think so,” Dan said, then swore. “I don’t know. She was really upset and I’m not sure exactly what happened. I think Greg pulled the weapon and made Ben go inside and … I don’t know what they were doing over there—she was saying something about the mall and the police but then her phone went dead. When I called her back I went right to voice mail. Jenn’s still trying to reach her, but we got nothing. We’re still in New York—”

“Where was she when she called you?” Izzy interrupted, driving even faster, trying not to get bogged down by the most obvious reason that Eden wasn’t answering her phone. There
were
other possibilities besides her being too dead to pick up.

“Outside of the house,” Dan told him. “You know, Ben’s and Ivette’s.”

Izzy did know. He’d been there before. With Dan. In fact, Dan had tried to kick his ass in the front yard of that very house. Where Eden was right now. Where fucking Greg had a fucking handgun.

“Greg’s a fucking idiot,” Dan said.

“I know.” He was also a drunk. Always great when the deadly weapons were in the hands of the drunken fucking idiots.

“So be careful,” Dan warned him. “You remember how to get over there?”

“I do.”

“Call me when you arrive,” Dan said, still doing his best imitation of the admiral of the fleet, but then added, “Please.” Probably only because Jennilyn was standing beside him and had given him a nudge. No doubt about it, the woman brought out the non-asshole-ish side of the fishboy.

“I will,” Izzy said. And if Dan could play nice for Jenn’s benefit, Izzy could do the same. “Thanks for calling me.”

There was a pause; then: “Thank you—for helping like this. I, um, really appreciate it, man.”

Izzy hung up his phone, aware that somewhere to the south Satan was ice-skating while flying pigs did loop-de-loops overhead.

I
t happened unbelievably quickly. Ben hadn’t been locked in his bedroom for more than twenty minutes when the deadbolt clicked and the door opened. He hadn’t expected the police.

Eden’s various past run-ins with the law made her think of the men and women in blue as adversaries instead of allies. So it wasn’t in her nature to call 9-1-1 in an emergency.

And Ben realized as the door opened wider that she
hadn’t
called. The two men and a woman who were standing in the hallway definitely weren’t police officers.

“How are you, Benjamin?” the older of the two men asked.

Ben stood up from where he’d been sitting on his bed, and backed away. His heart was pounding because he knew what this was, where they were from, and what they were here to do. “Considering I’m on the verge of being kidnapped by the Anti-Gay Squad, I’d say I’m pretty shitty.”

“You watch your language, boy!” Greg had cleaned himself up for the occasion. He’d put on a clean shirt and combed his hair. He also held a cell phone in his hands instead of his gun.

And that was how he’d called this terrorist cell. Ben had heard Greg’s voice out in the living room, not long after he’d ordered Ben into his room, told him to pack a bag, and thrown the deadbolt behind him.

Ben couldn’t imagine that Greg had paid to have their phone turned back on, but apparently he’d invested in a disposable cell phone.

He must’ve gotten it sometime in the past twenty-four hours, while Ben was gone. He’d been busy, since he’d also removed the deadbolt that Eden had put on the door, back when this was her bedroom. He’d reversed and reinstalled it, so that the latch was now on the outside and the keyhole was on the inside. So that someone could be locked in, instead of out, as Eden had intended.

And Ben didn’t have the key. He also couldn’t get out the window. They were now both boarded up.

“It’s not kidnapping, son,” the other man—the one who was in early twenties at most. “You’re ill, and your father here wants to help you.”

Okay, there were so many things that were wrong about what he’d just said, including that
son
, Ben didn’t know where to start. “He’s not my father, and it’s definitely kidnapping—or didn’t he tell you that he locked me in here at gunpoint?”

His words didn’t faze any of them. In fact, they all came farther into his room. The woman started going through his dresser and pulling out stacks of his clean socks, underwear, and T-shirts.

“Please don’t touch my stuff,” Ben said, but she didn’t stop.

“He did what he felt he needed to do,” the older man told him as the woman found his clean pair of black jeans on the shelf in his closet. “On our website, we encourage parents not to flinch from expressing their love for their children—forcefully if necessary.”

