Intoxicated (13 page)

 
He needed to make her see that he was serious about changing. Maybe he should take her out on a real date, pull out all the stops. The next time they parted, she’d know the meaning of ecstasy or he’d turn in his man card. She saw through his bullshit; he liked and respected her for it, but she didn’t know the real him. What he really wanted seemed a much more daunting task. He wanted her respect and that required a whole different skill set, one he wasn’t sure he possessed.

His cell phone vibrated again.
 

“What the hell do you want?” he asked when he saw the caller ID. “I said I would be there in a minute.”

“Jack, I’m scared. Please hurry.” Chelsea’s voice sounded small and uncertain.
 

“Did it ever occur to you that I might be in the middle of something? That maybe I can’t just drop everything the minute you call?”

“I’m in trouble. I messed up. Please come and get me. I’m scared.” Her voice quivered, thick with tears, words slightly slurred.
 

“Fine. I’m on my way. Just hold tight.” He sighed and turned the screwdriver in the ignition of the old truck, willing it to life with a half dozen pumps of the gas pedal.
 

He made a quick stop at Felony to pick up his gun and prayed he wouldn’t need it. Randy was there, stocking coolers and cleaning the bar. He raised a ruddy eyebrow when he saw Jack take the gun from the safe. Something in Chelsea’s voice scared Jack, made his gut clench as it did when danger lurked. The cadence of her speech made it evident that she was using again. God only knew what he would find when he reached her. The address she gave him put her somewhere around the abandoned glass factory near First Street. A derelict part of town littered with crack houses and prostitutes, it was nowhere any self-respecting person would visit in broad daylight, let alone at night.

 
Even though he knew better, he couldn’t help but blame himself for this fiasco. He’d been the first one to put a needle in her arm and she’d liked it way too much. Some people were like that. He’d been able to break the cycle, but Chelsea… Remorse and guilt squeezed his gut until he could barely breathe. The moment Chelsea arrived on his doorstep he should have put her on a bus back to Chicago or – better yet – driven her home himself. Not that she had anywhere to go when she got there. Her parents had washed their hands of her years ago. That left him to pick up the pieces every time she fell apart and he was so very tired of it.

CHAPTER NINE

Jack stood on the curb of Eighth Street between his pickup truck and the burned out chassis of a Cutlass Supreme with Randy at his side. He had tried to persuade his friend to stay behind, but the stubborn ass had insisted on coming along. For the third time, he pulled the crumpled piece of paper from his back pocket to check the address written on it. He looked from the paper to the house and back to the paper with a growing sense of unease.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Randy pressed his lips together in a tight white line, worry clouding his gray eyes.
 

“God, I hope not,” Jack said and felt a rush of gratitude that Randy had come along. By the looks of this place, he might need some back up. Chelsea had a tendency to walk hand in hand with disaster.

The house sat back a ways from the narrow street, cloaked in shadow and looking a good deal shabbier than its dilapidated neighbors. The moon receded behind troubled clouds, leaving the overgrown yard obscured by darkness. Plywood covered the doors and windows, the grayed wood splattered with red graffiti like splashes of blood on a corpse. No signs of life existed beyond the rusted tricycle resting against the broken porch steps, an eerie reminder of better days.
 

Jack removed the gun from the waistband of his pants and checked the clip one last time as he moved up the sidewalk, and prayed that he wouldn’t need it. Randy followed on his six, stealthy and dangerous as a lion stalking its prey. It was like old times, back on the streets of Chicago, when they’d walked on the wild side.

The front door was boarded shut but the covering over the back door had been pried away and swung to the side when Jack tested it. Randy pressed flush against the back wall of the house, pistol in hand. Jack raised a hand indicating that his friend should wait. Randy frowned but jerked his head in acknowledgment.

