Force Page 2

  But I didn't want to be interested.

  Right away, he turned his Cam Newton smile on me. "Hi Camie."

  I leaned against the doorframe and acted like I couldn't care less that Denver's leading heart wrecker was standing in the dimly lit corridor outside my apartment. "Where's Leo?"

  "His car didn't start this morning," Morris answered. "So he sent me."

  I looked at him a long moment. "What did you do to his car?"

  He laughed. "Why are you so suspicious?"

  "That doesn't answer my question," I countered.

  He faked a sigh. "I opened his hood and unplugged a few wires. Nothing serious. He'll figure it out in a few hours."

  "And why did you do that?"

  He cocked his head and grinned. "You know I've always had a thing for you, girl."

  "And you know I'm not interested in your thing," I told him straight out.

  "Yeah, but I thought if you got to know me, you might change your mind."

  "That's a lie," I threw back at him. "You thought if you did me a favor, I'd owe you."

  "That too," he admitted with another grin.

  So, I could have called Leo and told him how to fix his car but that would have taken time. And (like I said) I was SO ready to get going and hit that junk in that dry gulch out east. Besides, Morris has a truck instead of a car. And it has a winch. And that meant I could bring home more, bigger stuff. So, I planted my hands on my hips and gave him a blunt stare. "Let's get one thing straight right now, Morris Samuels. If you take me out to Limon today, I do not owe you anything. Ever."

  He didn't even try to hide his disappointment.

  "So you can either go back home, help Leo with his car and send him back over here or we can make this trip together. No strings attached. Got it?"

  "Got it," he said, squaring his shoulders. "I'll just have to rely on my charm and other attributes."

  And he had plenty of other attributes but I wasn't falling for any of them. Because he was Morris and I knew his interest in me wouldn't last more than a few days. Then he'd be off looking for his next victim. I mean girl. Morris is the world's biggest player.

  Besides, I know you can't count on guys. (Except for Leo. But he doesn't count. Leo barely qualifies as a guy, to be honest.) And the more good-looking a guy is, the more unreliable he's gonna be. I don't want a guy like that. I want a knight in shining armor and nothing less. But I'm not naïve and I know that guys like that don't exist in real life. Only in fairy tales and cheap romance novels.

  So here's my short-term plan. Get through high school without a boyfriend to distract me and save enough money to go to college.

  And here's my long-term plan. Get through college so I can get a job and support myself. Then maybe look around for a knight in shining armor. If there is such a thing. And if they aren't all taken by the time I'm ready to start looking.

  "Don't you like boys?" Morris asked about fifteen minutes later as his big black truck accelerated onto I-70.

  "No," I told him without removing my gaze from the road ahead.

  "Do you—"

  I cut him off. "No, I don't like girls."

  "Well, what do you like?"

  "Money," I answered.

  Morris nodded quietly for several seconds. Then he squinted in my direction. "That makes sense. What do you do with all the money you make selling old stuff? I mean the that money you don't give—"

  "Save it," I cut in.

  "What for?"

  "An education," I snapped.

  "And what will that get you?" he asked with an annoying snort.

  "What do you mean?" I asked, frowning at him.

  Morris shrugged his wide shoulders. "What d'you want to study?"

  I opened my mouth and realized I didn't have a good answer ready. I was so focused on "getting ahead" I hadn't given much thought to what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. "Something that pays a lot," I growled. "So I can live in a real house instead of a crap apartment."

  "You don't like living at the castle?" he taunted.

  Ugh. The apartment building where I lived was a four-story block of gray brick with crenellations at the roofline. Uh-huh, crenellations. Like the ones that go up and down on a castle wall…except a lot lamer because it's not a castle. Those stupid crenellations are the thing I hate most about where I live. What kind of nutcase tries to make an apartment block look like a castle, anyhow? And what kind of idiot names the place "Castle Block". That sort of thing is always a big, fat epic fail.

  "Don't get me started about that stupid fracking castle," I snarled.

