Page 1 of The Secret
Chapter One
Constantine
June
Fuckinghell,the things I did for my family.
Constantine? I need you to work twenty-billion hours tomorrow, son, starting at the farmer’s market before dawn, and oh, I can’t pay you.
You’ve gotta step up, little brother. Mama keeps calling me all, “Julian, I’m worried Constantine is squandering his future.” But I’m just trying to deal with my own life right now, so please handle your shit for once, okay?
Con, big bro, I know you’re a man who’s literally made of nothing but free time and money, given that you work two jobs and one of them is unpaid, and everyone knows you require no sleep to survive, so I need you to haul your exhausted ass over to fucking Camden in the middle of the goddamn night so you can drive my drunk—and totally underaged—carcass back home before Mama wakes up and figures out how her baby boy was celebrating high school graduation, ‘kay thanks.
Those last hadn’t been my little brother Theo’s actual words when he called me a little after two in the morning, naturally. It had actually been more like, “Hey, um… Connie? I had like, two shots… No. Maybe like,threeshots of Turkey? And maybe like three or six beers? I think I’m good though, because ‘liquor before beer, in the clear.’ Everyoneknows that. But, like, Sam says I’m a fuckin’ idiot? So what do you think?”
What I’d thought was that young Theodore needed to be ripped a new asshole, and I’d been only too happy to do it, but onlyafterI’d picked his sorry ass up and taken Sam home, too. I’d been an auxiliary police officer with the O’Leary PD for way too long to do otherwise.
At least I could console myself that Theo was safely at home in bed this morning. I just wished I could say the same. I was rocking a dull headache and my eyes felt as bleary as ifI’dbeen the one drinkingthree or six beerslast night, when I most definitely had not.
I glared at the sun, which was way too high in the sky, and kicked at the front tire of my ancient Civic, Bessie, who’d decided to be an attention whore at the worst possible moment. It was a sign of just how well my day was going that the sun only made my headache worse, and the tire ripped the corner of my only decent pair of sneakers.
Mother. Fucker.
A battered blue tow truck honked in a friendly way as it pulled to the shoulder of the highway in front of me, and Joe Cross opened his door and swung himself down a second later.
“Hey-hey, Connie. What’s the trouble?”
Joe was fifty-something, and pretty much always had been, as far as I could recall. He wasstocky, if we were being polite, with a beer gut that strained the front of his TB12 shirt, and I couldn’t have told you what color his hair was if my life depended on it, because he’d nevernotworn his battered, oldPatriotshat. I personally always thought he looked like Santa Claus’s illegitimate, Tom-Brady-loving son or something. Nobody should have cheeks that pink.
I leaned back against the driver’s door and shrugged helplessly. “It’s just like I explained to you on the phone, Joe. Started shuddering, smelled like burned toast, and then it just… quit.”
Joe frowned at the raised hood and the exposed engine, like he could diagnose Bessie’s condition just by sight. Hell, for all I knew, maybe he could. He nodded once. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you sorted, kiddo.”
Kiddo. I almost snorted. Right then, I felt about a hundred years old.
I leaned against Bessie’s side, closed my tired eyes, and sighed as the sunlight warmed my face. Ordinarily, standing in the bright sunshine of a late-spring morning in Upstate New York was high on my list of favorite things to do—right up there with sex and a hard workout—because it was one of the few things that calmed my mind for a little while.
Today, though, it had the opposite effect, reminding me that I was lateagain, and I was gonna get reamed for itagain,and Micah-fucking-Bloom was gonna give me that superior little smirk of hisagainfrom his booth at the farmer's market across from the Ross Landscaping booth.Not to mention, I was gonna have to sell a kidney to pay for my fucking car repair, and I was probably gonna get skin cancer or at least a sunburn, standing out here, because I had fuck-all control over anything in my life. My brain was buzzing like cicadas in a heatwave and it was driving me mental.
“Turn the engine for me, Con?” Joe said, bending over the front of the car.
I inhaled sharply and nodded, then pulled open the door and twisted the key once, twice, three times.
The dashboard responded by lighting up, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.
Joe made a motion for me to stop and I got back out.
“What do you think?” I asked anxiously. “Battery issue, maybe? Alternator or… something?”
My knowledge of cars was extensive, clearly.
Please be something cheap, please be something cheap.
Joe straightened and scratched his cheek with one blunt finger. “Wellll,” he began.
Okay, fine.Please be something not-insanely-expensive, please be something not-insanely-expensive.
“Thing is, Connie, car this old?” Joe shook his head. “Could be a lotta things.”
