My left eye was swelling shut, so I had to squint at him. “That’s badass,” I said. “Very Samuel L. Jackson.”
Luco took a step back and then, like he was punting a football, kicked me in the stomach. All the air whooshed out of me, and I retched from the shock and the pain.
Luco was gearing up for another kick when his eyes popped wide open. He stepped back, hands up. I turned my head and saw Susannah standing a few yards away, her feet apart, both hands holding a small pistol aimed at Luco. The two guys holding my arms froze. We all froze.
“Let him go,” Susannah said.
Luco was trying to look at both Susannah and the pistol in her hand, his eyes darting back and forth. It would have been funny if I hadn’t been struggling to breathe.
The guy holding my right arm said, “That’s a two-shot. You gonna shoot all three of us with that?”
“Nope,” Susannah. She raised the pistol to aim at Luco’s forehead. “Just him.”
His voice high, Luco said, “Let him the fuck go.”
The two let go of my arms, and I fell to my hands and knees, wheezing and trying not to throw up as I filled my lungs with air again.
“I’ll be seeing you, li’l girl,” Luco said, somewhere above me.
“Not if I see you first,” Susannah said sweetly.
There was a pause, and then I heard footsteps heading away. When I couldn’t hear them anymore, I looked up. Susannah was standing in front of me, the pistol held loosely at her side.
“Where the hell did you get that?” I managed to say.
Susannah shrugged. “I know a guy.”
“You know a guy?”
“Just saved your sorry ass with it.”
I stood up, wincing at the pain in my gut and around my eye, which was definitely swelling shut. Behind Susannah, I saw Frankie getting unsteadily to his feet and dusting himself off. “Hijo de puta tore my shirt,” he said.
“You okay?”
“Better than you.” Frankie peered at me. “He gave you a shiner. Gonna be pretty.”
Susannah pocketed her pistol and began walking back to school.
“Hey,” I said. She paid no attention to me. “Hey!” I shouted. I hurried after her, trying to ignore the pain in my stomach. When I reached her, I grabbed her arm and swung her around to face me. Her expression was equal parts sullen and annoyed. “What is wrong with you?”
“Let me go, Ethan,” she said.
“You’re skipping school, sucking a pipe with Luco?”
She shot back, “Like you didn’t smoke with him.”
“Until I realized it was stupid and that I didn’t want to go to jail, like he’s going to. Like you will if you keep doing this shit.”
Susannah wrenched her arm out of my grasp, glaring at me.
“Jesus,” I said, understanding. “You’re pissed at me.”
She folded her arms across her chest and continued to give me a death stare.
“Okay,” I said. I wiped my face with both hands, careful not to touch my bruised eye. “Luco is not a good guy. I figured that out like ten seconds after I smoked a joint with him in tenth grade. He’s a loser, Susannah. You didn’t miss out on anything.”
Frankie spoke up. “I told Ethan not to smoke with him.”
I gestured toward Frankie. “See? I was stupid and didn’t listen. Now Luco is pissed at me because he thinks I dissed him, so he wants to mess with me. How’s he going to do that, Suze? How’s he going to try to hurt me?”
I stopped and waited for her to figure it out. I didn’t wait long. Susannah’s expression went from sullen to angry to flushed and back to sullen again in the time it takes to turn a light on and off. She wasn’t used to being played.
“Look,” I said in a gentler voice. “You showed guts just hanging out with the dude and his two boys. You probably would’ve stuck that pipe in his eye the second he tried to do anything.”
Susannah’s face darkened. “Don’t try to handle me, Ethan.” She walked away, then looked back over her shoulder. “Sorry about your shirt, Frankie,” she said, then kept walking.
Frankie stood beside me as we both watched her walk past the baseball field back toward school. “What’s wrong with my sister, Frankie?” I said.
Frankie shook his head. “She’s too damn smart, and too damn angry,” he said. “And she isn’t scared of anything.”
Susannah reached the parking lot and stepped between two cars, vanishing from sight.
“That’s what terrifies me,” I said.
TWO DAYS LATER Luco and his friends grabbed Susannah after school and drove off with her. Another kid told us, and I called Uncle Gavin. “He’ll hurt her,” I said, my voice breaking.
“Go home,” he said. “I’ll find her.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Go home, Ethan,” he said, and hung up.
Instead, Frankie and I broke into the school’s yearbook office and found an old address for Luco. It was in the Bluff, a neighborhood west of downtown that, back in the day, was basically an open-air drug market. Frankie and his dad both had smartphones, so Frankie texted the address to his dad, and then we turned off our phones so we wouldn’t hear any calls from his father or my uncle. We got in Frankie’s car—the ’71 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am his father had taught him to rebuild and that I called the Frankenstein—and drove to the Bluff.
I don’t remember much about the drive, except for the fear rising up in me like a dark tide. Luco had taken Susannah and I didn’t know where she was, and dear God in heaven I was scared. I was more scared than I had been when two men came into our house and blew my family and my childhood into dust. And I didn’t believe in God, but driving to the Bluff in Frankie’s car, I told Him that I would do anything, anything to get my sister back; I would switch places with her
