Nothing to Lose Read online

  NOTHING TO LOSE

  Alex Flinn

  DEDICATION

  For my mother and grandmother

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ARTICLE

  THIS YEAR

  THIS YEAR

  LAST YEAR

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  LAST YEAR

  THIS YEAR

  THE NEXT DAY

  THREE HOURS LATER

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  EXCERPT FROM BEWITCHING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  BACK ADS

  BOOKS BY ALEX FLINN

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ARTICLE

  Jury Selection Begins In Monroe Murder Trial

  * * *

  Jury selection will begin in the case of a Miami woman accused of bludgeoning her husband to death last March.

  Despite the intense publicity surrounding the case, Lisa Monroe’s defense attorneys failed in attempts to have the trial transferred from Miami.

  Monroe, 35, a former legal secretary, is charged with murdering her husband, prominent local attorney and philanthropist Walker James Monroe, last March. Monroe plans to claim a battered-spouse-syndrome defense at trial. Her son, Michael Daye, now 17, has been missing since shortly before the alleged homicide took place.

  See: TRIAL, Page 9A

  Also: BATTERED-SPOUSE-SYNDROME DEFENSE, 1B

  THIS YEAR

  I shouldn’t have come back to Miami.

  The cop at the Whack-a-Mole game is a fat one. He dips his elephant ear into its cup of chocolate sauce like a blizzard with a tasty slice of roadkill. When his attention’s on that, I approach.

  “Give it a try, Officer?”

  I have to shout over the screams from the Tilt-a-Whirl. That makes it easier to keep my voice steady. I’ve been escaping cops’ notice for a year now—since I ran away. Secret is, don’t avoid them and act casual. I was always old-looking for my age. Now, with the beard I grew, you’d never guess I’m still a week from being seventeen. That, and the way my hair’s bleached white by the sun, conceals my identity. I’m no longer Michael Daye, high school athlete with a promising future. Now I look like someone with no future. I look like a carny.

  That’s what the cop sees, standing there. A carny.

  “Nah, I’m on duty.” He goes back to the elephant ear.

  “Some other time, then.” I start toward the next mark.

  “Hold on, kid!”

  I turn. Another cop, a female one, has joined the elephant-ear cop.

  “You know you want to play,” she says to him.

  I stand, looking down, but not too far down, until the big cop waves me off again. I walk away, but I’m alert to their conversation even as the Tilt-a-Whirl starts. In my situation you can’t afford to let your guard down.

  “Put the mole in the hole,” I call to the marks. “We’re looking for racers. We’re looking for Whack-a-Mole chasers.” Across from me at the basketball toss, a winning player tries to decide between posters of Elvis or Bart Simpson, Britney Spears or Jesus.

  “You at the courthouse today?” the female officer asks the other one.

  He laughs. “It’s a freakin’ sideshow. They don’t got sideshows at the carnival anymore—just the courthouse.”

  “That bad?”

  I go to help a mother and son. I take in the woman’s worn-down shoes and worn-out face and think of my own mother. She used to take me to the carnival too, Tuesdays like today, when they let you in cheap if you saved up bread wrappers. Mom and I always ate lots of toast the month the fair was in town.

  I miss my mother. It’s been almost a year since I saw her. I can pretend to forget about her most of the time, but not here. Not in Miami.

  “Just one.” The mom points to the kid.

  I count out her change and lean down to the kid. “You know how to play, Champ?”

  “No problemo. The moles come out of their holes, and you bash their brains in.”

  “Actually,” I say, “it works better if you hit soft.”

  Behind me the cops are still talking.

  “So, lot of reporters there?” the female says.

  “You name it—Court TV, all the locals. I think there was even a station from Cuba.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the big deal about this case?”

  The fat cop snorts. “What you don’t get is a lot. You been on the force as long as I have, you know which cases’ll get the attention. This one’s got it all: a violent murder, a rich guy, and a beautiful woman who’s guilty as sin.”

  I feel myself flinch, knowing for sure now. The woman they’re talking about is my mother.

  “You think?” the female cop asks. “I’m not so sure.”

  “What’s her defense?” the other cop says. “She brained him with a stinking fire poker.”

  “She’s saying he beat her up.”

  “That’s what they all say. If it was so bad, why didn’t she leave the poor slob? That’s what I want to know. Why didn’t she leave?”

