Shadow Boys (23 page)

A hawk flew across the horizon, alighting on one of the cottonwoods by the creek.

Junie licked his neck. Her fingers were still inside the waistband of his boxers. They caressed the sliver of flesh where leg joins torso.

His pulse quickened, body continued to react.

The kissing and the groping stopped.

He turned.

She stood at the foot of the bed, naked, his handcuffs dangling from her fingers.

“Put these on me, Raul. Then let’s do it.”

He shook his head.

“Really?” She snapped one side to her wrist. “You liked it before.”

He didn’t reply. He had liked it before, with the handcuffs and the dirty talk and the leather belt slapped against her ass just like she wanted.

Sex with Junie was raw and dangerous and unlike anything he’d ever experienced in his life. When they were together, he was exhilarated and more than a little fearful. When he was apart from her, he was consumed by the thought of their next time together.

She jingled the cuffs.

Raul was powerless. Her nakedness, this house, the way she gave herself over to him. He could not resist her.

So he went to her and did what she wanted. He handcuffed her, looping the metal around a bedpost so her arms were restrained above her head.

Then he mounted her, thrusting hard and fast like she wanted him to.

When they climaxed together, her chest flushed red and tears welled in her eyes, streaming down her face after a moment.

She always cried afterward, just a little.

At first Raul wondered why.

Now he just held on and tried to keep his mind from going to the dark places where images of his brother dwelled along with Wayne’s crushed face.

He removed the cuffs, and they dozed for a while. When they awoke, the shadows were long. So much for going back to the office.

Junie drank the last of the wine. “I’ve got a new job.”

“Yeah?” Raul moved across the room to his clothes.

Junie’s work history, much like her love life, had been somewhat checkered. Lots of jobs for a year or so at a time. The titles of her positions had always been nebulous—office manager, sales consultant, director of web marketing.

“A nonprofit,” she said. “They try to find work for people who are mentally challenged.”

Raul pulled on his pants.

“They need someone to run the organization. Somebody with the right connections in town.”

Raul pondered the idea. Working for a nonprofit might actually be a good fit for Junie. Because of her aunt, she knew a lot of well-to-do people, potential donors.

“That sounds like a great idea, Junie.” Raul buttoned his shirt. “You’ve always liked to help—”

“I told you.” Junie stared at him, eyes cold. She was half-dressed, skirt and bra. Blouse in one hand.

He realized his mistake. “Sorry.”

“That’s not my name. Not for years and years.” Her tone was frosty. “That’s my middle name. My kid name.”

“I forgot.”

“Talk to me like an adult. Call me by my real name, Raul.” She slid her blouse on. “Call me Hannah.”

- CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR -

Lysol presses the End button on Hannah McKee’s cell phone.

His people are still not answering. None of them.

He’s on his own, without a lot of options.

The next step is to call his attorney and activate the escape plan.

That’s the equivalent of going nuclear, however, and he’s not real keen on treading down that particular road. The escape plan means never coming back to Dallas, probably never seeing his children again. Never watching his oldest even start college.

Hannah is sitting on the floor of the makeshift orphanage, hands duct-taped behind her. Jamal is running from crib to crib, trying to shush the ever-growing number of crying babies.

The noise is giving Lysol a headache. He looks at Jamal, says, “Can’t you shut them fuck-trophies up?”

The boy doesn’t reply. He glances at a clock on the wall and goes to the next crib with a bawling baby, rocking several others as he walks by.

“They’re hungry,” Hannah says. “He can’t feed them all by himself.”

“Maybe if their mamas were here, they could feed them.” Lysol drops her cell phone on the dining room table. “Just a thought.”

One infant shrieks. The sound, a piercing wail, seems to start at the base of Lysol’s spine and shoot its way up to his brain.

“You have all the answers, don’t you?” She smirks. “The gangster with the plan. The great Lysol Alvarez, king of West Dallas.”

Her words bore a hole in his skull. They jangle around with the crying babies.

In all his forty-two years, Lysol has never craved anything so much as he does a single hit of ganja right now, just a taste to mellow everything out, to make the screaming infants and the bitchy white woman a little more tolerable.

Instead of sparking up some of Jamal’s stash, however, he allows the anger and frustration to wash over him. He strides across the room, grabs the lapels of Hannah McKee’s blazer and shirt, and yanks her to her feet.

“I got more options than you do, white girl.” He gets in her face. “I can walk away anytime I damn well feel like, and leave your skinny ass here while I call CPS.”

Her smirk deepens.

Anger turns Lysol’s vision red on the edges.

He grabs her throat, squeezes.

