Chapter Nineteen
Lucky let his nephews sleep in on Saturday. He’d had to take Todd’s side in last night’s argument, which didn’t endear him to Ty.
The things he’d called his mother for forcing him to move hadn’t been pretty.
Regardless of whether or not Ty thought classes lame, he still needed to do his homework, even if his older brother got to slack off another few days until college courses began.
He sure as hell couldn’t take Lucky’s car without permission.
Maybe Lucky could take him out later, just the two of them, and attempt some bonding without an older brother around to upstage him.
Todd staggered into the kitchen around ten a.m., hair sleep-tousled.
“Good morning, sleepyhead. Want some breakfast?” After last night’s shoutfest, Lucky kept his voice low. Sudden movements might not be good either. Teenagers, like wild animals, attacked with minimum provocation, though Todd didn’t rage nearly as easily as Ty.
“Cereal’s good.” Todd traipsed to the pantry.
“Is Ty still asleep?”
Todd whirled around. “He got up hours ago. I figured he’d be watching TV by now.”
The coffee in Lucky’s stomach roiled. “I haven’t seen him. Oh, shit.” The icy leaden ball in his stomach gave an awful churn. “What?”
Todd didn’t answer, but raced through the house, checked the front and back yards, and the garage, Lucky trailing behind him.
Todd scrubbed a hand over his face. “He kept saying he was going back home. I thought he was just running his mouth. He left his cell phone on the dresser.”
Fuck. No tracking him, then.
Lucky spent the rest of his day making phone calls and hunting his nephew.
“No response on the missing person’s report,” Bo said, busy helping Lucky pace holes in the living room carpet. “Everybody and their brother on the force is looking for him.”
“Atlanta’s no place for a teenager alone. Anything could happen.” Lucky’d worked in this city for over a dozen years. A sixteen-year-old could find plenty of trouble.
Or trouble could find him.
Bo interrupted Lucky’s pacing with a hand on his shoulder. “Look, he’s a smart kid. Chances are he’s someplace totally safe and he’ll be back once he calms down.”
“Maybe we should check the mall again.” Doing something, anything, beat hanging around the house doing nothing. They’d called the few friends Todd named to no avail. Rett and the Smiths hadn’t seen Ty either.
“Maybe we should wait. Did you ever run off when you got mad at your parents?”
“No.” Not the total truth. “Yes. Maybe.” Lucky’d always managed to sneak home without his parents knowing, or managed to blackmail a cousin into covering for him.
“You always came back, right?”
“Yeah.” No matter what horror lurked outside the door, Lucky could hold his own. While his mother taught him to shoot with the best of them, did Ty know how to fight?
“Then let’s give him a bit more time. Where did you look?” Bo touched a finger to his iPad and glanced up expectantly.
“The mall, the skating rink, bowling alley, the parks, anyplace young people hang out.”
Bo tapped at the iPad screen. “Where else?”
“I drove through the neighborhood six times, checked the Smiths…” Lucky shuddered. “I called every precinct in Atlanta, and the teen shelters. Rett’s looking, and I checked with Mrs. Griggs. Everyone he knows in town.”
“Todd and I went door to door asking the neighbors. We checked the club house and community swimming pool, the school campus, and the places we went to play Pokémon, but without his phone he can’t be gaming.”
Ty should be there. Lucky would gladly put up with his lousy attitude if the kid just came home.
Tongue between his teeth, Bo keyed information into his tablet. “Let’s go check again.”
Bo drove slowly up and down the streets, taking them to the malls and any establishment still open.
What if Lucky had talked to Ty sooner, or taken time off earlier to help him adjust? What if, what if, what if…
He’d put off telling Charlotte about her missing son long enough. In the morning he’d go to the police department personally, even if it meant blowing his cover story of being out of town.
Five minutes passed, then ten, twenty, thirty.
After four hours they had to go home, empty-handed.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to wait up with you?” Bo asked, letting the dog and cat in for the night.
“No. I’d love you to stay, but we both know it’s something I have to face myself. It’s not you he has a problem with.” Come hell or high water, he’d solve this problem, one way or another, before Charlotte returned.
Had he been too hard on the kid?
“Good night.” Bo brushed his lips over Lucky’s in the briefest of kisses. “Wake me up if you need me.” Moose and Cat Lucky trailed him down the hall.