  "Okay, don't chew my head off," he snickered. "I was just trying to make conversation. What do you have against me, anyhow?"

  "Nothing," I growled. "I just refuse to become another notch on your bedpost."

  "Headboard," he corrected me.

  "What?"

  One of his eyebrows arched upward. "I carve all my notches into my headboard."

  "Woohoo," I muttered under my breath.

  "And after that, I get a tattoo to commemorate the event."

  Sourly, I slanted a look in his direction and checked out the ink that covered most of his arms and crawled up his neck. "I'm thinking you must have used up every inch of prime real estate by now."

  "You'd think so," he answered. "But I've saved an inch or two for you."

  "Forget it," I told him.

  "C'mon," he argued with a low chuckle. "What are you holding out for?"

  "My thirteenth birthday," I growled.

  He laughed. "I know you're sixteen, Camie."

  "Yeah, and that's probably all you know about me."

  "That's not all I know about you," he argued with a smile.

  "Oh, really?" I challenged him. "What else do you know?"

  He got a superior look on his face. "I know you're pretty."

  I pushed out a sigh. Yeah, I'm pretty. My mom was runner up for the Miss Louisiana title when she was twenty-one. I got her looks and her tall, slender frame. But I wanted more from a guy than what Morris was offering. I wanted a guy who noticed that I had more going for me than just my looks. "I bet you say that to all the girls."

  "And it usually works," he answered with another Cam Newton smile.

  "Keep going," I invited him dryly. "What else do you know about me?"

  "Uh. You're really nice and really hot and I can't stop thinking about your legs."

  "My legs," I echoed flatly.

  "They'd look good wrapped around my—"

  "Other than my legs and my looks," I cut in before he could finish, "what do you know about me?"

  "I know everything I need to know," he threw back.

  "You don't know anything," I told him on a short sigh. "I could be a murderer. For all you know, I lure guys to my place and kill them in cold blood."

  "I know you're not a killer," he snorted. "I've seen you around town. I've seen the way you help—"

  "How about this?" I cut in again. "Do you know what my name stands for?"

  And for a second he looked unsure of himself which was a REALLY different look for the Big M. But it wasn't long before he recovered. "Should I?" he asked with no small amount of arrogance.

  "If you knew anything about me, you would."

  "Camilla?" he guessed.

  "Nope," I answered.

  "Camille? Camellia?"

  "Not even close," I told him.

  "Cameo!" he shouted, but he was wrong again. And he spent the rest of the trip trying to guess what my name is short for, which was fine with me because all I had to say for the rest of the trip was, "No", "Uh-uh" and "Wrong".

  The thing is…Morris should have been able to figure it out. He knows all about me and my family. My history. He knows that my father raised me after my mom bailed. He knows what is THE most important thing in Darryl's life. And he knows my dad has been chasing the same old dream since long before I was born. So he should have been able to guess where I got my name. His brother figured it out way back in
middle school. But Leo is sworn to secrecy so I knew he hadn't shared the story with Morris.

  We drove through Limon at ten-thirty and pulled off a few miles east of town. Fields of short, dry cornstalks bordered both sides of the dirt road. And off in the distance, I could see a big red barn lifting above the acres and acres of brown fields. I couldn't see the gulch I wanted to check out but I knew where it was and knew there was an old dump near the top of it, where it was deepest.

  So we jogged across the field, hoping we wouldn't attract any attention even though there didn't seem to be anyone around. And we found the ravine, right where it was supposed to be, a jagged slash cutting through the short cornstalks not too far from the road. We headed uphill, expecting to find the dump in five to ten minutes.

  At first I felt exposed because the gulch wasn't real deep where we dropped in. So if you were looking out across the flat fields, you'd see two dark heads bobbing along the ground. And if a farmer were to see us, he might come out to ask us what the hell we were doing on his land. But pretty soon, the walls got steeper and higher and we were completely hidden from view. Pushing out a sigh of relief, I picked up the pace, knowing we had about half a mile to hike before we reached the pile of junk I'd seen on those satellite maps.

