Tristan (The Ruins of Emblem #1) Read online

  He opened a drawer and frowned. “Did you eat my tuna fish?”

  “Hell no.”

  He held up a box of granola bars. “Can I have these?”

  “I don’t even know where those came from. They were probably left over from the last tenant.”

  Dover wasn’t picky. He tossed the box into a plastic shopping bag and threw a bag of potato chips in there to round out his meal. We’d been living in this place for almost a year and even though sometimes he reminded me of a fussy old woman we got along all right when he wasn’t piss drunk and busting me in the jaw. There were times like this morning when the good natured bickering reminded me of living with my brothers. Those were the times when I felt kind of a pang in my chest. I missed them, especially Brecken. He’d barely been a teenager when I took off and now he was practically a man.

  “I’ve got to stop by the high school today when I’m done picking up my stuff,” I said.

  He pinned his ID badge on his shirt. “Is that a good idea?”

  “I’ve got obligations,” I reminded him and he nodded.

  “Just don’t get your ass busted,” Dover said, smacking me lightly on the back of the head. “I don’t want to have to find someone else to cover your rent.”

  I gave him the finger. He laughed. Then he got serious.

  “I’ve told you before, Tris, maybe if you got your GED and quieted down for a while you could manage to find a real job. Hell, despite a few spots on your record maybe you could get a job at the prison someday.”

  I almost puked. He was dreaming. I’d never pass a background check. Besides, I’d rather tweeze my pubes than wrestle on a scratchy uniform every day so I could count cell keys and sweat through shifts in the blazing hot rec yard. Fuck that noise.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  The rusted door hinges squawked as Dover said his final farewell. “Have fun lurking around at the high school.”

  My cereal was soggy by now so I dumped it in the garbage and poured a new bowl. I had more than one reason to visit the high school today. It was true I had an errand to fulfill but there was also a certain schoolteacher on my mind.

  More than a week had gone by since she walked into the Dirty Cactus. I hadn’t run into her since then but I knew where to find her when I wanted to.

  On Sunday afternoon I gave my brother Curtis a ring. He was surprised to hear from me so soon after our last phone call. Usually he was the one who reached out to me and not vice versa. I asked him what was new and he told me about Brecken’s college classes and Cassie’s new knitting hobby and about how a recent storm tilted the palo verde tree in his front yard. Fascinating stuff. He didn’t mention his sister-in-law moving down to Emblem. And when he asked me what was going on down here I said there was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing at all.

  But I was kind of bothered about the fact that he didn’t say anything about Cadence. Curtis wasn’t the forgetful type. If he made no mention of Cadence it was because he didn’t want to.

  My big brother probably wouldn’t be too pleased over the things that were running through my mind ever since Cadence plopped herself down on a bar stool. The more I thought about it the more the idea of corrupting the ever loving daylights out of that girl was irresistible. She was hot and she was full of herself and she was on a fucking desperate quest to make the world a better place. For some ridiculous reason she’d chosen Emblem to make her mark.

  God, I wanted to fuck her.

  Even more to the point, I wanted to fuck with her.

  It was a good combination. Even thinking about it got me hard.

  Cadence liked getting her buttons pushed. I could tell that about her less than twenty seconds into our first conversation. She also liked me. Or at least she liked what she saw when she looked at me. She couldn’t hide the way she squirmed and sucked in her breath when I touched her hand and leaned too close. She didn’t fool me with the lie about some limp dick boyfriend named Todd. If Todd existed then he didn’t have much of a claim on her. She was eyeing me with too much interest and I could practically hear the gears turning inside her pretty head. She’d consider me a challenge, the adult version of some wayward kid in her classroom, raw material she could tame and domesticate the way her sister had house-trained my brother. I couldn’t fucking wait to see her try.

