The Starving Years (17 page)

Javier couldn’t blame him. He shoved Randy in the shoulder. “Let me out.”

“D’you know that guy? Can he get us off the street?” Randy tumbled out of the cab and Javier followed. The worker recognized Javier immediately—probably the first time the eye patch had ever been an advantage—and he broke into a jog toward the gate.

“Abre la puerta,” Javier snapped.

The worker fumbled with the padlock, the thick chain fell free, and the gate swung open. Javier motioned the truck inside, then helped the worker close the gate behind it and lock it up tight.

“Your father’s not here,” the worker told him in Spanish.

“I’m not looking for him. We need somewhere to stay. Somewhere safe.”

“I’ll get the foreman,” the worker said nervously. The coolly imperious look Javier had learned at his mother’s knee was not lost on him.
 

“You do that.”

Three construction trailers hugged the perimeter of the site—security, storage, and offices. Two vehicles were parked near the security trailer. There was a well-worn groove in the scrubby weeds outside the office, by far the most lavish of the three trailers. But nothing was parked there. Javier pictured the gleaming white Mercedes Sport Utility in those grooves—though it had been nearly half a year since he’d spoken to his father, so chances were, last year’s Mercedes was long gone, upgraded to something newer, and sleeker, with even more ridiculous distractions built into the dash.

The foreman, unfortunately, was not new. Raul was his father’s top man on site, and Javier had known him since high school—therefore, Raul had undoubtedly seen enough of the family’s dirty laundry to have a good idea of where Javier currently stood with the rest of the de la Rosas. Raul didn’t blanch and stammer under Javier’s gaze, not like the ignorant worker had. Still, he wasn’t a stupid man. He wouldn’t have gotten so far if he was.

“Alejandro is not here,” he said—much more assertively than the worker had.

“I can’t go back out in that.” Javier gestured toward the sound of sirens not too far off. “We’ll stay out of your way.”

“Our way?” Raul gave a humorless laugh. “There is nothing to be in the way of. Yesterday the police came, told us to shut down, send our crews home. We stayed to make sure no one steals the gear.”

“Why do you give a damn about the gear?” Javier said. “You should be home with your family.”

Raul crossed his arms over his chest. “Someone takes a jackhammer, uses it to break into a building—a store, a bank, maybe? Who is liable?”

DLR Construction…though not Raul, not specifically. If anyone should have been there risking themselves for the sake of the company, it should have been Alejandro, Javier’s father. Raul must have realized as much. His expression softened, and he sighed, uncrossed his arms and planted his hands on his hips.

“Do the phones work?” Javier asked.

“No.”

“Electricity? Internet?”

“Yes, so far. And we have a generator and plenty of gasoline if power goes out—although I wouldn’t be too flashy about using it. The gates are strong…but not that strong.”

“So far? The phones will be back up soon. They have to be.”

“You’re too young to remember Venezuela, Haiti….”

“You think this is a coup? That makes no sense. The trouble would start in Washington, not here.”

“Not a political coup, no. The politicians…they’re not really the ones who run things anymore, are they?” He pulled a carabiner from his belt loop and tossed the keys to Javier, who struggled, with his horrible depth perception, to catch them. “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Stay in your father’s trailer, what difference does it make? And the food…well, someone panicked before I could lock the door. I’m not naming names. If I find anything’s missing in there besides the food, I’ll know who it was. And don’t think I won’t tell him.”

“Fine.”
 

What Javier meant was, “thank you,” though of course to say as much would have made him look weak. And right now, he couldn’t afford to show weakness.

Chapter 16

The inside of the office trailer smelled faintly of cigars. Javier stood at the threshold for a moment and scanned the conference room. The navy carpeting was completely wrong for a worksite. It was covered in ashy-looking tracks that began by the front door, but grew fainter as they led deeper into the office. The furniture, too, seemed out of place, as if Alejandro had simply said, “Give me the most expensive of everything.”

Javier wouldn’t have been surprised if that was actually how the conversation had gone.

Marianne broke his contemplation of the ridiculous carpet. She pushed past him, and said, “Gotta pee.”

“Then you should have used the port-a-potty,” Randy said. “Because these temporary buildings don’t have—”

“This one does,” Javier said simply. The notion of Alejandro de la Rosa allowing his posterior to touch down on the same toilet seat as a humble laborer? Absurd.

