Running Scared (13 page)

“Jamaica’s an island.”

“Guess that’s a ‘no.’”

“Daegan—”

“Listen, Bibi, just step a little harder on the pedal under your right foot and drive away.”

“Why do you hate me?”

He barked out a laugh. “Take a guess.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“Fine. You’re sorry,” he said angrily without glancing in her direction. “Listen, I don’t even know you and that’s the way I’d like to keep it.” He glanced skyward, past the sharp angles of fire escapes and the high brick walls scarred by graffiti. Some of the boarded-over tenements were nearly two hundred years old and had once housed Irish immigrants when they first set foot on American soil—Sullivans and O’Rourkes of generations gone by. The Sullivan family had thrived in the new land, working, saving, buying wisely, and amassing a fortune, while the O’Rourkes, for the most part, had become laborers generation after generation. As his mother toiled in the textile factory, so would he in some other dead-end O’Rourke job. He might even drink himself to death as his granddad had.

Clouds, as gray as his thoughts, scudded across a sky that was darkening as night approached.

Bibi was driving beside him, keeping pace, her window rolled down, her blue eyes stormy. She, a Sullivan, would never know an empty stomach or a thirst for money so powerful he was willing to sell his soul to break the cycle of O’Rourke bad luck.

Maybe Bibi, in her need, could offer him a way out, but then he’d have to swallow his much-prized pride.

“What have I done that’s so wrong?”

“Set me up.”

“I…I didn’t mean to.”

“Cruel joke, Bibi.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be.”

“Sure it was.”

“But I didn’t know it,” she said. “Really, Daegan, don’t despise me because of Stu’s perverted sense of humor.”

This was a mistake. “I don’t despise you.”

“You act like it.”

For the love of God, he nearly felt sorry for her. What was wrong with him? She was putting on an act, using her endless female charms to try and find a way to humiliate him again.

“What if I told you I want to know you?” she demanded.

“I’d say you were a bored rich girl looking for a cheap thrill.”

“I’m not.”

He didn’t answer, just kept walking. What a sight they must look, him greasy and tired from a long day at the fuel company, her impeccably well groomed as she wheeled her expensive car through the narrow, refuse-filled alleys. A cat scrambled out of their path and watched from the top of a trash bin.

Bibi sighed loudly. “I do understand, you know. I don’t fit in either. Never have. Stuart and Collin are always together, laughing and talking and keeping secrets. Alicia’s a first-class bitch and Bonnie’s just a kid.”

“What do you care?” he threw back at her and the question ricocheted through his mind.
What do you care, O’Rourke? Why even keep up this conversation?

“I don’t like being left out.”

“It’s not so bad.” Christ, the irony of it. Now he was trying to make her feel better about some tiff she’d had with her shit of a brother and cousin. “Why don’t you go and lay all this on Alicia?” He reached into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes and shook one out.

“We don’t get along.”

“What a shame.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice.

“I was hoping we could be friends.”

“No you weren’t. You’re not that stupid.”

“You really are a bastard, you know that, O’Rourke?”

The same old bad taste climbed up his throat. “So I’ve been told.”

“Don’t take it to heart.”

He jabbed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth. “Why’re you interested?”

“Because you’re part of the family—the interesting part,” she said boldly. “And I want to know you better.”

“Why?”

Her smile was sincere. “Believe it or not, I think I like you.”

“Jesus, quit kidding yourself!” He clicked his lighter to his cigarette and, as the tobacco caught flame, drew in a deep calming drag. “You just find me amusing right now.”

“Maybe, but that’s good enough for me,” she said as she gunned the engine and the Corvette leaped forward, nearly knocking him over as she sped through the alley.

“Getting to know me is a mistake,” he muttered, but she was already gone, the taillights of her expensive car flashing bright red in the alley ahead. His eyes thinned against the smoke as he thought. No doubt she’d be back. She had that stubborn look about her, one that said she didn’t give up easily.

