Sleepless in Las Vegas (15 page)

“Unfortunately, yes. Yuri beat me to the punch.”

“
He
told them?”

“Yeah. Called Mom. Had the balls to say he was my friend, and that I
asked
him to call.”

“I didn’t give him Mom’s number, Drake.”

“I know.” Brax had screwed up in a lot of ways, but he’d never put their mother or Grams in harm’s way. Their dad, who had never owned a cell phone, probably gave Yuri the house number when the two of them were negotiating Drake’s debt payment.

Braxton sputtered a curse. “To upset Mom and Grams like that…why?”

“It was a warning to me,” Drake said solemnly. “Mom and Grams don’t know who Yuri is, by the way. They know about that trouble I got into five years ago, but Dad never told them Yuri’s name.”

“I remember. Dad told me he took a taxi to that club to pay Yuri the twenty grand.”

Their dad, who’d believed family stood by each other no matter what, had kept the lines of communication open with Braxton right up until the day he died. Benny Morgan always believed that one day his son would realize his mistakes and leave the “uncivilized” life.

Deep down, Drake wished for the same thing, but wishing was a lot like hope. It sounded pleasant and comforting, but a person couldn’t count on it.

“Did Yuri tell you how Dad paid him?”

“I assumed cash. Yuri’s not the kind of guy you pay with a check or credit card.” Brax sounded as though he didn’t know about the ring.

“I’m going inside now—”

“Hey, hold on. Need money? Place to stay?”

“Got it covered.”

“Drake…does Mom ever…?”

“Yeah,” he lied. He couldn’t say the truth, that she never asked about Brax. For years, she’d hoped he would turn his life around, but after he’d gotten arrested on tax fraud charges two years ago, she gave up.

Drake shoved open the driver’s door. “If you learn where Yuri likes to keep himself, call me. And if I call, pick up. Hey, one more thing. Does he still smoke those stinky yellow French cigarettes?”

“Like a chimney.”

After ending the call, Drake walked across the front yard, pausing at the tree. He touched its rough bark, took a moment to enjoy the purple flowers, smell their sweet scent.

When he and his dad planted it, his father had talked about how tall the tree would be someday, described the color of the flowers and their fragrance. All of it had come true.

Although his father had envisioned the outcome, he’d helped it along by staking the trunk for straighter growth, pruning its branches, ensuring it received adequate water, sunlight, nutrition. But at the beginning, his father had mostly held hope for its future.

Drake continued to the door as thoughts of Braxton, his mother, Jayne, Val, Hearsay, Grams, even himself floated through his mind. Each of them faced challenging days ahead that required guidance, shaping, sustenance.

And maybe, hope.

* * *

B
Y
EARLY
THAT
afternoon, Val had folded up the trash in the flattened plastic bags and stacked them next to Drake’s office door, figuring he could haul them in his truck somewhere, ‘cause this girl had paid her trash-hitting dues for the day, thank you. Then she went inside the office, nearly dropping to her knees with gratitude upon feeling the rush of cool air.

She headed to the bathroom and dabbed herself with damp paper towels. It would take a fire hose to get the stink off her skin and clothes, but a pat here and there made her feel a bit refreshed. After unlocking the door, then grabbing her lunch from the minifridge, she sat at her desk and checked her phone.

No message or call from Drake, but he was busy handling urgent family matters.

As she took a container and plastic spoon from the bag, her thoughts drifted to Drake and his family. Didn’t know anything about his mother or grandmother, but a man who would drop everything out of concern for his family got big bonus points from this girl.

She knew more about his dad. In that photo at Dino’s, she had seen an approachable and gregarious man. And that the picture still hung on the wall, some twenty years later, spoke of others’ abiding affection for him.

Approachable
and
gregarious
hardly described Drake. But the way Jayne, who kept her feelings wrapped up tight, had treated him with respect and entreated him to stay in her back office said a lot about his reputation and integrity.

Drake was loyal to his family and friends, a man of character who earned people’s respect. But it bothered Val how he could sometimes be so cold and forbidding. Not that she was Miss Perfect, but she liked to laugh and express herself, would rather try something silly than settle for the boringly familiar.