Marianne checked each of the doorways that surrounded the conference room, and confirmed the existence of indoor plumbing with a happy noise and a slam of a door.

“I can’t believe there’s a bathroom,” Randy said. “This job site’s active for, what? A year?” He seemed genuinely shocked. “Do you realize the expense involved in running the plumbing for a temporary gig?”

It would take a lot more than that to shock Javier.

Aside from the bathroom, Javier found two private offices adjacent to the main conference room. The first office was stacked with file folders and binders, and one of the chairs was occupied by a pneumatic drill with a frayed power cord. Javier slid behind the desk. A few photos were tacked to the computer’s monitor. A woman with a wedding band, a child. They were both black. Javier tried to imagine who, among Alejandro’s team, might be the brains behind this particular project—but he couldn’t. He’d been away too long. It was strange enough to find Raul still in place.

Javier stepped out of the office and closed the door behind him. “Stay out of that one,” he told everyone, out of respect to the man he might not have ever met. “But as for everything else…mi casa es tu casa.”

After all, in a sense, it was his. Wasn’t it? Alejandro might have arranged his will to distribute his fortune otherwise once he died, but he was still Javier’s father. Once you put your mark on a child, it was there to stay.

The bar in the conference room had been picked clean, and the refrigerator, too. But Alejandro’s office was still locked when they got to it. Raul’s key fit into the lock. And it turned.

There were no file folders stacked on Alejandro’s desk, no tools in need of repair slung on the seats. Javier entered. The office was the larger of the two. Except for the tread of a single ashy footprint just inside the threshold, it was pristine.

Probably because no work actually happened there. An occasional phone call, perhaps. A transfer of money. But that could happen anywhere. Maybe once, when Alejandro was younger, he’d known how to work. He’d even held the tools, and sketched the plans, and gotten his own hands dirty. Now, though, all he did was move money.

Javier didn’t suppose he needed to worry about turning out too much like his father. The love of money was the thing that made men act that way. And there was little chance of that happening to him, given how he despised it.

Javier circled Alejandro’s desk. Top-of-the-line computer. Immaculate blotter. No family photos—no surprise. He rifled through the drawers. Office supplies, mostly untouched. A few spare pantry packs of rice and beans—authentic, not just textured manna. Just like home. Or as close as you could come, and still keep it in your desk drawer. A bottle. Javier pulled it from the drawer. Seventeen-year single-malt, only a few shots gone. He smiled to himself as he appropriated it.

Because he was here, now. And Alejandro was not. Which meant he was in charge.

Randy and Nelson wandered into the office, and Randy took in the furniture and gave a low whistle. “Does that couch pull out? I think it pulls out.” Javier watched Nelson help him fold out the sofabed, and tried to decide. Nelson, or Tim? Nelson was better looking—though that had never really been the point. And Nelson wasn’t quite the playboy he liked to paint himself as—that was a plus. Nelson was also interested.

But the way Tim had kissed Javier, back in the truck outside the morgue…maybe Tim could also be persuaded to be interested.

“Is that a humidor?” Randy said.

Javier opened the wooden box on his father’s desk. A spicy tobacco smell rose from the wood. He took a cigar from the box and flipped it toward Randy. “Knock yourself out.”

“Oh no you don’t.”

Marianne stood in the doorway, barefoot, with the shoes Nelson had given her dangling from one hand. Her right foot was blistered and her left was bleeding. “You’re not smoking that thing in here as long as I’m around—or I swear to God, I’ll make it a point that when I puke, it’s gonna be directly on you.”

Randy held the cigar under his nose and sniffed it with longing. “It’s a good one, too.”

Again, Javier wasn’t surprised. Good? Like everything else Alejandro owned, it would be the best.

Randy craned his neck to look out the window, as if it might be worth slipping outside for—in a riot. “No cigar is that good,” Nelson told him. “Save it for later.”

Randy gave it another longing sniff, then tucked it into his jacket.

“Look at you,” Nelson said. He walked over to the doorway and took Marianne by the hand. He led her to the edge of the sofabed and sat her down. “You’ve got blisters on top of blisters. You’ve got to be careful with that. It could get infected.”