Jack thrust aside the plywood and took a tentative step into the house. He stopped for a second inside the threshold and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. At the same time, the moon emerged from its hiding place. Beams of moonlight filtered through the cracks of the boards over the windows and cast eerie pools of blue and gray light into the room. The floor was littered with trash; fast food wrappers, dirty clothing, and wads of aluminum foil used for cooking up the drug
du jour
. A sickening sweet scent overlaid the heavier odors of human excrement and unwashed bodies. Jack took a deep breath and pulled his t-shirt up over his nose and mouth to keep from gagging.
 

His heart sank as he peered through the kitchen and into the vacant dining room. Dirt and age smudged the once white walls, checkered by light square patches where pictures had once hung. Someone had spray painted a man’s face, twisted in an expression of agony, mouth open and garish in the moonlight. It stared at him in surreal disapproval. He thrust an arm out the door, motioning Randy in behind him. He had seen this kind of place before and knew the dangers that lurked behind every corner. Junkies could be freakishly strong and irrationally violent when stirred up. The two men moved silently through the debris into the living room as carefully as if moving through a mine field. Two dirty mattresses rested on the floor covered with a pile of rags. Not rags actually, but bodies wasted by drug abuse, barely recognizable as human. They didn’t stir as Randy and Jack approached and Jack wondered if they might be dead.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Randy said in a choked whisper and crossed himself.

Jack bent down and placed a hand on the nearest shoulder, shook it roughly, and was greeted by the upturned face of a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. The snub nose and hollowed cheeks were smudged with dirt, the sunken eyes glazed and unseeing. An unhealthy gray tinged the boy’s skin as if he hadn’t seen daylight for a very long time. No doubt he was a runaway. Jack had an unsettling vision of the boy’s mother, sitting at her kitchen table sick with worry, staring at her telephone as she waited for a call that might never come. That boy could have been him if he hadn’t changed his ways, he realized, and felt a rush of sympathy.

“You can’t save them all, Jack,” Randy said, as if reading his thoughts.

Right
. Jack sighed and shook the boy again who had slumped back to the mattress in oblivion. “I’m looking for a tall girl with straight black hair and blue eyes. Her name is Chelsea. Have you seen her?”

With great effort, the boy focused in on Jack’s face. The boy shook his head but Jack squeezed the thin shoulder harder.

“Are you sure? A pretty girl about this tall?” He raised his hand to his chin in approximation of Chelsea’s height.

The boy’s eyes sharpened and he nodded then pointed up the steps to the second floor.

Mingled relief and disappointment surged through Jack all at once. Part of him had hoped she wouldn’t be here, that this rescue mission would be nothing more than a waste of his time. The other part of him seethed with anger that she had once again put him in this situation. God only knew what horrific sights lay in wait for them at the top of the stairs.

None of the bedrooms had doors and he could see bodies in all of them. The first bedroom held several people who blinked at him without seeing, shuffling around like rats in the darkness. A boy and girl writhed in the corner, deep in the throes of sex, undisturbed by his presence.
 

He found her in the second bedroom, curled up on a pile of rags in the corner next to a gaunt stick figure of a guy with stringy blond hair. They were curled up together like shrimp in a tangle of skeletal limbs. Several emotions coursed through him as he caught sight of delicate features beneath the matted dark hair; shock at her state of dishevelment, anger that she could put herself in such danger, and sorrow that someone he had once cared for had fallen into such a deep pit of despair.

He crouched down beside her and brushed the hair from her face with a tender hand. She stirred and smiled but didn’t open her eyes.
 

“Chelsea?” He took her by the arm, shocked by the frailty of her bones, and shook her. “Chels, wake up. It’s time to go home.”

“Jack?” She blinked up at him with sleepy eyes. “Come to bed, Jack.”

“Get up, Chels. It’s time to go,” he said, his voice sharper than he intended.
 

“That’s okay. You go ahead without me. I’ll be there in a minute,” she said and fell back asleep.

“No, we’re going. Get. Up. Now.” He shook her again, hard enough to make her head roll on her shoulders. She roused long enough to take a swing at him then collapsed again.

