Guarding Lacey: A Smokey Dalton Story (2 page)

“We can’t talk her out of dressing like
this,” he said. “We’ve been trying for nearly a year. She’ll do what she wants.
But if she does get into trouble — if she starts crying a lot, or acting
really angry for no reason, tell me okay?”

I hated that. I hated telling on anybody,
even for a good reason. There was lotsa stuff Smoke should probably know, but
I’d make my friends and my pretend cousins mad at me if I said something, and
they wouldn’t like me no more, and worse, they wouldn’t trust me.

“What if she don’t want me to?” I asked.

“Tell me that too.”

“Feels like tattling,” I muttered.

Smoke ignored that. “If someone just
— does her — then she’s not going to want to tell her parents.
Maybe she’ll tell me. We can make sure it won’t happen again. We’d be
protecting her, Jim, not tattling on her.”

Made sense, but it still scared me. I
seen them guys with my mom. There was no protecting. There was just getting by,
surviving, and trying all over again.

But I didn’t say that to Smoke. I don’t
say a lot of what I think to Smoke. He don’t need to know all the details of
what happened before. I try to forget a lot of them too.

But it’s dang hard when I see Lace
standing under that arch, smoking, when she’s supposed to be in class. She’s
just waiting, and I don’t know for what. Then some guy comes up and he’s tall
and thin and wears a long cloth coat. The thin guy puts a gloved hand on Lace’s
arm, and she smiles up at him like he’s God.

Just then, Mrs. Dylan calls on me, and I
have to turn away from the window. Mrs. Dylan always looks tired. She’s not as
old as Smoke, but she has these big bags under her eyes, and even her voice
sounds a little wispy, like she can’t get enough energy to use it right.

“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to remember
what she’d said before she called my name. “I forgot the question.”

“When I called on you,” she says all
precise, which makes her seem madder than she probably is, “I asked you to add
one-half and one-fourth.”

“Three-fourths, ma’am,” I say.

She frowns at me, and I realize I
answered too fast. I don’t want nobody in this school to know how easy it is
for me. I feel my cheeks getting hot.

“Maybe I heard the question after all,” I
say with just enough attitude to make my friends smile, but not enough to make
her madder.

“Sometimes I don’t know what to do with
you kids,” she says and goes back to talking about how when you add fractions
you got to make the bottom numbers the same.

I turn back to the window.

Lace is gone.

I hope she’s gone back inside, all alone,
and is in some class now, shivering and wishing she was dressed proper.

But I know she’s with the guy in the
coat. And I know she feels cool.

None of this is cool. And I know at some
point, he’s gonna hurt her.

But what I don’t know is when’s the right
time to tell Smoke? And what if I’m wrong? What if the guy in the coat is
somebody nice like Smoke was to me, trying to talk Lace into the right path
like the rest of us been doing?

Lace’d never forgive me.

But she’d never forgive me if I wait too
long too.

I wish this all was as simple as adding
fractions. But it ain’t. And I got no idea what to do.

***

The answer comes at lunch. What would
Smoke do if this was some case? And that makes the answer easy.

Smoke would make sure he knows what’s
going on before he does anything. So I gotta know exactly what’s going on.

The lunch room is near the back doors.
They’re locked during school hours, even though Smoke says that ain’t legal.
There’s windows to the right side, but they’re marked up with soap so no one
can see in.

We can’t see much—sunlight or snow
or nothing—and the lights overhead are that regular kind not the
fluorescents like in the classroom, so it’s pretty dark in here, which is okay
with me.

I always sit as far from the windows as I
can get. My cousin Keith usually joins me. He’s my age. My younger cousins,
Mikie and Noreen, they know better than to even smile at us. We don’t want no
little girls anywhere near us, though I always make sure I know exactly where
they’re sitting, so I can keep an eye on them.

Keith sits down across from me. He’s
smaller than me but not by much. Smoke says I’m coming into my growth. I got
taller last year and Keith didn’t. He don’t seem to mind. He thinks I’ll get as
big as Smoke, not knowing that we’re not really blood.

He opens the brown sack his lunch comes
in and I do the same. None of the kids here have them fancy metal lunch boxes
because you can hide a gun in em so the school banned em. We check our
sandwiches (both peanut butter), our desserts (he’s got three homemade
chocolate chip cookies that I want and I know he won’t trade for my Nilla Wafers),
and our extras. I hand him my carrots and he gives me an apple. There ain’t
much more to trade, so we settle in.

“Lace dating some older guy?” I ask.

Keith frowns at me. “Lace can’t date.”

“Well, some guy picked her up this
morning.” I tell him what I saw. He’s more upset about the cigarettes because
he don’t know what I know about the way the world works.

“Can you find out where the guy takes
her?” I ask.

“Why’s that so important to you?”

“Because he might hurt her, that’s why.”
I don’t want him to ask no more because then I’ll have to just shut up. I can’t
explain.

Instead he grins. “You know Lace. Any guy
tries to hurt her, she’ll just hurt him right back.”

And he don’t say no more. Me neither, not
then. Because Smoke taught me if you want to get something out of somebody the
best way is to not push. So I don’t push. I wait.

Just before the bell rings for the next
class, Keith crumples up his lunch bag and tosses it into the garbage can
across the room. He makes it, and grabs mine to do the same.

But he stops, frowns at me because I
don’t complain, and says, “If I find out who Lace’s with, what’re you gonna
do?”

I shrug.

He crumples the bag harder. He knows me
too well. “You’re going to be Smokey, aren’t you? You’re going after her.”

“This guy’s too old for her,” I say.

“So tell Uncle Bill.”

Uncle Bill is Smokey. That’s what my
cousins call him.

“I don’t know what to tell Smoke,” I say.
“What if the guy’s just some minister or something and he’s being nice.”

