CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(13)
“Come on,” Stone urged. “Fifteen minutes. He’ll never know it was gone.”
I let out an exasperated breath. “Is getting arrested on your bucket list?”
Stone drummed his fingers on the hood of the Cadillac and broke into a slow smile. “Nobody’s getting arrested, son. The Gnome is probably asleep in his coffin up there in the big house. He’ll never know. We’ll just ride through the Burgerville drive thru and bring it right back.”
“Why?”
“Because we can. Because I’m tired of walking. Because the f*cker is tempting fate by leaving his shiny cock compensation tool out here with the keys inside.”
I paused. “Keys are really inside?”
Stone reached through the window and seconds later the silver keys came hurtling through the air. I caught them easily and stared at the innocent way they laid inside my palm.
“Well?” Stone prompted and when I looked at him I understood the game. I knew that boy better than he knew himself. It was all a grand old play. He expected me to say the hell with it and toss the keys back through the window. We would continue on our merry way and go stuff our faces full of greasy fast food. We would laugh at dumb shit and insult each other and be glad when the sun sank below the horizon. We would pass another uneventful summer evening bullshitting with friends and non-friends beside the banks of the canal or in the shadows of the old train bridge or at the base of the butte. There weren’t a lot of options to choose from when it came to Emblem nightlife. Then we would stumble home in the darkness, fall into our sloppy beds and let the day end without a single thing out of the ordinary happening.
“Okay.” I shrugged nonchalantly. “Let’s go.”
Stone’s face changed as I twirled the key ring around my finger. I kept my eye on him as I closed the distance to the car and opened up the driver’s side. A twinge of doubt crossed his face. He hadn’t been serious. He’d been expecting me to scoff and stalk away. He would have followed with laughter and plenty of teasing all the way to Burgerville and beyond. But now that I’d accepted the challenge there was no backing down, not for Stonewall Tiberius Gentry.
“I’ll drive,” he said coolly but he shot an uneasy glance around our quiet surroundings. The sprawling house beyond the gate watched impassively, a stucco giant that wouldn’t have any reason to get excited over car thieves. Overhead a carrion bird circled, a bad omen. I watched as he noticed, took a step back, then set his jaw.
“Nope,” I told him, jumping into the driver’s seat and feeling a dangerous thrill. The car was hot and smelled of leather and money. With a flick of my wrist the engine purred to life and I cranked up the air conditioning.
Stone climbed into the passenger side and shut the door quietly. I only knew he was uneasy because I understood him so well, always had. He was older than me by ten months but that head start had always seemed irrelevant. We enrolled in the same kindergarten class and hit just about every landmark of experience together. People were always forgetting that we weren’t twins and sometimes even I forgot. Stone had always been right there with me and it was unlikely he remembered that brief breath of time before I’d been around. So we weren’t twins. But we weren’t like the other brothers we knew either.
Stone flashed me the cocky grin that drove all the girls to weak-kneed idiocy. I grinned back at him.
Suddenly his smile dropped a notch. “Fifteen minutes,” he warned with a raised eyebrow.
I shifted to drive and eased the car down the street, feeling bad and feeling damn good at the same time, like I always did when we were doing something we shouldn’t, from scribbling on our bedroom wall with magic markers to tossing the principal’s chair into the town pool. It was an ancient feeling as old as my memory. It had always been this way.
We didn’t make it to Burgerville. As we closed in on Main Street it occurred to me, rather belatedly, that we weren’t invisible. In fact we were attracting a fair amount of attention cruising around in the former mayor’s luxury sedan. Emblem wasn’t a tiny town but it wasn’t a huge one either and probability dictated there were a few people who recognized the Gentry brothers and wondered why they were sitting in the Gnome’s Cadillac.
No cops though. No cops anywhere in sight. Stone shifted in the seat beside me when we stopped at the light on Main and Terrace. He was facing forward with a passive expression. Beyond him I caught a glimpsed of slack-jawed Mrs. Perry behind the wheel of the Honda stopped beside us. She owned the only flower shop in town. She was a friend of our mother’s. All at once the shittiness of this whole escapade struck me. If I had any sense I would just haul ass back to that fancy street before someone more important than Mrs. Perry took notice of us.
“Hey, look at that.” Stone pointed over my left shoulder. “We’ve got company.”
A horn blasted and I turned away from Mrs. Perry’s wide eyes to see Tony Cortez laughing in his prehistoric Camaro. The thing looked like it was one gearshift away from disintegrating but I was in auto shop with Tony and knew the car’s insides looked a whole lot better than its outsides.
Tony nodded his head and gunned the engine. Stone flipped him off but it was all in good fun. Tony was all right most of the time but just at that second in time his smug grin annoyed me. He figured I didn’t have any nerve at all. I gunned the Cadillac in answer.