As they headed down the next street, Jimmy muttered, “You guys are drug dealers, too.”
“What was that?”
Jimmy hitched up straighter in his seat and turned to face him, feeling brave, apparently. “You guys deal drugs, too.” An accusation, petulant and pouting.
Carter didn’t deny it, but he said, “What the Dogsdon’t dois trick high school kids into dealing for us, threaten to kill their families, and kidnap underage girls.” He bit back a satisfied smirk when he glimpsed Jimmy’s chastened expression. “You made a dumbass mistake, Jimmy, and you’re paying for it – Allie may have paid for it with her life. You don’t get to pawn that off on us. Our sins have nothing to do with yours. Man up and take some responsibility for once in your shitty life.”
He heard the boy swallow again, but he didn’t talk back this time.
“Take the next right,” he murmured as they approached another intersection.
They proceeded in silence, save for Jimmy’s occasional directions, and they ended up in an alarmingly familiar neighborhood. Carter felt the old prickling of anxiety sweat between his shoulder blades as they passed modest, run-down houses with chain link fences and crowded carports; weed-choked lawns andBeware of Dogsigns. The windows were rolled up tight, but he swore he could smell cigarette smoke, charcoal, and garbage left out in the sun.
His skin was buzzing, faintly, when Jimmy directed to a house only a few mailboxes down from the one where Carter had grown up; where his father still lived, presumably. He’d never bothered to keep up with the man after he came home from school, and didn’t plan to start now.
He took a deep breath, cleared his mind of the past, and refocused.
The house was small, probably a two-bedroom, chipped blue-painted siding, a carport, broken blinds in the windows and big flakes of rust on the iron porch rail. It looked vacant and abandoned, its carport empty, the grass of the yard waist-high and strewn with food wrappers and last fall’s leaves.
“This is it?” he asked.
Jimmy nodded, gaze tense and fearful now, pinned on the front of the house. “If the gate was open, it meant I could pull up. I would go in through the kitchen door.” A second set of concrete stairs led up from the carport to the side of the house.
“Did you see any other part of the house?”
“The bathroom, once.” He made a face, without looking away from the house. “It was nasty. So was the kitchen.”
“You went in, got the stuff, and got out.”
“Um…” He hesitated. “Sometimes I’d hang out a bit. They’d let me have a beer.”
Carter was starting to actively hate this kid. “How many times is ‘sometimes’?”
Jimmy shrugged uncomfortably. “Dunno. Five. Six, maybe.”
“And you’d hang out a few minutes. A few hours?”
“I dunno,” he said in a small voice. “I lost track of time.”
Carter huffed a sigh. “Were you so starved for friends you thought hanging out with a bunch of grown-ass criminals was a good idea?”
“I wasn’t–”
A sharp rap on the window startled both of them.
Carter whipped around and found Fox’s unimpressed face on the other side of the glass. Heart jumping, he rolled down the window.
Fox smirked, quickly, but then smoothed his expression and didn’t comment on Carter’s obvious startlement. “This is the place?”
“He says it is.”
“We’ll go take a look around. Watch the street. Call if something looks shifty.”
“’Kay.”
Tenny and Reese were already halfway up the driveway. Fox vaulted over the gate with the ease of long practice, and followed them.
“What’s up with those guys?” Jimmy wondered aloud.
