Free Pretty Reckless (Entangled Ignite) by Jodi Linton Page B

trailer, swinging my hips the whole way. At the top step, I nudged Gunner out of the way as I took my place. He scowled at me. Winking at him, I leaned into the door and pressed my ear against the screen. “Skinny,” I yelled.
    His paced across the trailer, the lock jolted, and I saw the door swing halfway open. Skinny was wearing a Guns-N-Roses T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of baggy, denim cut-off shorts swung against his knobby knees.
    “Where’s the other guy?” he asked, darting his sunken eyes around the porch.
    Gunner lifted a flat hand. “Right here,” he huffed, annoyed.
    Giving Gunner a ‘watch me do my job’ smile, I stepped to the side of the screen, putting myself in front of Skinny, who smiled uneasily back at me. Then he reached out, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me inside. I could hear Gunner yelling as the door was slammed in his face.
    The first thing I noticed was that the trailer smelled like dirty diapers, and I was pretty damn sure that Skinny didn’t have any children. Brown, worn carpet had been stapled to the floor, a rabbit-eared television was parked on top of a television tray, and Skinny’s plum recliner was covered in soda cracker crumbs. A tiny, narrow kitchen was to my left. Piles of food-crusted dishes spilled out of the sink. In the corner, his dining table was cluttered with an array of items: empty liter bottles of Pepsi attached to small, thin plastic tubes, dozens of pill boxes, and a gallon, blue water jug sitting on a stack of newspapers. When I caught the dense, putrid smell of ammonia, I knew I’d gotten myself into deep shit here. Apparently, Skinny had moved up the ladder of dope heads. He not only disturbed the meth, but he was also mixing up his own blend of the drug.
    I spun around to catch Skinny pacing skittishly, his veiny, bare feet crackling across strewn newspapers. He gave me a huge smile filled with years of meth decay. Black, rotting teeth receded into the roof of his mouth, and the ones still hanging on had turned yellow. He took a long stretch of his neck, revealing the spider web inked in a faded purple outline on his papery, opaque skin. He looked malnourished, from his rail-thin arms and concave stomach outline against his T-shirt to the sharp protrusion of his shoulders.
    “They want to kill me,” he said.
    “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
    He coughed and spat out a wad of meth head phlegm. “The guys dealing the Special K. I think that fucker you’re with is one of them,” he stammered—referring, I assumed to Gunner, though I didn’t know why.
    I also had never been able to tag Skinny as a reliable source of information. His brains had been fried worse than those burritos Elroy ate from the Filler-Up station since junior high.
    “Skinny,” I sighed, placing my hands on my hips, “that guy out there is Gunner Wilson.”
    “Well, hot damn. I didn’t know that fella was back in town.” Skinny sat down in his recliner, his tweaked-out fingers twitching.
    I leaned up against the far wall of the trailer, making myself as comfortable as possible until Skinny got to whatever point he needed to make. “And before you say anything, we’re not back together.”
    “Wasn’t thinking it.” He snickered. “A man must really be hankering for some pussy to go crawling back to a woman who blew his ass open.”
    “It’s a tiny scar!”
    “Whatever,” he shrugged.
    This was going nowhere fast. The conversation had detoured onto a road that always ends up with me looking crazy, instead of the direction it needed to go, which was what the hell was I doing in here?
    The lock jimmied. It would only be a matter of seconds before Gunner just kicked the damn thing in.
    “So what do you know about the Special K?” I asked Skinny to get the conversation going where it needed to. “I thought you only dealt in the meth business these days.”
    Skinny’s knees started to twist, his legs began to shake. “It’s real bad. These guys, the