She continues the infuriating smile. Then she cuts a look toward the table.

“There’s the phone.” Her voice is a croak. “Go on. Give CPS a ring.”

He lets go. She’s called his bluff.

Several more infants start to cry, increasing the overall noise level.

Lysol strides to the window, peers through the shades.

A police car has stopped across the street, headed in the opposite direction from the one a few minutes before.

A cop gets out. A white guy in his twenties. He leans against the hood of his vehicle and pulls out a cell phone. Not doing anything too threatening right now, but not going away either.

Several of Jamal’s boys are milling around the front yard, playing and roughhousing with each other. Lysol’s not worried that they’ll say anything to the officer about his presence. No street kid would tell a cop, especially a white one, anything. It’s ingrained in their DNA. Do not talk to the Man. Ever.

But what does worry him is if the cop starts doing a door-to-door, looking for a wounded guy in a gray linen suit who was shooting at a dude on Singleton.

If a cop comes to this house, knocks, and hears eleventy-seven babies crying when a ten-year-old answers, there’s a high probability he’s coming inside.

Therefore, Lysol has to shut the babies up.

Which means they need to be fed.

Hannah McKee is still standing where he left her, still sneering at him.

“Where’s their food?” he asks.

“Their formula?” she says. “That’s what infants consume. Not food.”

Her tone is condescending.

“Yeah. Their
formula.
Where is it?”

“It’s in the kitchen,” Jamal says. “Needs to be heated up first.”

“Can you do that?” Lysol asks.

The boy nods.

“You’re my number-one man, Jamal.” Lysol smiles. “Get to it.”

The boy beams and scampers away.

Lysol turns to Hannah McKee. Pulls a knife from his pocket, a lock-back Spyderco. He flicks open the blade and approaches her.

Her smirk slowly disappears. She inches backward until she hits the wall.

He keeps walking. When he’s about a foot away, he says, “Turn around.”

She hesitates and then complies.

Lysol slices the duct tape away, frees her hands.

“Okay. You can turn back now.”

She does as requested, rubbing adhesive off her wrists.

“Now take your clothes off.”

She stops rubbing, eyes wide.

“You heard me. Strip.”

“W-what?” Her voice is timid.

“You need to help Jamal feed these babies,” he says. “And I don’t want to worry about you running away or finding a weapon and hiding it somewhere.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Naked white woman, cruising down the streets of West Dallas.” He shakes his head. “I don’t see that happening.”

She gulps, face pale.

“It’s real simple,” he says. “You take your clothes off, you won’t be a threat.”

She crosses her arms like she’s cold and then immediately uncrosses them.

He slides the knife under the top button of her blouse. Slices the threads.

The button drops to the floor. The fabric shifts open, exposing the tops of her breasts encased in a black bra.

“You can keep your panties on,” Lysol says. “I’m not an animal.”

Hannah McKee stares at him for a long moment. Then she slowly takes off her blazer and unbuttons her blouse, dropping both to the floor.

Lysol smiles.

Homegirl is in good shape, from the waist up at least, everything firm and tight.

She stares at him for another stretch of time and then removes her bra, dropping it on the floor with her other garments.

Her breasts are pale and firm, nipples the color of almonds.

The funny thing is, by the way she moves and her facial expressions, Lysol is pretty sure she’s enjoying herself.

Dallas, Texas

2013

Raul Delgado didn’t remember much about his father.

The breath of a drunk man and a violent temper. A calloused palm slapped against a boy’s cheek.

Carlos, ever the rebel, had taken the brunt of their papa’s rage. Beatings for talking back. For not cleaning their room. For not bringing a fresh beer from the kitchen fast enough.

In Raul’s mind the memories of both father and brother were shadows, fading more and more as time passed. Events that seemed so important thirty-five years ago were just whispers now, snippets of time tucked in a closet, remembrances that might or might not be real.

Papa had been deported back to Tampico in 1983; he died soon after.

Raul wondered if his father and brother were together in the great beyond, if they acknowledged each other. If he still went to Mass, perhaps the priest could have told him.

Raul had always vowed that if he had children he would not treat them badly, the way he’d been treated. He’d be like Bobby. Kind but firm.

All of which made him very curious as to why he felt a burning desire to punch Tremont Washington in the mouth.

He was a nice kid, but whiny. Deficient, as the doctors say.

He fretted over the simplest things, opening and shutting a door a hundred times in a row, rearranging a stack of magazines in dozens of different combinations. Setting the table with a ruler so that all the utensils were equal distance from each other.

At the moment, they were alone in Junie’s office, the large room at the back of the Victorian house in the Uptown section of Dallas.

