“No, Daddy gave Mum the money to buy us one, but I think we both know where that went,” she said casually, as if the fact that her mother chose to snort that money in the form of coke instead of providing for her children was normal behaviour.
I guessed for Harleigh Rose it was.
My chest constricted again.
“Okay, tomorrow I’ll take you and King to the store and we’ll get you one.”
“King doesn’t think we should hang out with you anymore,” she told me.
It wasn’t like I hung out with the Garro kids, but since their dad had been shot in front of H.R. years ago, I’d felt a certain responsibility towards them. With King, it was easy. Sometimes he’d walk by my parents’ house on the way home from school and spot me in the garage, tinkering with my father’s old 1968 Mustang Fastback. Even at eight and now twelve, the kid knew more about cars than I did so he’d roll up his sleeves and help out. With H.R., it was a little more complicated, mostly because she was a complicated kid. I’d spend a few hours with her every Sunday at Mega Music, but if Farrah was being a bitch, H.R. often ran away from home.
Straight to my house.
At first, I hadn’t known what to do when I opened the door late one Thursday night to see her drowning in the rain, her face red from tears. Happily, my mum had.
My dad was a lot of things, most of them bad, but my mum was an angel.
So, without hesitation, she’d taken Harleigh Rose into our house, fed her, bathed her and put her to bed in the guest room beside their master.
We had a history, the Garros kids and me, but I was still surprised by how much it hurt to hear her say those words.
“’Cause you’re a cop now, it’s prob’ly bad for your reputation to be seen with bikers,” she explained.
I blinked at her earnest expression then laughed. “You and King aren’t bikers.”
“No, but he’s a biker-in-training and I’m a biker chick…” She shrugged. “And King just read this play by an old white guy about two families that hate each other. A kid from each family fell in love and they all ended up dying because they shouldn’t’a been together in the first place.”
I bit back the edge of my grin because I knew she didn’t like it when it looked like I was laughing at her. “That’s a play by Shakespeare called Romeo & Juliet. It’s incredibly stupid.”
“No duh,” she told me with a big eye roll. “But still, you’re Lion Danner of the Danners and I’m Harleigh Rose of The Fallen. Your people are cops and mine are bikers. Being friends doesn’t make much sense.”
God, but she was right.
As evidenced by my moral slip up today when I let her get away with shoplifting.
But I couldn’t leave her and King to Farrah’s devices, I just didn’t have it in me. I liked them too much.
“Sometimes, opposites attract,” I told her with a wink as I stood up and pulled her with me. “Now, come on. I’ve got a date tonight, and I want to talk to your mum when I take you home.”
“A date?” she asked me and there was something in her tone that had me turning to face her again. She was looking at the ground, carefully making sure her feet didn’t crunch any of the records on the floor. “Who would want to date you?”
“You’re too young to understand, but trust me, when you’re older you’ll get that it’s hard to find a nice, handsome guy who’s also tall enough you can wear heels around him,” I chuckled, because that was exactly what my date that night had told me when I’d asked her out last week.
Harleigh Rose stayed silent behind me.
After we picked up King from school and I’d taken them to Stella’s diner to grab a quick dinner, I drove them home so I could have a word with Farrah. If that didn’t work, as it hadn’t before, I’d get my dad to pull her down to the station and have a word with her there.
I was thinking this in the silence of the car, both kids tense as they hadn’t been all night knowing that I was taking them back to their mum. Harleigh Rose had tinkered with my iPod until “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses came on, the lyrics filling the cab of my truck in a way that her voice couldn’t.
The song painted a picture of Harleigh Rose with her sky-blue eyes huddled in a corner while her stupid mother shot up, wondering where else in the world was safe for her, if not her home?
I could barely breathe through the weight on my chest as I pulled onto their street and noticed a lineup of cars all around their little bungalow. The second I cut the ignition, I heard the music.
“Stay here,” I told the kids as I unbuckled my seatbelt and opened the door.
I could smell the heady fragrance of marijuana in the air.
Fuck.
“You hear me?” I asked Harleigh Rose and King as they both looked at the house then back at me.
“Sure, Danny,” King said with a firm nod as he climbed over the middle console to sit in my vacated driver’s seat beside Harleigh Rose so he could take her hand in his.
The kid was twelve going on twenty.
I gave them a nod then made my way around the truck and up the gravel drive to the home. I could hear people partying in the back over the noise spilling out from the house and I was surprised the neighbors hadn’t called the police.
The door was open when I tried it so I pushed in.
There were people everywhere in varying degrees of nudity. Two women writhed on the floor fully naked as they exchanged tokes of pot and blew the smoke into each other’s mouths. Men were lining up to do lines of coke off some very young girl’s ass and a couple was fucking in full sight of everyone else on the couch.
My fucking Christ, was this what King and Harleigh Rose were subjected to regularly?
I moved through the rooms, bile metallic on my tongue, my fists clenched so tight my short nails cut half-moons into my palms. I wanted to rip Farrah in two and grind her into dust so the Devil could snort her in Hell.
She wasn’t anywhere.
I searched the house again, worrying about the kids in the car when there were people like these addicts, felons, and partiers so close by.
Still, I didn’t find her.
Instead, when I entered the kitchen for the second time, I found Harleigh Rose standing in the midst of the revelry, her eyes trained on the hall like she’d been waiting for me.
“Rosie, what the hell? I told you to stay in the car,” I growled as I pushed between another couple to get to her.
“I found her,” she said, her voice dead like the tone of a heartbeat flatlining.
She took my hand and led me through the crowd, back down the hallway and into the master bedroom I’d already checked then behind a cloth partition I’d thought was decorative into a walk-in closet.
King was there too, crouched beside his mum with her head in his lap, but my eyes went to Farrah.
She was utterly still, her lips inked with blue at the edges, crusted vomit at her chin and cheeks.
She wasn’t breathing.
Quickly, I shrugged off my jacket and went to my knees beside her body.
“King buddy, need you to take my phone out of my coat and call 911, okay?” I ordered him gently as I found Farrah’s thready pulse and silently thanked God.
He didn’t respond, but I heard the numbers being punched into the phone and then, “Hi, name’s King. My mum had an overdose, need you to send the ambulance.”