Justice for All (The Outcast Book #1) Page 3

  “He asked me out to homecoming.”

  “Oh. I see. Good for you two.”

  “So you’re not mad?”

  “No, I’m not mad. You two deserve each other,” I say. I grab a couple of books from my locker and then slam the door shut. I stomp away before Stacey can say anything else. I’m tempted to scream with rage.

  It’s not that I want Dylan back. He’s a spineless toad as far as I’m concerned. What annoys me is two days after we break up—at my father’s funeral luncheon—he asks Stacey out to homecoming. He couldn’t even wait a week? And what kind of sad, desperate girl is Stacey to pick Dylan up on the rebound so quickly?

  I barge into the bathroom and immediately start to cough from a cloud of smoke. Through watery eyes I see a girl with a shock of bright pink hair dressed in a black corset dress. There’s a silver stud in her nose, a hoop in her lip, and a half-dozen rings in each ear. Tattoos run up and down her arms and on her chest. Her black-rimmed eyes narrow at me. “You got a problem, princess?”

  “What? No,” I say and then start to cough some more.

  “What’s the matter: baby awergic to smoke?”

  “No,” I say, but I feel like I’m back on the playground in first grade again. “I…I just had to…use the…toilet, you know?” I stammer. I give myself props for not saying I have to pee-pee.

  “So use it already. Or you waiting for someone to unbutton your pants for you?”

  “I am not.” I scurry into the bathroom stall to do my business. I dally in there for a few extra minutes in the hope the pink-haired girl will go away. She sticks around even after the bell rings for the first class of the day. I should get out of here. Why doesn’t that girl leave already?

  I finally take a deep breath and then step out of the stall. I hurry over to the sink as far away from the pink-haired girl as possible. I can still feel her watching me. When I can’t stand it anymore, I snap, “You want something?”

  The girl shrugs. “You’re that kid whose dad died, right? The cop?”

  “My dad was a cop, yes.”

  “I thought I saw you on the news. How you holding up?”

  “Fine. Not that it’s your business.”

  Her black lips curl in a smile. “Looks like the little princess has a spine after all.”

  “I’m not a princess.”

  “Ooh, sorry. It’s just you look like one of them, you know?”

  “Who’s ‘them?’”

  “The spoiled middle-class white girls. You all have that same look.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re a white girl too in case you didn’t realize it.”

  “But I’m not middle-class.”

  “Yeah? Where you get the money for all that jewelry and tattoos?”

  “Why do you care? Going to rat me out to your daddy’s friends?”

  “I’m just wondering what gives you the right to look down on other people who are minding their own business.”

  She snickers at me. “Listen to you. Your parents send you to one of those uptight boarding schools? Or is it from all the time you spend at the country club?”

  “Neither.” I throw up my hands. “Whatever. I got to get to class.”

  I turn my back and then start towards the door. “Hey, wait a minute,” the girl calls after me.

  “What?”

  “You’re already late for class, why not stay here a little longer?”

  “Why? So you can make fun of me some more?”

  “Nah. I was just yanking your chain. Come on, have a seat.” She pats the counter next to her.

  I look back towards the door and then back at her. She does have a point that class has already started. I’d get yelled at just as much for showing up late as not showing up at all; maybe less if I don’t show up since they might figure I’m not at school on account of Daddy dying. “What the hell,” I mutter.

  I climb up on the counter, my feet dangling over the edge to again make me feel like a little kid. The girl holds out a hand with black fingernails. “I’m Josie.”

  “Robin.”

  “Weren’t you going out with that Dylan French kid?”

  “I was. We kind of broke up.”

  “Good riddance. That kid is such a wuss. You probably never got to second base with him, right?”

  My face turns warm with embarrassment. “Not really, no.”

  “You even get to first base?”

  “Sure. A few times. It wasn’t all his fault. My dad chaperoned most of our dates. He made sure to bring his gun.”