So what the hell was he gonna do with her?

He wasn’t wrong. A week later she showed up, waiting for him after work, her rear propped against the hood of her shiny car as he ended his shift and started walking home.

Homer Kroft nudged him in the ribs with an elbow. “Looks like you got yourself a little piece of uptown.”

“Shut up.”

“When you’re through with her—”

Daegan spun then, grabbed the older man’s arm. “Give it a rest, man!” he ordered, his teeth clenched so hard they ached.

“Okay, okay.” Homer raised his hands in mock surrender. “Jesus H. Christ, back off.” He wandered off toward the bus station and Daegan approached his cousin.

“I thought I told you to leave me alone,” he growled as he walked up to her, ignoring the wolf whistles from some of the guys during the shift change.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She cocked her head to one side and smiled. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a natural masochist. I can’t help but hang out with people who don’t like me.”

“I never said that.” Or had he? He couldn’t remember.

“Then let me buy you a cup of coffee or a drink or something.” She opened the car door.

He laughed. “I’m not going to fall for that again.”

“You can drive,” she said, holding the keys in front of his face, letting the metal dangle and clink provocatively before his eyes.

He didn’t know what to say. Was she joking? The car was powerful and fast. His throat went dry with anticipation. His fingers itched to grab the keys. “You’re not serious.”

“’Course I am.”

“But—” He looked down at his greasy overalls and felt worlds apart from her. The way he wanted it.

“Don’t worry about it. The car’s been dirty before.” His heart started pounding hard and fast at the thought of wrapping his fingers around the steering wheel, tromping on the accelerator, and feeling the surge of power that came with all that horsepower. Then he thought of his mother. Nothing the Sullivans gave was without a price—a high price.

“What do you want, Bibi?” he asked suddenly.

“Just to get to know you.”

“Oh, hell!”

“I’m not lying,” she said, and he touched her then, grabbed her wrist and tried to see into her mind, but the door was closed and the only impression he received was the quick beat of her pulse and the sensation that she was hoping to do something wild and unconventional, something that was against all of Daddy’s rules.

Seduced beyond his power to say no, he licked suddenly dry lips.
This is a mistake, O’Rourke,
his rational mind insisted, but desire overruled logic and he lost the mental battle. He stared into her eyes and realized she knew she had him just where she wanted him. “Where would we go?” he asked.

Her smile hinted at sex and mystery. “Wherever you want, Daegan. It’s your call. I’m just along for the ride.”

“You’re making a fool of yourself.
En garde!”
Stuart lunged at Bibi, the tip of his foil nicking her shoulder as she parried, her fencing shoes squeaking on the old hardwood floor of the gym.

“What else is new?” Thrusting forward, she tried to gain the advantage, but he dodged her blow and she sliced at empty air. Again. Damn, but he was good. Always a natural athlete, Stuart had continually bested her at sports, academics, popularity, conversation, you name it. Several years older, with the edge of testosterone to keep him at an advantage, Stuart couldn’t help making her feel that she, his younger sister, was vastly inferior. Yet she kept trying to beat him, no matter what the contest, so today she’d agreed to this stupid fencing match Of course, she was losing.

“I’ve seen you with O’Rourke,” he said, clicking his tongue. “Bad form.”

“Seen me?” she repeated, stunned just as his foil drew a nasty line down the front of her metallic plastron. She’d thought she’d been sneaky, that no one besides her and Daegan had a clue.

“Ah, ah, ah.” With a final lunge, he won the match “Never let an opponent destroy your concentration. Sorry, Bibi. You lose.” He tossed off his mask and gloves. His foil clattered to the floor. Snagging a towel from an ancient hook near the window, he swiped at the sweat that had drizzled from his scalp and flattened his usually neat hair. “As for O’Rourke, you’d better leave him be. He’s trouble.”

