“Don’t worry, Alex,” Jetta said, lounging back with her bundle of grapes. “If ’ee tries to ’urt mein Chef, we will send ’im back to the ’ell ’ee came from.”
Coming from Jetta, that was refreshingly reassuring.
Miles returned to the bleachers a few minutes later, both eyes still in his head. I looked him over three times before doing a quick perimeter check. Nothing strange, but I couldn’t deny the gut instinct that told me something bad was coming.
Blue Eyes was a little candle flame in the darkness, and even though I didn’t know for sure if Miles really was Blue Eyes, I couldn’t let him be snuffed out.
Chapter Twenty-five
I sat by my window on the night of the job, waiting for the signal. My fingers jittered against the windowsill and my feet sweated in my shoes, despite the cold outside. Dad snored in the room down the hall, and if he was snoring, that meant both he and my mother were asleep. In the room next to mine, Charlie mumbled something about sugarcoated chess pieces. All they had to do was stay asleep for the next two hours, and everything would be fine.
I’d double-and triple-checked with Art to make sure the job was (mostly) safe and would definitely be over in two hours. I still didn’t know exactly what the job was, or what I was supposed to do.
But then I realized I didn’t care. I was going to enjoy tonight’s adrenaline rush if it killed me. I wanted to be a teenager. I wanted to sneak out at night (not while under the impression I was being kidnapped by Communists) and do things I wasn’t supposed to. I wanted to do them with other people. Real people. People who knew there was something different about me and didn’t care.
Art’s van rolled up at the end of the street, flashing its headlights. As quietly as I could, I removed the screen from my window, set it against the wall, climbed into the flowerbed outside, and slid the storm window shut behind me. Just like a nighttime trip to Red Witch Bridge. I set off down the slush-streaked street, squinted to make sure it was actually Art in the driver’s seat, then climbed into the passenger side.
“Okay, now we have to go get Boss,” Art said.
I buckled myself in. “Where are we going?”
“Downing Heights.” Art smiled a little. “I know you love it there.”
“Oh, but I do,” I mumbled. “Tell me we’re not going to Celia’s.”
“Nope. But first we have to get Boss, and he definitely doesn’t live in Downing Heights.”
Silent houses flicked by. In the distance, expensive Lakeview houses rose like dark mountains. But around us, each house was less friendly than the last. Suddenly my dirt-colored hovel of a home seemed so much nicer than before.
We turned a corner and the houses became downright scary. Like, Bloody Miles trying to murder me scary. I wouldn’t have come down this way even at high noon.
Art stopped in front of a two-story house that looked like staples held it together at the corners. Shingles were missing all over the roof, half the windows had the glass broken out of them, and the porch sagged in the middle. Garbage littered a front lawn enclosed by a rusted chain-link fence. Miles’s blue truck sat in the driveway, next to an aging Mustang that looked like it might be worth a lot of money if anyone tried to take care of it.
I knew something here must have been a delusion. Something. The darkness made everything worse, but this place . . . no one could live like this. This had to be fake.
“Uh-oh—Ohio’s outside.” Art nodded toward the side of the porch, where a makeshift doghouse gave shelter to the biggest Rottweiler I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like the kind of dog that ate babies for breakfast, old men for lunch, and virgin sacrifices for dinner.
No wonder he was Miles’s dog.
“He lives here?” I leaned forward for a better look at the house. “How is this even habitable?”
“It’s not, I don’t think. His dad survives by constantly surrounding himself in a booze haze and setting the hell hound loose on the neighbors.” Art shuddered. “The first time we ever picked Boss up, Ohio was awake. I thought he would bite my head off, and I never got out of the van.”
I had never imagined big, bulky Art being scared of anything. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. So Miles wasn’t rich. I’d still expected something a little nicer.
“What does his dad do?”
Art shrugged. “I think he’s some kind of security guard downtown. There’s only the two of them, so I don’t think they’re hard up for cash. But no one takes care of the place.”
Movement on the second floor distracted me. The window on the far left slid open. A dark figure crept through the narrow opening like a cat and reached back in for a coat and a pair of shoes. He put the coat on but carried the shoes, then hurried to the side of the porch roof, lowered himself down the drainpipe like a ghost, and dropped silently on the balls of his feet, right on top of the doghouse.
Ohio gave a snort, but he didn’t wake up.