Were she and Drake too opposite to make a relationship work?

She opened the container and breathed in the scents of cayenne pepper and garlic in Char’s homemade green gumbo. She was stirring it, admiring the chunks of okra, carrots and collards, when she heard a man’s raspy voice.

“Hey, how you doin’?”

Startled, she looked up. A middle-aged guy in a red-white-and-blue plaid shirt, a packet of cigarettes sticking out of the pocket, stood in front of her desk. His hair was combed back, emphasizing his broad face, shiny with perspiration. Squint lines etched the skin around his eyes.

“I’m Tony Cordova. Drake around?”

“Sorry, no. Want me to give him a message?”

“I’ll leave my card.” He pulled one from behind the cigarette pack and laid it on her desk. “He knows who I am.”

She glanced at the card, saw he was an arson investigator. Probably investigating the fire at Drake’s home.

“Would you like his cell phone number?”

“Already have it. Didn’t know he was working here, though, until Sally told me.”

“Sally,” she repeated.

“Bartender at Dino’s.”

She recalled the woman. Thirtyish, slender, pretty in a rock star kinda way with her spiky black hair and tight jeans and top. Guess Drake told her he was working here. Guess they were good friends.

“Looks good.” He grinned, gesturing at the gumbo. “Could smell the cayenne in the parking lot.”

“Green gumbo. My cousin made it.”

“Ah, nothing like homemade. My wife was quite the cook herself. Always took the time to do it right.” He paused. “People live too fast these days. Fast food. Fast internet. Slowness, my friend, is the essence of knowledge.” He pointed to his card. “When you give that to Drake, tell ‘im I got some news, would like to meet as soon as possible.”

As he walked away, she noticed he had a slight limp. Wondered if his reference to his wife in the past tense meant they’d divorced, but she doubted it. Few men spoke fondly of their ex-wives. Plus, when he spoke about her, the look on his face had been one of bittersweet reflection.

She tasted the gumbo. Delicious, but cold after being in the fridge all these hours. Some things were better hot.

Which made her think of Drake again. She reclosed the gumbo container, thinking she needed to put a lid on her hot Drake thoughts, too. It was good they’d eventually worked so well together today, but not so good to get all worked up over a man who played tug-of-war with her heart.

Whoa, her heart?

No. No. No.

This
thing
between her and Drake had to do with another part of her body, the part that made her palms itch and her insides sweat, and had absolutely nothing to do with her heart.

Picking up her lunch bag, she headed to the kitchenette. The problem with absolutes was they usually weren’t. If she were totally honest with herself, what had started the other night between them was not just about achy hormones.

Somehow, the man really had touched her heart.

After stashing the food in the fridge, she began rearranging the coffee cups as her mind muddled with how a man like Drake, who wore so much heavy, full-body emotional armor that he damn near clanked when he walked, had gotten through her defenses, which had hardened, too, over the years. And she knew exactly when it began.

Katrina.

She remembered those days huddled with Nanny on their roof, the two of them exposed to the rain-whipped winds, with nothing to hold on to but each other. By the second day they were so hungry, Val had fished dog snacks out of the water for them to eat. By the third day, when help hadn’t arrived, she’d kissed Nanny’s cheek, slid into the stagnant, swirling floodwaters and started swimming to their neighbor’s who had a rowboat. She still dreamed of those black, filthy waters, terrified of alligators lurking below the surface, and how she’d bumped into that corpse…

She made it their neighbor’s home, only to find it, and their boat, gone.

Too exhausted to swim, she had clung to a tree as night fell, listening to a distant woman’s voice sing “Amazing Grace” in the dark. Hours later, a FEMA search and rescue boat picked her up. Shivering from the cold and wet, she’d begged them to go to her Nanny, but when they arrived, she was gone.

Later, she learned a Coast Guard helicopter had rescued her grandmother, who’d died a few hours later. Dehydration and heatstroke, they said.

Holding a coffee cup, Val looked at the perfect box formation she had made with the other cups, wondering where to put this last one. She started to set it on top, but halted in midair.

