Chapter 1
Lenox
I lost track of how many blocks I’d been running. My chest heaved in the cold night air and my eyes darted from side to side, seeking a place to hide. Back up lights glowed dimly in the storefronts lining the street, doors locked and owners long-since gone to bed. I wouldn’t find any safety there. But I couldn’t stop; I still heard voices shouting my name, angry and sharp.
I couldn’t run much longer. My eyes moved more desperately and my standard for hiding places lowered by the second. Finally, I spotted it: a dumpster, hidden in the shadow of an alley so slim it barely showed around the corner of a building. I turned sideways and slipped between the walls of Good Cuts and Bob’s Drugs, grateful for a moment that I had such a thin body. In one, smooth motion, I grabbed the edge of the dumpster and jumped, swinging myself inside.
Thankfully the bags inside were soft and didn’t smell all that bad. I ducked down so my head disappeared behind the metal wall and shifted enough that I could settle in. The shouting grew louder as I struggled to keep filling my lungs as desperately as they wanted, without being loud about it.
Damn my luck! I ran my sleeve across my forehead and it came away wet and sticky. My hoodie was black, so I couldn’t see the red stain in the moonlight as more than a dark spot on the fabric. All I wanted to do was cross the street and pick up a pack of cigarettes from the gas station. Even now the addiction hummed in the back of my mind, demanding I feed it nicotine. I even waited over an hour to make sure Nathan and his crew of tattooed miscreants had really gone. I should have known better.
Tennis shoes pounded the sidewalk outside the alley and I heard Nathan’s voice, taunting me. “I know you’re out here somewhere, you little worm. If you come out and come quietly, I might even spare your pathetic life. Otherwise, I’ll put my glock in your mouth and splatter your brains across the alleyway. There’s more than one way to handle a snitch.”
A flashlight beam appeared on the wall of Good Cuts. I tried to remain as still as possible to avoid the trash bags crinkling and giving away my presence. “You think he went this way, boss?” Mack’s whiny voice echoed through the alley.
“I doubt it. Even his scrawny ass wouldn’t fit through that gap.” Nathan growled and the flashlight moved back toward the street. “Come on. He’s bound to be around here somewhere. There’s no way he’s not out of stamina by now.” Their footsteps carried on up the sidewalk, accompanying voices getting softer as they got farther away.
Only after a solid fifteen minutes of dead silence did I finally breathe a sigh of relief. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small flip phone, pressing redial and holding it to my ear. It rang twice before a gruff voice answered. “Hello?”
“They know,” I said, my voice trembling despite my attempts to stay calm. “I don’t know how they figured it out, but my cover is blown.”
An annoyed grumble followed my words, then a sigh. “Alright. We’ll have to pull you out, then. Are you able to get to the station?” I thought for a moment, calculating the number of streets I’d have to pass through to get to the police station. Nathan and his cronies had gone east and the station was south, so I should be able to avoid them, in theory.
“I think so. I’m on Twelfth and Vine, between the barber shop and the drug store. Managed to lose Nathan and the others, barely. I’ll head for the station along Twelfth, then drop down on Spring.” It was risky, but so was agreeing to be a police toy. I knew Nathan didn’t like snitches, but I had to get out of this life somehow. Being in a gang was never the plan. Not even close to the plan. I was supposed to be an engineer, top of my class graduate from an Ivy League school. Not a high school dropout with a pocket full of marked bills and a head wound.
Slowly, I pulled myself out of the dumpster and dropped back to the concrete alleyway. The only sounds around me were cars buzzing by and electric lights, devouring power to light the night. I avoided those, sticking to shadows and alleys as much as possible. It was eight blocks to the station and my legs were already trembling from exhaustion.
I didn’t have much choice, though. Every minute I spent out in the open was a minute I risked being shot. So I called up every ounce of strength that my scrawny body could muster and kept putting one foot in front of the other. Every shadow made me flinch, and every voice froze the blood in my veins. But eventually I made it to the darkened lot outside the police station.
All four streetlights around the squat, brick building had been shot out. Again. Three squad cars sat in the lot, their paint faded from the sun and years of weather. The window next to the front door looked like a spiderweb, complete with a big, fat black spider in the corner. At least all the lights inside were on, promising safety and maybe a ticket out of this inner city hellhole.
The bell on the door rang as I stepped into the warmth of the station. Unfortunately, it was a sound I’d been Pavlov’d to fear. It made my jaw tighten and my heart speed up, even though I’d been on the good side of the law for almost a full year now. The receptionist, a grey and serious woman with wide-brimmed spectacles and an inability to smile, took one look at me and pressed the button to summon the chief.
She gestured to a chair in the corner, where I gratefully collapsed. “Good to see you too, Velma,” I grumbled, though she pretended not to hear me. I guess an ex-gang member, twenty-one year old kid with no family and no future didn’t rank high on her conversation list. That was fine. She usually yelled at people when she acknowledged them anyway.
The chief appeared moments later, his uniform the neatest and newest thing in the entire station. He glared down his nose at me and gestured toward his office. Though my muscles protested, I hauled myself out of the chair and stumbled after him into the all-too-familiar room. Unlike the dusty, dingy rest of the station, the chief’s office was pristine. The folders on his desk were piled neatly in the corner without so much as a page out of alignment. Each pen had its own slot in the pen holder on the opposite corner, and he seemed to take great pride in keeping the medals on the wall shiny.
“I should have known this would happen at some point.” He sat down in his large leather chair and straightened the name placard on his desk. Robin Rassmussen, Chief of Police, it read. “I would have hoped we could have gotten a little more information before it did, but what more could I expect from a kid?”
A retort leapt to my tongue, but I bit it back. Chief Rassmussen had given me a chance, even if he acted like it was the worst decision he’d made in his life. He opened the drawer on the left side of his desk and pulled out a manila folder. “Since I knew this day would come, I took the liberty of preparing a new identity for you months ago.” He slid the folder across the desk to me, and I opened it.
A new social security card. Birth certificate. Bank account information, along with a bank card. High school diploma. Driver’s license. Passport. I moved them out of the way and pulled out a stack of pages stapled together with a name at the top: Lenox Arthur. I wrinkled my nose, but didn’t make a fuss. Everything had already been put together, after all. It was too late to complain about a fake name now.
“We’ll put you on the first bus out of here in the morning. That folder should have everything you need to start a new life in Hatch, Nevada. The police station there has agreed to take you on as an intern until you find something else, and you’ll stay in one of their safehouses until you get your own place. That document is your new background story, so you’d best memorize it.”
I scowled again as I read through the background story. It read like some D&D nerd wrote it, which they probably had. “Where the hell is Hatch? I’ve never even heard of it.”
“That’s the point. We’ll run your obituary on Friday, everyone will believe you died of–” He looked me up and down, his eyes settling on my forehead. “–A head wound. And with that, Jeremy Lefferts ceases to exist.” He pushed his chair back from the desk and pointed toward the door. “Have Russ take you to the break room, where you can at least get a shower and a bandage for your head.”
I slowly nodded and closed the folder, a million thoughts crashing through my mind. Going into witness protection hadn’t been on my Life Bingo card either, but here we were. At least I didn’t have anyone that would miss me. That thought carried me through a cold shower in the barrack-like room where officers working 24-hour shifts rested, and onto a greyhound bus. With a wallet full of new identification and a small backpack with a single change of clothes, I rumbled away from LA and toward middle-of-nowhere Nevada.
Honestly, it was kind of exciting. How many people were given an opportunity to entirely reinvent themselves from the ground up? No debt, no attachments. Just a new name, a new city, and possibly, just possibly, another chance to live the life I always wanted.
