Pieces of My Heart (30 page)

I couldn’t be more stunned if he’d said he just swam across the ocean. The only thought anyone had ever given me had been when they saw me and thought of a way to hurt or humiliate me—peers and parents alike. To have someone think about me outside of that, to
miss
me, is beyond imaginable. I study him, trying to decide if he’s just teasing me, setting me up for some elaborate prank, but honestly, he seems sincere.

“Then I saw you that first day and you ran away, and I’ve been trying to talk to you since. You don’t seem very open to conversation,” he says somewhat wryly. He looks at me, waiting for me to say something. I sigh.

“Things change,” I say. He cocks his head, trying to understand what I mean. “Life here isn’t the same. I’m not the same.”

He nods, accepting this. He comes and squats in front of me.

“Yeah, you’re a lot taller,” he says gravely. I look up at him, and see his downturned mouth, then he glances up at me through his lashes and I see the gleam there. I can’t help it—I laugh. This brings a smile to his face and I quickly cover my mouth to stop the sound. His smile falls, and he reaches up to pull my hand down.

“You shouldn’t do that. I had forgotten what a great smile you have.”

I spin away from him, tears threatening again. “You shouldn’t say things like that,” I mumble, rolling my pants back down—a gesture not without pain.

“Yeah? Why not?” He sounds genuinely curious.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed the way things are at school. I’m everyone’s favorite loser. There isn’t anyone more fun to pick on than me.”

He’s silent so long, I finally turn back toward him, and see anger on his face again, jaw clenching. I’m taken aback, worried that he’s angry with me. I glance at the bank on the other side of the stream again, wondering if I can make a run for it with my knees so sore. I know I can, of course I can. I’ve had to run other times with worse pain than this.

“Yeah, I’ve noticed. It really makes me mad.”

I choke out a strangled laugh at that.
He’s
mad about that? I shake my head.

“I want to be your friend,” he says, and my stomach tightens.

“You can’t be my friend. No one can be my friend. It’s social suicide.”

He reaches out and brushes his finger lightly over the bandage knotted on my hand, leaving an improbable trail of fire.

“I can honestly say that even if that is true, I don’t care.”

I let out a frustrated groan. “Of course you care. Everyone cares. Do you want to be treated like me? Trust me when I tell you that you don’t.”

“Trust
me
when I tell you I don’t care. I think you give both yourself and some of these people too little credit. Besides, if they’re that immature, who cares?”

“Spoken like someone who’s never lived in my shoes.” I look off to the east, staring at the rugged mountains.

He’s silent for a minute, head down. “You’re right. I haven’t been there. I’m not asking for a sacrifice by either one of us. I’m just asking for a chance to be your friend.” He gazes at me, compelling me to meet his eyes.

“Why?” I ask, barely above a whisper. “You don’t even know me anymore.”

He smiles, and I feel my resolve weaken. “Yeah, but I’d like to.”

I shake my head and grimace. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking for anything. I won’t expect any more than you want to give. Mostly just for you to not ignore me during photography.”

The corners of my mouth lift a little at that. “I was kind of wondering how I was going to do that when we had to partner for labs.”

He grins.

I look at him dubiously. “I don’t know about the friend thing, though . . .”

“Yeah, you might be right. You might not like me too much when you get to know me,” he teases.

Fat chance.

“Or you me,” I return, dead serious.

“I doubt that,” he’s smiling, but his voice is solemn. “But we won’t know if we don’t give it a chance, right?”

A thousand reasons why we shouldn’t bubble up, but he squeezes my upper arm in supplication, much as you might with someone who really is a friend. The arguments die on my lips.

“It’s your funeral,” I mutter insolently.

He laughs, and then holds out his hand to me. “Friends?”

I stare at his offered hand, before finally placing my hand in his. He gently squeezes, careful of the injury, then stands, drawing me up with him.

“Come on, friend, I’ll give you a ride home.”

“No!” He looks at me, surprised at my vehement refusal, but I can’t let him drive me to my house. “I mean, that’s okay, I like to walk. I walk home every day.”

“Okay,” he accepts this without argument. When I begin to climb the hill, my bruised knees that have been sitting in one position long enough to stiffen betray me and I groan involuntarily.

“What?” His concern is immediate, as he looks me over.

“Nothing, it’s fine. I think I hurt my knee a little.”

I try to play it off, intending to grit down on the pain and walk as if nothing’s wrong. My body, never my ally, has other ideas and two limping steps give me away.

“Alright, enough of the martyrdom,” he says, sweeping me up into his arms as if I were a small child. Surprised, my arms wrap around his neck to hold on, embarrassment causes me to duck my head. He strides easily up the hill, not putting me down until we reach his car. He sets me down, opens the door, moving a pile of books for me to climb in.

