Chapter Thirteen – Jack
Chapter Thirteen
Jack
I’d only gotten glimpses of the inside of Angela’s apartment before, and here I was, finally in the inner sanctum. Rabbit ran off upstairs. “So where’s your grandma tonight?” I shouted after him.
“Book club.”
“Is she really gonna be out till ten?”
“Prolly!” Rabbit shouted back, before reappearing and thundering down. “Can I show you some stuff?”
He wanted to be liked so badly that he was impossible not to like. Rabbit had fine blonde hair, pale skin like his mother’s, and eyes as gray as a thunderstorm. I grinned at him. “Only if afterwards I can show you some things.”
“Okay!” he said, grabbed my hand, and started hauling me upstairs.
Rabbit’s room was any seven year old’s dream—his mother had painted the walls to look like outer space, black with bright supernovas, swirls of distant galaxies, the deep red of a bursting sun, and his sheets were rocket-ship patterned. All things my parents would’ve never bothered to do.
Being seven, he took all this for granted.
“Wow—Rabbit,” I said with a low whistle, spinning to take it all in.
“What?”
“That’s pretty cool,” I said, gesturing at the walls.
He glanced up from the toy pile where he was digging for something special to display. “I guess.” He pulled out a dinosaur with a jetpack. “But this is cooler!”
I sat down on his bed. “You’re right,” I agreed.
For half an hour we looked at different toys and made them attack each other.
I followed along with his imagination, trying to keep up as we went from trying to survive an alien invasion to biting someone named Molly, to racing because we were being chased by a dog the size of a house and had been thrown into the past. At the end of it I fell onto his twin bed in defeat, pretending to die in dramatic fashion, which was ironic since up until about ninety minutes ago I actually had been dead—and from my vantage point I noticed a break in the black wall, presumably the door to a bathroom.
“Okay. The aliens have won,” I said, sitting up.
“They can’t win, Jack. You have to keep fighting!”
“I’m dead,” I groaned.
“No you’re not! It was just poison! You had an antidote!”
“I did?”
“Yep!”
I shook my head and rocked to standing. “Well, all right then—but recently dead people sometimes need to pee.”
“The bathroom’s over there,” he said, and started industriously lining up more toys.
I casually leaned forward like I was taking off a boot, but instead of doing that brought out the knife Paco had given me, and tossed it out onto the bed behind me in an easy arc. Then I slowly walked to the bathroom, closed the door behind myself, and listened against it with an ear.
Any minute now.
I was a little disgusted with myself, waiting for a friend’s child to accidentally touch something possibly painful but—how else was I to know?
If I whipped it out and given it to him to touch, he’d tell his mom for sure—I had to have some plausible deniability—although if he ever told Angela, it was likely I’d never get back inside Dark Ink, much less her apartment.
After three minutes of mostly silence I leaned over, flushed the toilet, and walked back out, prepared to take it away from him safely, expecting to find him using it to pry the saddle off a dino-charger.
Instead, I walked back into the room and saw it sitting where I’d tossed it on his bed. “Didn’t you see that?” I asked, pointing at it.
“Yeah.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Yeah.”
“Well…why aren’t you playing with it?”
He was stacking dinosaurs up on top of one another to make a mega-dino and didn’t even turn toward me to talk. “My mom told me not to play with knives.”
And there was the difference between Rabbit’s upbringing and mine, in a nutshell. If I’d been given a knife, I probably would’ve hid it in my mattress and dreamed about using it on my frequently angry father. What the hell had I been thinking anyways? I swooped it up and clipped it back in my boot.
“I’m hungry,” Rabbit announced, looking to me for food.
Me too, kid. But I knew somewhere perfect for children to go. “Go get your shoes and a jacket—we’re going out.”
I wrote Angela’s mom a note, tenting it to be easily visible on the counter just in case she got home before us, while Rabbit was running around the house putting clothes on. When I was done with that, I felt my phone buzz—Paco, worried about my non-mammilian instincts.
I’m working my night off tonight, because of you.
I’m flattered.
You’d better be. Everything all right in there?
Peachy. We’re heading out.
