Page 23 of Puck
“Oh dear.”
He laughed again. “You have no idea. Well, I was sent to hunt down some leads. I found the woman, the main suspect, started an interview . . .” He sighed and shook his head. “She seduced me. I mean, it wasn’t hard, but I should have known better. Anyway, I let her seduce me, and we . . . well . . . she liked some interesting stuff, let’s just say that. I ended up handcuffed naked to a hotel room bed, and she was gone in a puff of smoke. Eventually someone went looking for me, found me, uncuffed me, and I got reamed out, disciplined, all sorts of fun shit. Well, I went out with some guys from the Bureau one night, told them the story over drinks, and ended up getting that tat to commemorate the occasion.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “You let the suspect of an investigation seduce you?”
He nodded. “And handcuff me to the bed with my own cuffs. She knew exactly why I was there and figured she had my number pretty well pegged. Correctly, as it turned out.”
“Was it worth it?” I asked.
Puck laughed. “Hell yeah! She was older and experienced, and holy hell, did I learn some amazing new tricks from that woman.”
I frowned. “By older, you mean what?”
He tipped his head to one side. “I was twenty . . . seven? Twenty-eight? And she was at least midforties, if not closer to fifty.”
I laughed again. “Jesus, Puck.”
He nodded. “That’s me.” He cut a glance at me. “So. Your turn.”
I sighed. “Really? You end on a funny note, and now I’ve gotta dredge up all my old shit?”
He nodded. “That’s the agreement.”
I sighed again. “Fine. So I had a totally boring, normal, two-parent, suburban life until I was sixteen. Mom was a dental technician, and Dad was the manager of a car dealership. I had an older sister, Danielle. I was a dancer, I was in the math club at school, had a perfect GPA, a cute boyfriend, my own car, I was popular.” I swallowed hard. “My dad’s parents were both dead, and my mom was the only child of elderly parents. Which meant I had one set of grandparents, who were in their eighties when I was sixteen. I had one uncle, my dad’s brother, and his wife, but they lived three states away, and my dad wasn’t close to them.”
“Not liking how this is sounding, babe.”
I nodded. “You can probably guess. My mom and dad were taking my sister to a fine arts camp for the summer—she was a painter, a really talented one. Well, a guy wasn’t paying attention, crossed the centerline, and crashed into my parents’ car head-on, doing sixty in a forty-five. Mom and Dad were killed instantly, and my sister died on the way to the hospital. My grandparents couldn’t take me. They were in an assisted living place, my grandmother had dementia, and my grandfather could barely walk. Which left my aunt and uncle, Tammy and Craig. I knew them, but not well. They’d come over for Christmas every few years, but we just weren’t close to them. They didn’t have kids. Tammy couldn’t, I guess, and they decided against adoption. I dunno much about any of that.” I spent a few moments in silence, staring out the window at the passing buildings, trying to put my thoughts in order. “At first, living with them was okay. They were nice enough, pretty much just let me do my own thing, since I was almost seventeen. Senior year of high school, new school, new state, parents dead, sister dead, no friends, didn’t know anybody . . . it was rough, as you might imagine.”
“That fucking sucks, Colbie, I’m sorry.”
I offered him a small smile. “That’s just background, Puck.”
He winced. “Shit.”
I nodded. “Yeah. So I’d been living with Craig and Tammy for . . . six months, eight months, something like that. I came home from school one day, and Tammy was gone somewhere. Shopping, drinking with friends, I don’t know. Craig was home. Got laid off, I guess, and got wasted. He was stumbling around the house, shirt open, pants undone. Saw me . . . made a pass at me.”
“What? Are you fucking kidding me?”
I sighed. “I wish, Puck. I tried to squeeze past him, brush it off as just . . . a drunk thing. He . . . um—yeah. You know.”
“No.” Puck’s voice was hard. “Hell no.”
I nodded. “Yep. On the stairs.” I swallowed hard again. “I went to the police, filed a report, had the whole rape kit thing done. Tammy visited me in the hospital . . .” I trailed off, finding it hard to finish.
“And blamed it on you,” Puck filled in.
“Got it in one.” I ran my hands through my hair, an agitated gesture. “So I had nowhere to go. Seventeen, an orphan, two months shy of my diploma, no work experience, nowhere to live, and no one to trust. I checked out of the hospital with the clothes on my back, not a cent to my name, not even a backpack.”
“Fucking hell.” Puck squeezed my hand, and this time he didn’t let up. “What’d you do?”
“I was homeless. I lived in a homeless shelter, showered in the gym showers before school started, stole some clothes from a Goodwill store, got free lunch and breakfast at school . . . it worked out. I graduated high school with a 3.9 GPA. The second I had my diploma, I started hitchhiking north. I don’t know why, I just figured New York was the place to be for a homeless girl.”
“Damn. 3.9 GPA and you were fucking homeless?”
I shrugged. “I’d done well in school, and then when the accident happened, all I had to focus on was school. It was all I had, so I dug in hard, I guess.”
“How’d you go from homeless to where you are now?” Puck asked.