Bending the Rules (22 page)

“He probably got a better offer than slapping paint on buildings for you.” But Jase shifted uneasily. Because all three of those kids had stuck with their obligation a helluva lot better than he had ever expected. And Henry’s old man sounded like a piece of work. He blew out a breath. “All right. Give me his address. I’ll swing by his place.”

“Thank you. This was the day we were going to start doing the fun part. I can’t imagine him missing it, even if he did pretend it was a great big pain in his behind.”

“Yeah, yeah.” But he shook his head at her unrelenting faith in the teens she taught. “The address?”

She rattled it off, and he wrote it in his notebook, along with the name and location of the coffee shop where she was waiting with Danny and Cory. “When I know something, you’ll know something,” he said curtly and snapped his phone shut.

His informant was no longer in sight and it turned out Henry didn’t live that far away, so within ten minutes Jase was knocking on the youth’s tenement door. He didn’t really expect an answer and was surprised when Henry himself pulled open the door.

The kid looked equally surprised to see him. “Shit,” he muttered in disgust. “It’s you.”

“You were expecting the blonde herself? Ms. C. tells me you stood her up.”

“So she sent out the big dog to haul me in? I thought you didn’t like us anymore—we ain’t seen you around much. Whatza matter, Ms. C. wouldn’t let you into her undies?”

“Don’t make me hurt you, kid.” He wished the words back the minute he saw Henry wince and gentled his tone. “Everything okay with you?”

The boy’s chin shot up. “Macadoodledandy.”

“Then let’s go. They’re waiting for you at the Fremont Coffee Shop.”

Henry’s narrow shoulders hunched in. “I ain’t going.”

“Why not?” He studied the boy for bruises but didn’t see any. Not that that meant a helluva lot—Henry was covered from neck to ankle in baggy black clothing.

“I don’t wanna, all right?”

“Ms. Calloway says this is the fun part.”

He scowled. “I did what I was supposed to do. I painted all those fucking walls to cover the tagging. I’m done.”

“There’s just one problem with that,” Jase said softly, because he could see that the boy was genuinely upset. “Ms. C. said to fetch you. So fetch you I gotta do.”

“I can’t draw, okay?” Henry yelled.

He blinked. “What?”

“She says this is s’pose to be the fun part and let’s do some art, but I’m not like Danny G. and Cory. I can’t draw.” He snatched up a brand-new-looking sketch pad that had been under a tin of colored pencils and thrust it out at Jase. “She gave us each one of these and said to work up some ideas for the wall. But I can’t.” He whipped the cover back, showing Jason the ragged edges where page after page had been ripped out. “I got ideas, but I can’t draw ’em!”

And it was eating him up, Jase saw. He rubbed his temples. “Okay, let me think about this.” Doing so, he came to the only possible conclusion. “I have to call her.” “No!”

“It’s better to tell her straight up what’s going on, Henry. She’ll handle that a helluva lot better than you just blowing her off. You agree that she’s a pretty nice woman, right?”

“Yeah,” he said fervently.

“Then you gotta trust her. It’ll break her heart if you up and disappear on her. She was really worried about you, you know. That’s why she called me. Plus, you think she’ll just give up on you? The woman is a pit bull—once she gets something in her head she doesn’t let loose until she has what she wants. So let her help us figure this out. Because, trust me, she won’t just say ‘oh, well’ and walk away. She’ll hound you till your ears bleed. And you might as well save yourself that, because in the end, kid, you will rejoin the fold.”

“Fine,” Henry muttered, hitching a shoulder as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. But he turned aside to swipe the heel of his hand over his cheeks.

Pretending he didn’t see the tears the boy was mopping up, Jase walked to the far side of the small living room and called Poppy.

She exclaimed in distress after he explained the situation to her and said in a low, fierce voice, “You tell that child we can fix that. I can’t turn him into Rembrandt—or even Gary Larson—overnight. But I can walk him through some basics and there are other options for this project besides the actual drawing. I’ll prep Cory and Danny. You just get him down here.”