  I wait for him to answer his own question. He does.

  “She’s a gold digger, that’s why. She married the old man for the cash. Then she got tired of hearing him snore, so she killed him.”

  I make myself walk over to the game controls. I stand there one minute, hand on the switch, listening as one by one the sounds around me evaporate, and I hear instead the ocean outside my bedroom window. The old helplessness washes over me like a wave. I hadn’t stayed to protect her.

  “Hey, kid!”

  The cop’s voice penetrates my head’s silence.

  “You! Game-op!”

  I turn to face him. He’s finished his elephant ear and is checking his uniform for stains. He looks up, and I think I see a flash of recognition in his eyes. Then it’s gone.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I’ll take a chance.” He reaches for his pocket, real slow, knowing what I’ll say next.

  I say it. “On the house, Officer.” I lean to check his station. Each board has a balloon that fills with air as you bash the mechanical moles. First one to pop a balloon is the winner.

  “Wait a second, kid.”

  I look up. His eyes search my face, and I fight the urge to glance away.

  He says, “What’s your name?”

  “Robert Frost.” The lie comes easy. I hope he won’t ask me for ID, but I hope my face shows I have it. “Like the poet.”

  He doesn’t ask. “Sorry. Thought I knew you from … somewhere.”

 
I shrug. Then, with a hint of a southern accent no Miamian would recognize as fake, I say, “You have some chocolate on your badge.”

  “Thanks.” He goes to wipe it, and I start to walk away.

  His voice stops me.

  “Kinda young, aren’t you?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Runaway?”

  “No, sir.” I smile and hitch my thumbs into my pockets. “Wanted to see the world. Took off after senior year and been to twenty-eight cities since then.”

  I shouldn’t have come back to Miami.

  “Where you from, Robert?”

  “Lennox, Louisiana.” Loosiana. A lie. “The sticks.”

  People are looking at us, and the cop’s friend nudges him. “Hey, you’re holding up the works.”

  The cop looks at her, then the crowd. Then at me.

  “Sorry, kid. You go ahead.”

  “No problem.”

  I turn toward the game controls. I make myself move slow. Behind me I hear the cop say, “He just looked so familiar.” I throw the switch, and all around me mechanical moles start popping up. Every station is filled, and they’re whacking, whacking, filling my ears and my brain with the noise, obliterating every feeling but loneliness and every thought but one: I shouldn’t have come back to Miami.

  THIS YEAR

  An hour later I find my friend Cricket working at the double Ferris wheel.

  “I can’t stay here,” I say.

  “Cops buggin’ you?” Cricket gets harassed by cops all the time. He says he’s twenty but looks younger. “What I do is I keep a copy of my birth certificate with me at all times. Just makes life easier.”

  He leans to get it under the switch for the ride—a crumpled, Xerox-copied sheet of gray paper that identifies him as Jason Dietz, born twenty years ago in Kansas.

  “That’s your real birth certificate, Jason?”

  He shrugs.

  “It’s not just the age thing with me,” I whisper. “I ran away. There could be people looking for me.”

  Cricket folds the paper back up. “No one looks for teenaged runaways. You’re a low priority. We’ve got our own little foster-care system here at the carnival. They give you a bunk to sleep in and all the corn dogs you can handle. Long as you’re not obvious about it, no one much cares.”

  He goes back to what he’s doing. I head for my joint, though my break’s not over. It’s getting later. The crowds are getting heavier, which makes it easier to hide. But tonight, here, it’s just more people who might know me. I feel lost in a sea of eyes. Cricket doesn’t get it. Being underage and a runaway still isn’t the whole story, a story I maybe need to stay and tell. I bump into a woman, and she glares at me. I duck my head and move on.

  When I return, the cop from earlier is there again, playing. I hang back. I remember what he said: Guilty as sin. Why didn’t she leave the guy? A gold digger.

  They don’t know the whole story.

  LAST YEAR

  From the outside, the house looked okay. That didn’t always mean anything.

  Tristan let out a low whistle. “I still can’t believe you freakin’ live here, Daye. You so lucked out.”

  “It’s just a house,” I said.

  “My gramma’s place in Little Gables, where she lets us crash on the couches where the cats don’t sleep—that’s a house. This is a mansion. A compound. An estate. A—”

  “Look, it’s a house, Tris.” Tristan’s muffler was bad, and I wanted to get inside before the truck’s idling motor woke someone. “And it’s two A.M.”

