Risk (Gentry Boys #2)(49)

“What the hell are you doing out here?”

He held up a bottle in the shadows. “Having a beer.”

“At six am?”

“Yeah. You want one?”

“No.”

Chase smiled and took a long drink. I waited until he was done. “Were you waiting up for me?”

Chase looked up at the fading moon. Sunrise was near. “I was talking to Cord.”

I leaned against the wall and rubbed my eyes. They burned. I needed sleep. “Where is Cord?”

“He went back to bed.” My brother took a deep breath in the dark. I could feel his eyes on me. “Did you have fun watching the fight?”

I didn’t answer right away because I didn’t want to talk about that. I wanted to remove it from my mind. “The guy got pretty f*cked up,” I admitted.

Chase let out an odd chuckle. “Fucked up. Yeah, he did.”

“What, were you there or something?”

“No. I told Cord where you were so he made some calls.” Chase tipped the beer bottle back and emptied it down his throat. “I guess you didn’t hear.”

“Hear what? Jesus, Chase, can you come clean about what you’re getting at?”

“He’s not f*cked up, Creedence. He’s dead.”

“Bullshit.” I said the word. I heard it hanging in the air with a note of hope. But I knew Chase was telling the truth.

“Afraid not, Big C. He was deposited at the county medical center with a crushed skull. Bleeding in the brain or something. I don’t know. He’s dead all the same.”

The ground no longer felt solid beneath my feet. I tried to summon the image of Emilio’s self-assured grin but couldn’t.

Chase stood up. He pulled his arm back and then let the beer bottle fly through the air. It landed somewhere in the parking lot with a mighty crash.

“Damn,” he said softly. “I missed. I was aiming for the windshield of that f*cking Escalade.”

“Yeah, you never could throw for shit.”

We stayed in the darkness together, side by side, until the earliest rays of light began to play across the ground. Chase had always been a talker, a wisecracking pain in the ass with a smart answer to all of the good and the ugly in life. But as he stood next to me I felt his struggle to come up with some words, any words, in the face of awful things.

“Think I’ll go get some sleep,” I finally said.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I’m gonna shower so I can smell pretty for class.”

“You don’t have any class, remember?”

His laugh came out as a cough and he started to go indoors. Suddenly he pivoted and hugged me briefly, awkwardly. He didn’t say another word before retreating inside. When I heard a door shut and the shower start I went to the kitchen. I’d left a pack of cigarettes on top of the fridge. Filthy habit, I didn’t pick them up often. They reminded me of someone I didn’t like to think about.

I went back to the porch and lit a cigarette but didn’t inhale. I knew there was no point in lying down. Sleep wasn’t coming. I wished I hadn’t left Truly’s bed. For the hours I’d spent holding her, my mind had stopped warring with itself for a while. But I was afraid if I stayed then I would blurt out all the crap that was weighing on my mind; the fears I had for myself, for my brothers. I didn’t have any right to shove all that trash on her.

Truly was still something of a mystery. She was caring and gorgeous and she excited the living hell out of me. She’d given hints that her past was complicated but I didn’t push her to talk about it. I just listened to whatever she did want to tell me. There was some painful history there; that much was clear. If she thought any of it would matter to me enough to let go of her then she was wrong.

The sun quickly began to exert its power over the desert and I started to sweat sitting out there on the patio. I heard Chase trudge off to whatever he did in a day. Saylor and Cord woke up and milled around in the kitchen, going about their morning routine. From what I heard of their conversation, it sounded as if he hadn’t filled her in on what happened last night. I listened to her trying to brightly chatter away before she paused, asking him what was wrong. He gave her single syllable answers and then kissed her before she left with a sigh.

A few seconds after I heard the front door close, Cord poked his head out on the patio.

“You can come inside now,” he said.

I sighed. I’d burned through the whole pack of cigarettes although I’d only inhaled a few times.

Cordero sat on the couch. He was wearing one of his frayed old shirts and sporting new ink on his left arm, a complex tribal tattoo.

“You do that?” I asked, pointing.

He didn’t look. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at me with the same blue eyes I saw in the mirror every day. “Sit down, man.”

I sank down next to him. Chase always cranked the air conditioning way up. As I leaned against the couch the blowing air chilled my sweaty skin. I figured Cord might lecture me about running off to watch the fight last night without even telling him anything about it. Then he’d probably drag me to the gym for a workout and to try to sort out everything he might know about beating a fighter like Jester.

You.

When I closed my eyes I saw that son of a bitch pointing his finger at me with a grin. When I closed them again I saw Emilio’s head lying in a pool of blood.