Now Cole was living with Jake’s mom, which wasn’t exactly a cakewalk, either. Mom was worn out from having raised three boys almost single-handedly, and she did the best she could for Cole, but Cole was just too much for her. When had she called this afternoon to tell Jake that Cole was AWOL, she had sounded exhausted.
Frankly, Cole exhausted him, but he was determined to give the boy a sense of direction, a purpose. No one had done that for Ross, himself included—and he didn’t want to make the same mistake again. But more times than not, he felt like he was banging his head against a wall. Cole could go along, doing okay, then one of those thugs he called friend would appear, and the kid was lost, running with a crowd that had, somehow, become more familiar to him than his own family.
Tonight he’d run off with Frankie Capellini again, a loser if Jake had ever laid eyes on one. But he had an idea of where they might have gone, and just as soon as he was through with Zaney, he was heading up Old Galveston Road.
Speaking of which, lights were on in every room of Zaney’s house; hard rock was blaring out the open door onto the street and Jake could just make out the off-key strains of Zaney’s guitar. Inside, the place looked like a gulf storm had hit it—pizza cartons covered the coffee table, empty beer cans were stacked precariously on one end table. The wide-screen TV was tuned into a Rockets’ game. Jake stepped around an empty McDonald’s bag on the floor, headed for the dining room.
Shirtless and bent over his guitar, Zaney grinned the moment he saw Jake. “Dude!” he shouted over the blare of the stereo, grinning wildly as he put his guitar aside.
“Turn it down!” Jake shouted back.
With a startled look, Zaney glanced at the stereo as if he had just realized it was on. He hopped up and over to the stereo, and punched a button. The noise was suddenly reduced to the sound of a basketball game on the TV. “Hey! The Rockets are playing!” he happily observed.
Jake grabbed the remote and turned off the TV, then motioned to Zaney’s arm. “So, what’s the story? Broken?”
Zaney glanced down at his arm. “It’s probably all right.”
“Probably? What did the doctor say?”
“Ah man, I got tired of waiting for him,” Zaney said with a laugh. “There was this screaming baby—I mean, something fierce had hold of that little dude.”
Jake was momentarily speechless. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Nah . . . he was really wailing.”
Great, just great. Jake impatiently thrust a hand through his hair. Zaney smiled sheepishly. Jake clamped his jaw shut before he said something hurtful—Zaney tended to wear his feelings on his sleeve.
“Hey, it’s all right!” Zaney insisted, and to prove it, moved his arm from left to right, unabashedly wincing at the pain it caused him.
“Zaney, it’s bad enough you got arrested, man. You cost me the whole morning bailing you out and driving you to the clinic. And you skipped out? How in the hell are we supposed to finish all the jobs we’ve got lined up if you don’t go to a doctor?”
Zaney dropped his gaze to the table and shrugged halfheartedly.
“Shit, I’ve got more work lined up than we can handle. I need you, man!”
“I’ll go. Tomorrow, I’ll go, I promise, Jake,” Zaney said earnestly, and at Jake’s dubious look, he insisted, “I promise!”
“You better. I gotta go,” Jake said irritably and stalked out of the dining room. “Take care of that arm!” he called over his shoulder, but his words were drowned by the sudden blast of hard rock at his back.
So now he could thank Robin and Zaney for his rotten, rotten mood as he roared up Old Galveston Road in search of Cole. He wondered what Robin Lear would do with someone like Zaney. Cut him up and serve him to some garden party. The probability of truth in that only made his mood blacker.
The ride out wasn’t helping, either—this stretch of road was littered with graffiti-scarred buildings, pawn shops, thrift stores, and used car lots. He was rarely out here anymore, but was nonetheless desperately familiar with it—when he and his brothers were kids, they’d run these streets like loose mavericks, into the trashed alleys and beyond to the levees, where they would fish for crawdads, make forts out of old tires and build race cars with boxes. Ross and Todd never left this part of town.