Todd strolled out of the kitchen. “Good night, Uncle Richie.”
Lucky tried not to flinch. He’d grown unused to being “Richie.” Richie had died long ago. “Good night, Todd.” He rose and gave his nephew a hug, awkward at first, but then wholehearted. Damn, but he’d missed out on most of his nephews’ lives. If he’d been there, would things have been better or worse?
Certainly Victor’s money would have ensured they never lacked for anything—as long as Victor stayed in the picture.
As much as Lucky had loved the rich life, the clubs, the fancy restaurants, the expensive gifts, they weren’t him. No matter where he and Victor went, Lucky always felt out of place, like he didn’t belong.
Out of place. He’d felt out of place.
So did Ty.
Lucky sat on the couch, waiting for his nephew, like his father had waited on him when he’d stayed out too late.
Would Lucky one day find himself sitting in this house, waiting for his own kids to get home?
He turned out the lights and paced. What would he say to Ty when he finally got home? Did he have any right to say anything at all?
Oh, dear God! What if Ty didn’t return? Maybe he should drive around looking some more.
Lucky neared the point of snatching up his keys when the front doorknob turned.
He sucked in a deep breath, heart banging away in his chest. May he find the right words to say.
The door eased open and a slim figure slipped through, shoes in hand, creeping toward the hallway and freedom.
Lucky flipped on the lights. “Not so fast.”
Ty froze, then bristled. “What do you want?”
Lucky flinched at the venom in the words. “We’re going to talk. Come here and sit down.”
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say. I’m tired and going to bed.” Ty took a few steps toward the hall.
Lucky swallowed hard. Pride didn’t go down easy. “Please. I only want to talk.” Could Lucky follow through? He eyeballed his glowering nephew. Oh, yes. To keep his nearest and dearest safe and lay down laws, he could.
Ty stayed near the hallway. Finally, he sighed and crossed the room at a snail’s pace, flinging his tennis shoes to the floor. “Okay. I’m listening.”
And inwardly rolling his eyes, no doubt. “Sit.” Lucky patted the couch cushion beside him.
Ty pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes in a stunning imitation of his mother at his age in all her teenaged, bratty glory. He sat in a chair opposite of Lucky. “Okay, I’m here. Now, shoot.”
Lucky’s heart pounded harder than it ever had when he faced down a gun. Say words he couldn’t take back and he might live with regret the rest of his life.
Oh, to make this easier. Inspiration struck. Lucky stalked to the hall closet, rose up on his toes, and fumbled around on the top shelf. A-ha!
He pulled down a full pack of Oreos. Hmm… He’d only left a few…
Bo.
Lucky returned to the couch and handed over the pack. “Don’t tell Bo about my junk food stash.” Although Bo replacing the nearly empty package meant he already knew and understood Lucky’s need to self-medicate with sugar.
He waited, holding his breath. Ty ripped open the pack and shoved a cookie into his mouth.
“Good, now I have to do the parental thing and tell you we have rules around this house for a reason.” Lucky had no right talking about rules when he usually went to great lengths to bend them to the point of breaking. “We’re all living here. If we follow the rules, we stand a chance of getting along.”
“Or else what?” Ty crossed his arms over his chest. “You’ll kick me out? Go ahead. It’s not like I want to live here anyway.”
Taking a deep breath and counting to ten helped Lucky calm his nerves. “Until you’re eighteen, you have to live where your mother tells you to. Right now, that’s in this house.” Over the years Lucky had lived in much worse places—some with bars on the windows and doors, and some guy with a ridiculous nickname determined to make Lucky his bitch.
The last guy who’d tried sang opera for a week.
Ty kicked up his glare. Too bad for him seeing the same expression on Charlotte’s face far too often left Lucky immune.
Lucky fought not to glare back, fighting the same battle of wills he’d once fought with his father. His mother used to tell him and his siblings, “Your kids are going to be twice as bad as you are.”
Maybe Lucky shouldn’t have kids. They’d be delinquents for sure.
Lucky tilted his head right and left, cracking his neck and easing some of the tension out of his shoulders. Intimidation never worked on a pissed off young ‘un.
“Look, kid,” Lucky began.
“I’m not a kid.”
Lucky studied the product of his sister’s raising. No, not a kid. Lucky had arrested guys Ty’s age for drugs and other crimes—one he’d even had to bring up on murder charges.
