Chapter One

Used condom. Check. Dirty coverlet and sheets. Check. Empty bottle of Whiskey Moon thrown on the floor. Check. Wadded pair of stockings. Check. K-Y Jelly. Check. Discarded syringe in the trash. And check. Addey Ruanova pieced together room 16. The pigpen of cheap sex compliments of cheap prostitution. She slapped on her plastic gloves and began disposing of the evening of lewd fun. The Sunshine Motel on 32nd and Brewer Street merited this caliber of patrons. The prostitutes in Camden, New Jersey, were working hard tonight. The items were a firm reminder she was working the evening shift, what Junior Alverez called “bump and grind time”. He once told her, “People are screwin’ and the meter is tickin’. That’s why I started offering hourly rates.”

Hard work was ahead of her, jobs that included vacuuming, bleaching the bathtub, disinfecting every surface and making the bed to the standard befitting of an army recruit’s bunk. But the routine was disturbed when a question rang out from the parking lot, shot from cupped hands around a mouth. “Addey—hey, Addey, are you up there?”

She immediately recognized the voice. Deke Ruanova, her brother, waved her down from the parking lot. “Sis, come on down here! I need to talk to you!”

When she saw him, he was wearing that “I’ve been running several blocks and finally stopped” expression. He was dressed in a gray, oversize sweatshirt, the hood conspicuously drawn over his head. Judging by the number of times he’d bummed money from her or been in hiding from the police, she knew he was in trouble again, and it had to do with drugs or the selling of drugs.

Aggravated, she called out to him, “You better not be running from the police again. I don’t want anything to do with your gangbangers. Or do you need money for drugs this time? It’s drugs, isn’t it?” It’s always drugs.

Deke’s frazzled face shaped despair. He was sweating in copious amounts. Withdrawal was setting in. His lips were too white, and his skin was chalky. She imagined his track marks were puckering open, begging to be satiated.

She tromped down the second-level steps to the parking lot. She was sick of him visiting her at her jobs and begging for cash. She scanned the parking lot and was confused to see her brother had vanished. “Where are you, Deke? Come on, I have work to do.”

A door was half-open on the first level. A crescent of light filtered onto the sidewalk. Guessing he was inside the room, she entered. She fired questions at Deke. “Do you want twenty bucks? Is that what you’re going to ask me? I don’t have more than ten bucks on me. Let me guess: I should write you a check for more? Well, screw you. I don’t have my checkbook on me.”

Was this how family treated each other? Carlos and Norma Ruanova were wonderful parents. Norma was an elementary school cafeteria worker, Carlos a security guard. They were native-born Mexicans who’d gained citizenship into the United States and started a family. Even good parents couldn’t shield their child from the local Camden gangs who corralled neighborhood kids by their promises of easy money. This neighborhood was one of the poorest, most violent cities in the United States.

Expecting to scold her brother, she was spring-ejected into a moment of horror by what she saw next. “What are you doing, Deke? Deke, you shouldn’t be in here.”

The room was hotel manager Junior Alverez’s office. Deke was hunched at the steel safe underneath Junior’s desk. He was pouring sweat. He wore a pair of leather gloves, his fingers busy trying to crack the safe’s combination. “Watch the door, Addey. That’s all I want you to do. I’m not bumming money this time.”

He worked at the combination. Each time it failed, he cursed the box, punching the safe. His patience was growing dangerously thin.

“You really want to drag me into this plan of yours?” A sob snuck into her voice. “You’d do that to me after everything you’ve put me through? I’ve bailed you out of prison. Your gangbanger friends hit on me. Those idiots even cost me that office job a year back, and you’ve never apologized for it. Not once, Deke.”

He crafted the same response every time she reprimanded him. “No, sis, it ain’t like that. It ain’t like that.”

The tears couldn’t be stopped. “Yeah, it is, Deke. It is like that.”

Failing to find the combination once again, he said with a sharp tone, “It ain’t like that.”

She had to do something to chase him out of the office.

“I’ll call the police. I’m not going to jail for you. I can’t believe you’re pulling this shit. Have you been casing my workplace? I make an honest living. It may not be the best job on earth, but it’s work.”

That’s when Deke overtook her, slapping her face with a cruel backhand and seizing her shoulders, then shaking her twice. Her hold on the moment vanished. She was blinking the blots out of her eyes and doing her best to gain her breath.

Her brother’s face was bent into something devious.

He gave the orders. “Watch—the—fucking—door.”

