And she had slammed into that door, again, and again, and again, and…just like that—

  Freedom.

  She puffed on the joint, sucked in the smoke, and opened the small fridge she’d found in a dumpster and repaired and cleaned up. She pulled out a Budweiser, popped the top, and drank her fill, the beer irritating her busted lip. She pressed the cold can against it and then her oblique. Broken-Jawed Bitch really packed a wallop.

  But there she was that night, charging to freedom, not knowing where she was going. Not caring about that in the least. After all those years. Then there had been Joe Atkins, looming up in her field of vision like the big, bad boogeyman. Only she was bigger and badder than Joe would ever be. He was a gnat to be squashed.

  She lifted the beer can until it was upside down and she finished it off, wiped her chin, and pinched the joint out, saving the rest for later. She breathed in the reefer-scented smoke drifting in the air, like lines of miniature cumulus in her room, with the added benefit of making her high.

  Yes, there had been Joe. And then he had been there no more.

  Squashed. Freedom.

  She lay back on the mattress, kicked her flip-flops off, and wriggled her long toes.

  She had cash, she had a single credit card that she used very sparingly, she had a place to live, wheels to go to other places. She had jobs that she did, crap that she pulled. Not all legal, but so what? Nothing done to her had been legal.

  Survival. She fell asleep thinking only of that. Just like pretty much every other night.

  It didn’t make her feel worse and it didn’t make her feel better. But at least it made Cain feel something.

  Hallelujah, you survived it all, El. Now go to sleep and get ready for tomorrow.

  Just in case it comes.

  Chapter 10

  HER PHONE ALARM DINGED AT SIX A.M., and Cain rolled over and yawned. She sat up and opened the window to get out the final dregs of any lingering pot smoke. But she wasn’t too worried. While they had random drug testing at her first place of work today, they used a blood test. A blood test could only detect THC, the component in pot that made you feel high, for about three hours after use. A saliva test could do it for between twenty-four and seventy-two hours. A urine test could nail you for up to thirty days after use. Hence, many employers used saliva or more likely a blood test as their testing tool. Otherwise, they’d test their way right out of business because they’d have no bodies to do the work.

  That was the dirty little secret of the crap work world where millions labored every day. And the savviness of addicts who needed a job.

  She opened her fridge, cracked three eggs into a glass, and drank it down raw. She had seen this done in an old movie about a down-and-out boxer named Rocky. Protein, apparently, which helped your body recover and build. Which was good, Cain thought, because it tasted like shit and had the texture of snot.

  She changed into the outfit she had fought in—blood, sweat, and all—covered that with a hoodie and sweatpants, and slipped on a pair of worn sneakers. Then she left her place, padlocking the door on the other side. She ran for miles, her breath forming visible clouds with every exhale. Winter was coming with speed. But she would be snug in her little place, hopefully.

  She liked to run, and her long legs and frame were built for eating up massive quantities of ground. Cain had been running her whole life. Sometimes for real, other times just in her mind, especially when she’d been locked up all those years. She would jog in place and let her imagination take her to any place other than the one she was in. The things she did in her mind to keep going, it was some wicked shit. Taught her stuff. Demonstrated that your mind could get you through anything. Anything. Because it had done so for her.

  Psalm of my life: If you can’t live in the world you have, make one up.

  She stopped at five different “tents and boxes” and handed out cash from her prize money at each one. These were not boozers or druggies, at least not mostly. They would use the money for food and other necessaries, because they all had young kids living with them in their distress.

  “Thank you,” said one young mom, who was white but looked brown with the sun and the dirt. Cain could relate. This was the “tan” of homelessness. It was unlike any other skin tanning ever, Cain knew. It fried your brain as well as your outside. It never really came off you because you worried every minute it could happen again. It was like you were a fugitive for life and your only crime was bad luck or bad choices. When the rich and powerful made a mistake their lawyers and PR folks took care of it.

  Cain waved the woman’s thanks off and kept running. The next family was black, the next one after that, too. The next ones spoke Spanglish and shivered in the chill. The next family, she couldn’t really tell what they were, not that it mattered. They were breathing, they were human. They look like me in that way. That was enough. Boxes were meant to house stuff, not put people in. Not until they’re dead, anyway. Most people looked at them and felt either sorry or disgusted, or both. Not Cain. She just saw folks who needed some help.

  At the end she had given away over half her winnings.

  She knew what the term “Good Samaritan” meant, but only because of the Bible reading. But that was not why she was doing it. She did it because today she had money and today they didn’t, but needed it. Keep it simple was Cain’s motto. When you thought too hard about it, you tended to want to keep what you had and dare others to try to take it.

  She got back to her place and completed her daily workout with pushups, floor dips, chin-ups on a bar wedged in a doorway, lots of ab and core work with a medicine ball, and exercises with a kettlebell she’d gotten for a buck from a gym going out of business. Then bodyweight lunges and squats and calisthenics followed by shadow boxing; she finished with some heavy-duty stretching.

  The strong and vigilant don’t always survive, but it damn sure improves your chances.

