Reckless Night by Lisa Marie Rice Page B

had always been something in him that didn’t want to live. The boy couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father clean and sober. He had no mother. A ll his life, it had been just the two of them, father and son, drifting from shelter to shelter, staying until they were kicked out.

    The boy stood for a moment, looking down at his only blood relation in this world, dead in a pool of vomit and shit. Nobody had noticed his father’s dead body yet.

    Nobody ever noticed them or even looked their way if they could help it. Even the other lost, hopeless souls in the shelter recognized someone worse off than they were and shunned them.

    The boy looked around at the averted faces, eyes cast to the floor.

    Nobody cared that the drunk wasn’t getting up again.

    Nobody cared what happened to his son.

    There was nothing for the boy here. Nothing.

    He had to get to Caroline.

    He had to move fast before they discovered that his father was dead. If they found the body here, the police and social workers and administrators would come for him. He was eighteen, but he couldn’t prove it. And he knew enough about the way things worked to know that he’d become a ward of the state. He’d be locked up in some prisonlike orphanage.

    No. No way. He’d rather die.

    The boy moved toward the stairs that would take him up out of the shelter into the gelid, sleety afternoon.

    An old woman looked up as he passed by, cloudy eyes flickering with recognition. Susie. Ancient, toothless Susie. She wasn’t lost in alcohol like his father. She was lost in the smoky depths of her own mind.

    “Ben, chocolate chocolate?” she cackled and smacked her wrinkled, rubbery lips. He’d once shared a chocolate bar Caroline had brought him, and Susie had looked to him for sweets ever since.

    Here he was known as Ben. In the last shelter—

    Portland, was it?—his father had called him Dick. Naming him after the manager of the shelter always bought them some time. Not enough. Eventually, the shelters got sick of his father’s drunken rages and found a way to kick them out.

    Susie’s hands, with their long, black, ragged nails, grasped at him. Ben stopped and held her hand a moment. “No chocolate, Susie, ” he said gently.

    Like a child, her eyes filled with tears. Ben stooped to give her grimy wrinkled cheek a kiss, then rushed up the stairs and out into the open air.

    No hesitation as he turned into Morrison Street. He knew exactly where he was going. To Greenbriars. To Caroline.

    To the one person on the face of the earth who cared about him. To the only person who treated him as a human being and not some half-wild animal who smelled of dirty clothes and rotting food.

    Ben hadn’t eaten in two days, and he had only a too-short cotton jacket on to keep the cold away. His big, bony wrists stuck out of the jacket’s sleeves, and he had to tuck his hands into his armpits to keep them warm.

    No matter. He’d been cold and hungry before.

    The only warm thing he wanted right now was Caroline’s smile.

    Like the arrow of a compass to a lodestar, he leaned into the wind to walk the mile and a half to Greenbriars.

    No one looked his way as he trudged by. He was invisible, a lone, tall figure dressed in rags. It didn’t bother him. He’d always been invisible. Being invisible had helped him survive.

    The weather worsened. The wind blew icy needles of sleet directly into his eyes until he had to close them into slits.

    Didn’t matter. He had an excellent sense of direction and could make his way to Greenbriars blindfolded.

    Head down, arms wrapped around himself to conserve what little warmth he’d been able to absorb at the shelter, Ben slowly left behind the dark, sullen buildings of the part of the city that housed the shelter.

    Soon the roads opened up into tree-lined avenues.

    Ancient brick buildings gave way to graceful, modern buildings of glass and steel.

    No cars passed—the weather was too severe for