“These are yours,” he says, handing me the pile. “You dropped them outside the school today.” No reference to the fact that the reason I had dropped them—and skinned my hands and knees—was that I had been running from him.

“Thanks,” I mumble.

He closes the door, walking around to climb in the driver’s side. It feels surreal, riding in a car beside a boy, almost as if I’m normal. I direct him to within about a block of my house.

“Stop here, I’ll walk now.”

He turns to look at me, an argument ready, but something he sees in my face stops him. He nods, and pulls over.

“You sure you’ll be okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Hold on,” he says when I reach for the door handle. He jumps out, running around the car to open my door. I pretend that my knees aren’t blaring at me, and he pretends not to notice as I clamber out.

“You know, you’re a little taller, too,” I tell him, amazed at my boldness.

He laughs as he gets back in, gives me a wave, turns his car around and drives off. I watch him go, wonder thrumming through me—right alongside the suspicion.

Available Now

From Author Sherry Gammon

Unlovable

Preface

Before I could reach his lifeless form, Alan grabbed my face and lifted me onto my tiptoes; my battered lungs begged for air. Dragging his slimy mouth along my neck he muttered, “I’ve waited so long to have you I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to control myself as long as I’d hoped.”

He stopped and pinched his eyes shut before dropping me back to the ground. “No, Alan, you can wait a bit longer for your revenge,” he counseled himself while stroking my hair. “But maybe a little taste wouldn’t hurt.” He jerked my face to his, dropping his foul lips to mine.

Something inside me snapped. If I was going to die, I’d go out fighting, so fight I did. I raked my fingers over his face, digging up flesh, and while forcing my thumbs into his eyes, I brought my leg up between his, hard, crushing his groin.

He stumbled and fell on top of me, pinning my battered body to the ground. His weight added unwanted pressure to my already tender ribs, and I screamed out.

However, Alan’s screams overshadowed mine; he was in serious pain. I scratched, bit, and punch every inch of him I could make purchase with, holding nothing back. Still reeling from my well-placed knee, he spewed out a list of profanities a mile long as I tore free and forced my broken body across the kitchen floor toward the gun. I was almost to the drawer, when, from his prostate position, he hooked my foot, dragging me back several feet.

I looked back at his sweaty face, now scarred and bleeding thanks to my fingernails. He leered at me. “You. Will. Pay. For. That.”

“
A
bsolutely pathetic!” You’d think I really was an awkward high school senior instead of a
top of my class,
MET agent. Yet, here I sat at my ridiculously oversized desk, spinning a cheap Bic pen in tight little circles, lamenting my lack of courage.

“Get a grip, Seth, and talk to her already!” I shoved the pen back into the desk drawer and slammed it shut. Only my self-imposed chastisement didn’t help. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get up the nerve to ask Maggie Brown out on a date to save my life.

I crossed over to the window, frowning down at my scarred cowboy boots clapping against the linoleum floor. Not exactly my first choice in footwear, but they did provide me with a convenient place to hide my sidearm. It’s not as if I could meander around the high school with a gun strapped to my chest.

Okay, focus. Maybe I should try making small talk with her; that’s assuming I don’t choke to death on my tongue first.

While considering a few other lame scenarios, my eyes wandered over my dreary surroundings. It was your vintage government-issued office. Aside from the obese desk that lay sprawled across the center of the room, cold and lifeless, a rusted gray filing cabinet sat stuffed in the corner, with a gray pleather chair leaning cock-eyed against it. A seriously out-of-date laptop, which was, believe it or not, gray, hummed loudly in the top right corner of the desk. The only bright spot of color in the room was the half-empty, blue and red Diet Pepsi can parked in the center of my desk.

Fortunately, I seldom had to be in my office. I worked throughout Upstate New York with the Mobile Enforcement Team, or MET. Being a specialized unit of the DEA, our job is to work specifically with local authorities, helping dismantle drug trafficking in urban areas. For the past five months, I’d been working undercover at Port Fare High pretending to be a student. Heroin use was on the rise in Port Fare, with three reported deaths from overdose last summer alone. The dealers made it stronger, therefore more addictive, and cheaper.

My assignment was to
buddy up
to the popular kids, figure out who used it, and from whom they bought the stuff. That meant I had to spend most of my days with the school’s cheer captain and her groupies. Thanks to my wealth, she and her clique readily accepted me into their circle. She was the quintessential social climber and one shallow girl. I learned right away she didn’t use heroin, but I wasn’t too sure about some of her friends.

Three other agents worked undercover at the school besides myself. One of them worked with the different sports teams, another covered the known drug users at the school, and the last was a
floater
. His job was to blend quietly into the background.