  She showered in cold water because that was all there was. She had started her period late last night. She had had her first period at age eleven while she was with the Atkinses. She thought she was dying when the cramps came and the blood dripped from down there. She had begged Desiree to help her. The woman had laughed and thrown her a roll of paper towels, telling her that it would come every month, like clockwork. She had added, “They sell stuff for it, but the paper towels will do for you. It’s not like you’re going anywhere. So deal with it.”

  And Cain had dealt with it using the paper towels. Until Wanda Atkins had explained to Cain what was really going on, and given her boxes of tampons. That had been an eye opener. She remembered asking Wanda if boys had periods, too.

  “No,” she had said. “Good thing, because they couldn’t handle it.”

  Cain believed she spoke the literal truth.

  Wanda had been nice to her, sneaking her books, taking care of some medical needs, bringing her some extra food. But she never once made any effort to free her. There were limits, Cain supposed, to people’s generosity. And morals.

  Chapter 11

  FOR TWENTY-FIVE HOURS A WEEK and nine bucks an hour Cain operated a forklift loading packing crates onto tractor trailers. They wouldn’t allow her full-time work, because that came with benefits and other rights. All the guys there—she was the only female—were also part-timers.

  She parked her Honda outside the terminal, put on her hard hat and protective shoe coverings and safety goggles, punched the clock, and climbed into her little rig. They could have gotten plenty of guys with heavy equipment operating licenses to do this, and who had been laid off in the recent downturn. But Cain was a lot cheaper and didn’t demand full-time work. People like her were a hot commodity in the free market right now. She was a worker who didn’t mind getting screwed: Employers loved her.

  She liked the work because she didn’t really have to talk to or deal with anyone. She just climbed into her seat, manipulated her ride hauling the crates and boxes, and did her thing. Years before, she had earned a good living doing similar work. Then she’d been injured on the job and the painkillers had helped a lot, so she kept taking them. Then came the day when she couldn’t stop taking them. And then it wasn’t just painkillers. It was anything she could snort, swallow, or stick herself with. And there went her job and everything else.

  Someone had suggested counseling. She had gone to one person but when he’d asked about any troubles in her past, she got up and left. It wasn’t worth it. Cain knew if she waded back into that, she’d just slit her wrists. There was only one way for her to go and that was forward. Some psych guy could write a book on her, but Cain would never read it. She had lived it. One ride through hell was enough.

  Cain had never been to prison, only in jails for short periods for stupid crap she shouldn’t have done. Petty thefts, DUIs, drug possession, throwing a drunk accountant through a plate glass window for grabbing first her ass and then her breasts, only to have his buddies swear it was all her. Stuff like that. Shit happened; shit just happened to her more than to a lot of others, it seemed.

  Each time she was arrested she’d been afraid that her ID and manufactured past would not pass muster and uncomfortable questions would follow. Yet she had found that the police in real life were not quite the stuff you saw on TV. The computers were old and boxy, the offices drab, the clothes they wore drabber still. There wasn’t an ounce of sexy among the whole crew, the morale was low, and the energy to go above and beyond on low-end cases like hers was virtually nonexistent. She was one piece of dull paper in a billion. Just shuffle her through because who really gave a crap.

  Thank God for that.

  She clocked out on the dot. She was about to get into her car when a new guy came up to her. His job was to fuel and detail the trucks, or at least she had seen him doing that.

  He was lean—too thin, really—with a scraggly, ill-groomed beard, twitchy eyes, and a conceited expression, at least to Cain.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hear you don’t like guys.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  He grinned. “’Cause you’ve never gone out with none of the boys here.”

  “You talking about the one guy who has teeth, or all the others?”

  “Hey, that’s bitchy,” he said, frowning.

  “What the hell do you care?”

  “I don’t know. Look, forget it. Shit, I mean, what the hell is your problem?”

  Cain said, “I got no problem. Just here doing my job. And now I’m going to do another job.”

  His expression changed from angry to curious. “Yeah? Where is that?”

  “Why?”

  “I make chump change here. I clean offices at night. But that pays shit, too, and it ain’t regular work. Look.” He glanced around nervously and then lit up a cigarette. His hands were shaky. “Look, I…I got me a kid. And my old lady ain’t doing too good. Rehab, y’know? Meth, it’s a bitch.”

  She looked him over and decided his old lady wasn’t the only one fighting a meth addiction. Cain saw all the signs because she’d been there, too. “Detailing trucks and cleaning offices? Not much future. Same goes for meth. You don’t kick that, nothing else matters because it gets in your head and you can’t do anything else but worry about the next pop and how to get it.”

  “Shit, I know that! So what else do you do?” he asked.

  She looked him over. “I do group Lyft rides three times a week in the afternoon. My car’s not pretty, but it takes people who don’t have a lot of dollars where they need to go. Not great money, but it’s something. Then I go home and sleep. Then four nights a week I work security making rounds at a gated community a few miles outside of downtown. Ten to six in the morning. I’m on duty tonight, in fact. They used to have their own private police force, but then they outsourced it to save money. See, even the rich pinch pennies sometimes. It pays eight-fifty an hour, no real bennies, but there’s no heavy lifting. And you get a little car to drive around in. I’ve been doing it for six months and the only thing that happened was I had to roust some pothead kids out of a rich dude’s pool.”