  My dick was at full attention right now and I hopped in the shower to beat off and get on with the day. I had to go all the way to Tucson to pick up the goods and after counting my cash three times to make sure I had what I needed I took a ride in the two tone brown and yellow Ford pickup I’d scored a few months ago from an old alfalfa farmer who’d owned it since 1987 and planned to move to Colorado to live with his son. I loved that truck. It reminded me of the old truck my dad owned when I was a kid. Against our mother’s wishes he used to let me and Curtis ride in the bed when he went off-roading far out in the desert where there was nothing around for miles. The ride was so rough I remember thinking my brains were going to come loose inside of my head as I choked on the dust but those were some of my best memories, holding onto my big brother in the bed of that old pickup while our dad sharply jerked the wheel around to make us shriek. It was a small miracle that Curtis and I never toppled right out into the sand but we didn’t. It was too bad Brecken never got to come along and share those good times. He was too young. My mother would always have a fit when we came home with our clothes full of dust but my dad knew how to wink at her and kiss her neck so she never stayed mad for long.

  I never knew what happened to that truck after he got shot in the head at a local convenience store and died before he reached the hospital. Maybe that old pickup was still on the road somewhere, still hauling kids around and spinning donuts in the desert. I liked to think so.

  The drive to Tucson was more tense than usual because after I passed the electrified prison fences on my way out of town I found myself thinking about Dover’s warning. He was right. I might be looking at hard time in an orange jumpsuit someday. I’d lost count of the number of guys I’d known who faced a long stretch on the wrong side of the Emblem prison bars. Most of them had done worse shit than I ever stuck my nose into but a few were just dipping into small time trouble and had the bad luck to be assigned a severe judge. As for my luck, it had held out so far but I suspected I wasn’t invincible.

  The Tucson transaction went smoothly. A whisper of doubt hissed through my mind as I pulled up to the derelict old motel where I was meeting my usual contact and for half a second I debated backing out of the parking lot and returning to Emblem empty handed. I could scrape by picking up extra shifts at my day job. My boss had already extended an offer to give me all the shifts I wanted because he had trouble keeping reliable help. It would be enough to cover rent and meals made of cheap meat plus a few drinks a week at the Dirty Cactus. There were people who lived a lot worse.

  But I shook the idea away and went through with the deal anyway.

  Later on I stopped for lunch at a burger dive not far from the University of Arizona. It was a smaller campus than Arizona State, not that I’d spent any time at either one engaging in academic pursuits. ASU had the best parties and the hottest ass so it was worth the drive to Tempe now and then. This place had some nice scenery too. Two blondes wearing tight sorority tees eyed me from across the room. Then some beefy looking hulk walked in and sat down at their table so they got distracted. It was just as well. I didn’t feel like hanging around here in Tucson and anyway I had Cadence on my brain. The college kids laughed a lot and the girls took selfies in case anyone wanted to see what they looked like eating hamburgers.

  There was never a time when I thought I might end up like them. Even during the years when I was at Emblem High, playing for the football team and behaving like a regular teenager, I never had any thoughts about college. By the time Curtis moved Breck and me out of here in the spring of my junior year I was already planning to drop out. Curtis did the best he could with a crappy situation. There was never anythin
g he could have said to stop me from doing whatever I wanted. I hoped he understood that by now.

  Back when I’d first come running back to Emblem I’d fastened myself to a tight collection of creeps that used to run around with my brother back in the days when the original Emblem Rioters were one of the principal crews trampling all over the law abiding people of Emblem. The ER’s weren’t wise enough to avoid getting greedy in the face of temptation and dove headfirst into the underground pharmaceutical trade with no thought about how their high volume would attract the attention of the feds. Curtis had already smartened up and skipped town when the shit hit the fan and a couple of years went by before any of the former ER’s dared to stick their noses up out of the sand. Someone must have decided a rebrand was in order because they started calling themselves Emblem Evil, sporting old style biker cuts and rolling through the streets in a fearsome procession of deafening motors and trying to capture their lost glory, The scene was wild for a little while but I started to rethink my life choices when I watched a guy get his ear sliced off for the crime of swallowing a few too many of the pills that were supposed to finance all that glory.

