Page 42 of American Hellhound
~*~
Technically, Maggie hadn’t lied to her mother. Not outright anyway. She’d said she had a babysitting gig “just down the street.” And that she was going to “walk” there. She had walked, and her destinationhadbeen just down the street. It was more of an omission, really, the way she left out the part about the outlaw biker and driving off in his battered old truck. She just had to hope Denise didn’t get curious and start calling the neighbors to affirm her story.
They swung by McDonald’s and picked up dinner, then headed for Ghost’s apartment.
It was…
It was sad.
Father and son lived in a two-story brick building that was one of seven in a run-down complex jammed in between a laundromat and a non-denominational church. Even in the dark, she could see the windows needed re-glazing, and the asphalt in the parking lot needed resurfacing. Dim lights burned behind mismatched curtains; bicycles leaned against walls. The lot was full of cars and vans that had seen better days.
Ghost led them up a concrete staircase to a brown-painted door, rubbing at the back of his neck and looking at the toes of his boots as he jangled his keys in his other hand. “I’m not much of a housekeeper,” he confessed, and let them inside.
They entered a living room/kitchen combo cluttered with kid toys, occupied by ratty, mismatched furniture. Maggie spotted a hallway that must have led to bedrooms and a bathroom.
Ghost set the greasy McDonald’s bag on the café table just inside the kitchen and Aidan pulled out his chair, sitting up on his knees to reach for his Happy Meal.
Ghost hung back, still not wanting to make eye contact, shoulders slumped. It was the smallest and least confident Maggie had seen him.
“My ex got all the furniture,” he said, gesturing to the brown sofa. “So.”
Maggie shrugged out of her jacket. “Don’t worry. No one expects men to have any interior decorating taste.” She shot him a smile and he returned it with obvious reluctance, his gaze touching hers only briefly before moving away.
“Sorry,” he said again.
Maggie touched his arm, and she felt him go perfectly still beneath her hand, the muscles drawn up tight. “Hey.” She waited for him to look at her. “It’s okay.”
He took a deep breath and flashed her a humorless grin. “Nah. It’s not.” Then he stepped away and went to tell Aidan to behave himself.
~*~
Roman was late. Ghost stood with a shoulder braced against one of the clubhouse pavilion’s support posts, smoking, a paper bag of coke burning a hole through his cut pocket. Overhead, the stars winked between the tattered shreds of clouds. The air smelled of river water, the tang of algae that always rolled in with the fog. A pleasant night, just cold enough to be cozy, for those who had sweethearts to cuddle up against.
The thing was, Ghost hated the drug business. Not for moral reasons – he wasn’t sure he had any morals anymore, and maybe never had any to begin with – but for practical ones. Every time Ghost went out to make a drop, he increased the odds of being stopped and frisked…and being put away for possession with intent to sell. Dogs were automatically suspicious in the eyes of the law, so he had a high chance of being singled out anyway. Raising a kid on a single income – and a shitty income at that – meant he couldn’t afford to get put away. What would happen to Aidan? His mother didn’t want him; who the hell would she pawn him off on? And Ghost couldn’t even contemplate allowing Duane to take care of his kid. Duane had practically raised him, and that wasn’t a ringing endorsement.
And he didn’t like the idea of personally flooding the streets of his city with narcotics.
So maybe there was a moral reason after all.
He wondered idly if Maggie knew why he’d had to go out tonight. She probably did. And if she disapproved, it hadn’t stopped her from watching Aidan.
He was pulled from his thoughts by the sound of an approaching bike engine.
“You’re late,” he told Roman when he was parked in front of him.
“And you’re early,” Roman shot back. “It’s a miracle.”
Ghost clenched his jaw and counted to ten in his head. “Can we just do this?”
“Yeah. I’m supposed to meet Mandi after this.”
Mandi Bishop, who was currently engaged to a doctor.
Ghost swallowed a disgusted sound and swung onto his bike.
Roman’s company was the kind that sucked the joy out of everything. Even riding. What should have been a pleasant ride outside of the city, the cold wind scraping at his face, tunneling up his sleeves and cooling the nervous sweat along his collarbones, was instead spent hating the man who rode beside him. The trip seemed to drag, mile after mile with nothing to look at besides Roman’s loathed silhouette in his peripheral vision.
And then they reached the rendezvous point, and Ghost realized how awful things really were.