I should never have left her alone on the roof.

She clutched the cup to her chest. The storm broke her city, and it broke her heart. She lost her innocence about life, grew tougher about the world.

Since then, some people—like Jasmyn, Char, Del and Cammie—had gotten through her defenses, but until the other night, no one had found a way to her heart. Not the part that loved her new family or was grateful to be alive. Nor the part that put faith in things unseen, like magic and mystery. Until the other evening, she hadn’t been aware of what she was missing. She had not been open to the kind of love that could heal or hurt.

That part of her heart was not only worth fighting for, it was worth risking everything for.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“
N
O.”
D
RAKE’S
MOTHER
stood in the center of the living room, surrounded by the Swedish modern furniture she and Drake’s dad had picked out twenty years ago. “I absolutely refuse to have surveillance cameras mounted outside this house.”

She patted her hair, a style that hadn’t changed in years—cropped close to her head, wisps of auburn framing her face. The haircut was like her, sensible yet feminine. In October she had turned sixty-five, but she looked a lot younger, probably because she stayed out of the sun, had never smoked and never drank except for a glass of wine on special occasions. She still wore her yellow bowling shirt, with “Dot” stitched in red over the pocket, from her Friday lunchtime league. That, and her water workouts at the senior center down the street, kept her trim.

Right now the center played into their argument.

“So your grandmother likes to occasionally visit the center,” she continued. “It’s not far. I don’t need to watch her every minute. And I don’t want guests knocking at the door and knowing they’re being spied on.” She fidgeted with the collar of her shirt. “Just like Orwell’s book
1984,
governments are already oversurveilling people. Next they’ll be watching us in our homes.”

“I’m not talking spying, Ma, I’m talking about Grams’s safety. Plus, face it, it’s a pain to walk all the way to the door just to find some college kid selling overpriced magazine subscriptions.”

“Which reminds me,” she muttered, “I still need to cancel one of those subscriptions.”

Drake glanced at the dice clock over the TV. It was way past snake eyes, or two o’clock. Almost two-forty. Since arriving nearly an hour ago, he had been talking nonstop to his mom and grandmother about the fire and answering a lot of questions. His mom had been walking him to the door when he’d casually mentioned mounting several surveillance cameras outside. One with a long-range view of the sidewalk, to ensure Grams traveled safely up and down the block, and the other positioned on the front porch to see visitors.

Bad move. Now he and his mom were embroiled in another discussion.

“Anyway, the senior citizen center is at the end of the block,” he continued, “which
is
far for an eighty-five-year-old woman. Especially one who’s driving a wheelchair in the dark after her nightly martini.”

“Have you seen her martini glasses? They hold three ounces, barely.” She crossed her arms, giving him the look that said she was in charge. The look he had seen ever since he was a kid. Back then, it was like a steel wall. No way to get over it, ram through it or dig under it. So you backed off. “No cameras.”

But as a man, he better understood that look. It wasn’t a barricade. More like a line in the sand.

Over the years he had guarded his own lines, fought hard for them, too, sometimes long after they had disappeared. But when you’re standing alone, the lines nowhere to be seen, you start to get the message that being victorious doesn’t mean you won the battle. That defending a position has more to do with one’s fears than any real threat.

He didn’t know why cameras scared his mother, and maybe he didn’t need to know. What mattered was to not fight the line, but encourage her to step over it.

“You’re right. Three ounces isn’t much. Mostly it’s her age that concerns me. She’s eighty-five.”

“Goodness, I hope you don’t broadcast my age as often as you do hers. But since you’re stuck on it, keep in mind she’s a vigorous, healthy eighty-five,” she said under her breath, “with a new hearing aid that makes her part bionic woman.”

“Good to know, because that means she can hear people and scooters and skateboards. Problem is, in the dark, they might not see
her.
”

She released a weary sigh. “These cameras have night vision?”

He nodded.

“How big are they?”

“Size of a golf ball. I could fit one into a bird feeder.”

“I don’t like bird feeders. I’ll be cleaning up poop all the time.”