Defender Page 10

  “What’s your name?” she asks him.

  “Ricky. Ricky Ramirez. My mother is Lucy’s sister.”

  She glares at him. “Don’t remember her having a sister. How did you find me, anyway?”

  “An old classmate of hers remembered you, and we saw your site. I just want to know what happened to her.”

  “No idea.”

  “Do you remember who else she was hanging out with back then?”

  “That’s a long time ago, and we weren’t close. Don’t know anything.”

  She’s nervous now. Sweating. But why?

  I can’t hold back any longer, so I finally speak up, taking another angle. “We tried asking Social Services, but they don’t have any record of Lucy after she was put in the foster home you were in.” Of course, I just made that up, trying to shake Rosie into giving us more. “Did she run away, or maybe hook up with someone?”

  Rosie focuses on me. “And who are you?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “Yeah? What’s your name?”

  I don’t have time to make one up. “Tyne. Tyne Greer.”

  My last name stops her. She stares at me, and I swear she’s spooked. Her face goes a deeper shade of red. She looks cornered.

  “Who sent you?”

  “Nobody. We’re just trying to find his aunt.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with this. Whatever happened was a long time ago. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “But I just—” I start.

  “No. I’m done. You have to go now.”

  “But—”

  I step back as the door slams in our faces. We’re left standing on the porch, stunned.

  “Guess we’re done talking,” Stick says.

  “Guess so.”

  We go down the steps.

  “What the hell was that about?” he asks.

  “She knows something. Did you see when she heard my name was Greer? She freaked.”

  Glancing back at the house, I see the little girl peering out the window.

  “But why? What’s to be scared of? Old Mad Dog is long gone, right?”

  I shrug. “He’s dead and gone. But maybe what happened back then is still living on somehow. I mean, guilt is forever.”

  EVERYWHERE I GO I get stared at. There’s no escaping it. Kids are the worst; they can’t hide their shock as they gape up at me. Most times I can tune it out. I see the heads turning in my direction out of the corner of my eye and just keep my focus forward, like I don’t notice. But it gets old.

  I want to be invisible. Not Girlzilla towering above the crowd.

  But I catch a break when I’m on the court playing with a team of other tall girls. And when I’m here, in the community center pool. In the water, I’m just another swimmer, only my head above the surface, my body below.

  Here I can stretch out to my full length, kicking without hitting anything and swinging my arms wide and long with a smooth stroke as I slice through the water. To me, chlorine smells like freedom.

  As I reach one end of the Olympic-sized pool, I kick off the wall and keep doing my laps.

  I’ve been coming to the center three times a week for my knee. It’s a perfect workout, one where I don’t have to worry about my knee collapsing on me. I’ll be back hitting the hard court soon enough, but this keeps my lungs and endurance up.

  I can’t completely shut my brain down, still thinking a mile a minute, but I can lose myself in the rhythm of the strokes. Outracing the darkness inside me. Reaching for that elusive aquatic Zen, of being here and now and nowhere else.

  I swim till my limbs feel like rubber and my lungs burn. It’s a strain to pull myself out of the pool, but I’m clearheaded as I hit the showers.

  Besides the pool, the center’s got workout rooms, an ice rink and two gyms, one with a hard court. As I pass, I peek in at a pickup basketball game and spot two girls from my team. Nobody’s calling fouls, so it’s kind of a dogfight, with a lot of banging and flying elbows. Everybody’s taking wild shots.

  “Yo, Tiny!” Roxy shouts to me. Rocket Rox, our best player. She might make the Junior Nationals team, which is way out of my league. “Get in the game. We could use some defense.”

  I shake my head. “My knee’s still recovering.”

  “Well, speed it up. We’re on a nasty losing streak since you went down. Getting murdered on the boards without our big meat.”

  “I’ll be back at practice next week.”

  “Better be. We miss our monster.”

  She chases down a rebound as I walk away. Roxy’s right. I need to get back, get noticed by the scouts. Because I only started to play in my junior year, I’ve been trying to catch up to the other college-bound girls who’ve been working the scouts and university reps since they were freshmen. I have to push through the pain. I’ve eased up on the pills, but if I have to up the meds to play, then I’ll do it.