Marianne looked down at her raw feet. “It’s not so bad,” she said. Her voice was tremulous.

Javier took a look. It was bad.

“You can’t keep wearing those shoes,” Nelson told her. “They’ll just make it worse.”

“But the other ones dug blisters into my heels, plus they were killing my calves. I can’t go around without shoes.”

“We’ll think of something.” Nelson turned to Tim, who’d drifted into the room silently, and was lingering by the wall as if he wished to blend into the paneling. “Do you have anything we can use in the truck?”

“A pair of boots…but they’d be way too big.”

Javier glanced down at Tim’s feet. He had the biggest feet of anyone there. He then noted that Nelson was quelling a smile. Big feet…big everything. Maybe Nelson’s vulgar façade wasn’t altogether a pretense.

Tim looked as if he was embarrassed to be found without a pair of women’s shoes in Marianne’s size…just in case. “What about socks?”

“I’m not walking around outside in nothing but socks,” Marianne said. “And they won’t fit inside the shoes. My feet are too big for ’em as it is.”

“How about duct tape?” Nelson asked.

Tim brightened, and nodded.

Nelson smiled. “Duct tape, it is. And socks. And one of those first aid kits.”

“Which one?”

“Surprise me.”

Javier watched Tim slip out to the truck. Tim’s reaction to Nelson’s approval was palpable. Because he craved any sort of approval—or because it was from Nelson, specifically?

Tim returned with the items, then Nelson knelt before Marianne and cleaned her bloody, filthy feet with Alejandro’s spotless pima cotton towels while everyone else watched, strangely fascinated. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make me a pair of shoes out of men’s tube socks and duct tape,” she said. Her voice quavered.

“Okay. I won’t tell you.” His fingers were gentle with the antibiotic salve, which he followed loosely with gauze. “But I doubt we’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. So for now, just let your feet rest.”

Javier turned away as Nelson taped the gauze in place. Medical procedures of any sort made him uncomfortable. They hadn’t always…only since he’d woken alone in the hospital in Gaza with shrapnel in his face, and his life, as he’d known it before, was over.

None of them had managed to steal more than a few hours’ rest the night before—unless you counted Nelson’s drugged stupor. Once Marianne powered on the computer and determined there was no new update on the Voice of Reason and sent another email assuring her parents that she was fine, they closed the blinds and scoped out places to rest—Nelson and Marianne on the sofa sleeper, Randy on the sofa cushions now on the floor, and Javier and Tim on a pair of stiff couches in the conference room.

Javier assumed that sleep would take him quickly. Instead, he found himself staring at the trailer’s ceiling long after Randy’s snores began drifting in from the adjacent office. Moving quietly, he turned to steal a look at Tim, who’d also been up all night. Tim wasn’t asleep, though. He lay on his side, watching Javier solemnly.

“You can’t sleep, either?” Tim said.

“We should try.”

“I guess.” Tim continued to stare at Javier without making any effort at all to go to sleep. He seemed like he might just continue to stare, but then he blurted out, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About…your eye.”

Of course. It all came down to that. Despite the kiss, Javier realized he’d been a fool for thinking it would ever be any different. “It’s not my favorite subject. I’m sure you can imagine.”
 

“Well, yeah, but….” Tim’s voice went loud and edgy as he sat up and swung his feet over the side of the couch. Randy’s snores faltered, and Tim stood up, peeked into the office, and carefully shut the door so he and Javier could talk. He seemed too agitated to sit back down, though, and he began to pace instead. “It seems like a pretty big detail to gloss over.”

“Fine, then.” Javier stood, too. “Now you know. So what’s the problem?”

“No problem. It just seems like you would have said…something. That’s all.” He sat down glumly and stared at his big feet.

Since Tim had been the one to refuse to describe himself, Javier had presumed the worst. He’d done his best not to imagine anything, specifically, while they steamed up the chat room together. Nothing but the feel of his hand on a stiff cock. His mouth against an ear. The tang of flesh beneath his tongue. The warmth of a tight ass.

Actually, he’d been pleasantly surprised by Tim’s appearance. Tim was rough around the edges, yes. But he was tall and lean, with a strong jaw and fierce eyes. Maybe Javier had been prepared for a pasty, pimply little man with soft, white hands. Probably, he had. And he’d been determined not to let it bother him.