  “That’s class. Bum rides off me, then don’t even—”

  “Thank you.” I opened the door, then shut it as fast as I could without slamming. I forgot to wave good-bye until his pickup had sputtered into darkness. I turned the key, hearing the ocean behind the house.

  It wasn’t Tris’s fault. We’d been tight since sixth grade, when my mother finally gave in and let me play football. We were lots alike—both our moms worked as paralegals, and we’d lived on the edge of a school district where everyone else had a trust fund. Neither of us had fathers—not even dads-on-weekends like most guys. Mine ditched when I was two. Tris said his could be “anyone at South Miami High the same year as my mom.” Other guys’ dads embarrassed themselves, screaming in joy or agony at our football games. Tris and I, we didn’t have to worry about that.

  But lately I only saw Tris at school and at practice. Tris thought it was because I’d moved to a better neighborhood and bailed on him. I never corrected that. I also never told him why I had to rush home after practice. Sometimes, when he said I was lucky, I wondered if he was really that clueless.

  I didn’t turn on the light inside. My eyes got used to the darkness.

  As soon as they did, I’d look for the runner. That was what Mom called the piece of embroidered fabric on the hallway table. It was always the first thing I noticed when I came in. In my situation, you learned to look for signals.

  Since Mom married Walker, she’d been working on her embroidery, day after day, week after week, trapped in the house like that queen in the fairy tale she used to read me—the queen who spun straw into gold. She’d done that runner about a year ago, and since then it had been draped there—a Christmas gift for Walker, but it was a frequent target on his pissed-off days too.

  “I’ll rip it,” he’d threatened the week before. “Then I’ll rip you.”

  But that night it was safe on the table. Check. Somehow, I knew if Walker ever really ripped that runner, it would mean trouble.

  I took off my shoes and walked on careful feet. Through the living room, neat too. Neater than neat. When my mother wasn’t embroidering, she cleaned like her life depended on whether there was dust in the corners of the gleaming tile floors. And maybe it did.

  Dining room—check. Kitchen—check. Library, sitting room, study—all fine. Even the fireplace poker in the study was arranged at the perfect angle.

  I began to breathe.

  It was always there, when I was home, but especially when I wasn’t. The thought: What was happening? What was he doing to her? When I was at school or at football practice or partying with my friends. Any time I started having fun, I wondered.

  And I’d had fun that night, the first I’d had in a while. I deserved it. Tris had dragged me to this party at Alex Ramos’s house, a senior party, but we got in because, rumor had it, we were going to make varsity next year. I even hooked up with Vanessa, a cheerleader whose double-Ds were a sort of goal line for every guy on the J.V. team. I’d scored a first down, removed her bra and almost her shirt, in the porch swing in Alex’s yard. I could have gotten more yardage, but the whole time I was thinking: What is Walker doing to her?

  I finished my inspection and crept up the dark stairs.

  My door never creaked when it opened. I’d made sure of that. I stripped off my clothes and got into bed in the dark. I didn’t even brush my teeth, though the smell of my breath—stale beer—grossed me out.

  The night was quiet, quieter still after the lights and music of the party. And I was alone, more alone than even in the crowds at school. I lay thinking about Vanessa. She’d told me to call her. I’d agreed, though I knew I was lying, which made me a shit on top of everything else.

  Then I realized I wasn’t alone.

  I felt the presence and braced myself. Cowered, really. Cowered like the coward I was, wondering what I’d done to wake Walker. Wondering what he’d do about it.

  “Hi.” It wasn’t Walker.

  “Mom … you’ll wake him.”

  She sat on my bed and reached for the light switch. “He’s not home. He had his dinner and went back to the office.”

  How had I missed that? The absence of Walker’s black Mercedes was an obvious all-clear.

  “When’s he due back?”

  Her glance darted toward the window, and she didn’t answer. I noticed the way her long, white nightgown hung on her. When had she gotten so thin? But her skin was tanned, her hair streake
d blond like the other rich lawyers’ wives. She didn’t hang with them or do whatever it was they did. Tennis, maybe. Or volunteer work. Not her. Her tan came from sitting on the balcony, sewing, waiting for Walker to come home.

  Still, she looked good. She was young for a mom, and if you didn’t know her, you’d think she was happy.