No longer a boy, not yet a man, and so ripe for trouble.
“No, you’re not a kid,” Lucky tried again, “but you’re sure the hell acting like one. Pass the Oreos.”
If Ty glowered any harder Lucky’s head might explode, yet he snagged the cookies and handed Lucky the pack. Even with his stomach tied in knots, Lucky took one, to at least share something with his nephew.
“You ain’t got the right to talk to me about rules and being a kid.” Ty practically spat the words. “Mom told me all about you, what you did.”
Lucky winced. “Yes, I made some bad choices. I deeply regret one”—okay, maybe a few— “I’m sorry. I know it had to be rough on you, having an uncle in prison.”
“Hard? Dude, I thought you were the coolest thing ever.” Ty slapped a hand over his mouth.
What? “What did you say?”
Ty stared at the floor for a long, long moment. “I said, it was pretty cool to have an uncle in prison. All my friends thought so. I mean, before you got busted, you had an awesome car, went everywhere, had lots of money.”
Lucky cringed. “What I did wasn’t cool, it was dam… Darned stupid.”
“You can go ahead and say damned, you know. I’ve heard it often enough.”
“And have your grandma wash my mouth out with soap if she found out? No, thank you.” Old fears died hard.
The corner of Ty’s mouth twitched, then stopped. “What wasn’t cool was what you did to the man who bought Mom a house.”
He should’ve known his sister’s kids would know. He’d never expected them to be homophobes, not with a mother like Charlotte, but one never knew. “What, exactly, did I do to him?” Lucky snagged another cookie to have something to do.
“Turned on him. Testified against him. He killed himself because of you, after all he did for this family. Then you got out of jail to work for narcs. Mom told me all about it when she said we’d be moving here, so I wouldn’t find out on my own.”
Oh, fucking hell. “I don’t regret what I did, but you need to know, this man you’re so upset about?” Lucky made sure he had Ty’s full attention. “His name is Victor Mangiardi, the drug lord I worked for. He didn’t kill himself. He made a deal too.”
Ty narrowed his eyes. “He what?”
Lucky shrugged. How to explain Victor, and his continued existence in Lucky’s life, if from a distance? “He’s now working for an international drug trafficking task force. Sort of like my job, only world-wide.”
Eyes nearly sparking, Ty folded his arms across his chest. “Mom told me he died.”
“I only found out recently that he’s still alive. I might not have told your mother the whole story. I don’t want her to worry about me, and talking about what I do scares her.”
Ty pushed his chin out, a gesture so much like Bo’s it made Lucky’s chest ache. “Doesn’t matter. I barely remembered you, but Mom showed me pictures of you and me. Todd talked about you. I couldn’t wait until you got out so I could meet you.
“Then we heard you died.” The anger left his eyes, replaced by something aimed to rip Lucky’s heart out. “Why didn’t you try to see us? Tell us you were alive?”
“You were better off not knowing me.” A hard admission, but the truth nonetheless.
The world’s angriest teenager snorted. “Don’t you think you should’ve let me be the judge of that? I hate when people say they’re doing stuff for my own good, when really, it’s all for them.”
“You have to understand—”
Ty shot to his feet. “Grandpa says two words to me on the phone and then ‘here’s your Meemaw’, my uncles are either too good to talk to the likes of us or off in rehab. Then there was you… you played dead.”
While they were telling hard truths, Lucky had another. “I was dead. Officially. No play about it, I was in an agent protection program. Had a memorial and a death certificate and my 401K got paid out. My ID doesn’t say Simon Harrison because I like it. Guess I’m just a bad smell, coming back to life all inconvenient-like.”
“Convenient for you, though.”
Even though Ty spoke pure fact, Lucky flinched. He deserved every single barb digging into his soul. “I’m sorry. If I had it to do over again… I’d probably do the same thing. I honestly did what I thought was best for you, your mother, and your brother.”
“Well, then maybe you should have stayed dead! You couldn’t be bothered with us for years, and now all of a sudden you decide you want us back in your life, so we have to give up our home, friends, so you can get what you want. Have you ever thought about what I want? Have you?”
Lucky closed his eyes, each of Ty’s words tearing out chunks of his heart. He’d been so sure, so damned self-righteously sure, that his family was better off without him.