Fuck!
It couldn’t be easy. Nothing was ever easy with her. He scrubbed his face with his free hand, curbing the urge to throttle her. With a sigh, he shoved his pistol back into the waistband of his pants and began to disentangle the stick figure guy from her. The guy groaned and rolled over but never woke up. At least that was one thing he wouldn’t need to worry about.

 
“Jack, you want to hurry it up?” Randy’s urgent whisper floated up the stairs. He’d stayed at the foot of the stairs to keep an eye on things. “We’ve got company.”

From the back of the house came the banging of car doors and hushed voices floated up the sidewalk. Jack paused from his dealings with Chelsea long enough to peak through one of the windows. A Cadillac Escalade gleamed in the moonlight. A well-dressed young men accompanied by a guy clad in a leather jacket, his hair shaved into a Mohawk, walked toward the house. Dealers, no doubt, come to collect or sell or maybe both. The last thing he needed was an altercation with Chelsea’s dealer. They always hated losing a customer.
 

“We’re leaving, Chels. Right now. Get your ass up.” He poked her with the toe of his boot. She moaned but didn’t move. He bent down and scooped her up, throwing her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She weighed no more than a child and he carried her easily down the stairs.

Randy met him at the bottom of the stairs. “We can go out this way,” he said, motioning toward a door in the living room. “It goes out to the garage.”

Jack adjusted Chelsea’s weight over his shoulders and nodded for Randy to lead the way.
 

CHAPTER TEN

A few minutes after ten o’clock on Friday night, Ally and Karly stepped out of the cab in front of Felony. The line of admission comprised of various leather clad bikers and head-bangers intermingled with a surprising number of college students, snaked down the sidewalk and around the corner of the building. The bouncer recognized Ally and waved her to the front of the line amid grumblings from those left waiting. With Karly in tow, she stumbled down the dark maze of hallways, an eerie fog swirling around their feet. Music vibrated through the walls like the rumbling of distant thunder. Butterflies fluttered in Ally’s stomach as each step took her closer to Jack. Just knowing that he roamed within the same four walls sent her pulse into cardiac arrest territory.
 

“This is crazy,” Karly said eyes wide like a kid at Disneyland.

“Just wait,” Ally replied as they stepped through a ragged hole knocked in the wall fondly dubbed “The Rabbit Hole” and emerged into a different world on the other side.

Laser lights and strobes shattered the darkness like strikes of lightning timed with the music. The band raged on the stage, dripping with sweat, instruments ablaze in front of a standing-room-only crowd. Girls in scanty clothes writhed in metal cages and on platforms around the perimeter of the dance floor. Flames danced on large flat screen TVs placed at intervals around the space like windows into an inferno. Those were new, Ally noted, and gave the place an edgy, modern feel.

“This is awesome,” Karly shouted into Ally’s ear over the heavy riffs of bass guitar. “Now, where’s your guy?”

“He’s probably in the back – at the bar,” Ally shouted in return and motioned toward the back of the room. As if on cue, Randy appeared at Ally’s elbow. Word traveled fast. The bouncer at the door must have alerted Jack.
 

“Come with me. We’ve got a couple of seats for you at the bar,” he shouted, leaning down from his impressive height to her ear, and nodded in that direction. The crowd parted respectfully for Randy as he cleared a path across the dance floor.

Jack looked up from the cash register when they approached and a broad smile complete with dimples lit his face. Any prior uneasiness dissipated under the warmth in his eyes. She smiled back at him. How any man could look so sexy was beyond her. He wore a weathered leather newsboy cap low over his eyes and an open white dress shirt that revealed the word
Revolution
tattooed across his abdomen. He could have walked straight out of the pages of
Rolling Stone
magazine. She made a mental note to ask him where he bought his clothes.

“Looking good,” he said with an appreciative sweep of her figure. “Nice dress.”