I Dream of Danger Read Online Free PDF

run by a true sadist. Everyone in the household walked around with scars and hollow eyes. How the fuck the authorities managed to avoid reading the signs was beyond him. But they did. They kept shipping kids to Carlton Norris, and Old Man Norris just kept taking them in and cashing the checks. His beaten-down wife fed them shit food and did just enough housekeeping to keep cockroaches at bay, then would disappear into her room when the old man got that crafty look in his eyes.
    It wasn’t rage, it was addiction. He fed off other people’s pain. He didn’t feed off Nick’s. Nick was five foot ten by the time he was eleven years old and he kept himself strong. No one messed with him. Norris didn’t want to mess with him, anyway. Norris liked the smaller kids.
    One night Nick stopped the beating of a small boy, Tim, who had that look about him. The look of someone who wasn’t going to survive much longer. There wasn’t anything Nick could do to help the kid’s long-term survival, but by God he was going to survive this beating. Nick swung at Norris and connected well. He pulled the punch at the last minute so all Norris got was a black eye. It could have been a shattered jaw.
    Nick woke to blinding pain. Norris had taken a hammer to his wrist and was shining a blinding light in his eyes. Just past the light Nick saw a gun barrel.
    “You run, boy,” Norris growled. “You run as fast as you can because in an hour I’m calling the cops and reporting a dangerous juvenile on the loose. He beat me up, and he beat up a younger boy. And don’t think for one minute that little worm won’t rat on you and say you gave him the scars and bruises.”
    No, Nick knew enough of the world to understand that Tim would be too terrified to contradict Norris.
    The safety went off the gun. “Run, you fucker.”
    He ran.
    He ran and ran. He hitched rides, was a stowaway on long-haul trucks, and once hid in the luggage compartment of a Greyhound bus. He didn’t even know where he was going. He survived on stolen food and water bottles from service stations, but in the end his wrist blew up like a balloon and infection set in.
    He dropped—in an affluent part of a town—unconscious with, as he was later told, a temperature of 104.
    He came to very briefly to see an angel looking at him, so he knew he was dead. She was beautiful, a tiny sprite with light blue eyes, fair hair a halo around her head, screaming, Daddy, Daddy !
    That’s nice, he remembered thinking. I died and went to heaven. Fucking A.
    Only he hadn’t died and gone to heaven, he’d gone to Lawrence, Kansas. And his life split into two, because he was picked up by the finest man on the face of the earth, Judge Oren Thomason.
    He was taken to a hospital where the little blond angel rarely left his side, and when he was better, he was taken home to the kind of home he never even knew existed. Calm and gentleness reigned there, along with love and respect.
    The angel turned out to be Elle, a beautiful little girl who became his shadow. Nick had never been loved before, but Elle made up for that. She loved him fiercely. He went home with them—to his own room! With a bed with clean sheets, a closet full of clean new clothes, books, and a laptop on a desk. All his own. He’d gone from the hospital straight into bed, still too weak to stand up for long. Elle ferried in trays full of food she could barely carry and stayed with him until he finished every bite, then read to him, endlessly, from books he’d never heard of but which fascinated him. A wizard called Harry Potter. Lions and witches and wardrobes. A whole world called Middle-earth.
    And in the meantime, Judge Thomason was working his own wizard’s magic. By the time Nick was on his feet, he was a ward of the judge and enrolled in middle school.
    Kindness like a warm, gentle tsunami washed over him, a strong and utterly irresistible tide that carried him forward.
    Somehow Nick Ross, mongrel dog, had been folded into