  I stop in the other gym, where I know I’ll find Mom right about now. She comes here twice a week with Squirrel, because one end of the gym has a climbing wall, and he’s nuts about it. As a toddler, he started simple, with the table, chairs and counters at home. One day we found him perched on top of the fridge with no sign of how he got there. Then we caught him on the ledge looking out the open window. You’re not a flying squirrel, I told him. Growing up as big sister to a death-defying dynamo, I was always on Squirrel watch. Holding him back from traffic and subways, crazies and crack pipes in the alley. His bodyguard, because he could be gone in a blink. Over the edge.

  Which is why we have heavy-duty steel-framed solid window screens that give our place a bit of a prison vibe. These days Squirrel sits by the window for hours watching the road crew rip up the street below, playing along with them using his own bulldozers and trucks.

  I spot Mom on the bench by the kids’ section of the wall, in her workout spandex and sneakers, her coppery hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “Hey, Ty. Good swim?”

  I nod. “Good climb?”

  “Can’t keep up with him.”

  Squirrel’s halfway up the wall, dangling from handholds. He’s wearing a helmet and a harness with a safety line rigged up so there’s no way he can fall and get hurt. If he loses his grip he’ll just hang there swinging till you reel him in.

  “He’s bugging me to try out the adult wall,” Mom says. “Says he wants to go higher and climb with the bigs. But I don’t want him getting stuck where I can’t reach. The kids’ climb is bad enough for me. He’s got no fear of falling, but I do.”

  Squirrel waves to us, hanging by one hand and giggling hysterically.

  “Were you ever that crazy?” I ask.

  Mom shakes her head. “I took risks when I was young, but not that death-defying.”

  “So what was it like growing up in the Weeds?”

  “Way worse than the Zoo. Dark and nasty.”

  “Was it always just you and your mom?”

  “Yeah. Just us versus the world. Mom worked two jobs, so I was alone a lot. Getting in trouble. I got a job myself as a delivery girl.”

  She gasps as Squirrel loses his grip and swings by the cord on his harness. Looks scary, but he just dangles in the air for a few seconds before his momentum brings him back to the wall and he digs his foot into a hold, then finds another to grab on to. Without a pause, he continues his vertical crawl.

  “I was hoping this thing would help get the Spider-Man out of his system so he wouldn’t go climbing everything in sight. But now he’s a hard-core height junkie.”

  Mom’s told me a bit about her old “job” making little drug deliveries around the neighborhood. A very dumb thing she did way back when.

  “Hard to believe you worked for a drug dealer,” I say.

  “He was only a small-time nobody in the Weeds—called his place the Fab Pharmacy, because he dealt in prescription drugs. It was an after-school thing some of the girls did. Stuff you do when you’re young and desperate and figure you’ve got nothing to los
e. Living in the Weeds, it was impossible to stay clean. Anyway, I was making good money till my mom got suspicious of my new clothes. I told her it was thrift-store stuff, but she was no fool. Mom busted me—actually followed me and caught me with a delivery. She went ballistic. Here she was killing herself working two crap jobs, and for what? So I could be some drug runner? She dragged me with her to go see the Fab Pharmacist and told him to stay the hell away from me.”

  “Your mom went after a dealer?”

  “He wasn’t exactly a drug lord. Just a wannabe, a low-level loser. She told him to stay away, and he says, ‘Or what, you gonna rat me out to the narcs?’ And, well, you never saw my mother’s temper, but when you set her off she could get scary mad, in your face. She had a stare that could skin you. So she says, ‘No. I won’t rat you out. I’ll burn your place down with you in it.’ I didn’t know who I was more scared of right then, him or her. He told her, ‘There’s plenty more in the Weeds want to work for me.’ ”

  I shake my head, amazed.

  “You ever know a girl back then named Lucy Ramirez? Would have been around the same age as you. Dark-haired Latina, had a chipped front tooth.”

