Page 3 of Taken for Granite
“Now? Chloe gets out of school in an hour.”
“In and out, Junie. I’ll give Chloe a slice of pie while she waits.”
Juniper frowned and sipped her coffee. Her kid sister, Chloe, came to the diner every day after school and did homework until Juniper finished her shift. Did it matter if she delivered catering or wove her way through tables?
“You’ll keep an eye on her?” she asked.
“Chloe’s a good kid. No one will mess with her,” he said.
Juniper believed Jack. Staff wouldn’t mess with a fourteen-year-old girl on her own, and Jack’s hulking presence would keep away any diners who might take advantage. Far from the fanciest or the best neighborhood, the diner took the idea offamilyseriously. After slinging six years of coffee and blue plate specials, Juniper was family.
“Thanks.” She finished the cup, already feeling the surge of caffeine and sugar in her blood.
Waitressing was hardly her dream career, but shit happened.
Twelve years her junior, Chloe never felt like a little sister. She was the surprise baby who came along just when Juniper became old enough to babysit. Juniper’s own teenage rebellion only put distance between them. By the time she went off to college, the sisters barely knew each other. Sure, Chloe sometimes stayed the weekend at Juniper’s apartment and they watched movies and ordered pizza, but to her, that still qualified as babysitting.
They argued and were far from perfect, but they were family. Juniper never doubted that she was loved fiercely.
Then shit happened.
Chloe stayed with Juniper for movies and pizza on Valentine’s Day, letting their parents have a date night.The next morning, as Juniper drove Chloe back home, she knew something was wrong the moment her car turned onto the block. Firetrucks and an ambulance blocked the street, forcing her to walk the last distance. The air smelled like smoke and bitter, melted plastic.
The events were a jumbled mess in her mind. She remembered waiting on the neighbor’s tiny scrap of lawn as the fire department worked, calling her mom’s cell phone and getting the voicemail. Someone asked her if anyone had been inside and she didn’t know, she didn’t want to know but her mother wasn’t answering the phone. She remembered the bodies covered in white sheets and being asked to identify her parents. Chloe clung to her the entire time.
The firefighters had found her parents in their bed, seemingly asleep, presumably dead from smoke inhalation. At least they never knew what happened.
And that was how twenty-year-old Juniper became the guardian for her eight-year-old sister.
The work van rattled to life. She hated making deliveries. The diner’s catering was nothing special, just a batch of day-old bagels, a box of pastries, and to-go containers of coffee. A mediocre bakery supplied the bagels every morning and they were terrible, even under an inch-thick layer of cream cheese. The pastries were made in-house and worth the effort. The cinnamon rolls were ooey-gooey bites of perfection and her absolute favorite. She gained five pounds just from the smell alone.
Juniper rolled her eyes at herself, like a few extra pounds were the extent of her worries. She should be so lucky.
After the fire, she had to grow up real fucking fast. She finished the semester but only because her rent had been prepaid and they needed a place to stay until the homeowner's insurance repaired their parents’ house—legallyherhouse now.
Per state law, a minor child needed their own bed and could not share a bedroom with an adult. As Juniper only shared a two-bedroom apartment with her roommate, she convinced the social worker that her roommate, Kim, was her girlfriend and Chloe lived in the other bedroom. Juniper slept on the couch. Kim didn’t like it, but she couldn’t complain about the inconvenience of having a recently orphaned child in the apartment without seeming like a stone-cold bitch.
After withdrawing from school and moving back into the house, Juniper found a job waitressing in the neighborhood. It wasn’t the best part of town, but it wasn’t the worst. It was home, which was the most important thing. People knew the Bouvet sisters and looked out for them.
So what if her boss, Mick, owned a few local strip clubs and bars? And if those clients came ’round the diner at 3 a.m. for a very late dinner or aggressively early breakfast? Big deal. She made decent money working the morning and lunch shifts, and no one expected her to take her clothes off.
The van complained and the engine sputtered but she eased it onto I-95. Getting the vehicle up to speed always made her nervous. It ran like a workhorse, never failing, but it was not a racehorse, either. Normally she took surface streets to avoid the frustrated honks of other drivers, but she had no time today. She’d get down to Packer Avenue and to the dockyard fast, unload her delivery of crummy bagels and cold coffee, and look the other way if someone slipped something into the back of the van.
Not her problem. She was just the driver.
Old Louis Lancer ran his business just close enough to the legal side of the law that the cops and public officials looked the other way. One of the legendary colorful characters of Philadelphia, he always had a cigar clenched between his teeth and a pretty thing on his arm. He drank, smoked, and ate a fatty diet much to the dismay of his heart doctor. It didn’t matter, because Louis was larger than life. Everyone understood on some level that he was a bad guy, selling drugs on the streets and laundering the dirty money through his strip clubs, bars, and restaurants, but he had a robust laugh and a twinkle in his eye, like a naughty Santa. You couldn’t help but like the guy.
He died, under his mistress, from heart failure. “With a smile on his face and pussy on his dick,” Little Mickey said at the funeral. Well, everyone called him regular Mickey by then. Couldn’t go around calling the new boss by his pet name. Still, the neighborhood admired Louis’ grand exit, even if it was cliché. Died while having sex? Better than dying on the toilet, she guessed.
Mickey took over the family business, but it wasn’t the same. He lacked his father’s affable disposition. Everyone in the neighborhood grew up calling him either Little Mickey or Blue Eyes because they couldn’t call him Crazy Eyes, which sprang to mind looking at his flat, dull-eyed stare. Well, you couldn’t call him that to his face, and no one had the balls to call him that behind his back.
Old Louis was never the jolly criminal that Juniper imagined. He had been a dangerous man. She just saw the smiling public front that made people forget all the bad things he did and only remember the Christmas toy drive or handing out baskets of food at Thanksgiving.
Mickey had none of that. He didn’t smile and no one would ever dare describe him as affable. He didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was.
He also believed that the Illuminati and a shadow government ran the world, so he was clearly cuckoo bananas crazy pants.
Traffic crawled. Juniper pressed her head to the steering wheel, dreading the coming face-to-face with Mickey. What was she going to do? Who knew how much longer Mickey would honor his father’s agreement? She’d never get out from under this loan, and it was only a matter of time before Mickey decided that he couldn’t trust her. There was only one way this situation could end, and it wasn’t happy.