I hated deceiving the students, but the dealers had to be stopped before more people lost their lives.  I appeased my guilty conscience by telling myself we weren’t after the kids who used the stuff; we wanted their supplier.

The case actually began last winter. I was on an assignment near Syracuse with my team captain, Booker Gatto. We were tracking a particularly unscrupulous drug dealer, trying to learn who his supplier was. The scum dealer’s MO, Method of Operation, was to hang out around the local elementary schools. He’d lace candy and other goodies with drugs before offering it to them in hopes of getting them addicted. Nine children lost their lives before he was killed in a shootout at a local pool hall. We lost one agent that day. He left a wife and two small children behind.

The dead dealer’s fingerprints and dental records turned up a big fat zero. His identity went to the grave with him, and we buried him simply as John Doe. Booker found the situation suspicious and had the case file sealed to the public to protect the team from retaliation.

We never learned who his supplier was, but we did stop the flow of heroin into the area, temporarily anyway. Unfortunately somewhere close by another piece of trash lurked in the wings to fill the void.

Word on the street was Rochester was the new hot spot for our elusive supplier, more specifically, the community of Port Fare. My town. Since volunteering for the assignment at the high school, I’d grown to know these kids. Mostly good kids, some a little lost, but overall they formed a good group. I made it my personal mission to catch the low-life if it was the last thing I did.

My thoughts of the high school brought me back around to my other problem. Maggie. She didn’t fit into my assignment at the school, and I seldom—actually
never
got up the nerve to talk to her. The few times I ran into her in the hallway, my tongue had swollen to the size of a small whale, essentially blocking off the oxygen supply to my brain. Last week she celebrated her eighteenth birthday, and could I spit out the words
Happy Birthday
when I saw her in the library studying? Nope.

Before I could tear myself up again, my office door flew open. In sauntered my team leader and best friend, Booker. No, he was more than a friend; he was like a brother to me.

I laughed at him in his black, full dress uniform, including the standard issue Glock pistol tucked into a leather holster at his waist. I hated our wool uniforms, too itchy. Luckily for me, jeans and tee shirts fitted the required uniform of my current assignment, along with the boots, of course.

“What’s up, Book?” I went back to my desk and sat down, my pleather chair squawking out in protest.

“We got a new lead on the heroin ring. It’s the most promising one yet.” Booker shoved the door closed behind him, causing the window to rattle. Flipping open a thin manila folder he took three photos out, tossing the top one onto my desk.

“This is Felix Hoffman,” Booker said, tapping the photo of a seedy-looking man with stringy red hair and a pockmarked face. “He’s a small-time thug with a record a mile long, mostly for dealing marijuana, but it seems he has new aspirations. He was seen in Applegate Park talking to a couple of new guys last week.”

“I’m guessing we don’t know who these
new guys
are?” The man in the photo had
creep
written all over him. Definitely not someone I’d want to run into in a dark alley, not without my Glock, anyway.

“Nope. However, word on the street is they have a powerful contact.” He dropped onto the corner of my gray desk. “Do you remember that stabbing last week in Applegate Park?” I nodded, and he continued, “Cole’s the doctor assigned to her case. He called me this morning when she came out of the coma, and I went over to interview her.”

He set the file down and pulled out a small blue notepad from his breast pocket, flipping over a few pages. “Her name is Michelle Stringer, eighteen years of age—she's only a few years younger than you, kid." Booker shook his head. "She went into the park looking to score some grass, and came across our new friends instead. They intro’d themselves to her simply as Bill and Alan and tried to convince her to buy some heroin from them. She said she wasn’t interested, but this guy Alan insisted that she try it. He said he only offered the good stuff, and she wouldn’t regret it.

“He began bullying her around.” Booker’s eyes darkened as he spoke. He held zero tolerance for men who abused women. Understandable on all accounts, but especially after what he’d been through. “But it seems our Ms. Stringer is a second degree black belt,” Booker said. “She got a few good kicks in until this Alan character drew out a pearl-handled knife from his pants. He proceeded to shove her into their car.”

“What kind of car?” I sat up and reached for the pen I’d been spinning earlier, along with a slip of yellow paper from my desk drawer.

“Beige,” Booker said, rolling his eyes.

“That narrows it down.” I sat back, tossing the pen onto my desk.

“She did say it had several rust spots,” he offered, jotting something down in his notebook. “Ms. Stringer stated Alan fastened her wrists together with cable ties, and that he really got off on cutting her up with his knife, telling her he could make her scream for hours before she died if he wanted.”

“Guy sounds like a real…charmer,” I said, forcing back a coarse remark.