Leaning forward, Lucky rested his head on his hands, elbows on his knees. What could he say, what could he do, to make this better? “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I agree. You’re sorry.”
Had Lucky been such a hard-ass at sixteen? Yeah, probably. “Look, Ty, I’m sorry I wasn’t there for y’all. I’m sorry about doing things that caused me to go to prison, but I’m not sorry for what I have now. I’ve made amends, have a new life, and I’m making a career out of putting men like me, no, like I used to be, out of business.” All he could do was his best, right? “If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m not perfect—”
“You can say that again.”
Lucky tamped down a glare. “I’m trying. I know I can’t turn back time, but I can promise you from this moment forward, I’ll do my best to be the uncle you deserve, the brother my sister deserves, and the son my parents deserve.”
Ty sank back down to the chair. “Bo likes you. Says under all the bullshit you’re okay.”
Lucky let the “bullshit” slide for now. He didn’t deserve Bo’s praise. He’d done good from time to time, mostly by accident. “Bo could find good in the devil himself.”
“I think he could, at that.” Ty’s laugh died a quick death, along with his too-brief grin. “I want to forgive you, understand why you did what you did, but right now it hurts too much.”
Lucky well understood the pain of rejection. For years he’d endured the agony of having a family turn him away.
He’d treated Ty the same way. “I’m sorry,” he said again, when nothing better came to mind.
“Bo says, given time, I’ll be able to forgive you.” Ty shook his head. “But right now, I don’t think I can. It was okay when we lived there and you lived here, but now…” He spread his hands and shrugged. “I don’t want to live here. I want to go home.”
Ouch, but understandable. “The best I can hope for is for you to try.”
“I’ll think about it.” Ty held out a hand and Lucky passed him the cookies. “Why do we have to move? I have friends up there. Things going on at school.” Now he sounded more scared little boy than pissed off young man. “I was on the soccer team.”
“Your mother loves you more than anything, worked hard all her life to raise you and your brother. Now Todd is going to college, and you will too before long, if you want to. Once you’re gone she’ll be alone. She doesn’t want to be a nurse’s aide all her life. When she was younger she wanted to be a nurse. Now she’s got the chance. Yes, she wants to be near me and Bo. We were close growing up.” He wouldn’t tell Ty about Charlotte’s offer to have a child for Lucky and Bo.
“But my friends!”
“You still talk to them on your computer or phone nearly every day, right?” Not the same, but better than the available options when Lucky was sixteen.
“Yes.”
Inspiration hit. “We’ll try to get you up to Spokane every once in a while, if that’s what you want. But, please, will you give me a chance? Give Atlanta a chance?”
Ty yawned. “I’ll think about it. Can I go to bed now?”
Nothing else came to mind to help Lucky’s case. “Yes.”
Ty stood and picked up his shoes.
“Ty?”
Ty turned back toward the couch. “Yeah?”
No “yessir.” Lucky hadn’t earned a yessir. “You need to let me know when you leave the house. I don’t care what you think of me, this isn’t Spokane, it’s Atlanta, and I spend my days on the streets, seeing how bad it can get. I don’t want you wandering around alone, you hear me?”
“I’m not a child!”
No, he wasn’t, no matter how much Lucky wished to turn back time. “I don’t care if you’re that old guy from the Bible.” He remembered the story from long ago Sunday school, even if he couldn’t recall names. “I feel the same way about your mother, and even Bo. They both tell me where they’re going, and when they plan to be back. It’s common courtesy.”
“Like you said you’d always be there for my mother?”
Ouch. Lucky tried not to flinch. His nephew sure knew how to hit below the belt. Probably learned from his mother, but then again, Lucklighter blood flowed through his veins, so he’d likely been born knowing how to fight dirty.
But not how to fight to defend himself if he needed to. Lucky might not have much to offer, but he could teach self-defense. “Have you ever boxed?” Talk about grasping at straws.
“Boxing? Like on TV?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“I want you to go to the ring with me sometime.” Usually, Lucky took rookies to the boxing ring to teach them who was boss. He’d teach Ty one of the few worthwhile things he knew.
Maybe, just maybe, they’d start to bond.
If Lucky didn’t get killed for good first.
When Ty reached the door to the bedroom he shared with his brother, he said, “I’ll think about it,” and slipped inside.