  Josie snickers at that. “Your dad sounds awesome.”

  “He was.”

  She reaches into her purse for a pack of cigarettes. She shakes one out of the container to hold out to me. “You want one?”

  “Not really,” I say. Daddy smoked like a chimney, but Jessica made him do it outside to avoid soiling our lungs with secondhand smoke. I’m not sure if Jessica smokes outside the house; if she does it’s never in my sight. And Dylan was too goody-goody to ever do anything illegal like smoke a cigarette.

  Thinking of him, I snatch the cigarette from the pack. Josie lights it for me with a silver lighter shaped like a human skull. “That’s really cool,” I say.

  “My dad got it down in Mexico. I lifted it from his pocket.”

  “Awesome.” I stick the cigarette in my mouth and right away start to cough like when I first came in. Josie laughs at me. “Shut…up.”

  “You really haven’t smoked before. You want to pull in the smoke for a few seconds and then let it out,” she says. She demonstrates this to me. “Hold it in, but don’t swallow it.”

  “Right.” I take a drag on my cigarette. It goes a little easier this time. I start to see what Daddy saw in these when the nerves in my stomach start to calm and a sense of peace descends over me. “These are normal cigarettes, right?”

  “Yeah. You want something stronger?”

  “No! I…I was just wondering.”

  She snickers at me. “The little princess is being corrupted now.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Too bad. It’s your nickname now.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “But if you’re going to hang out with me, you got to do something about that look.”

  “I’m not getting a bunch of tattoos and piercings. My sister would go nuts.”

  “Ooh. Sounds like your sister is the badass in the family.”

  “She’s just uptight.” I blow out a stream of smoke. “She’s been taking care of us since our mom died. It’s made her a little protective.”

  “That sucks. My mom isn’t dead, but a lot of times I wish she was.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yeah, maybe. So if your mom is dead and your dad is dead, that means you’re an orphan now, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Aren’t they supposed to send you to the orphanage where they feed you gruel and force you to make license plates?”

  “That’s prison you’re thinking of. And no, my sister is old enough to be my guardian.”

  “Awesome.” Josie snuffs out her cigarette on the countertop. “Come on, let’s take a walk.”

  “To class?”

  “Nah. I could use some coffee. You ever drink that, princess?”

  “Duh. Of course.” I snuff out my cigarette the way Josie did and then follow her out into the hallway. We stop at my locker so I can drop my books off. Then she leads me out a back door, through the teacher’s parking lot.

  There’s a Starbucks a couple of blocks away. I snicker when Josie starts to go inside. “Starbucks? Really?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know it’s all uptight middle-class, but their lattes are awesome,” Josie says. I shake my head and then follow her inside.

  ***

  The moment I walk through the door, Jessica starts in on me. “What the hell did you do?”

  I run a hand through the hair I got cut to shoulder-length and then dyed black with red at the ends. “You don’t like it
?”

  “What was wrong with your hair the way it was?”

  “It was boring.”

  Josie and I had been in King’s Village, the hipster part of town. We stopped at a coffeehouse for a couple of lattes and the barista had asked, “What will your little sister have?”

  Josie thought that was funny as hell. When I caught our reflection in a store window, I could see why the barista would think that. Josie is only a year older than me, but she’s a few inches taller and a lot more developed in other areas. She was wearing her black corset dress with fishnet stockings and combat boots and of course there was her pink hair, tattoos, and piercings. Then there was me in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers with my light brown hair in a ponytail, looking all of twelve years old.

  I told Josie I wanted to look a little more grown up. King’s Village is a really good place for that. We started at a secondhand clothes store. I tried on a pair of leather pants that almost cut off circulation in my legs. I decided instead on a black hoodie and black jeans with the knees torn. Josie still made fun of me, but it felt a little more adult than what I had been wearing.