  There was a problem though.

  Once you were in you couldn’t just shrug and walk away as carefree as you please. Try it and expect to part with a piece of flesh or two. Fortunately the guys running the show had rocks for brains. One got shot in the chest after trying to mow down a highway patrol officer. Another one was found electrocuted in a bathtub after fucking his brother’s old lady. Two more went up in a cloud of careless smoke when they tried experimenting with cooking their own crystal in a double wide three miles outside town. Everyone else got disturbed by all the bad karma and scattered.

  The way I saw it, the problem with operating in a gang was that having too many players on the field ended the game. Numbers attracted attention. And if you were on the outside of the law then attention was the last thing you wanted. A solo operation was better. Easier. Far less risky.

  I still had a few more shakeups in store before that lesson sunk in. Curtis might still be sore at me because of a phone call he’d gotten last year to bail me out after I was busted for trespassing and theft of copper pipe from a construction site up in Phoenix. That setup wasn’t even mine. I just didn’t say no when a buddy asked for a little help. So I quietly served my sixty day sentence and hardened my resolve. Now I knew how to say no. I knew that I could only depend on myself.

  And these days I had no group, no gang, no tribe that I belonged to. Which was exactly how I wanted it.

  I tossed my garbage and ordered a milk shake to go before hitting the road. I took my time on the ride back to Emblem, choosing the back country roads that used to get a lot more use when the area was more agricultural.

  The last bell at Emblem High had just sounded when I pulled into the parking lot. Teenagers were madly pouring out of the front doors of the brick building like they were escaping from a horror movie monster. I scanned the cars and found the beat up blue Buick from another era, a car that belonged to a man who languished in the nearby prison. His son drove it now. I parked three spots down and waited.

  The kid didn’t take long to appear and wasn’t surprised to find me leaning against the hood of his car. While it might not be the wisest idea in the world to deal with business like this in the middle of a high school parking lot there weren’t a list of great options to choose from. He didn’t have a cell phone and if his mother found me knocking on the front door she was as likely to point a gun in my face as she was to say hello.

  Ernesto Rivera barely glanced at the envelope I gave him. He was full of questions, questions I wasn’t able to answer. Not because I didn’t want to but because I didn’t know much. I tried to reassure him as best I could even though the effort was inadequate. Nesto, named after his father and resembling his father so strongly he was practically a clone, finally shoved the envelope in his back pocket and thanked me for coming.

  “I got to get to practice,” he said. “I just came out to my car to grab my gear.”

  “You’re still on the team?” I asked.

  “Uh huh.” The kid pulled a frayed green duffel bag out of the trunk. “I’m the best kicker they got,” he boasted. He pushed his black hair out of his eyes and looked at me. “You played, didn’t you?”

  “A million years ago. Linebacker.”

  “It couldn’t have been that long ago. You were in Raf’s class, right?”

  “Right,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t move on to questions about his older brother. Rafael hadn’t been seen around here in almost a year, ever since his father got arrested for something Raf had done himself. There’d been a time when I assumed Raf, with all his brains and his talents, would be one of the ones who made it out of here the legitimate way. I was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time I miscalculated, surely not the last.

  Nesto shouldered his bag and took a step back. “Thanks again Tristan. My mom’s still not herself. She’s depressed. It doesn’t help that we’re deep in the hole on the store lease.” His eyes lit up as an idea popped into his head. “Hey, you wouldn’t know of any way I could earn a little extra, do you? I was thinking I might not stick around until graduation anyway. Two years is a hell of a long time.”

  “No,” I said instantly. “Don’t do that. If you need more to get by than what’s in that envelope then come find me and I’ll make sure you get it.”

  His brow furrowed and for a split second I thought I was looking at his brother. Raf was always a riot to have around but get ready for hell if you ever managed to make him mad. At some point Raf’s temper started getting the better of him more often than not and that’s when he started speeding toward a downfall.

