Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106953 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106953 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
I hand her everything. “Can you dress yourself?”
She stares at the pile of stuff in her arms and then at me. Sighing, I take the clothes and drop them on the floor. Holding up the jeans, I say, “Legs in.”
She places a tiny thin hand on my shoulder for balance and steps into the clothes. They’re way too big for her, but shit, too big is better than the ripped, dirty thing she’s got on. I motion for her to pull the nightgown up over her head and then turn around. I can hear her struggling but keep my eyes down. At the small tap in the middle of my back, I twist around to see her dressed, with the sweatshirt on backwards. It’s good enough.
I roll up the sleeves three times before the tips of her fingers peek out. The socks, which I think are ankle ones, go up to her shins.
Resting on my haunches, I take a look at her. She’s a drowned rat in this stuff. I pull the last piece off the floor. It’s a knit cap. I fit it over her head, tucking her long hair up until there’s not a strand hanging down.
“I’m hungry,” I tell her, getting to my feet. “Let’s eat.”
She follows me down the three flights of stairs. We exit out the back of the building—away from the cop, Patty, and the El Camino. I’m a fast learner, too. You have to be to survive on the streets. Information is key. The more you know about a person, the more you can control them.
So I keep all my shit locked down tight. Not that I have a lot of shit right now. Other than the cash that’s back in my sock and a few other pieces I’ve managed to squirrel away, I don’t own anything. But I will. Someday.
2
Leka
Right now, I’m living in a solid two-bedroom off the blue line train in Midtown. Most of Stinky Steve’s gang lives in a house on the north end of Jackson Heights, shoved together like sardines in a can. They call it the Pie House because that’s where they do all their fucking. It smells like rancid spunk and shit-streaked underwear.
I spent two nights there dodging piss buckets the older guys balance on the top of doors in hopes that the victim gets a yellow shower. Maybe I would’ve taken that, but when they started trying to shove crap up my ass so I could prove to them I was a man, I lit out. I’d rather sleep on the street.
I did that for a couple months until I stumbled onto this particular setup. Two years ago, I was trailing a realtor, Mike, who was dating the boss’s sister. Stinky Steve runs a crew of about a dozen who deal mostly in stolen electronics. He rose to power after pulling off a robbery of a thousand iPhones. Sure, that was eight years ago and it was a single job, but that’s all it takes in our world. Plus, Stinky Steve’s got good instincts.
He knows things about people, like how the delivery employee in charge of all those phones would be easy to flip with the promise of new wheels, or how tying his boat to the Big Boss would protect him from the Tong gang that is cutting into everyone’s profits, or how cutting off the thumb of his second-in-command for leaving a partial fingerprint at a scene would make everyone in the crew fall in line forever
Stinky Steve thought the mark was cheating on his sister. He was right. The realtor fucked a lot of his clients, usually in the condos and town homes that he was listing. These places had lockboxes, a little metal box that hung on the door handle. Inside the metal box was a key. Sometimes the metal boxes had a key code, but other times, Mike, the realtor, would just use this magical thing called a master key.
One day while he was busy fucking a client in somebody’s bedroom, I copied the master key. Since then, I’ve surfed from one nice apartment to another. In a city this big, there’s always an apartment for sale.
My current digs have been empty for months. I heard it’s because someone died here and whoever owns it doesn’t want to come off the “fucking ridiculously high” asking price, as Mike had screamed into the phone the other day. I hope it never sells. It’s the perfect place for me—close to the subway with a street side entrance that’s supposed to be for staff and deliveries. There’s a drugstore and grocery a block away. There’s even a library that’s big enough to hide in. In this place, I can pretend I’m not a twelve-year-old thug who’d rather keep all his fingers than interfere with a prostie getting beaten by a cop.