Pocketing his phone, he turned back to Henry. “She said everything’s going to be all right. Grab your stuff. Apparently Ms. C.’s got a muffin with your name all over it.”

Prepping or no prepping, he was impressed with the other two teenagers when he and Henry arrived at the café a short while later. They didn’t jump all over the kid for holding things up the way teens could do, but instead simply moved over to make room for him at the table.

Then he recalled the boys’ horror the day Cory had her meltdown. They’d asked him, of all people, how they should act around her and had actually followed his suggestion that they refrain from commenting on it unless she brought it up first.

Apparently these kids had each other’s backs.

“Check this out,” Cory said and flipped open her sketchbook with one hand as she reached for Danny’s with the other. The two started pitching their Northwest-themed graffiti idea so fast and furiously, half the time they both talked at once.

“So?” Cory demanded when they finally stopped to draw a breath. “Brilliant, right?”

Henry stuffed an oversize bite of muffin into his mouth, then buried his nose in the glass of orange juice Poppy had placed in front of him. But if he hoped to avoid the conversation, he didn’t know teenaged girls.

Or any woman, for that matter, Jase thought wryly.

“So?” she insisted, giving him a poke. “This is where you’re supposed to say, ‘Brilliant, Cory.’”

“What do you care what I think?” he muttered. “Looks to me like you and Danny got it all figured out and it’s not like I got sumthin’ to contribute. I don’t even know how to draw.” His thin shoulders hunched up under his ears.

“You know how to color, though, right?” Danny said easily.

Henry nodded slowly, losing a fraction of the tightness gripping his narrow frame.

“This is going to be the biggest project any of us have ever done,” the older teen said.

“No kidding,” Cory agreed.

“And it’s going to take all of us. So how about Cory and me and Ms. C. do the drawing and you and Detective de S. help with coloring it in?”

Wait a minute. Jase mentally jerked upright. How did he get to be part of this equation?

Danny stole a pinch off Henry’s muffin and popped it in his mouth. “And were you paying attention to the part where we’re gonna hide trolls and stuff inside the bigger picture?”

“I’m gonna do fairies,” Cory interjected.

Danny gave Henry a look. “You see what I’m dealing with here, bro? We need more man-stuff to counterbalance her girlie influence.”

“Hey!” she protested.

Henry sat a little taller in his chair. “Lizards,” he said emphatically and turned the sketchbooks around to study the drawings more closely. “Lizards are cool and come in all shapes and sizes, from those little rock ones to Komodo dragons.”

“Reptiles.” Cory sighed. “Wonderful. You’re such a guy.” But her lips curved up.

He ducked his head again, but this time Jase watched him hide a little smile of his own. “Lizards are cool,” the boy said to the preliminary drawings in front of him. “They’re like the last of the prehistorics. And we could slip them into all kinds of places. Like here,” he said, pointing. “Or maybe here or here.”

Poppy shoved her dishes away and said, “Open up your sketchbook, Henry. I want to show you something. Cory, if you can spare a page or two, I’d like to use yours for a minute.”

The kids did as she asked and she hitched her chair closer to Henry’s. She dug two pencils from out of her massive tote and handed one to Henry. “Do what I do,” she instructed and drew a long oval in the middle of the page.

He drew a similar one on his pad. She added another, smaller oval toward the top of the first one, then attached a long, skinny triangle to the larger oval’s bottom curve.

He followed suit and after several more minutes of adding a line here, refining or erasing an existing section there, a lizard began taking shape on both pages. Henry gawked. Then he looked up at Poppy, his face alight. “I drew that!”

“Yes, you did,” she agreed. “I can walk you through a couple of other types of lizard as well, and maybe a snake or two. The trick when you’re beginning is to do them a layer at a time.”

He tore his glance away from the reptile he’d drawn to look at her.