  “Security job! I can’t pass no background check and if I have to pee into—”

  She interrupted. “They don’t do any of that. No pee cups. No tests, at least they never have with me. They’re supposed to, I guess, but the place that hired me? I went in for an interview at four in the afternoon and was on duty at ten that night. The only thing they asked me was what size uniform I took and whether I wanted a gun. They just want bodies riding around in a uniform looking like they know what they’re doing. Optics, they call it.”

  “No training, really?”

  “If they had to get people to pee or pass a background check they might as well close up shop. No Ivy Leaguers are applying for this stuff.”

  He took a puff on the cigarette and slowly blew the smoke out while he stared at the ground. “I guess that’s right.”

  “And anyway, all the homes have these fancy security systems and surveillance cameras out the ass. We’re just gravy on top of the mashed potatoes.”

  “And did you want a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “For eight-fifty an hour, I got a gun, they got a gun, they’re more likely to shoot me.”

  “I think I’d go for a gun.”

  She looked him over. “You know how to use one?”

  “Sure. How do I apply for a job?”

  She pulled out a piece of paper and pen from her glove box, spun him around, and used his back as a desk as she wrote a phone number down. She handed it to him. “Here. Tell ’em El Cain sent you. It might help. I know the extra cash comes in handy. After they take out taxes and crap it’s around two-twenty a week.”

  “Shit, that’s more than I make here. They pay me under the table so it’s less than minimum, but they feed me lunch and there’s usually some leftover donuts for breakfast.”

  “There you go. You can buy your own donuts.”

  He looked at the paper and said, “Thanks, I mean it, really.”

  “No problem. Hope it works out.”

  He looked at her bruised face, apparently focusing on it for the first time. “Damn, what happened there?”

  “Got in a fight.”

  “Who with?”

  “Some other chick. She ended up in the hospital to get her jaw wired and to hopefully think about something else to do with her life. I ended up going home and having a beer.”

  He chuckled as though he thought she was kidding. “But do you like guys?”

  “I like some guys some of the time. I don’t like most guys most of the time.”

  He grinned and stuffed the paper into his shirt pocket. “You’re not like what they said.”

  “I’m not like what anybody says, because nobody really knows me. And that’s how I want it.”

  Chapter 12

  YOU, A RENTAL COP? Now that’s a good one.”

  In the rearview mirror Cain was staring at herself in a plain gray uniform with chevrons on the sleeve signifying absolutely nothing. It was just more optics. She was perched in her tiny two-door Smart Car, with the name STEELE SECURITY SERVICES airbrushed on the side panels in nifty colors. There was an orange bubble light on top of the car that she would turn on from time to time and then she’d speed around just to break up the boredom. She had the seat all the way back but with her long legs she still felt cramped.

  She had been on duty for about two hours; it was a bit after midnight. She had made several rounds over her area of responsibility and found zero cause for concern. Certainly, the rich were sensibly afraid that someone would try to take what they had, but the truth was most thieves went for easier targets, like the poor and working class and sometimes reaching up to grab on to those in the middle of the economic pecking order.

  There was a gatehouse on the only road into the community and it was manned by an armed guard 24/7. There were also two cars patrolling the neighborhood during the night, one of which was hers. The homes had all the latest gizmos in security, with more cameras than a Hollywood back lot. All in all, this was one tough nut for someone to crack. You made a 911 call from here, the real and rental cops would show up before you put down the phone. Someone had broken into an apartment she’d had once in Detroit in an area that could have been generously called “in transition.” She called 911 but the cops hadn’t even bothered to come. They were probably scared to.

  She started on another round through the subdivision. And even though she’d seen them many times before, Cain found herself still marveling at the size of the homes, or estates, that were located here. They looked like mini-hotels. They all had landscaped grounds, lavish in-ground pools, guesthouses, and elaborate statuary, with each owner clearly trying to outdo his neighbor, if the amount of remodeling and new construction work being done was any indication. But, hey, you had to do something with the cash. She had no idea what the homeowners did to earn enough to live in places like this, but she knew she would never be among their number. And she was okay with that. She didn’t want to live in a place so big that she might get lost.

  Later, she pulled off the road, had a cup of lukewarm coffee poured from her thermos, and pecked in notes on the iPad the security firm gave her to use. The observations were perfunctory and were really only meant to show that she was actually doing something. She seriously doubted anyone read them. And if they did, it was a massive waste of time.

  Nearly hit squirrel. Heard dog bark. Saw rich white girl sneak out and jump into clunker hatchback with poor brown boy and they drove off. Saw drunk homeowner pawing equally drunk woman half his age and not his wife as they stumbled into house getting naked along the way.

  Same old crap.

  Cain turned on the radio, drank her coffee, and scrolled through her phone. Amazing things, these phones. When she’d first learned of the internet it had blown her away. That was some seriously cool shit. There was so much she didn’t know that she had had to prioritize and focus on the things she needed in order to get by. That was it. All the rest, she just winged it.