The Chamber of Five by Michael Harmon

Author:Michael Harmon [Harmon, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-89641-5
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BROOKE SMILED WHEN I met her at my car after school. “New windshield?”

“You heard?”

“Who didn’t hear?”

“Typical.”

“I also heard that you were the one who put up the judge poster.” She eyed me. “Did you?”

“Does it matter?”

“To me it does.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You two have some issues, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “We don’t get along.”

“Be careful around him, Jason.”

I told her about the plan to break Singletary’s arm, and she looked down, silent.

“Mind if we make a stop before doing the posters?” I said.

She nodded. “I’m free until dinner.”

We drove, talking about the election, the platform that we’d campaign on, and school in general. She was nervous to be taking on the Chamber, and hadn’t dared to tell her mother yet. I reached to the backseat at a stoplight, grabbing Thomas Singletary’s file and handing it to her. “His address is inside.”

“Warning him?”

I nodded.

She looked at me, hesitating. “Did I do that much damage to your lip?”

I rubbed my tongue over the slightly swollen cut. “I ran into a door.”

She frowned. “Lame.”

“What?”

“You’re a horrible liar.”

I shrugged. “My dad.”

Silence.

“You don’t want lies, but you don’t want the truth, either. Not fair.”

“He hit you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrugged, brushing it off. “He lost his temper.”

“You told him about the Chamber?”

I nodded.

She looked out the window. “Maybe I didn’t want to know the truth.”

“He’s not that bad. Just when he’s around.”

She didn’t laugh. “He’s a congressman.”

I laughed at that one. “And that’s supposed to make him any different?”

“Does he do it often? Hit you?”

“No. It’s been around a year since the last time.”

That seemed to make her feel better. On-and-off hitters were better than all-the-time hitters, I guess, and as we drove, I glanced at her profile. She was pretty. She noticed me looking. “What?”

I drove. “Nothing.”

“You were looking at me.”

“I’m not some kind of abused kid, Brooke. We just got into it. That’s all.”

“Okay.”

I shifted. “He’s just an asshole. The world is full of them.”

“He shouldn’t hit you.”

I cleared my throat. “So are you going to give me the address or are we going to drive around all day talking about the social ramifications of dickhead dads?”

She finally laughed, shaking her head, then gave me the address.

Slum city. I’d been through the Heights before, but it was different when you pulled from the main arterials and drove through the neighborhoods. Blocks of small houses, most with hash-brown front yards, led to concrete apartment buildings and complexes looking like cold-war-era bomb shelters. Guys hung on corners talking trash and giving hard stares as we passed, and I began having second thoughts.

This was what my dad called a necessary evil. On a grand scale, these were the losers of society, and to have winners you needed losers. He’d told me once that keeping the losers centralized in areas like the Heights protected the regular people and gave the cops something to do other than handing out speeding tickets and sleeping in their cruisers.

We found Thomas’s apartment building, a thirteen-story concrete box on D Street, and I glanced around, unsure I wanted to be there.

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