As if answering a verbalized question she said in her easy way, “Look, if we start over from the beginning and use two different colors of lead, you can see both how we begin with the core shapes and how we refine the design from there. It won’t turn you into an artist overnight, and you’ll have to practice at home from the sketches we work on today. But it’s a start, huh?”

“Yeah.” He stared down at the lizard he’d drawn. Cleared his throat. “Yeah.”

Jase leaned over to study the sketches with a critical eye, surprised to see that while Henry’s lacked some of the realism of Poppy’s, it was pretty damn proficient for a kid who couldn’t draw.

And he heard the mental snap of a trap springing closed.

He had been avoiding looking at her as much as possible ever since he and the kid had arrived at the busy coffee shop, but he glanced at her now.

And swore under his breath.

She was so freaking…extraordinary. Pretty, sure. Nice—he’d already established that. One hell of a teacher, without a doubt.

And he was in the mother of all fixes.

Because he found himself saddled with a stupid-ass investment in this project, an investment he’d neither sought nor wanted. Found himself caring more than was smart about what became of these kids. He wanted to know why, while she seemed totally pumped about this project, Cory kept shooting nervous glances at the café door. How Henry would do with a few basic art lessons under his belt. What the exceedingly well-spoken Danny’s story was.

So, sure, he could cut back on how often he participated in the upcoming art-on-the-side-of-the-wall venture. He could try to keep things to a minimum.

But there was no way in hell he was going to be able to just walk away from it entirely.

It was all Poppy’s fault. She was like a damn Venus flytrap, and he was the poor sucker who’d made the mistake of leaning too close to check it out.

Only to have her—all big, soft eyes and satin skin—suck him in and take him prisoner so fast he barely knew what had hit him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Man, when it rains, it fricking pours, doesn’t it?

J
ASE PUSHED
through the padded fake-leather door of Sessions, currently the hottest blues bar and dance club in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood. The hot riffs of a guitar, combined with a wailing harmonica and sax, hit him like a one-two punch to the solar plexus. He felt surrounded in a sound so visceral it tugged at his senses. He wasn’t much for dancing, but the music had a driving rhythm that made it hard not to move.

The joint looked like a dive, housed as it was in a squat no-frills building with a décor that ran to scarred wooden tables and neon signs advertising alcoholic beverages. He imagined that the owners probably had no burning need to make the place attractive in order to haul in the crowds since it consistently got the best bands in the city. But the bar had one big, fat negative in his book, and that was its location. Columbia City was no place for an unescorted woman to be running around after dark.

And Henry had told him late this afternoon that Poppy was coming here tonight with her girlfriends.

He couldn’t freaking believe it. He’d thought she was smarter than that. Dammit, it was Friday night and he had plans of his own—he was supposed to meet Hohn and a couple other detectives at a cop bar up north at eleven, which was just a little over an hour away. But here he was, compelled to make a ten-mile trip so he could impart a few security tips to the Babe and her friends. The minute he made sure there was a plan in the works for getting them safely home when they decided to hit the road, however, he was out of here. So the quicker he found them, the better.

The only problem was, he didn’t see them. He circled the room until he ended up back near the bar without catching so much as a glimpse.

Of course half the bar appeared to be on the dance floor—it was a writhing mass of people dancing with various degrees of talent. As usual, more women than men crowded the area, since females these days no longer sat around waiting for men to ask them to dance, but rather hit the floor on their own schedule. He could hardly say that he blamed them—women who liked to dance must outnumber the men who did four to one.

He saw Poppy’s friend Ava first. She was hard to miss. It wasn’t only the sleek red hair or her spectacular retro body. And just when the hell had it become more rule than exception for so many of today’s females to be built like concentration camp survivors, anyway? Not that her attributes didn’t contribute to her noticeability, of course. But mostly, the woman could dance. Her arms flowed and her curvaceous hips swiveled and she simply moved as if she were an integral part of the music.