Lawless (King #3)(3)

“What’s your name, Darlin?” he asked.

“I’m Thia Andrews,” I said proudly, extending my hand out to him like my dad had taught me to do when introducing yourself.

“Thia?” he asked, giving me the same weird look most people did when they heard my name for the first time.

“Short for Cynthia, but not like Cindy. There are twelve girls in my class and three of them are Cindy’s so I’m glad I’m a Thia and not a Cindy.” I stuck out my tongue and mimicked sticking my finger down my throat. I hated the name Cindy, although when my dad proposed Thia as an alternative my mom refused to use the new nickname and had stuck to calling me Cindy. “What’s your name?”

He took my hand in his. “They call me Bear, Darlin’.” His skin was warm, except for the cool metal of his rings. I looked so small and pale compared to Bear, my hand looked like doll hands. “I got a buddy who shook hands as a kid too.”

“Daddy says it’s polite.”

“Your daddy is right.”

“Your friend who shakes hands, is he nice like you?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t exactly say I’m nice. But my friend? He’s…let’s just say, he’s different,” Bear said with a laugh.

“Different is good. My teachers say I’m different cause I got pink hair, although they also say I have a speaking-out-of-turn problem,” I said, with all the prolific knowledge of a ten-year-old.

“Sometimes different is real good, kid,” Bear agreed.

“Is your real name Bear?” I asked. “Is your last name Grizzly or something?”

“Nope,” he said. “Bear is just a nickname my club gave me. All the members go by nicknames, except we call them road names.”

“You’re in a club?” I asked with excitement. “That’s so cool! If your real name isn’t Bear though, what is it?”

“Can you keep a secret?” he whispered, looking around to make sure no one was listening. “I haven’t told anyone my name in years. Even my old man calls me Bear. But my real name? It’s Abel. And now you’re one of the only few people who know that.”

Abel

“That’s a really great name.” Although Bear fit him too. He was taller than my dad and he had a lot of muscles and his hands were huge like Bear paws.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a clip with folded bills in it. More money than I’d ever seen.

More than what was in my Buzz Lightyear piggy bank in my room at home.

More than what was in Emma May’s register.

Bear pulled off three of the bills and set them on the counter. “What’s that for?” I asked, looking down at his hand which was partially covering the money as he slid it over to me and released it.

“That, is three hundred dollars.”

“What do you want to buy? I can run over to the hair place and get Emma ’cause this dang register—”

“I’m not buying anything. It’s for you. For your help today. For not—”

“Three hundred bucks for not calling the sheriff?” I asked, catching on to what he was offering.

Three hundred dollars to a ten-year-old might as well have been a million.

“Consider it a thank you for not shooting him,” Bear corrected.

“That’s okay. Emma May would have been mad about the blood anyway.” Emma May hated a mess.

Bear laughed again and I smiled. “You’re funny, kid. You know that?”

“I am?” I’d been called crazy, weird, strange, talkative, but never funny. I decided that I liked being called funny.

“Yeah,” he said pushing the money closer to me. He looked up and around the counter. “No cameras in here?”

“I never seen one, but Emma is cheap, that’s what Mama says cause she used fake flowers at her wedding, so maybe she didn’t buy cameras.” I blurted, eager to say anything to elicit another smile from Bear.

“Make sure you keep this money safe. Hide it somewhere. Don’t tell anyone. It’s a secret between you and me,” he said with a wink. I tried to wink back but only managed to blink both my eyes at him like the genie on the old reruns of I Dream of Genie. Bear reached over and pushed some of my crazy stray hairs out of my face, tucking it back behind my ear. His fingers were rough but gentle, and when he withdrew his hand I wanted nothing more than for my hair to spring back out so he could do it again.

“I don’t want your money,” I blurted. I’d gone to the dollar store last week with my three-dollar allowance and couldn’t find a single thing I really wanted. Three hundred some things were way more than I could ever want.

“Well in my world when someone does a favor, we repay that favor,” Bear said, resting his chin on his hand. My eyes darted to the ring on his middle finger, a skull with a shiny stone in the center of the eye. Bear looked down, following my gaze. “You like that?” he asked, taking the ring off his finger.

“Yeah, I never seen nothing like it.”

Bear held it between two fingers and looked down at it like he was seeing it for the first time. He was quiet and his forehead scrunched like he was thinking about something the same way mine did when I did my math homework. “I have an idea,” he said, setting the ring on the counter. “This ring? It’s a promise. In my club, when we give this to someone it represents a promise.”