Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

giggled as I slid down the tree, and it’s why I can’t control the sudden, irrational anger.

“You can’t just take a kid without a warrant,” he says.

“What fucking world are you living in?” I was on the verge of convincing Africa. I’d opened up a tiny crack in his armour, and if I’d just had a few more seconds, everything that happened back there could have been avoided. Africa is a dipshit, true, and we wouldn’t even have gotten into that situation if it wasn’t for him… but he was starting to see reason. He’d realised what was at stake. If Nic had just shut the fuck up, Leo wouldn’t have gone apeshit, and those National guardsmen might still be alive. We’d have food, water, maybe a new ally. “You have a law degree. I thought they only gave those out to smart people. So explain to me why you thought talking about the constitution and in loco fucking parentis was going to help back there.”

“Careful,” he says.

“Get this straight. In my world, there are no warrants. No court protections. We are right out on the fucking edge. You wanna go talk to Tanner about the law? She doesn’t care, you idiot. You can throw down clever legal arguments, and hide behind as many laws as you want, and it will mean precisely dick. She’ll grab that Constitution you’re waving in her face, and use it to light her cigarette. And by the way, you wanna talk like that to fucking Africa? Of all people?”

He looks at me then. Really looks at me. Like he’s seeing me for the first time.

“I am a black man living in America,” he says slowly, not taking his eyes off me. “You don’t get to talk to me about not being protected by the law. Not ever.”

“That’s not what I…”

“I don’t give a fuck.” His voice is monotone, cold as a switchblade. “I know exactly what it’s like to live in that world. I went to work for the District Attorney for no money so I could find a way out of it. I don’t need some white girl telling me I don’t understand what it’s like.”

Abruptly, he turns, walks off into the darkness.

I want to call after him. Say… shit, I don’t know. That I’m sorry. That I overreacted. That it doesn’t matter how right he is, because people still died up there – and wouldn’t have if he’d just let me handle it. I’m furious with myself, more embarrassed than I’ve ever been in my entire life – but I’m also furious with Nic. He has to know that wasn’t what I meant, he—

I drop my chin to my chest, groan long and hard.

In the end, I do the only thing I can. I get to my feet, and I keep walking.

Annie said she’d meet us at the Main Street Bridge – the one that is now a huge pile of rubble, thanks to the little car chase we had with the Legends biker gang. It’s south of us now, no more than a quarter-mile, just down Wilhardt and left up Main. But we get to the intersection of Wilhardt and Naud, and we can’t go any further. There’s a gigantic sinkhole at the far end of the intersection, cordoned off by tattered yellow police tape.

Nic rubs his jaw. “OK. We can head up there.” He points to the north-east “Up Naud. Drop into the river.”

“Won’t that add like an hour to the trip?” My voice sounds dead. It’s started to rain heavily: big, fat, cold drops spattering my arms and neck and wrists. Leo’s little lightning strikes must have opened up the clouds. It’s not a downpour, not yet, but the rain is steady and hard.

Nic gives me a pitying look. “It’ll add about five minutes. Come on.”

Turns out, Nic is right. In minutes, we hit the concrete slope heading down into the storm drain. I keep my eyes on my feet, not wanting to fall over again – which is totally within the realm of possibility. I’m expecting more hard-packed dirt at the bottom of the slope, but the concrete doesn’t stop.

I look up, startled. We’ve reached the covered-over section of the river, where the entire storm drain is concrete, end to end. The river itself is in a channel running down the centre of the drain. The flat, even surface feels odd under my sneakers.

Nic is maybe fifty yards ahead of me, walking without looking back, moving awkwardly across the concrete. He’s still holding the unconscious Leo. Jesus, I haven’t even had a minute to think about the boy. This isn’t just what he calls the wiggles – and what he did with the lightning was clearly very different to how he electrified the storage unit. It drained his tank completely, and God knows what nerve damage it’s doing to him now.

Who did this to him? Who gave him this ability? And what the hell are they trying to accomplish?

Nic moves up the slope slightly, manoeuvring around a cracked part of the concrete. As I follow, my anger turns on him. How dare he tell me I’m being racist? How can he possibly think that? He has to know what I meant, and he just took it in the worst way possible. And just to be totally clear, I wasn’t the one who took the Africa situation from dangerous to completely fucked-up. That was all on him.

Which doesn’t change the fact that I still tried to tell a black American about how the law wouldn’t protect me. There is no sugar-coating that. I didn’t even consider how it would come across.

It’s not that I don’t see race. People who say that deserve to get their teeth knocked out. But I thought it didn’t matter. I told myself I lived in a diverse, accepting city – that whatever its problems, it still didn’t matter that much what race you were. Hell, I worked – work – with people of colour.