  Then we went down to a salon to get my hair cut and dyed. That took a couple of hours, first to get it black and then to add the red. The stylist had given me a whole bunch of colorful swatches with green, blue, turquoise, purple, and even pink like Josie’s. I decided on the red. Not copper red like a natural redhead; it’s blood red, like the blood staining Daddy’s body after the bomb went off.

  Combined with some white foundation, black lipstick, and a heavy dose of black eyeliner, I look totally badass now. Badass enough that Josie will have to stop calling me “princess” now. That is if I can ever see her again.

  Jessica runs a hand through my new hairdo. “I suppose it’s not a surprise you’d start acting out. I just thought you’d wait a little longer.”

  ‘“Acting out?’ Is that what you think this is?”

  “You don’t have to be a shrink to figure that out.” Jessica shakes her head. “I guess if that’s what you think you need to do right now I can deal with it.”

  “Gee, thanks for your understanding.”

  “Come on, kid, don’t be that way. Why don’t we do something? We could order a pizza and watch a movie.”

  “Whatever.” I slip free from her to storm into my bedroom. I expected Jessica to get mad, not to patronize me. Like I’m a little kid dressing up in a costume. This isn’t some stupid “phase” or “acting out” or any of that. This is the new me, the less naïve me. The orphaned me.

  To keep myself from crying and ruining my makeup, I go over to the window and then take out a cigarette. I got these out of Daddy’s desk the day I met Josie. There were ten in the pack; this is only my third one. I haven’t really picked up the habit yet.

  I blow a stream of smoke out the window. I send Josie a text to tell her what happened with Jessica. “She doesn’t get it,” I type.

  “They never do,” Josie texts back.

  That’s probably true. I take another drag on my cigarette and then put it out before Jessica can see me with it. The new me might look badass, but I still don’t want to hear Jessica’s shrieking about the dangers of smoking. There are some places even the new me fears to tread.

  Chapter 5

  When I want to be alone, I go into Daddy’s study. Jessica is still too scared to come in here, so I can have more privacy than even my own bedroom. That makes it a good place for when I want to do homework or be alone with my thoughts.

  I’m doing the former right now. Despite the Goth makeover, I still put some effort into my homework. I’m not going to be valedictorian like Stacey Chang, but I at least want to graduate on time. The sooner I graduate, the sooner I can be out of here. Then I can leave this whole crappy city behind. If I can get the money, maybe I can go to college in LA or San Francisco or Seattle. Honolulu would be good too. Oxford would be even better, but there’s no way I can afford that.

  When there’s a tap on the door I assume it’s Jessica to say dinner is ready. I sit up with surprise when I hear Carol say, “Robin? Are you in there?”

  “Yes.”

  She opens the door and immediately smiles. “Jessie said you had made a change. It’s cute.”

  “Thanks,” I say, though “cute” isn’t exactly what I’m going for.

  She doesn’t sit down. Instead she paces in front of Daddy’s wall with all the evidence on Madame Crimson pinned to it. She runs her hand over part of it and then turns to me. “We need to talk. I have some bad news.”

  “What?”

  She gestures to the wall. “They’re shutting down your father’s task force on Madame Crimson.”

  “What?” I say again, only a lot louder. “How could they do that?”

  “With Heine gone, we lost our top witness. The others are too scared now to testify.”

  “You still have the records—”

  “Oh, sure, we have reams of physical evidence. Juries just love that.” She tries to put a hand on my shoulder, but I shake it away. “I know it’s hard—”

  “You don’t know anything! He was my dad!” I wave towards the wall. “That was his life’s work and now you’re throwing it all away.”

  “We’re still going to get her. It’s just going to take more time—”

  “Daddy was at it for fifteen years and now you’re going to reboot everything. Maybe by the time I’m collecting Social Security you’ll get off your asses to do something.”

  “Robin—”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “There’s one other thing. We have to take that stuff down. A couple of guys are going to be here tomorrow to pack up any files your father might have kept here. Whatever you do, don’t touch anything.”