“I don’t think so.” Bibi fingered the button on her foil, bowing the thin blade. It had taken all of her nerve to seek Daegan out again and his reception to her had been about as warm as Nantucket Sound in December, but slowly he’d come around, met her for coffee a couple of times, only insisting that she let him buy. He’d become less hostile, not so damned brooding and cynical, and she’d seen past his facade, through his tough act to a glimmer of the boy behind the guarded and wary mask, a side to him that she’d found refreshing. “Besides, he doesn’t even know I’m alive,” she lied, walking over to the window and staring outside through the thick glass. The private gym was spread over the top floor of their house. From this, the fourth floor, she stared down to Louisburg Square, where the first pale rays of sunshine were slanting through branches of trees just starting to leaf.

Stuart rotated the kinks from his neck as Bibi pulled off her mask. “Oh, I bet he knows you’re alive and has probably estimated how much you’re worth. He’s under-educated but far from stupid. We’re the ones who should act as if he doesn’t exist.”

“Change of heart?”

“I just don’t like you getting involved with him.”

She tossed her hair off her shoulders. “I’m not involved with him or anyone else.”

“Don’t lie, Bibi.” Leaning a shoulder against the old window ledge, he rubbed his chin and sighed. “You’re so poor at it. Anyway, I’ve seen you with him and so has Collin.”

“Collin?” Her head snapped up and she caught a naughty glint of amusement in her brother’s eye.

“That’s right. He wasn’t too pleased, called O’Rourkea…let me get this straight…‘a dumb-ass lowlife who just wants to see what it’s like to get into a rich girl’s pants and drive a car he’ll never be able to afford.’”

“What?” Bibi whispered, horrified. It was one thing for Stuart to know what she was doing, but not Collin. At least not yet. So far, nothing had happened between Daegan and her. Not that it would. What she did with him was no one’s business.

“Well, something along those lines.” He scratched a shoulder. “Collin hates the bastard. Somehow thinks he might usurp his right as Frank’s firstborn or something.” His smile was cold. “Silly, isn’t it? Just like his old man.”

“You started it by taking Daegan to the summer house.”

“And it was fun, admit it. The collective look on our cousins’ faces was priceless! I thought Alicia was going to shit her silk drawers, and Collin, damn but he was nearly apoplectic.”

“What about Daegan? How do you think he feels?”

“Who cares? Oh! I get it.
You
care. Perpetual friend of the underdog, righter of wrongs, doer of all that is good in the world.”

“Not really.”

“But that’s what you’d like us all to think now, isn’t it?” Stuart said as he scooped up his foil as well as hers and hung them neatly in the glass case at the far end of the cavernous room. Weapons of all shapes and sizes were displayed in the cupboard. He fingered a particularly wicked knife with a curved blade. “You’d like us all to believe that you have lofty goals when even you know that you’re a fake.”

“I’m not—”

“Oh, shove it, Bibi. You don’t have to prove anything to me. I know how your mind works and love you anyway.” He locked the cabinet and turned to face her, his features set in that superior, don’t-question-me-as-I’m-damned-close-to-being-a-deity expression that she’d come to loathe.

She bristled. “Don’t you have better things to do than spy on me?”

“It’s in all our best interests, and mine specifically, to keep an eye on you.”

“Afraid I might soil your reputation?”

“Don’t you know me by now?” Stuart’s lips stretched into an easy leer. “If anyone dirties my name, believe me, it’ll be me and I’ll do the deciding of how, who, when, and where.” His voice was suddenly oily, as if he found the thought of crossing whatever moral line he’d drawn in his head seductive.

“I thought you wanted to get to know him.”

Scowling, he draped the towel around his neck and settled onto a bench of the exercise unit, doing leg curls as he stared at the ceiling. As children, they’d shared their deepest secrets in this room where they’d played, worked out, and sought sanctuary whenever the pressures of being solid, upright Sullivans had become too great. Bibi had practiced ballet at the barre until she’d become too tall and gangly, and Stuart had polished his tennis and squash strokes against the far wall in this room that smelled of generations of Sullivan sweat mingling with lemon-scented oil that was used to wash the floors and walls.

