Never Go Home by Christopher Swann

Author:Christopher Swann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When I hit 285 I take it and go northbound, merging with the traffic that even late on a Monday night flows around the city, a river of steel in a bed of stone. No police cars fly up behind me, no blue lights flash in my rearview. I’ve escaped the shitshow. But other than that, I didn’t gain much, only that Bala didn’t know where Tane was. At least the Sureños don’t have him. So where is he? Has he bugged out of Atlanta? Maybe hopped a plane to Hawaii or the Solomons or some tiny atoll on the other side of the planet? Bala might have had some ideas about where Tane could be, but now I’ll never know. I need to get back to Ethan’s house and figure out my next move. Maybe tomorrow Uncle Gavin will be awake and coherent and can give me some direction. Not all of Bala’s Sureños are dead, and if they can regroup after tonight, they’ll want their money man back even more.

I take the Roswell Road exit, and as I ride up the off ramp, the King and Queen buildings rise above the tree line, just a couple of miles further down the interstate. The twin towers each have lattice crowns so the buildings resemble chess pieces: the Queen has a rounded arc, the King a squared-off top. Right now they are lit up with blue light, gleaming on the horizon. Last year I stood on this same bridge staring at the towers—they were green then—and working up the nerve to jump. Ethan found me and talked me off the bridge and into the hospital. He literally saved my life. Of course he did—that’s his job, bestowed on him by our father as he lay bleeding to death in our house: Watch your sister. His last words. Watch your screwed-up disaster of a sister.

I drive down Roswell Road, passing the ice-skating rink and the adult entertainment shop and the gas stations where day laborers stand every morning waiting for contractors who need to hire workers cheap. Past them are apartments and a New Age bookstore and the red bull’s-eye logo of Target, and at the top of the hill is the Church of Scientology and more apartment complexes and a Waffle House and a former strip joint-slash-gentlemen’s club that has weeds thrusting up through cracks in the parking lot. And leading off of both sides of Roswell are side streets like tributary streams leading to residential neighborhoods, row upon row of houses, thousands of them rolling away into the night, only a few sputtering streetlights to hold off the darkness.

I turn onto Ethan’s street, the motorcycle’s throttled growl echoing in my wake. Across from Ethan’s house, the construction site is dark and quiet. I give it the finger before going up Ethan’s driveway, bouncing over the tree roots. The front windows of Ethan’s house are soft yellow squares of lamplight in the dark. I’m home.

The kitchen door is open and I walk inside.

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