He removed a .28 caliber pistol with masking tape around the handle. He aimed it at her when she didn’t address his demands. She attempted to reach out to her brother, to reason with him. “Deke, put it down. I’m your sister.”

He was a split second from cracking the gun handle over her skull. “Watch the door, and I won’t shoot you.”

The way his hands trembled, he was craving heroin, and nothing would stop him from gaining the money for his fix. That was Deke’s favorite drug. He wasn’t a brother anymore, and she wasn’t his sister. She was only an outlet to more money, more drugs.

She feared to protest anymore. He would shoot her. Family did it to each other all the time. The stories in the small columns of the daily newspaper reflected those facts.

Addey prayed under her breath that Junior or anybody else didn’t come along and discover them.

Just open the safe and get the hell out of here. Nobody gets hurt. Finish it, Deke. Finish it fast.

He rolled the combination. The safe’s lock failed to disengage. “I watched that piece-of-shit roll those numbers. Why isn’t it opening?”

“Please stop this. You’re not getting any money, so get out of here. I’ll write you a check, okay? You want my ATM card? This isn’t necessary. I’ll give you whatever I’ve got if you just go right now.”

She hadn’t seen Deke in nearly a month, and now this unexpected visit. He’d been following her to work, casing the rooms and peering into Junior’s window to watch him roll the combination to the safe all this time.

He tried the numbers three more times to no success. He’d sweated through his top, the article pasted to his chiseled body. He turned toward the door, keeping the gun drawn. “Then we’re waiting until your boss shows up. He’ll open it for us. I had the combination wrong. I’ve seen the cash. He’s got thousands in that thing.” Boiling from his throat, “It’s all mine.”

Deke’s wish came true. Junior walked up to the doorway. He was wearing a Lakers jacket and smoking a cigarette. Junior was in his fifties, with large-rimmed glasses and a tired expression.

He saw Addey first. “What’s wrong, Addey? You look upset.”

She was speechless and reacted too late. Deke forced Junior forward by the arm, driving him to the floor. He bashed the gun against the back of his head with an uncouth crack.

“Open the safe, or I’ll shoot you in the head!”

Addey screamed, “I had nothing to do with this, Junior, I swear it. This is all him.”

“Shut the fuck up, both of you.” Deke jabbed the muzzle into Junior’s face. “Open it, and I’ll be going. It’s that simple, old man.”

Junior’s face was fuming with anger, but he was also smart. He returned to his feet, agreeing to the plan. He opened the safe without a word of protest. With a gunslinger’s speed, Junior withdrew the Ruger pistol hidden inside. Addey’s eyes widened. Her ears absorbed the clap of the double shots. It happened so fast. Deke’s chest bloomed red. The wall behind him splattered from floor to ceiling in red. He landed against the wall, the life taken out of him in seconds. He was motionless, blood spooling from his open lips.

Junior aimed the gun at her now, avenging what he considered a brother/sister operation. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me, Addey. I trusted you. I was going to promote you to evening manager.” Face flecked with blood, Junior became another criminal’s mug shot posted on the evening’s news. “And this is the shit you pull?”

She tried to back out of the room. He shoved her next to Deke’s body. Addey slipped on all the blood that had pooled across the floor. Her pants were sodden, arms painted in what kept gushing from Deke’s chest.

She was hysterical. “No, no, no—I had nothing to do with this! I was working, and he came out of nowhere. I tried to stop him. And you shot him. You shot him!”

“Boy had it coming.” Junior was callous to Deke’s demise, jaded from so many robberies that he’d been victim to. “I make an honest living. I don’t push drugs and rob people. It was self-defense. He was hopped up. He didn’t know what he was doing. I wasn’t going to be one of those victims killed by some idiot on PCP, or whatever the hell was pumping through his veins. I’m nobody’s victim.”

The man was becoming less and less human. His expression was that of a murderer. “I’d be in my right to shoot you too, Addey.”

A cough. “You won’t touch her.”

Junior caught the bullet on the left temple. Half his head blew away. She closed her eyes too late. The split-second death would relive itself forever in her memory. The body then collapsed, though she only heard it happen.

Addey was too shocked to be touched by the act of brotherly protection. She couldn’t work up the courage to dial the police. The blood in the room was neon, beading its harsh tones against the artificial light. She shifted each time the widening circles from both ends of the room threatened to touch her until she had no choice but to step out of the office and into the night air. Sirens wailed in the distance. Someone else had summoned the police.

She waited at the curb and wept.