Why?
Kid’s hungry, and I don’t remember how to cook.
There are these things called ‘microwaves.’
We’ll be back by ten, that’s when Grandma’s getting back.
You think I’m letting you out of my sight?
Don’t think you’re going to have much choice. We’re going to Happyland.
Happyland was one of those places you couldn’t get into without a child in tow, all the better to cut down on predators. I’d never been, but the commercials made it look nice.
Thanks for the knife, I texted him, and repocketed my phone.
After a brief tussle which I let him win, I let Rabbit lock his door officially and then stick the key into one of his jacket’s many pockets, and together we walked out to my ride.
“Wow—this is yours?” he said, his gray eyes wide.
“All mine,” I said, as he ran around outside my 1963 Lincoln Continental, putting handprints on all the smooth black. I’d won it years ago in a private card game—the only time I’d ever used my whammy to cheat. The guy who owned her didn’t deserve her, and Betty was worth cheating for.
It was clear from Rabbit’s excitement that he’d never been in a real car before—and quite possibly my car had never had a child his age in it.
I thought for a dark moment about putting a trashbag underneath him, lest he foul the passenger seat with some child-related effluvia, but decided against it, and let him roll the radio dial from side to side instead, as we shouted over the engine noise.
“This is awesome,” he said, when we were three blocks away from his apartment. “My mom never lets me sit in the front seat!”
“Why not?”
“I dunno!”
Because—I realized slowly—letting children his age sit in the front seat was probably illegal.
And since my car was from 1963, Betty also didn’t have airbags.
Not a big deal for me, since I couldn’t die, but I realized this was perhaps a worse betrayal of Angela’s confidence than leaving Rabbit with a knife.
“Hey, Rabbit? Promise me you’ll never tell your mom I let you do this. ”
He started cranking the windows down excitedly—likely he’d never seen a hand-crank either. “Okay!”
Happyland was one of those uniquely Vegas institutions—a children’s arcade with an exceptionally strong bar.
If you weren’t going to get to gamble or see any adult entertainment, at least you wouldn’t have to spend your evening sober.
I parked and watched Paco’s car slide past us in the parking lot.
Rabbit hopped out of the front seat and slammed the door behind him like a king. “Happyland! My mom never takes me here! Not even when the other kids have birthday parties!”
“Well, as you might have noticed, I’m not your mom,” I said, grinning at him, as he hovered around me like an errant comet, zooming forward and back as we made our way inside.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Rabbit told me, the second we could hear the bleeps and bloops of the games inside, like Paradise Island siren songs.
“Yeah, I’m not falling for that,” I said.
I put a hand on his shoulder and steered him into the dining half of the establishment.
The entire menu was a kid’s menu, with a small ‘adult’ section, so the roles were reversed.
Rabbit contemplated his side of it after we sat down, and I wondered how much he could actually read. “What’re you getting?”
“Chicken fingers with ranch.”
When the waitress came by, I let him order. “Make it two,” I said, giving the woman both our menus. “And please bring extra crayons.”
She gave me a flirtatious wink. “You got it.”
She returned with crayons, a decaf soda for Rabbit, and a Jack and Coke for me.
I could eat and drink, it just didn’t do much of anything—and it definitely didn’t make me less hungry.
Some unconscious part of me kept track of the way the kid in the booth across from us kicked his legs, even as I tried to deny it.
“What’re you drawing?” Rabbit asked, looking up from his own placemat, where he, too, had been hard at work.
I hadn’t been paying attention much, to be honest. I’d started off with a curve, then another, then bubbled out from there, and was now in the middle of a complicated cloud system which I was shading in—it was about to rain.
“Thunderstorm. You?”
“Your car,” he said, holding his placemat up. We hadn’t been given black crayons, so he was making do with dark purple.
I grinned at him. “Hey, that’s pretty nice—maybe I can keep it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But only if you sign it once you finish. I want a Rabbit original.”
He was excited, then turned sly. “You know my mom gets paid for her art….”
“I’ve got five bucks in my pocket for tokens. That’s all you’re getting from me.”
He laughed, and went back to coloring.