  His kid brother was different though. Nesto’s face relaxed and he gave me another grin. His folks operated the Emblem Mart on Main Street. I used to go in there whenever I had some pocket change as a kid. If Ernesto Sr. was around he’d always slip a few handfuls of colorfully wrapped candy with Spanish labels into a brown paper bag and tell me to share it with my brothers. He’d passed his crooked grin down to both of his sons but only his namesake inherited his upbeat attitude.

  Coincidentally, the Emblem Mart was where my own father met his end one night when he stepped out for cigarettes and never came back. It was a small world. At least within the confines of Emblem.

  “You take care of what’s in your back pocket,” I told Nesto. “Make sure you keep it someplace safe.”

  He nodded but he was distracted, looking past me at something. I turned around to see what it was and found myself staring at Cadence Gentry. She was wearing a loose dress dotted with pastel flowers and I couldn’t see nearly enough of her legs since it reached down past her knees but any extra skin was better than nothing. A short sleeve white sweater thing buttoned across her chest, depriving me of what I really wanted to see. I wondered why she was draping herself in sweaters when it was over a hundred degrees out but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Cadence was as pissed off as a demon; red-faced and fist-clenched and glaring so violently I could swear she was considering throwing off her sweater cape and murdering me right here on the crumbling asphalt in front of Emblem High.

  “Hi Ms. Gentry,” Nesto spoke up, sounding confused at the sight of his teacher on the verge of committing homicide.

  She glanced at him and softened. “Ernesto,” she said. “I just graded your essay. Outstanding job. You earned an A.”

  He was pleased. “I worked on it all weekend.”

  “It showed. Keep up the good work.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Cadence handed him a rectangular slip of yellow paper. “In the name of a job well done, here’s a Positivity Pass.”

  Nesto hesitated to take the piece of paper but finally accepted it, holding the thing awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger and giving off the impression that he had no idea what to do next.

  “Thanks,” he said and took a step back. “Look, I got to get to prac
tice or coach will have me running laps until dark. I’ll see you tomorrow Ms. Gentry. Bye, Tristan.”

  “Later,” I said, watching Cadence. Her hair fell softly past her shoulders and despite the fact that she’d probably just spent the day locked in a grueling cycle of class bells, crowded hallways and teen angst, she remained fresh-faced and absurdly pretty.

  But now that Nesto was gone her expression had returned to thundercloud status.

  “Hey, Cadence,” I said, casually leaning my arm on the roof of Nesto’s car. “I thought I might run into you here.”

  She hissed through her teeth. “Tristan, you son of a bitch.”

  What the fuck?

  The last time we were face to face she was virtually salivating. Somehow since then I’d become the devil incarnate and I didn’t have so much as a hasty hand job to show for it. I couldn’t guess kind of problems this girl had come up with between then and now. To be honest I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be bothered with finding out. In spite of the interesting idea of getting Cadence Gentry on her knees and at my mercy this episode was reminding me that I’d sworn off sticking my dick into insanity. Cadence hadn’t tried to carve up my balls yet but right about now she seemed like she’d be open to the suggestion.

  Fortunately my dick wasn’t in the mood to consider reason. While Cadence glowered at me with inexplicable fury my pants grew tight from a rising boner and that’s when I was sure about something.

  I wasn’t fucking going anywhere.

  Chapter Five

  Cadence

  A mere two seconds after the last bell of the day rang the energy in the building careened from stagnant to chaotic as the human contents of Emblem High emptied into the packed corridors and raced for the nearest exits in the loudest most disorderly manner possible.

  Walking these halls at dismissal time was a different experience than I remembered from my high school years and not only because I was now a teacher instead of a student. For starters, there were no student lockers aside from the gym lockers rooms so unless an after school activity beckoned no one had any reason to stop on the way out the door. I’d been told by Aura that the lockers had been removed a few years ago as a way to discourage drugs and weapons from being kept on school grounds. It occurred to me that that people could just store the drugs and weapons in their backpacks if they were so inclined but I had a feeling the thought had occurred to her too so I said nothing.