Free Charming Grace by Deborah Smith Page A

Caddie Seville, we celebrated by spending fifty bucks on matching alligator tattoos—mine on the right hand, Armand’s on the left. “Together we make one soul,” bro, he said. “Tough as a gator, and just as hard to kill.” I got teary, slapped him on the back, and nodded. He hugged me.
    It wasn’t a good life, but we didn’t know that then. Neither one of us got so much as a day’s formal school time, and we knew more about drugs, guns, whores and gangs than any teenagers ought to know. Madame Taber was bat-brained crazy and Jeremiah stayed high and mean. He broke my nose in a cocaine funk one night. After I got up off the floor with blood all over my face I kicked him where the Jeremiah don’t shine. While he was bent over clutching his groin I put a fork to his throat. “You ever do that again, you’ll spout blood like a stuck pig,” I warned.
    Thank God he was too stoned to notice I’d picked up a plastic fork.
    “Don’t you get too good at this life, bro,” Armand would say from time to time, like a ritual to protect me. “You goin’ to college some day. Become a re-spect-able citizen and an architect, oui ?”
    “You’re goin’ to college, too, oui .”
    He would just laugh. By the time he turned eighteen Armand was six-two and as swank as any rock singer. He already looked like he belonged in casinos and women’s beds, not a classroom. At fourteen I was a tall, lanky cowboy without a horse, all shaggy dark hair and acne. I spent my time reading and sketching things to build. I had cheap notepads full of houses, barns, skyscrapers, space stations, moon castles, you name it. Inside my head I lived a whole different life from the streets and dark back roads.
    By now I had enough size and attitude and sense to be one tough dude, though gang fights and hassles with cops and stretches in kiddie lock up weren’t my idea of fun. Armand and I covered each other’s backs, stayed away from hard booze and dope, smoked expensive cigarillos and flirted with the clean, pretty daughters of the best people—as long as those people were looking the other way. Armand liked fine clothes and pinkie rings. I was a jeans and good-book man. He managed to look like a class act even when we got sucked into human cockfights out at Titter’s place.
    You know, funny thing, but car thieves aren’t real nice people. They like to swing a tire chain or a wrench at their competition. They got touchy over Titter’s pay scale and the fact that he favored me and Armand. We had a real knack for fine goods—Mercedes and late-model pick-ups and even an occasional Jaguar. That caused some jealousy. We learned to handle it. I got the scars as proof.

    I was just fifteen when Jeremiah beat Madame Taber to death with a baseball bat. The cops caught him before the blood was dry on her tarot-card table. “Damn, she a psychic but she didn’t see it comin’,” Titter opined. Armand and I snuck into the shop that night, collected our things, and left. Armand pried a board off a wall and yanked out a steel box full of cash and jewelry. “Stupid-ass Jeremiah never knew I saw him hide this,” Armand said, his eyes gleaming. “Bro, there’s about fifty-thousand bucks in here.”
    “Good. We’ll drop off a couple thousand at the church. Father Ruble’ll bury Madame Taber in style, then.”
    Armand arched a dark brow at me, assessing my charity with mild disgust. “Bro, we could bury her in gold and get the Pope to kiss her coffin, but she’s still gonna be readin’ fortunes for the roasted-and-poked crowd in Hell.”
    “Maybe so, but it’s what Mama would want us to do.”
    That softened him. “Okay, bro,” he said gently. “You’re right.”
    We bought fake IDs and spent the next year in Las Vegas. Armand gambled at backroom crapshoots and chased strippers who thought he was at least twenty-one. I got a job working construction at the big hotels, thanks to a mob connection of Titter’s. I was big for fifteen, had a