The weights clicked softly with each push of Stuart’s muscular thighs. “I guess you have a point,” he admitted in un-Stuart-like fashion. “I would like to know him—to find out what makes him tick. Hey, would you add a little weight—ten pounds, I think,” he said as Bibi, trained from her youth to do whatever he asked, adjusted the pins in the heavy bars. “I guess he’s interesting in a perverted kind of way.”

Stuart was sweating again, his face reddening as he kept pushing on the weights. “Why do you think Frank keeps a mistress for twenty years but completely ignores her kid—his bastard? Why, when it’s common knowledge that he’s got this…well, this other family for lack of a better word…are we forbidden to talk about it? Why doesn’t Aunt Maureen divorce him or force him to give the slut up?”

“Pride.”

“Stupidity, if you ask me.”

“Maybe she takes lovers herself,” Bibi mused and Stuart laughed out loud.

“Can you imagine Maureen doing it with anyone? I think it’s a miracle that she’s got three kids. That means she had to have sex with Frank at least three times.” His face twisted in revulsion and he said in the high falsetto he used to mimic his aunt, “How messy!”

“Stop it.” But she couldn’t help smiling. Aunt Maureen put the tight in uptight. “You’re the one who’s perverted.”

“Yeah, but I have to work at it. With Frank it comes naturally—kind of like a gift. Maybe from God.”

“You’re wicked,” she teased and his gaze settled into hers in that heart-stopping way she found so unnerving. Sometimes it was as if he could read her mind, see past the barriers she’d so carefully erected, and find his way to the darkest part of her soul.

“So are you, Bibi. And it doesn’t stop there. You’re as perverted as the rest of us.” His smile had disappeared and he was suddenly dead serious.

“Don’t turn this around on me—”

“You can’t have him.”

Her heart stopped.

“It’s not decent. Practically incestuous.” He said the word as if it tasted delicious. “I think you’re fascinated with him because he’s the forbidden fruit, you know, kind of like Eve in the Garden of Eden with the snake and the apple.”

“And where do you fit in this scenario?”

“I’m the snake, of course.”

“And Daegan’s the apple?”

“Right…and Collin, he’s Adam, isn’t he?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, flushing.

“If you say so. Just be wary of the bastard O’Rourke.”

“I feel sorry for him, okay?” Bibi lied as she shook her hair away from her face.

“Sorry for him? For the love of Christ, why?”

“He’s poor.”

“But free.”

“Free?”

“Hell, yes.
He
doesn’t have the responsibility of being a Sullivan. He doesn’t have to come at anyone’s beck and call, does he? Just hangs out in pool halls and bars until he gets kicked out, keeps the hours he wants, and doesn’t have to worry that someone isn’t the right social station.” Stuart let the weights drop with a clang. “That’s freedom. Something you or I won’t ever feel.”

“But he doesn’t have any money.”

“Maybe he doesn’t need it. Maybe money’s just a trap to keep a person in line.”

“Wait a minute. For years you’ve been telling me that wealth is freedom.”

He climbed to his feet, snatched his towel, and started for the door. She was right on his heels. “I hate to admit it, but maybe I was wrong,” Stuart said. “Just for a week, I’d love to feel what it’s like to be my own master—dirt poor but able to make my own choices in life. Just for once”—he said, opening the door to the winding steps leading downstairs—“I’d like to tell Dad to ‘fuck off.’”

She could barely believe her ears. Stuart liked to use foul language behind his father’s back, but he’d never seemed so vehement before, so angry. Even now, after a strenuous workout, his muscles were bunched, his jaw tight.

“So why’re you giving me so much grief about seeing Daegan?” she asked, her finger trailing on the rail as they hurried down the stairs.

