Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’s looking
up at me.
    And she’s smirking.
-7-
    I head to the DJ box, touch fists with
Randy. “Declan baby! Nice to see you! What you think of the set?”
He swings his head over at Heaven-Leigh. In his Sri Lankan accent
he says, “Da babe is good, eh?”
    I raise my eyebrows, and I mouth, WOW !
    “ Hot, eh? Hey, Xavier!”
    Mr. Curls seems to have permanently dropped the redhead—she
must’ve gotten what she wanted, and promised to see him “later.”
He’s standing next to Heaven-Leigh. Or, as I’m starting to think of
her, The
Heavenliest Heaven There Is . She looks so bad-ass, and yet, so tiny and
delicate...
    Mr. Curls comes over to the DJ Box. He puts a hand in his
tartans, then pulls it out, gives Randy some skin. And then runs
the hand around his greasy hair and looks around like he’s
expecting five-oh to jump him or something.
    Uh- huh. As I thought. Dealer. And his name is Xavier. Mental
note.
    “ Xavier, this is an old friend of mine,
Declan Cox.”
    “ Cox?” Xavier Curls says to me. “Like the
DJ—”
    “ Yeah, like Carl,” I say, already
anticipating the statement. It’s a regular one around this
crowd.
    “ Alright, esseh ! Cool, man!” Xavier fires an imaginary gun at me. Randy
flips some dials and changes the beat, sticks his hand up to let me
and Xavier know he’ll turn his attention to us in just a
sec.
    “ So, where was I?” Randy says. “Oh, yeah,
Cox here. Best damn football player Brooklyn’s ever
seen.”
    “ No, Randy, that’s Trev.”
    “ Bullshit. It was both of yooze . That he
has the limelight now doesn’t change the facts. He threw, you
caught and ran. You guys were dynamite on the field. Beyond
increasing my cholesterol levels on Bowl Weekend, I don’t know shit
about the game—but what I do know is the two of yooze was chain lightning over at Lincoln.” In Randy’s
accent, threw comes out
as true . But he’s
straight Brooklyn when he says yooze . As in: Da two-a-yooze was chain lightning.
    “ How’s your pops?” he asks.
    “ Still hating the world as far as I
know.”
    Randy rolls his eyes, shrugs. Pops is a
slimeball. But compared to Randy’s own father, no truer angel has
ever walked the earth. “You still not talkin to him?”
    I shuffle my feet, look around. I’m trying
to figure out how to change the subject when Randy puts his finger
up again to pause our conversation. He turns a few knobs on the
mixer. I stand there uncomfortably for a second. Waiting. Xavier
looks wired, eyes too jittery. It looks like he’s got more than a
little ice-cream habit going (that’s the same as being a chipper.)
Maybe he does a bit of dragon chasing on the side as well. But he
doesn’t look like an H addict. Big C? That’s likely. He’s sniffed
and run an arm over his noise more than once since I’ve been
standing here.
    D udes like him make me nervous. Time bombs. Like pops’s
Catalina .
    Randy turns back to me , forgetting his earlier question. “I put
on some premixed Café del Mar so
we can talk some more. Had a good roll, Deck-Man?”
    “ Uh, no, didn’t roll tonight.”
    “ Problem? Xavier here’s our in-house
thoroughbred, sells only pure-grade; but you can never turn away
the dudes who sell stepped-on shit. Not everyone can afford the
high-quality stuff. Hey I got some for you if—”
    “ No, no, Randy. That’s not it.” I put my
hands up to say I definitely don’t want the drugs. I do too many of
them as it is. “No, actually, the sound was so good I outright
forgot to drop. By the time Skate was hitting his peak and wanted
more, he just took mine.”
    “ No shit, eh?” Randy says this with all the
disbelief of a guy who’s been in the scene too long—and done too
many drugs—to have come to consider that music and drugs are not
separately discernible entities. “Well, Xavier here knows her.
First time I ever took anyone’s advice on picking a DJ for the
night. It was a gamble. But it worked out. She took the spot of two
other