Raul sat behind Junie’s desk, going through the bills for the organization that employed her. More than a couple were past due.

Tremont was playing with a Nintendo, humming and talking to himself. The noise grated on Raul’s nerves.

A Wednesday morning. Junie was in the front of the building, arranging for a job placement with a client.

Raul sighed and pulled some cash from his wallet, enough to cover the electric bill.

Tremont’s game made a ringing sound, and he cackled with pleasure.

Raul, who’d never had children or a wife, didn’t know how most people stood the banality of a family. And the noise.

His politico friends urged him to get a wife and/or a baby, preferably both, and soon.

Find a woman, any woman, and marry her. And if you played for the other team—you know, if you’re gay—that’s all right. Then find a man to be your partner. That narrative would work just as well as the traditional picket-fence scenario.

What didn’t work, they said, was the loner bachelor who was a workaholic and, quite frankly, a little odd.

Voters didn’t like odd, the politicos told him. They liked people they could have a beer with. And that’s not you, Deputy Chief Delgado.

Raul wondered if he should ask Junie to marry him.

They no longer had sex together. He’d caught her in bed a few months ago with a man fifteen years her junior.

Strangely enough, the person most upset by the discovery was the young man. He was convinced that Raul was going to kill him.

Raul had shrugged and told him to leave. Then he and Junie sat in her darkened living room and stared at the wall. Not talking. Not fighting. Just sitting, both lost in their own thoughts.

He snapped back to her office, to Tremont on the couch. From the front came the sound of the door shutting. A few moments later Junie entered the room.

“What are you doing at my desk?”

“Keeping the lights on.” He tossed the cash so that the currency fanned out across the top of her work space.

“You didn’t need to do that.” She took a puff from her e-cig.

The Nintendo made a losing sound and Tremont whined. Both Raul and Junie ignored him.

“Do what?”

“Throw your money around. You think I’m impressed by that?”

Raul didn’t reply.

“I have everything under control.” She hurriedly picked up the currency. Made no move to give it back.

Raul pondered the other women in his life. He was attractive and had a sizable net worth, thanks to the investments from his settlement with the city decades before.

So there was no shortage of female companionship. But most were, for lack of a better term,
whole people,
and Raul realized that he was not. Parts were missing from him. Feelings and emotions that didn’t function in the same manner as in other people.

So perhaps he was not the marrying kind. Unless his spouse was someone like himself.

Like, say, Junie.

What would a marriage with her be like? He couldn’t imagine.

She’d become withdrawn and morose, bitter about her life and the choices she’d made. She continued to surround herself with people of means, nominally as part of her work at the Helping Place. The proximity to wealth was like salt to a wound, however, leaving her full of envy and regret.

Then, there was Tremont.

The boy worked at the Helping Place, in the office. When he was not playing games, he sorted files, emptied the garbage cans, picked up trash from the lawn.

Junie (he could never get used to calling her Hannah) had warmed up to Tremont, taking an interest in him and his activities. She brought him along when she met with African American families who had disabled children. The boy was her passport into a world that would normally be shut off to a white woman from North Dallas.

“Tremont and I have some appointments in Oak Cliff this afternoon.” She mentioned an address deep in gangbanger territory. “Will you give us a ride?”

“Where’s all the money, Junie?” He pointed to the bills. “Why’s everything past due?”

“Don’t call me that.” She held up her nameplate.

“Where’s all the money,
Hannah
?”

“We’re establishing a new program. Pre- and neonatal health care for low-income women.”

“Your organization doesn’t have the resources for any new programs.”

“What do you know about this place?” She pointed at him with the e-cig. “What do you know about the needs of children in economically depressed areas?”

Her words sounded like they came from a brochure.

“How much do you need to keep the ship afloat?” He crossed his arms.

“I’m not dependent on your largesse.”

“There’s a fancy word.
Largesse.
” Raul chuckled. “You fucking a college professor now?”

“Nice language.” She nodded toward Tremont. “A great way to talk in front of a child.”

“He’s heard worse. Let’s get back to the financial health of your organization.”

They stared at each other. Raul imagined he was angry, but deep down he knew that was not the case. He was just tired. He wanted things to be normal. But therein lay the rub. What the hell was normal?

“The finances of the Helping Place are none of your concern,” Junie said.

“Really?” He stood. “Whose money do you use to balance the books every month?”

She didn’t reply.

“Does the board know how bad it is?”

The Helping Place was managed by a group of directors, all volunteers. Civic leaders and socially prominent individuals. People who would be aghast at the fiduciary mismanagement.