  She frowns, thinking back. “Don’t think so. Why? Who was she?”

  “Nobody. Just a…a relative of somebody at my school who grew up there. Never mind.” I switch subjects. “Slimy dropped by the Zoo the other day to see Dad.”

  “That old snake.” Mom shudders. “Sam Savard. Even his name slithers.”

  “Do you remember him being around the Weeds when you were a kid?”

  “Yeah, he’d come by all the time. Liked the girls.”

  That grabs me. “How do you mean?”

  “He’d show up in his black Cadillac, throw block parties for us out back, with barbecues and ice cream, order up pizzas. He had his favorite girls who’d get gift cards and rides around town. The prince of pervs. We all knew what he was after. Some girls went for it, to make some money. Most were sorry they did, after. The cops tried to charge him a few times, but he managed to buy everybody off and keep the girls quiet.”

  “You never went?”

  She gives me a look like I just shocked her, instead of her shocking me. “God, no. I was wild, but I knew better. Besides, my mother got in his face a couple of times when she saw him hanging around the girls. She never backed down from anybody, no matter how big and bad they were.”

  “Your mom was fierce? She’s always seemed sort of tame to me.”

  We don’t see my mom’s mom much. She lives way out on the West Coast.

  “You have no idea. She plays the sweet old lady now, but she could stare down the devil. You get on her wrong side, she’ll take you out.”

  I smile at Mom. “Sounds familiar.”

  “What, like me?”

  “Well, you nearly started a riot in the stands during that game where the girl fouled me with an elbow to the throat.”

  “It was a cheap shot, and that little bitch’s mother was sitting in the next row cheering her on.”

  “That’s part of the game. And the girl got ejected. But Dad still had to hold you back from going after her mom.”

  She shakes her head with a little laugh. “I wasn’t going to beat her down or anything, only…get in her face. I’m not going to just sit there and watch you get chopped like that. They think because you’re so big it’s okay. Like you don’t feel it. Anyway, do you really think your dad could hold me back if I didn’t let him?”

  “Guess not. My mom, the warrior waitress.”

  “Hey, waitress is what I do. Warrior is what I am.”

  We look up at my baby bro, creeping along near the top of the kids’ wall.

  “You coming down?” Mom calls to him. “Ever?”

  “Come get me, Mum,” he dares her.

  She groans. “So what’s with the silent treatment you’re giving your father? You’ve been freezing him out.”

  What can I tell her?

  “Just some father-daughter drama. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Whatever it is, fix it. You guys are too close to be apart. Make it right and make up.”

  “I’ll try.” That’s the best I can do.

  Mom puts her helmet on, eyeing the climb.

  I get up to go.

  “Now,” she says, “I’ve got a Squirrel to catch.”

  And I’ve got a killer.

  GREER CONSTRUCTION.

  Strange seeing my last name big and bold, plastered on signs around the site.

  Stranger still how two brothers, Dad and Uncle Jake, who grew up in the same place, with the same chances and same everything, turned out so different.

  Dad’s stuck keeping the Zoo from falling apart while my uncle builds new places and tears old ones down. Construction and demolition—don’t know which Jake likes more. He built a dream house for himself and Aunt Vicki, then poisoned it with his temper and drinking.

  “Hey, Tiny,” Jake calls, when me and Stick show up at the site trailer. “Come on in.”

  He sent me a text earlier, saying I should drop by to pick up the Raptors tickets he promised the other day. A game is the last thing on my mind, but Stick said we need the distraction to keep us from cracking up.

  “Hi, Uncle Jake. You remember Stick?”

  He looks up from a desk buried in paperwork, Starbucks cups and boxes of donuts. “Right, your cheerleader. Hey, kid, saw you at one of her games.” Jake digs in a drawer. “Here we go. They’re good seats—sixth row, center court.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Have a donut,” Jake tells Stick. “You look like something out of a starving-kid commercial.”

  Stick never passes on free food, even if it comes with an insult. He grabs an éclair.

