The Hard Bounce - страница 79

Kelly.

I opened my lids and found myself staring into a pair of brown-yellow wolf’s eyes a foot from my own. The rest of the head came into focus. Ivory blond hair. Pink skin. I blinked to adjust the color levels before I realized who I was looking at.

Twitch.

And then there was Twitch.

I remember his entrance into St. Gabe’s even more vividly than Ollie’s spectacular debut. Junior and I were driving mops around the foyer when the batch of newbies got led in. I didn’t like looking at the new kids. Their fear, hurt, and loneliness was as solid in the air as the mop in my hands. Their pain reminded me of my own.

Junior had no such problem. I remember his words, too. “Aw shit,” he said. “This kid is gonna be meat.”

Sure enough, there was the meat. He was twelve years old, but he could pass for younger, he was that small. And lord, was he pink. Twitch looked like he was made out of milk and cotton candy. I felt bad for him, but there was only so much I could do for a kid who had a bull’s-eye tattooed on him by natural selection. His natural weaknesses would be noticed. Nobody wanted to be noticed at St. Gabe’s.

His left eye fluttered in a spastic twitch, breaking our gaze, and I saw the rest of the newbies. Two of the smaller kids were crying. Some tried to look their hardest, which isn’t that hard between the ages of seven and seventeen. All the weaknesses I feared in myself came flooding in.

Then there was Twitch. He looked right at me, into me, and Robert Shaw’s voice from Jaws echoed in my mind. “He’s got dead eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.”

No prerequisite fear. No heartbreak. Just cold, baby, cold.

We absorbed Twitch into our crew. At first, some of the boys thought it was charity for the kid. I knew better. I knew, deep down, that I wanted the kid with the wolf’s eyes on my team. Because I never ever wanted him to be an enemy.

All in all, he was safe at St. Gabe’s, and the world was safe from Twitch while he was there.

Twitch’s pink lips curled in a joyful smile. “So, who am I shooting?”

I tried to get up and fell back to the bed, jabs of pain peppering my whole body. I had more tubes in me than Radio Shack. I sat up again, trying to pull needles and tubes out of my arms, but my body seemed only peripherally under my control.

“Whoa, whoa,” Twitch said. His voice hadn’t dropped a lick during puberty. He grabbed my shoulders and forced me back down. “Don’t want to be pulling those out yet, Boo. Especially not the morphine drip.”

“Guhhh,” I rasped. My throat was full of cotton balls dipped in lye. “Guhhhh,” I repeated, trying to stand again.

Twitch’s birdlike hands pressed me flat against the bed. I was so weak I couldn’t force off a guy who would lose a wrestling match to a gimpy kitten.

“Kelly,” I croaked. It hurt.

“That the brunette?”

I nodded. That hurt, too.

“She’s okay. Scared from here to bejeezus, but she’s fine.” The corner of Twitch’s eye spasmed in a wink.

The relief brought tears to my own eyes. “Water.”

Twitch handed me a red plastic cup that felt like a barbell in my hands. I emptied it in two huge gulps. The water backflipped a few times in my empty stomach, but stayed down.

I cleared my throat. “Junior. Where’s Junior?”

“Cops are talking to him.”

“What happened?”

“I only got here in the last act, man. All I know is Junior called me from lockup and told me to get over here.”

“He all right? He was bleeding.”

“He’ll live.” Twitch giggled. “He got to the girl’s house and heard screaming when he knocked. When he kicked in the door, the psycho broad whacked him with a mace or something.”

Kelly must have popped him with Spike. That’s my girl. “Where is she?”

“She’s in the lobby. Cops won’t let her in yet. You gonna eat that?” Twitch pointed to a tray on the bedside with a dried-out turkey sandwich, a mini can of ginger ale, and a deadly looking Jell-O brick.

“Go nuts. Why won’t they let her in?”

“They want to talk to you first. Cops already talked to her. She’s still pretty spooked.” So far, so good. Nobody, including Junior, knew a damned thing to tell the cops. It was going to stay that way. “You even got a patrolman standing outside the door.” Twitch held up the patrolman’s badge. “See?”