Status Updates From Safe House (Burke, #10)

I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, heading toward Queens. Exited at Metropolitan Avenue and swung back toward Brooklyn.

Fear never abandoned me. I took it with me everywhere I went. Everywhere they sent me. The State—my true parent—sending me to surrogates who continued its vicious work. The orphanage. Foster homes. Reform school. Prison looming as inevitable in my future as college was in the lives of the privileged.

I was in a room with two women. Within the last few days, one had held my hand in the street, sat on my lap and told me secrets. The other had paraded around in her new shoes and sucked my cock. Now they were together, and they wanted me to do something.

She looked at the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the tabletop, raised her eyebrows in a question. I lifted it up, held it out to her. She took one. I fired a wooden match. She didn’t bring her face down to the flame like I’d expected. Just sat there watching my hand from under her long dark lashes. The flame burned, slow and steady in the musty joint’s dead air.