“I said don’t
touch
my
stuff!
” Ben got louder and even took a step toward the woman, and just like that it was all over.

The two men rushed him and he didn’t have time to do more than flail as he tried to fight them off. They were bigger and stronger, and they easily muscled him to the floor before he even drew in enough breath to scream.

Then, Jesus, he was too surprised to scream as the pair of them unfastened his pants and pulled them down, flipping him over to expose
his bare ass to the world—and was he the only one here who was picking up on the irony of this? Homoerotic, much, anyone?

But then he realized that the older man had a syringe, and then he did scream as the man gave him a shot, right in the butt.

“What the hell?” Ben said as the older man released him, as the younger one helped him pull his pants back up—and quite possibly copped a feel in the process—before he, too, let Ben go.

As he scrambled to his feet, buttoning his jeans, zipping his fly, it didn’t make sense that Eden wasn’t there—he expected her to come charging down the hall, at any minute, coming to his rescue.

But then his legs didn’t hold him. They felt so leaden and weak. Or maybe the very air was heavy because once he crumpled on the floor he couldn’t seem to hold his head up either and his arms didn’t work and as he looked up at Greg’s friends from the grimy bedroom carpeting he knew he’d lost.

It was worse than being tased.

Whatever was in that syringe made it impossible to stand or even to speak.

And they all smiled at him as he fought the inability to move, as he tried to form two distinct words.
Fuck
and you.

“A few months with us,” the woman said cheerfully, as if they hadn’t just drugged him against his will, as she put his clothes into plastic grocery bags, “and your need to mourn will come to an end. When you feel better about yourself and about the path you’re taking in life, you’ll wear bright colors again. And
that’s
a promise.”

I’d do that
, Ben wanted to say,
if I could just live with my sister, because I know that she loves me. Do you know where she is …?

But he didn’t get the words out before the woman and the entire room faded to gray.

Fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. That was all it took for Eden to run down to the convenience store on the corner and spend four jillion dollars on a cell-phone charger cord that she wasn’t even sure would work.

She ran all the way back to Greg and Ivette’s house, struggling to get the plastic package open, intending to go around to the side of the garage, where she knew there was an outdoor power outlet. She and her friend Tiffany used to huddle there on the cracked concrete, in the shade, with the ancient boom box that had been donated by the church—as was nearly everything they owned—plugged in and blasting.

But, now, as she approached the house, she realized that a car was parked out in front. And while it wasn’t impossible that, after her cell-phone battery had died, her brother had made a few calls and found a friend or teammate in the vicinity, it seemed unlikely that this car belonged to a Navy SEAL. Large and black, it was an older-model sedan, and as she got closer, she saw it was heavy with the Jesus bumperstickers.

It was then, while Eden was still three or four houses away, that a woman came out of the front door, carrying two plastic grocery bags. She was followed by two men who were carrying …

“Ben!” Eden shouted, her lungs burning as she ran even faster. “What did you do to him?”

Her little brother was clearly unconscious, one of his arms hanging down limply, his head lolling back.

And, Lord, Greg was out on the front steps now, pointing toward her and shouting something in his nasal-thin voice, and they all moved faster. The woman opened the rear door, and the two men together pushed and pulled Ben inside, one of them climbing into the back with him. The woman was already in the passenger seat, and the second man climbed in behind the wheel, just as Eden reached the car.

She heard the doors lock as she reached for the handle, and she saw alarm on the woman’s face as she looked out the car window and up at Eden.

She was Ivette’s age, but she had what Eden and Ben had always thought of as
hairdo hair
. It was cut short, and she’d spent time blowing it dry into a style most often worn by sitcom grandmothers, instead of just pulling it back into a haphazard and messy ponytail, the way Ivette usually did.

She had wide blue eyes and a fleshy face with a lipsticked mouth that made an almost perfect O as Eden used her handbag as a cudgel and swung it.

It didn’t break the window. It didn’t even crack it. It just thudded ineffectively as the car’s engine started with a roar.

Eden moved then, sobbing with her anger, scrambling to put herself in front of the car, to keep them from pulling away.