Lynnette Kent - Now That You're Here

A couple more blocks…a hundred more yards…just two flights of stairs. Funny, how the sickness got so much stronger, so much faster, these days.

He pounded on T-Bone’s door as Ry all but fell asleep against the wall. The door swung back. “What the…? Oh, it’s you.” The man with shoulders as straight as the bone of the steak he was named for ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Whaddaya want?”

“Can Ry crash for a while? I’m going out.”

“Me, too.” Tomas wiped his nose on his sleeve.

T-bone glanced over his shoulder into the bare room. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” He turned, stumbled through an inner doorway and closed the panel behind him.

Harlow shoved Ryan and Tomas inside. “Get some sleep. And maybe tomorrow night we’ll get a decent dinner.” Before they could think of a word together between them, he shut himself out in the hall.

Claws raked at the inside of his head, and his stomach twisted as he stumbled down the steps. The closest supply wasn’t the safest. But he didn’t think he could make it farther. Sometimes, second best had to do.

I know a hell of a lot about second best, he thought as he tracked down the dealer, made the buy and ran for cover.

Big brother Mark had always been a tough act to follow. Captain of the Little League team, the Pop Warner team, the Y soccer team. Straight A’s in every grade. Special awards in math and science. And that was all before high school.

Then the real stuff started happening. Scholarships and special sports camps and more math awards. Honor Society prez, top of the senior class. Headed for the Air Force Academy.

Until shithead little brother screws up. Big time. One minute, Mark’s standing there yelling at him. The next, a car speeds by and big brother’s flat on his back with blood everywhere.

Crouched behind a Dumpster at the back of a liquor store, Harlow tightened the band around his bicep, pumped his fist, took the syringe from between his teeth. Funny thing was, Mark had even more influence over his brother’s life after he was dead. We’re number two, whether we try harder or not.

But just a minute later, when he loosened the band on his arm and felt the power surge through his blood, being number two didn’t matter anymore.

LUNCH in the club’s kitchen, with Tiffany at the table and Emma cooking, was not Jimmy’s number-one choice for their first date in twenty years.

But he couldn’t deny that she knew her way around a kitchen. He watched as she sliced tomatoes, lettuce and onions, leaving them in neat stacks, instead of strewn across the table, which was the style he was used to. She skimmed the top off melted butter and then basted the rolls before piling on thin slices of ham and cheese, vegetables and a special sauce she threw together in about ten seconds flat.

The result was magic. “What’d you do to make ham and cheese taste like this?”

“Even the chips are different. Better,” Tiffany added.

Emma smiled. “The right mustard, a few spices…oh, and bat’s eyes. The bat’s eyes are crucial.”

Tiffany’s face went white. She lifted a corner of the roll and stared suspiciously at the inside of her sandwich. “What are those little round brown things?”

Jimmy laughed—for what seemed like the first time in years. Emma put a hand on the bartender’s shoulder. “Capers, Tiffany. The seeds of a pepper plant. I promise, no animal eyes of any kind.”

“Oh.” Tiffany sighed with relief, then gave Jimmy a dirty look because he was still chuckling. “How do I know what strange stuff foreigners put in their food? Far as I’m concerned, meat loaf with peppers in it is a gourmet dish.” She got to her feet and walked stiffly to the door into the club. “Thanks for the lunch, Emma. I’d better get back to work.”

Jimmy held up a hand. “Hey, Tiff, your limp beats mine today. What you’d do this time?”

She grinned. “In-line skating. There was this bump in the asphalt…”

He nodded. “I get the picture. Take it easy.”

“Sure, boss.”

Emma stacked the paper plates and took them to the trash. “She’s very easy to like.”

“Tiffany’s almost as big a draw as the music. Half the customers come in just to flirt with the bartender.”

As for himself, Jimmy enjoyed watching Emma move around the kitchen. The apron she’d tied on over her yellow dress did nothing to conceal her full breasts and shapely hips and legs. A breeze coming through the screen on the back door stirred the small curls at her temples and on the nape of her neck, made him think of how smooth her skin was in those places. And in others…

In just a minute or so, the kitchen looked spotless, which was as novel a concept for this room as decent food. Jimmy tamed his thoughts into innocuous words. “You really are good at this cooking stuff. I wouldn’t have guessed that twenty years ago.”

“I’ve learned a lot in twenty years.” She folded the dish towel and sat in the chair across from him, her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. Her fingers, he noticed, were bare.

“Who do you cook for?” Might as well make sure of his assumptions, not that he planned to take advantage of Emma any more than he already had by giving her a job.

“Friends, myself. Dad, when I could.”

“No husband?”

She shook her head. “No husband. I was engaged, but we…broke it off.” After a second her gaze met his. “No wife?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Not even an engagement. And no good explanation, either.”

“You don’t need to make one.” She took a deep breath. “Listen, Jimmy, I wondered, have you thought any more about the medallion?”

The question hit from out of the blue, and he didn’t have a ready answer, except the truth. “It’s a beautiful piece and I’m very honored that your dad wanted me to have it.”

When she hesitated, he answered her next question before she asked. “But no, Emma, I don’t want to trace the history. I told you—it doesn’t matter.”

“I’ve done some research on the Internet—we wouldn’t necessarily need to visit the reservation. There are galleries and museums in the Southwest—”

“Which is where the metalwork probably came from. I know. I’m still not interested.”

Her folded hands dropped to the table with a thump. “Why?”

He would have liked to avoid this confrontation, but couldn’t. “Look. There was a man, an Indian, who made a big point of his heritage, his cultural pride. He knew the legends and the language of his tribe. He could trace his people back for a hundred years and more. He talked about forcing the whites to acknowledge Indian rights, to make reparations for the land they’d stolen. He wanted to bring the Indian race back to its rightful place of power, on the same level with whites.”

Emma nodded without speaking. Her gaze encouraged him to finish.

“This man lived on land his family had claimed for generations. One day, a car pulls up in front of his house—a house hung with signs and symbols of Indian power. An Oklahoma oilman gets out, nice guy, good suit, and offers the Indian an indecent amount of money for that land.”

“He took the money?”

“Of course not. It was Indian land. So the white men came back one night and caught him out at the barn, then beat him up until he agreed to sell.”

“I know these evil things happened. But that doesn’t explain—”

He held up a hand. “The man was my grandfather. My mother was his youngest daughter. They moved to the reservation after that, where he drank himself to death. My dad did the same, a little while after he told me the story. I was eight years old.”

“Jimmy—”

“I figured out right then and there that being an Indian was an accident of birth. A correctable birth defect, even. I found the cure. I walked away from that history and I don’t look back. For any reason.”