Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

“So that’s it, then,” I said.

She pushed past me to the bathroom vanity and wrenched open the doors. The gopher’s ice cream container rattled as she threw it on the counter, seed spilling inside.

“What the hell is in there?” she asked.

“A gopher,” I said grimly. She peeled a corner of the container up and peered inside, shut it tightly.

“Right.” She sighed and left the room. In the living room, I watched her snatch up her clipboard.

“Having pets is not one of my parole restrictions,” I said, my throat tightening.

“No,” she said. “But maintaining steady accommodation is. This building is rent-controlled. Pets are prohibited. I’m putting it in your report that you have deliberately sabotaged the conditions of your parole.”

“Wait,” I said. “Look, it’s not my—”

“There’ll likely be a review of your circumstances following this revelation, Ms. Harbour.” She wrote something on the paper with a flourish. “You can expect a call from the department within the next twenty-four hours.”

This is what you wanted, I thought. A mixture of dread and sweet, sweet relief flooded over me, warm honey sliding down my neck and shoulders. This is what I had been playing at all along, creeping softly into dangerous territory, following Sneak’s siren call. This was why I had let a possibly wanted lifelong criminal sleep in my house, sit on my couch and do drugs. Why I had gone with her to visit a crime lord. Why I had accepted dirty money and a gangster car from that crime lord, why I continued to pursue a dangerous investigation that was none of my business. It was this moment, the instant it all came crashing down. The fall. The backward plunge. I’d felt it when I was arrested, the sickening ease of knowing my life and freedom were no longer in my hands. My job was gone. My child was gone. My friends were gone. In a few days I’d be back in Happy Valley, where nothing mattered, where I was required to do and think and be nothing.

You don’t have to jump off a cliff. You just have to lean back, put your arms out, and let the gravity take you. Float away.

I found my fists clenching as Jasmine walked to the door and closed it behind her.

Give up, my mind said.

“Fuck you,” I said aloud.

I went to the bedroom and ripped the sheet back from the mattress. They always look under the mattress, but they never pull off the sheets. The stack of notes Ada Maverick had given Sneak and me was fanned under the spot where my pillow would rest, some slipping down the bed. I gathered a handful and folded it as I ran to the front door and out across the lawn.

Jasmine Bahru was sitting in her red Kia, writing more words on her clipboard. I knocked on the window and she wound it down.

“Don’t hand in that report,” I said. She stared at me. I steadied myself against the car with one arm, my hand hanging down in Jasmine’s view, and let a couple of the notes fan from my fingers. Jasmine looked at the notes, then at me.

“Are you offering me a bribe, Ms. Harbour?”

“You came here to fuck me,” I said. “That much was clear from the moment you walked in. The gopher in the bathroom is a stretch, and you know it, but you were determined to catch me on something. I don’t know what you’ve got against me, but let me try to even things out.”

Jasmine sat, watching me. I stood on the curb with nothing to lose. She could see it. The emptiness, the wildness. She reached up and took the notes from my fingers, counted them. Eight hundred bucks. She peeled the page off the clipboard and handed it to me. I watched her drive away, feeling tremors start in my fingers and feet.

“Sneak?” I called when I got back to the apartment.

“Help!”

I rushed to the bathroom. Sneak’s legs and ass were hanging out of a manhole in the ceiling, her skirt caught on the edge of the opening. Rippling cellulite, white butt in a purple G-string. I grabbed her legs and did little to help her flop to the ground.

“How the hell did you get up there?”

“I’m a gymnast,” she reminded me. “And a drug addict. The easy part of both jobs is getting up. It’s coming down that’s hard.”

I pondered the deeper philosophical meanings of that while I examined the paper Jasmine had given me, sweat-damp and smeared from my hands. It was filled out in full. She had been citing me for breach of efforts to maintain stable accommodation, as she declared she would.

I was familiar with parole reports. What I was looking for was not the report’s breach contents, but a line close to the top of the page. I usually did little to arouse the suspicions of authorities. I lived a good, clean life. There was a box that normally remained empty. But this time, there was a name in the section that read Recommending officer, the space to record the police or prison authority who had called the parole office, recommending someone check up on me.

“Detective Al Tasik,” I read, touching the page.

My phone rang. I went to the counter and picked it up. An unknown number. Ada Maverick’s voice was unmistakable.

“I’m gonna give you an address,” Ada said. “Meet me there.”

“Why?” I asked. “Is everything okay?”

“I got your boy here,” she said. I heard a whimpering sound in the background, like a dog makes when someone treads on its toes. “Dayly’s boyfriend. Come help me play with him.”

JESSICA

Jessica had been on hobo detail plenty of times as a patrol cop. Things had been different back then. Most of the ragged, windswept men she herded out from behind dumpsters or off the sides of busy, dusty highways had been crazy somehow. She’d heard every possible rendition of the world’s coming demise from the alcohol-reeking