Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

town with a traveling drug salesman. All kinds of drugs, apparently, but that’s not why she left. The kid she’d kneed was the son of the county sheriff. Maybe if that hadn’t happened, maybe she would have steadied down and . . .” Risa’s voice died.
    For a time there was only the thump and grate of tires over a rough dirt road.
    “Do you really blame yourself for the choices Cherelle is making now?” Shane asked finally.
    “My mind doesn’t. My emotions . . .” Risa shrugged slightly and tried to explain what she rarely thought about. “She was my mother and my sister and my friend all in one.”
    “Is she the same girl now that you remember from fifteen years ago?” he asked.
    Risa wanted to say yes. She couldn’t. “Sometimes. Just sometimes.”
    “And those are the times that really hurt.”
    She closed her eyes for an instant. “How did you know?”
    “I have my share of fifteen-year-old regrets. And they don’t change a damn thing about the world today.”
    “Your father?”
    “And my mother. I wanted them to love me as much as I loved them, but I gave up on my father before I was ten. It took me longer to see what my mother was and wasn’t.”
    Even now the words stuck in Shane’s throat, in his mind. Until a few years ago he had blamed his father for everything, a blanket condemnation born of a boy’s helplessness and rage. “She never stood up for her own child against him, even when I was way too young to do it myself. Especially then. She’d just wring her hands and make cupcakes. Jesus. To this day I can’t stand the sight of cupcakes.”
    Risa ached for the boy he had been. “Did your father beat you?”
    “That would have been too crude. Bastard Merit isn’t a crude man. He simply, systematically, stripped me of every thread of self-respect. Nothing personal. He does it to everyone who hangs around him long enough.”
    She let out a long breath. “And here I thought he just got bad press.”
    Shane smiled. “The man gives more than two billion dollars a year to various tear-jerking causes. It improved his press to no end. Mother’s idea, by the way. It hurt her that her husband had a reputation as the biggest shit-heel since Nero.”
    “What a pair we are,” Risa said. “I always wanted a real family, and you always wanted to get the hell away from yours.”
    “Like I said, I’m no good at the relationship thing.”
    “How would you know?”
    “Mother tells me every time we talk and I refuse to ‘get along with’ my sweet old man.”
    “Well, that clinches it. You’re hopeless. Your mother ought to know, seeing as she’s such a howling expert on healthy relationships.”
    Silence, then a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I never looked at it that way,” Shane admitted.
    “As an adult?”
    “Yeah.”
    “If it helps, I avoid looking at Cherelle that way every chance I get.”
    He hesitated. “That could be dangerous.”
    “I figured that out about the time I was playing hurdles in the casino. But . . .”
    “But Cherelle still saved your ass when you were fifteen.”
    “Yes.”
    Shane could picture it all too well, including the part that Risa didn’t talk about. “Did you ever think your ass wouldn’t have needed saving if Cherelle hadn’t been having sex in the backseat while the sheriff’s son raced through the night drinking beer and listening to all the grunts and moans?”
    Risa didn’t answer, which told Shane that his assumption had been right.
    “Someday,” he said, “you might think about the fact that you and Cherelle ended up in different places because you started out different in the same place.”
    “Then I have nothing left of my childhood but lies.”
    “No, you have a child’s memory in an adult mind. Not the same thing at all. Your love for your friend was true.”
    “And yours for your mother, your father?” Risa challenged.
    “Inevitable. Hell, part of me still loves them. I just don’t like them worth a damn.”
    Risa was still wrestling with that when the road bent to the right and ended in the dusty front yard of a clapboard house.

Chapter 50
    Las Vegas
    November 4
    Night
    J ohn Firenze sat in his gleaming private office and wanted to kill something. Not just anything. One thing in particular. His fucking stupid nephew Cesar, whose fucking stupid face was plastered on every TV screen in Vegas.
    It was just a matter of time before someone phoned an ID to the cops. Then Firenze would be answering