  “They can’t take Daddy’s stuff—”

  “Technically any information belongs to the department. I’m sorry, kid. I wish there was something I could do.”

  “I can think of a few things you can do.”

  She shakes her head and then backs out of the room. I let out a scream and then shove everything on top of the desk to the floor. How dare she! How dare the whole department! Daddy was a good cop, the best cop on the force, and this is how they repay him? He gave everything—right down to his life—to them and they move on after a couple of weeks like nothing happened?

  I can’t let this happen. I have to do something about it. I promised Daddy that I would find a way to stop Madame Crimson. I had hoped to have some help, but it’s clear now that I’ll have to do it alone.

  Maybe not entirely alone. I still have Daddy’s notes to guide me. At least until those assholes from the department show up. Carol will know if I take the stuff, but there is another way. I smile to myself as I take out my phone. I snap one picture after another of the wall, making sure to get close enough that I can read what everything says.

  I can keep them on my phone, but having a backup would be nice. I sit at Daddy’s computer to print the pictures I took. While I wait for everything to print, I copy his files from the hard drive too. Some of that should come in handy later.

  By the time Jessica calls me to dinner, it’s done. At least that part of it. The real question is what I’m going to do with it all.

  ***

  Neither of us wants Daddy’s room, but Jessica insists we go through his things to pack up his clothes and stuff to give to charity. She holds up a plaid flannel shirt. “Remember when he took us to Mount Winston?”

  “And you broke your leg trying to impress that ski instructor? How could I forget that?”

  Jessica’s face turns red at the memory. “You cried about it louder than I did.”

  Now it’s my turn to be embarrassed. Seeing Jessica writhing in the snow, I thought she was going to die like Mom had. I was only seven; I didn’t understand yet that not all injuries are fatal. I take the shirt from her to toss into the cardboard box with what we’re giving away. “You didn’t even get that guy’s number.”

  “Dad wouldn
’t have let me go out with him anyway. I mean, that guy had to be twenty-five at least.”

  She pulls out the ugly ties we got for him on Father’s Days gone by. There’s one with Winnie-the-Pooh with his head stuck in a jar of honey that I got from a Disney store. “You were so proud of this one that you guilted him into wearing it. Remember?”

  “I remember,” I say. “I’m sure it really scared the crap out of the criminals.”

  We share a laugh and then Jessica drops the tie into the box. Not everything has a sentimental story to go with it; a lot of the clothes are perfectly ordinary stuff Daddy wore on the job. Before long we have the box filled. Jessica sends me down to the basement to find another empty box.

  I turn on the light and then start down the squeaky wooden stairs. When I was little it used to terrify me to even stand on the top steps. Now I can go all the way down and start sifting through the boxes of old crap without any problem. I shake my head to see Jessica’s pink skis propped up against the wall.

  Dangling in front of the skis is Daddy’s old punching bag. I don’t remember him ever using it, but Jessica used it a few times when she was briefly into tae bo. I ball my fists up and then give the bag a right hook. I squeak from the pain; the bag is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I guess that’s why boxers use gloves.

  I look around for a pair of gloves and eventually find a pair of black gloves probably older than I am. They’re about five sizes too big for my hands. I shake my head and then toss the gloves back into a box. I give the punching bag a kick out of frustration. That hurts a lot less and it’s pretty satisfying to see the bag lurch back a few inches.

  “Hi-ya!” I shout and then kick the bag again. I try a roundhouse kick that nearly topples me over. It’s good no one else was down here to film that. I giggle to myself and then try to kick it again. I maintain my balance a little better this time.

  “Are you still down here?” Jessica calls out.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, I was just looking at some stuff.”

  “Hurry up, would you? The Salvation Army closes at six.”

  “OK, OK,” I grumble. I find a box that’s mostly empty; I dump the contents into another box and then start towards the stairs. I take a look back at the punching bag; I think we’re destined for a rematch in the near future.