Keith nods real slow. He finally gets it.

“If you cut school, Uncle Bill will kill
you.”

“Not if he don’t find out,” I say.

Keith tosses my bag into the garbage and
makes that shot too. The bell rings and we stand up.

“If you cut,” he says, “I’m cutting with
you.”

“You don’t got to,” I say.

“She’s my sister,” he says. “And she’ll
kill me if she sees me going through her stuff.”

“Is that what you’re gonna do?” I ask.

“You think I’m gonna ask her?” He grins
at me. “She keeps a diary. In code. And I know how to read it.”

***

The next day, after we get inside the
school and Lacey runs off to the girls room, Keith takes my arm and steers us
toward the lockers.

“He takes her to the Starlight Café for
lunch, every day for the last week now.”

The Starlight’s just around the corner.
It’s the restaurant part of an old hotel that’s mostly used for drug sales and
one-hour rentals. Mostly old people eat in the restaurant, like they probably
did when it was a fancy place.

I frown. “That’s all her diary says?
Lunch.”

“Says he thinks she’s pretty. Says he’s
an agent or something and thinks she can be a model.”

I let out a small breath. I’d heard that
before, lots of times. Mom used to yell at girls who cried in her living room,
girls who were always saying they thought they were supposed to be modeling.

“What’re you gonna do?” Keith asks.

“I’m gonna tell him the truth. She’s too
young to be a model.”

“Okay,” Keith says. “You wanna go to the
café and wait?”

I bite my lower lip. I’m not gonna be
able to get rid of him. It’s his sister after all. But I don’t really have much
of a plan. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on.

“No,” I say. “Let’s see if he comes today
first.”

We skip class. We hide out near the
janitor’s closet before it’s time for math, and then we go outside. I make sure
we stay as far from that arch as we can and still see it. And I tell Keith to
just stay quiet.

He thinks it’s all a game, and Keith is
really good at games. So he’s so quiet next to me that if I didn’t see the
white from his breath, I wouldn’t know he was there.

Sure enough, about the time math starts,
Lacey comes outside and stands under the arch. She’s wearing another short top
tied so tight around her tummy that I can see the red mark it’s making from
where I’m standing. Today she’s wearing a skirt so short that if she bends
over, she’s not hiding nothing, and a pair of white go-go boots she had to have
borrowed from somebody.

She lights a cigarette and Keith makes a
growly sound.

We all wait, and finally the guy in the
coat shows up.

I can see him closer than I did yesterday.
He’s old, maybe as old as Smoke. His hair’s slicked back and he’s got them
weird sideburns that go most of the way to his jaw. He smiles at Lace, but I
don’t like it. His eyes aren’t smiling at all.

He puts out his elbow and she takes it.
Me and Keith follow.

Smoke taught me how to tail somebody. I
don’t think he meant to, but sometimes he gets tails on his cases, and he has
me watch for them, and he always tells me if they’re good tails or bad ones. I
told Keith how to do this, how once we get to the sidewalk, it’s important to
look like we belong and like we ain’t watching nothing, but I’m afraid he’ll
screw me up.

That’s why I go first and when I got to
the sidewalk, I start walking with attitude, like I’m a Stone. I can hear
Keith’s boots crunching on the snowy walk behind me. Ahead, the Starlight Diner
looks just as cheesy as I remember, with its dirty windows and the black steam
rising out of the grates on the ceiling, turning that side of the eight-story
hotel gray.

I don’t see Lace or the guy, but I figure
they’re inside. It took me and Keith about ten minutes to get there, which I
figure gave Lace and the guy time enough to get settled and not worry about the
windows or the door.

Just as I make it to the store next to
the Starlight, the door opens, and Lace comes out. She’s smiling. The guy still
has her elbow. He’s taking her across the driveway and to the front door of the
hotel.

My stomach cramps so hard I think I’m
gonna puke. But I swallow it down.

I run forward—I’m gonna stop
them—but Keith grabs me and makes me near to falling over.

“What’re you doing?” I whisper.

“You said not to—”

“They’re going to the hotel.”

He looks confused. I shake him off. By
the time I get inside the hotel, they’re on the stairs. The place is old and
smells of cigars and sweat and beer. The smell makes my eyes water — not
because it’s so bad, but because I know that smell. I grew up with it.

I’m shaking real bad. That morning, I
thought of taking Smoke’s gun out of the glove box in the car, but he told me
if I ever did that, even for a good reason, he’d whup me—and that’s the
only time he’s ever threatened to whup me for anything, so I only thought about
the gun, I didn’t take it.

All I brought was some tweezers and a pen
and a screwdriver, just cause I thought I might have to break into Lace’s
locker or something.

Now I understand though why the Stones
have those knives, and I wish I had something because that old guy’s a lot
bigger than me, and Lace and Keith’re next to worthless.

Keith’s beside me, breathing hard, and
looking confused. The desk clerk don’t even look at us. He’s probably used to
Stones coming in and out. Nobody else is in the lobby.

I point to the payphone next to the
bathrooms. “Call Smoke,” I say, handing Keith all the dimes I got. “If he’s not
at home, try Laura’s. Tell her it’s an emergency and who you are and she’ll get
him. If you get him, tell him I said Lace is in trouble.”

“Trouble?” Keith repeats and looks at the
stairs. “What kind of trouble?”

“You stay here,” I say and run for the
stairs. As I fly up those stairs. I can hear Lace asking a question far away,
which means she’s not in a room yet, so I go past the first floor, then the
second, and by the time I get to the third, I see a door close at the end of
the hall.

I figure they’re down there. If I’m
wrong, I’m in trouble, but I’ll search this whole place until I find them. I
hurry down the hall, and try the door, but it’s locked.