Blood of Paradise by David Corbett Page B

felt it, heard it even—the way you do, the loud clicking thunk in the joint, the echo up the bone. He tried to jog back to the tackling line but the thing turned to muck under his weight. Two managers had to help him off the field. Meanwhile, Mr. Faceless Sophomore Hamburger finally sat up and took a neck-snapping whiff of smelling salts.
    And so, the day after, there Jude sat in the living room, next to his brooding mother, his ankle a fat, blue throbbing thing at the end of his leg, a testament to anybody who cared to notice what a hopeless case he was.
    Finally, a cry went up from the basement, a sound so lusty you’d have thought they’d discovered Jimmy Hoffa mummified in the crawl space. The tall lead agent excused himself and followed the sound downstairs. Ten minutes passed before he came back, a clump of money in each hand, wrapped in cellophane like sandwiches—to contain the smell, Jude guessed. It looked ragged and soiled, street cash. The agent laid one stack beside the other on the coffee table, then stared right at Jude with those odd green eyes.
    â€œFound these and more like them downstairs, behind a false wall panel, a matter of feet from where your bed is. About twenty thousand, we think. Just a rough guess. Mind telling me who it belongs to?”
    Not a false panel, Jude thought, a loose one. He’d installed them all himself—he was good that way, working with his hands—knew the spot the agent meant, difficult to seal flush because of a bulging joint in a water pipe. He’d shown it to his dad once, asking advice. “Forget about it,” the old man had said. “Hide it with something. A chair, some shelves.” And Jude had done that: Hidden it. Forgotten.
    Before he could say any of that, his mother reached out, grabbed his knee hard, and squeezed. “He’s a minor. He’s not answering questions till we speak to a lawyer.”
    Jude shot her a look but obeyed, saying nothing. The agent glanced from one to the other, waiting them out. Finally, he gave it up, collected the money, and said, “Very well,” then returned downstairs.
    Jude whispered, “He hid his—”
    â€œShut up!” In her lap she strangled one hand with the other. “For God’s sake don’t make things any worse than they are.”
    He waited but she wouldn’t look at him. He wondered what she knew, what she was hiding. Or if she was simply trying to keep what remained of her life in one piece.
    He sank into his own reckoning then, looking at the thing from every angle he could. He felt betrayed, the old man hiding all that money where it might be considered not his but his son’s— Cash ain’t a crime , he’d say, and you’re a juvie . And yet Jude caught a backhanded compliment in it, too, a show of trust. You’ll know how to handle yourself , his father seemed to be saying, if it comes to that . Did he ever intend to tell Jude about it? How did he think his son would react? Jude never learned the answers to those questions. By the time he got up the nerve to ask, the old man was dead.
    It wasn’t till some time later that he saw the other thing, the one that troubled him even more. There was an eerie parallel between what happened to the two of them separately, one day apart: proud and suited up one minute, humbled and taken away the next. Like it was meant to be, a lesson from on high to them both: Don’t get cocky. The things you take for granted, rely on—the things that make you who you are—can vanish in a heartbeat.
    And that’s how you find out, Jude thought, what it feels like to be faceless.

10
    Malvasio sat up and rolled the stiffness from his neck. Beside him, the girl fidgeted beneath the sheets and drew away, sensing he’d woken. An unconscious impulse, her withdrawal, and unearned since he’d never touched her, not that way. He had his standards, after all. Some of these kids