  Naturally, the floor of the ravine was uneven and littered with rocks. There wasn't any flowing water but the ground was damp and muddy in places. So you had to take your time and pick the place you wanted to put your foot. And even though I was being careful, I stumbled a few times. But I managed to regain my balance before Morris could help, which I figured he was dying to do. Anything to get his hands on my hips.

  So I was busy thinking about how I didn't want to do that when I tripped on something buried in the mud…and fell flat on my face.

  I moved quickly, leaping back to my feet before Morris could help.

  "What the heck was that?" I exclaimed, wiping the mud from my jeans and checking out the wall of the ravine where it had slumped into the ditch. I prodded a lump of dirt with the toe of my boot. It should have been relatively soft, but it wasn't.

  Morris shrugged and hunched his shoulders against the morning chill. "A rock covered in mud?"

  I prodded some more with my foot and found something hard beneath the muck. Really, I was just trying to catch my breath and put some distance between Morris and me. But while I was at it, I uncovered something that looked like toes reaching for the sky.

  "What the…" I started, then went to work for real, digging in with my hands and clearing the mud away from the strange object. "It looks like…a foot," I panted a few seconds later.

  Morris slouched against the opposite wall of the ravine, his hands in his pockets. So far, he'd kept his white running shoes relatively clean. "It isn't a dead body, is it? Because if it is, we need to get out of here. Like now."

  I shook my head. "It's too solid to be a dead body."

  "It could be petrified," he suggested.

  "If it's petrified, it wouldn't be a body," I told him.

  "What would it be, then?"

  "It would be some kind of artifact…that was worth a fortune."

  "A fortune?" he echoed, finally sounding a little interested.

  "Yeah, give me a hand, will ya?"

  "Okay," he answered. "But if it's valuable, I'm in for half."

  "Whatever," I answered.

  Together, we pushed the wet soil away then tugged on the ankle we'd exposed. Really, I was only expecting to come up with a foot or a leg. I wasn't expecting it to be attached to a whole…body, complete with a set of wings. I wasn't expecting to get all of it.

  Of course, it was covered with mud so I couldn't get a good look at it but I'd never seen anything like it before. So naturally, I wanted it. It was probably only some kind of memorial statue stolen from a cemetery (like one of those guardian angels you see watching over a grave) but what was it doing out there in the middle of some farmer's field? Not that it really mattered, because someone had thrown it away and I was determined to have it.

  "You take the feet," I told Morris. "I'll carry the other end." That's when I found out Morris's interest in me was limited. Not that I was surprised or anything. When it comes to girls, guys want it all. They just don't want to have to work for it.

  "I'm not carrying that thing all the way down this gulch and across the fields to my truck," he told me, point blank. "I don't care if this thing might be valuable. I'm not gonna ruin my shoes over it."

  I gave him an exasperated look. "Well, I'm not leaving without it, Morris, so figure out how you want to do this."

  So we decided to take a chance and bring the truck through the cornstalks over to the edge of the gulch. And we used Morris's winch to load up as fast we could, all the time hoping nobody saw us. But Limon's a quiet place and the fields were deserted and we got away with it. And an hour later, we were cruising down I-70, heading back to Denver with my muddy prize in the bed of the truck.

  Morris's truck has an extended cab so I couldn't see my graveyard angel, even though I looked back over my shoulder several times. But I could hear it sliding around every time Morris accelerated or braked or veered around a bend in the road. And a few miles out, I told Morris to slow down because I didn't want the thing to get chipped or damaged.

  And all the time I'm rubbing my dirty hands into my jeans, I'm thinking about the next step and making plans. Since I live in an apartment, I didn't have a good way to clean the thick mud off the statue. But Morris and Leo had a hose at their house just north of downtown and that would work just fine. I couldn't wait to find out what was underneath all that dirt.