“After he finished with her, she was kicked to the curb, literally, and left for dead. An older man out walking his dog found her shortly after and called nine-one-one. It’s probably the only reason she’s alive, and the fact that Cole was the doctor on duty when she was brought in. I don’t believe she would have made it otherwise. The guy’s a miracle worker.”

“What about the other guy? Bill, right?”

“Alan and his knife demanded most of her attention. She did say Bill wasn’t too happy about Alan using a knife on her. The two men had an intense argument, but Alan was determined to punish her for kicking him. When Alan threatened to carve Bill up if he didn’t shut his mouth, the argument pretty much ended.”

“Did she give us a description?”

“She guesses Alan to be about six feet tall and Bill to be a couple inches shorter. Both men were dressed in black polyester shirt and pants, and Alan had on shiny black ankle boots with silver zippers.”

“They’re definitely not fashion icons,” I said. “How about hair and eye color?”

“Slicked-back, dirty blond hair for both men. As for their eyes, is bloodshot considered a color?” he frowned.

“So they were high.” That wasn't unusual. Selling was how most dealers supported their own habit. “Anything else?”

“Only that Alan wore a one inch silver plug in his right earlobe.” Booker flipped the notebook shut and tucked it back into his pocket.

“Is she willing to work with a police sketch artist as soon as she’s feeling stronger?” Hopefully, this was the break we’d been looking for. 

“Yes, I’ll run the drawing through the files, and maybe we’ll find a match.” He slid the next photo onto my desk.

“Meet Barbara Brown. This old driver’s license photo is the only picture we have of her. I’m still trying to find something more recent,” Booker said, before swiping a drink of my now warm soda. He winced and set it back down.

“Haven’t you ever heard of ice, kid?” Ignoring him, I looked over the photo. The woman’s blue eyes looked familiar.

“It seems she’s somewhat of a recluse,” Booker said. “We’re not even sure how she’s involved yet. We do know that Hoffman’s been over to her house almost daily for the past few weeks, and he doesn’t come empty-handed.”

“Drugs?” I asked, scanning the info beneath the photo. It stated she was only twenty-five years old when the picture was taken, yet she looked much older. I didn’t pay much heed since it was a DMV photo, and when have they ever been flattering?

“Again, not sure. Some days he brings over a few grocery bags full of something and leaves an hour later empty-handed. Other days he comes with nothing more than a bottle of vodka, but when he leaves he has the weighted-down grocery bags from before. We thought about bringing him in for questioning until he was spotted with the guys in the park. Now we’re hoping he’ll lead us to them. Something tells me they’re the big time players we’ve been after.”

“What makes you so sure there’s a drug connection between him and Barbara Brown? Hoffman could be her boyfriend.” I didn’t doubt Booker, I just felt bad for the poor woman.

“Because of her.” He dropped the last photo from his file onto my desk. “Ma—”

“Maggie.” I sat up sharply, picking up the photo. “I know her. She’s a senior at Port Fare High. What does she have to do with this? Is she this woman’s daughter?” I knew the answer before I asked the question. The eyes, they held the same pained expression.

“Yup. Physically she’s a textbook case, kid. She’s gaunt, with jutting bones, and she has dark rings around the eyes. She could be the poster child for Heroin Chic.”

“You’re wrong about Maggie. She’s brilliant. She has a four-point-oh GPA, and she spends her lunch hour in the library most days. No one’s mentioned that her mother does drugs, but I've heard she drinks a bit.” That was a mild exaggeration. I’d overheard Maggie’s ex-boyfriend Zack Finkle telling some of the guys in the locker room that her mom was an all-out drunk.

“Maybe I’m wrong, but look at the photo, kid. Something’s going on with her.”

I absentmindedly ran my thumb across Maggie’s cheek in the glossy eight by ten before realizing Booker watched me. I grabbed my warm soda and took a swig. Yuck! His face split wide in a grin.

“So, you’re sweet on her?”

“No . . . I . . . well, she’s nice. The other students genuinely like her. In fact, she was dating this obnoxious kid until last week, and he’d been whining about her being a goody-goody because she wouldn’t smoke grass with him. Supposedly, that’s why they broke up. I sincerely doubt she’s doing heroin. Or cocaine,” I added before he could.

“Does she seem out of sorts when you talk to her?”

I cleared my throat. “I haven’t actually talked to her.” I dropped my gaze, wanting to hide my anxious expression.

“She makes you nervous, huh? Must be love. Puppy love, anyway.”

“Shut up, Booker.”

“Kid, you’re in the presence of a master. Here’s what you have to do, my callow friend. You joke around with her, tease her a little, you know, get her to laugh. Make it so
she’s
the nervous one. That is how you’ll win the lady’s heart.”