Page 111 of Chaotic Curse
HAWK
If I weren’t driving,I’d probably throw my phone down on the hard pavement.Watch the screen shatter.
Shattered—like the mirror at Reyes’s house.
Shattered—like Ted’s skull in my father’s office.
Shattered—like whatever I had with Daniela.
“Feel better?”Falcon asks.
“Why does everything end up broken?”I say, more to myself than to Falcon.
Falcon’s mouth flattens.“You want to ask me that?Really?”
“No.I know that’s not fair after what you’ve been through” I rub the back of my neck.“I need a drink.”
He stares straight out the windshield.“You sure that fixes anything?”
“No.I’m sure it doesn’t.”I keep my eye on the road.“Where do you go when you need to not feel like this?”
He doesn’t answer right away.He keeps staring straight ahead.I’m asking about quiet.Distance.A place where the noise in your head gets drowned out by something else.
“I know a place,” he says finally.
“Good.”Then I start thinking.“You sure Peter will handle this?”I ask.
“He always does.Unofficially, like you wanted.If Dad trusts him, I trust him.”
Right.Falcon doesn’t really know who our father is.And now isn’t the time to tell him.Not when all this other shit is going on.I don’t have time to listen to my brother extol his non-existent virtues.
“Where?”I ask.
“Cut past the next exit,” Falcon says.“It’s a little dive bar outside Summer Creek about thirty miles.”
I do as he says.We drive past a strip of pawn shops and a busted laundromat and then into a neighborhood that looks like it forgot what year it is.I hit a pothole, and my bones rattle.
“There it is.”
The neon sign flickers.It says only “Bar.”No name other than that.
I pull into a spot and kill the engine.“What the hell is this place?”
“The kind of place you want right now,” Falcon says, opening the passenger side door.“It’s a dive.The kind of bar that never closes, even though no one other than a few locals go in.”
“Sounds like a front for money laundering,” I say.
“Could be.”Falcon scratches the side of his nose.“But I doubt it.I think it’s just one of those dives that refuses to die.”His mouth curves in a half-grin.
I glance at the cracked brick, at the way the neon sputters.
Falcon steps out first, boots crunching on gravel.
I take a breath and shove open my door.
“Why here?”I mutter, falling into step beside him.
“Because in a place like this,” Falcon says, pushing the door with his shoulder, “no one asks questions, and no one remembers faces.”