“Because you’re getting
too
involved. Losing your objectivity. All winter long you kept going and visiting him. Instead of looking at him clinically, like a lab specimen, you’re beginning to think of him as family…or possibly more. He’ll start to get ideas.”

“I think he’s interesting, that’s all.”

“Oh, sure!” Stuart made a sound of amused disgust and stopped at the final landing, where he turned and faced Bibi on the stair above him. “O’Rourke’s dangerous as hell. You’d be smart to stay away from him.”

“And you’d be smart to stop spying on me.”

“Would I?” His gaze smoldered for a second, raking down the front of her, as if her fencing jacket and breeches were made of clear plastic wrap. “Careful, sis, you’re playing with fire.”

“That’s right, Stu, and you can’t make me stop.”

He hooked an eyebrow skyward and clucked his tongue. “A challenge, Bibi? You’re throwing a challenge in my face? Haven’t you learned anything yet?” His eyes sparkled with a fierce anticipation. “I never lose.”

“Frank’s coming over tonight and I think it would be nice if you stuck around.” Mary Ellen was seated on the faded stool in front of her vanity and tilting her head this way and that as she twisted her hair and pinned it to her head. The radio was playing softly. Neil Diamond’s voice warbled through the small rooms.

“Why should I stay?” Not that he was really interested,

“We have a lot to discuss. You’re nearly finished with high school; it’s time to think about college and Frank promised to—”

“I don’t want his money.”

“Don’t start with me,” she warned. “He’s paying lots for Collin to go off to Harvard—”

“That’s different.”

“You’re his son—”

“I’m not!” he said harshly. “Don’t you get it? God, Ma, what would it take for you to understand? He doesn’t claim me and I don’t want him.” The song ended and a DJ started talking about local news.

“Hog wash.” Mary Ellen snapped off the radio.

“I’m serious, Ma. The minute I turn eighteen, I’m outta here. We’ve already talked about it.”

“But I didn’t think you meant it.” She pasted her most wounded look on her face as she slid big gold hoops through her earlobes, but Daegan didn’t let it get to him. Not this time. It was better if he left—better for her, better for Bibi, better for him. Life was more confusing than ever. He grabbed his house key and reached for his jacket. “Don’t go,” she begged forlornly.

“I have to,” he said, turning and seeing, in the mirror’s reflection, the pain in her eyes. She was scared. Frightened of losing her only son and certain that the man she’d let mistreat her for nearly twenty years would throw her out once his bastard was on his own. She would no longer have the golden chain looped around Frank Sullivan’s neck forcing them to be together, but Daegan figured it was for the best.

He reached the door when it banged open and the bane of their existence strode in. Red faced, his nostrils quivering with rage, he cast one quick look at his mistress before zeroing in on Daegan. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Frank?” His mother’s voice wobbled, but Daegan was on the balls of his feet, smelling the fight that had been simmering between him and his old man for as long as he could remember. All he wanted was one good shot.

Mary Ellen stepped out of the bedroom. “Frank, honey, please—”

“Let him say his piece,” Daegan cut in.

“Do you know what the boy’s been up to?” Frank demanded, his eyes focused on Mary Ellen. “Do you? I’ll tell you what. He’s been hanging out with Robert’s daughter. Even showed up at the lake house last winter, confronted Collin and the girls.” He hooked a meaty thumb at his chest. “At my kids. Do you know what Maureen did when she found out?” He shook a fist at Daegan. “She’s talking to her damned lawyer, some hot-shot divorce attorney in Manhattan! You know what that means?”

Mary Ellen’s face changed. Hope gleamed in her eyes. “That you’ll finally be free.”

“Yeah and broke. She’s gonna wipe me out.”

“But then we could be together. Oh, Frank.”

He stared at her as if she’d said she’d just been visited by aliens from Mars. “Are you nuts? You think that’s what I want? To what? Marry you? For the love of God, woman, sometimes I swear you don’t have a brain in that pretty head of yours. I’ve told you over and over again that it’s out of the question.”