“Good night, Son. Or should I say good sleep?” Antonio smiled.
“Thanks, Dad.” Luca escaped to his bedroom in the finished basement, determined to turn off his brain and indeed get some sleep—if he could.
Chapter 2
Dawn had worried so much about the cop that morning that she’d handed him her new work phone number at ScholarTech. What an idiotic thing to do! She knew better. Always keep a low profile, Dawn! With her past, she shouldn’t even be seen talking to a cop.
At least she wasn’t in her neighborhood when she’d met him. She had stopped off at the Christian Science Center before work. It was something she’d started doing to help “center” herself. She loved the fountain and the massive pool. She would sit on a bench and gaze at it for a while before heading to her job.
Unfortunately, Dawn had to be careful about how and when she moved around town because of the gang she’d gotten mixed up in from the age of fifteen. Dawn had been involved with the gang for three years until she had decided it was time to turn her life around. One of her girlfriends, who’d been with Mick, one of the leaders of Keene Street Gang, had overdosed. That was Dawn’s wake-up call to get out.
They still managed to track Dawn down whenever they needed her “advance warning system,” aka her psychic abilities. Especially when an illegal deal was about to go down. Dawn wasn’t happy about still being on their radar, but she had no choice. Once you were in, they felt like they owned you until you died or managed to go off the grid.
The problem was that she couldn’t afford to go into hiding or even leave town, for that matter. She had her grandma to look after, and she needed to save up before they could even think of heading somewhere warm and cheap, where she could take care of the one person who had never given up on her. She’d been working at ScholarTech for the past month and had started to save toward a little nest egg, but she was a long way from making her dream come true.
Stepping off the subway train two blocks from her house, Dawn made sure her “don’t mess with me” attitude was firmly in place. She carried her keys attached to a steel baton that she had made good use of when walking through the streets after dark. Her neighborhood wasn’t the best place to live and certainly not the safest. One day, she vowed, she and her grandma would get the hell out of Boston. The crime rate was high and the sense of security was low.
Home not-so-sweet home.
Dawn and her grandmother, Annette, lived in a small, two-story duplex house. It was spotless and uncluttered, unlike some of the other houses in the neighborhood where people tended to accumulate junk like it would magically turn into mountains of gold. Annette always said, “No sense buying something you don’t need or needing something you can’t buy.” Dawn didn’t mind that the house was small. What she did mind was the crime-filled location. Dawn threw a quick glance over her shoulder before taking her key out of her pocket. Just as she opened her front door, a male figure stepped out from the dark side yard of the old, battered colonial next door.
Crap.
It was Ice Spider, her one-time boyfriend and a member of the Keene Street Gang.
“Hey, what’s up?” she asked, trying to remain nonchalant as she gripped her keys.
“You tell me.” He waltzed up the steps and leaned on the railing. “Anything tripping your wires lately?”
She wasn’t going to tell him about the cute young cop from that morning, so she just shrugged. “Why? You got something to worry about?”
He snorted. “You know better than to ask that. If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re out, you’re out.”
“I’m out, so why do you keep coming back?”
He sidled up next to her. “I hope you’ll change your mind.”
Trying to hide her anxiety, Dawn stood her ground. “I know you want a psychic heads-up to ‘conduct business’ when the cops aren’t around, but I don’t like being used. I really do want to move on.”
“I wasn’t using you. How many times do I have to tell you, she didn’t mean anything to me, baby. We can go back to the way things were.”
Dawn suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. “I wasn’t even talking about that. Look, Ice, I’m really sorry, but it’s not gonna happen. I’ve got things to do.”
She opened the door, stepped inside, and was ready to close it in his face if she had to. Her grandmother was home, and she never wanted them to meet.
“So where are you working now?”
What could she say? There was no way she was going to tell him she was working at ScholarTech. “Nowhere.”
“Why don’t you go back to the convenience store? Carla could use your help.”
She liked Carla, the owner, a no-nonsense woman who stood up to everyone, including the gang members. Carla had run the convenience store since before Dawn was born. A chain smoker whose idea of a breakfast drink was a vodka tonic, Carla was the unofficial den mother for the street kids who called Keene Street home.
Dawn had worked at the store for four years while she was going to school part-time to get her associates degree. But she had quit six months ago. Three holdups was her limit, thank you very much. The store was where many drug deals were made, and every so often, a rival gang would rob the place when they wanted to send Keene Street a message. Stupid gang wars. Besides, she’d been ready to leave and look for a career-oriented job anyway. “No. I’m still looking for work,” she lied smoothly. She wasn’t about to tell him her business.
He smiled and crossed his arms. “Well, isn’t that something. I might have a job for you.”
