Mike said nothing but there were gears turning in his head, Crow could see that much from the way his pale blue eyes were not fixed on him but locked on something unseeable in the middle distance. Very quietly he pressed his point. “I’m telling you that I’m going to teach you some self-defense, whether you like it or not.” Crow put his hand on Mike’s shoulder and this time left it there.
“You can’t make me learn anything,” Mike said, but still his eyes were staring at the screen displays in his head; even his voice was a little dreamy.
“You’re right, I can’t. You have a choice. Either you agree to let me teach you some moves, or you go back to delivering newspapers and we’ll just call it a day.”
That jolted the focus right back into Mike’s eyes and he stared hard at Crow, shocked disbelief crackling there. “You’d really fire me…?”
Crow held his face hard for a few seconds, and then he laughed. “Oh, hell no, you lunkhead. I’m talking outta my ass here, Mike. Truth is, I don’t really know how to do what I’m trying to do. I want to do for you what someone once did for me, and I’m making a piss-poor job of it.” He shook his head. “Help me out here, kid.”
The moment stretched, and just about the time Crow was thinking
Crow shook his head. “Nope. No uniforms, no bowing, none of that shit. Mind you, I’d really like to teach you jujutsu the old-fashioned way, be kind of an Obi-wan Kenobi sort of role model, but we don’t have that kind of time. Jujutsu takes years, and we don’t
It took Mike a while and Crow gave him the time. Mike got up and went into the storeroom to fetch a dustpan and brush to clean up the mess, his blue eyes thoughtful, his freckled cheeks flushed with the aftereffects of their conversation. It wasn’t until all of the popcorn had been swept up and tossed back into the box, and all of the plastic roaches tagged and set on a shelf that he stopped, turning around to face Crow. Mike was fourteen years old—fifteen on December 28—but when he looked at Crow his face was ten years older. Crow could see the man that Mike would become. In a weird aside inside his own head, Crow tried to superimpose Mike’s face over that of Big John Sweeney, but it didn’t fit. Not at all. The mouth and the nose were Lois’s, yet those cold eyes, the red hair, the square jaw all made him look, strangely, like a young Terry Wolfe. But that was stupid. Crow shook the thought away so he could focus on what he was seeing
“Sure,” Mike said, “what have I got to lose?’
(5)
Vic chain-lit another cigarette and tossed the old butt out the window. The inside of the pickup’s cab was nearly opaque with smoke but Vic didn’t care. His truck was parked on a side street near Corn Hill, engine off, all of the windows except one rolled up, and the driver’s window was only cracked three inches. His cell phone lay on the dash where he’d placed it after he’d hung up on Lois, his brain churning over the conversation he’d just had. “Vic,” she had said with placating brightness in her voice, “you’ll be happy to know that Michael has gotten a new job. It pays better and he’ll have regular hours so he’ll always be home on time.” She said that as if it was what Vic wanted to hear. “In a store. He’s going to be a sales assistant in a store on Corn Hill.”
“What store?”
“Why, the craft store owned by Malcolm Crow. You remember him? He’s been in the papers…”
If she had said anything else of importance, Vic had not paid attention to it. He’d mumbled something about it being a good thing and had hung up, tossed the cell phone on the dash, and started smoking his way through a pack of Camels.