  I started getting impatient when we reached the city and had to slow down, stopping at several red lights. And I didn't even notice that I couldn't hear anything sliding around in the truck bed for the last mile or so before we got to Morris's place. It wasn't until we reached his house that I discovered my loss.

  I jumped from the passenger seat, my feet hitting the asphalt driveway as I hurried around the back and dropped the gate before Morris could get there.

  But the statue was gone.

  Chapter Two

  The loss of the statue was a disappointment…but life's like that. Full of disappointments. I've survived a whole lot worse. And I've learned that you can't let stuff like that drag you down and shape your life.

  But for the next several weeks, I spent quite a bit of time wondering what had happened to my graveyard angel. The most likely explanation was that it had bounced out of the truck when we traveled over a bump. Or slid over the side when we were going around a bend. Not that it would have been easy to get out of an enclosed bed with the tailgate up. But what other explanation was there?

  Yet deep down, I knew we hadn't driven over a bump that was big enough to dislodge anything from the bed. And I was pretty sure I'd heard it sliding around when we stopped at the first red light in the city.

  I supposed it could have been stolen, someone jumping into the bed and removing it while we were stopped at a light. But how would someone have even seen it? And why would they have taken it?

  I even retraced our route through the city on foot, going back to that first red stoplight and hoping to catch a glimpse of the statue on the side of the road or lying in the gutter, maybe in pieces. But I didn't find anything. Only office workers hurrying to their jobs and street people lifting hopeful eyes as I searched the city.

  And in the end, I had to accept the fact that my angel was gone and it wasn't coming back. I got on with my life even though I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd missed out on something really good that I could have sold for a lot of money…or kept in a corner of my bedroom if it was something I liked a lot. Eventually, I made a second trip to Limon (with Leo this time) and returned to the ravine, finding the pile of junk I'd never reached on the first trip and bringing home a few things I sold online.

  Two months after I lost the statue, I was plugged into my summer routine, making the rounds of the thrift stores and du
mpsters early in the week, hitting the garage sales on the weekends and playing softball three afternoons a week (Tuesday, Friday and Saturday).

  Early one dumpster-day morning, I tied the laces on my running shoes and stuffed some money into the back pocket of my jeans, making sure I had an assortment of small bills for the mall. Then I stopped at Mrs. J's door on the second floor. She doesn't get out much so I usually check with her to see if she needs anything while I'm out.

  On the city's the sunny streets, I rolled the sleeves of my plaid cotton shirt up to my elbows before I got too far from home. Even though it was early, it was warm out. And on my way to the 16th Street Mall, I found old Phil Everton crouched against a wall outside McDonalds. I tucked a five into his cup.

  "Thank you, darlin'," he mumbled, his mouth splitting into a smile that creased his weathered face like a rumpled paper bag, his blue eyes a stark contrast to his dark tan.

  I threw a grin back over my shoulder at him.

  Living in the city, I know most of the regular panhandlers. I know which ones are real and which ones are scamming. The scammers don't get anything from me. But I don't mind helping out drifters. I can usually tell which ones need help and which ones are on-the-take due to my "gift".

  Uh-huh, I have a gift…if you want to call it that. I don't usually talk about it and nobody knows about it, except for Leo and my mom. Mom says I probably got it from my great grandmother who was some kind of Voodoo Priestess back in the day. I'm talking chickens and feathers and scattered blood. Which is totally weirding when you think about it. Anyhow, when I meet someone for the first time, I get a flash of insight into their character. Just a quick glimpse that lets me see the thing that makes them happiest, or the thing they're most proud of.

  Weird, huh? Crazy weird.

  So when I see someone new begging on the mall, I can usually tell a few things about them. The ones who really need help are usually flashing on the last good meal they had while the scammers are fixated on money and the drunks are thinking about a bottle. It's as simple as that. It's no big deal and really not terrifically useful in day-to-day life. Especially when most of the guys my age are flashing on the last video game they won. Or the girl they were with on Friday night…which I'd really rather not see.