Better off Dead A Lucy Hart, Deathdealer - By Eva Sloan Page 0,5
and gritted his teeth and looked up in exasperation. He hated when she did that. He was certain she would land on her feet, unscathed, but he hated when she willfully tossed herself from such heights.
“Show off!”
Chapter 2
THE ALARM bleated a call that could easily wake the dead. Lucy rolled over and squinted at the clock. She’d managed to sleep through twenty minutes of its racket, yet didn’t feel a bit rested. What she did feel was sore and old. She pulled herself up in bed and turned the evil alarm clock off instead of punching it, hard—the damned thing had cost her twenty-three ninety-five, plus tax. She looked around at what had been her bedroom for the last six months and once again felt poor.
Sore and old and poor...life was good.
It was a room in her Gram’s house, actually the room her mother had grown up in. It had one little window, which she had forgotten to draw the curtains on, so now the afternoon sun was making the generic white walls glow like halogen floodlights. Her private bathroom had been bigger than this room.
She kicked off the covers and stumbled over a pair of black Dr. Scholl’s sneakers, and then walked gingerly on her always aching feet to The Smallest Closet in the World!
Of course, she was reminded, as she opened its door to the half-dozen mix-and-match Wal-Mart sales rack outfits that comprised her entire wardrobe, that she really didn’t need the space.
When the FBI and the IRS had returned to Lucy’s family’s house three days after they’d taken her father into custody, it hadn’t been to tell them why they’d taken him—though they’d found out at the arraignment that he was charged with money laundering, tax evasion, extortion and, on a horrifying side note, immigrant slave labor trafficking.
No, they came for the house, the cars (including her red Mustang) and then went room by room and took anything of value. In her case she lost absolutely everything. Every piece of jewelry, cell phone, and every item of clothing and pair of shoes—even her damn socks had been designer label. She got off with the tank-top/sweatpants ensemble she’d been wearing only because she was trying to work off some of her worry on the treadmill in the home gym.
They also froze all of her father’s assets, so all her mother left with was three hundred dollars in cash, no mode of transportation, and a suitcase of clothes that were deemed to have no value.
On the other hand, Lucy’s brother Seth left the house with almost everything he owned, including some of his video games.
She stood out on the sidewalk in front of their five-hundred-thousand-dollar Spanish villa style house with her mother and brother, waiting for the taxicab an agent had taken pity on them and called.
Her mother, Lila, had had two choices as she’d stood there waiting for the taxi. They could have probably afforded to stay in a flea bag hotel overnight, and then they’d be flat broke in the morning. Or, they could take a cab to the bus station and buy three tickets to her grandmother’s place in Four Corners—a tiny town about an hour east of their home in San Bernardino.
Standing in her bedroom in Four Corners, California, she took in the blue and yellow uniform that hung in her closet (replete with a tacky sun visor emblazoned with The Golden Arches) and was reminded again that she worked at McDonalds.
Her father had rolled over on his law partners, to secure a ten-year prison sentence served in a minimum-security facility. But that deal hadn’t included Uncle Sam returning any of her father’s assets to the family, so her mother was now a cocktail waitress in nearby Barstow, and Lucy had to take the bus just to get to work every day.
That alone had been an all too humbling experience, and the only thing she clung to now was the hope that one day she’d be able to buy herself a used piece-of-shit car. That way she could drive herself to McDonalds for the next ten to twenty years.
Dreams of marrying a multimillionaire or going to a good college had gone up in smoke months ago when she’d first taken the bus to work, had missed her stop, then had scrubbed a public toilet as her initiation into the fast food service industry. She had felt that her life had gone down that toilet the instant she’d flushed it.