  “Since you’re here, let me give you the tour. See what you’re missing.”

  Jake doesn’t mean that in bad way; it’s just that he can’t help bragging and showing off. And since he’s passing out hundred-dollar tickets, I can’t say no.

  “Grab a hat and I’ll take you up to the top. Million-dollar views.”

  We all put on yellow hard hats—Stick’s is perched on top of his springy corkscrew curls—and Jake leads us to the site. The building is still a skeleton, twenty stories tall.

  “I keep bugging your dad to come work for me.” Up close, I can smell the booze on Jake. Maybe in his coffee? Don’t know if I’ve ever seen him completely sober.

  We get on the elevator, just framework with no doors or walls. You can see the street, and Jake’s classic red Mustang parked there, falling away as we go up. Whenever Jake drops by the Zoo you can hear him coming. The car’s supercharged engine blasts the block like rolling thunder. He comes downtown to see my games sometimes, or to drop off tickets. But mostly he just shows up to show off, parking his muscle car in front of our dump. I’ve seen Vega checking out the Mustang, and I can tell she’d love to take it for a joyride, straight to the chop shop. Feeling the itch of her old ways.

  “I’d make Teddy a foreman,” Jake says. “Even get him a deal on a place somewhere nice. Anywhere’s better than the Zoo. Everybody’s waiting for them to demolish that place—hell, I’d love to do it myself. Nothing like bringing a building down. There’s a science to it, knowing where to find the sweet spots, the breaking points. Then what took years to put up comes crashing to the ground in seconds. It’s a rush.”

  He flashes his canine grin.

  “They talk about tearing the Zoo down,” I tell him. “But Celia says that Slimy doesn’t want to give it up.”

  “Celia? She still breathing?” He sips his spiked Starbucks. “She was always hanging out her window like a gargoyle, spying on everybody.”

  The elevator clunks to a stop and we step off, into a frigid wind blowing in off the water.

  “The penthouse. Yours for five million.”

  The view is stunning. We’re right on Lake Shore Boulevard, where you get the full panoramic view of Lake Ontario, from the marinas and the ferry docks to the por
t with the big ships. From the CN Tower to the green oasis of Centre Island across the harbor, and the busy little island airport. This place is a pocket paradise of fresh air and freedom in the downtown crush.

  “Sweet,” Stick says. “When do I move in?”

  He smiles at me, forever a dreamer. He can see himself here. Me, I know I don’t belong. It’s dizzying—not just from the height and staring all the way down through the bare bones of the construction, but also from the jump from one world to another.

  “What do you think, Tiny?” asks Jake.

  “I think it’s amazingly, wonderfully impossible.”

  “Possible if you fight and bite your way to the top. Like I did. How about you, Stick?”

  “I’m in. I can bite.”

  Jake glances at us standing together and shakes his head. “You two make a crazy-looking couple. What does she do, use you for a toothpick?”

  Jake likes to joke, but most times it seems he’s the only one laughing.

  But Stick’s immune to insults. He’s had worse and come through smiling.

  “She can use me for whatever she wants.”

  Punching him in the shoulder, I look off in the direction of the Zoo, but it’s hidden behind skyscrapers.

  “Hey, Uncle Jake, you ever hang around the Weeds when you were a kid? You know anybody from there?”

  “Didn’t spend a lot of time with the local losers. I set my sights higher, ran with a different crowd.”

  We watch a small plane buzz by overhead, escaping the city.

  “So you wouldn’t remember a girl named Lucy who used to live there? Spanish girl, thin, long black hair, had a chipped front tooth?”

  He takes a drink. “No. The girls I went for all lived far from the hood.”

  Stick gives a little shrug. It was worth a shot.

  Wherever we look, it seems like Lucy barely left a footprint in the world. Nobody came when she cried out.

  Maybe she went unheard back then. But I hear her now.

  “WHAT IS THIS?” I ask.

  Stick’s showing me something on his laptop. We’re sitting at the desk in his room, and he’s devouring a jumbo bag of barbecue potato chips.

  “More homicide homework.”