It had taken more charm than he generally cared to exert these days, but he’d managed to convince the lady living across the street to give him a call if she saw anything, and that woman? Old Mrs. Werner was nosy. If anybody had been snooping around, more than likely she’d notice something.
It didn’t let him breathe any easier, though.
He didn’t think he’d ever breathe easy again.
Please . . . you must do this for me . . .
Blocking the echo of a woman’s voice out of his head, he pushed the door open. Before he climbed out, though, he reached below the seat and took out the one thing he never went anywhere without.
The butt of the Sig Sauer P250 fit solidly in his hand. Slipping the safety off, he looked toward the passenger seat. A solemn pair of eyes looked back at him. “Come on.”
The boy sighed and slid out of the car. “Do we have to do this every day?”
He’d asked the same question yesterday. He’d asked it the day before. He’d keep asking it, Gus knew. It would only get worse, because the boy wasn’t exactly a child anymore, and that rebelliousness that always crept out during those years between child and adult was getting ever closer.
Still, there were things in life that didn’t care that Alex wanted some freedom. Things that didn’t care that the boy just wanted to live a normal life.
Gus’s job was to make sure the boy lived. Period. Staring into a pair of eyes eerily like his own, he said quietly, “Alex.”
That was all he said. Alex’s lids drooped and his skinny shoulders slumped, but he climbed out of the truck, plodding around to stand next to Gus and stare up at the old house.
Alex grumbled under his breath. Gus ignored him as he looked around, eyes never resting in one place. Before he shut the door, he grabbed a bag from the back and slung it over his left shoulder and then pulled out his denim jacket, draped it over his arm and hand to hide the Sig Sauer.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Nope.”
“There’s nobody here,” Alex said, his voice sullen, bordering on rude. He mumbled something else and Gus stopped, looked back at him. The anger in the boy was getting worse, flaring closer to the surface today than it ever had.
“We’ve talked about this, Alex,” he said quietly. “You want to be angry with me, you got a right. But remember what we talked about.”
Gus didn’t blame him. The kid had every right to be pissed. Gus wasn’t a twelve-year-old kid who’d had his entire life uprooted and he was pissed.
“This is so fucking stupid,” Alex snapped.
Stopping in his tracks, Gus turned around and stared at Alex. “Watch your mouth,” he said quietly. “Your mother raised you better than that.”
Alex sneered. “Yeah, she raised me better but she’s dead—”
The boy’s voice cracked. And as the anger faded away into agony, Gus reached out, hooked his hand over Alex’s neck. “Yeah. She’s dead. But she wanted you safe. And you’ll be safe, Alex. Now come on . . .”
You must promise me . . .
A hard, shuddering breath escaped Alex but then he pulled away, looking at Gus with glittering eyes. The tears he wouldn’t shed still shone in his eyes until he blinked them away. “I told you, there’s nobody here.”
“Yeah. I heard you. We’re checking anyway.”
Twenty minutes later, while Alex oversaw the dinner of macaroni and hot dogs, Gus stood at the sink, trying unsuccessfully to scrub the engine grease from his hands. He’d worked eight hours at the construction site, then picked up a hundred bucks helping one of the guys from the site do some work on his car. He was filthy, he was tired, and he was hot. He wanted to plunge his head under the cool stream of water coming from the faucet, but he just kept scrubbing at the grease on his hands.
The phone rang just when he’d decided to give up. Hurriedly rinsing his hands, he grabbed it, spying Elsie Werner’s number. The sweet, incorrigibly nosy lady from across the street. “Hello, Elsie . . . need me to come clean out the pipes again?”
“Well, now that you mention it, the one in the bathroom is running rather slow,” she said.
Gus would swear she clogged them up just so he could come over so she could ogle his ass. He’d had plenty of women ogling his