Take Me There Read Online Free PDF

phone anymore. That’s how paranoid I was that they would find us. I hadn’t seen them since that night they brought in the car from the hit-and-run.
    “How would I know?” Wade answered, a little too defensively.
    “Gomez won’t like this,” Kip whispered behind me. “If he sees them here …”
    “He won’t see them here.” Eight Ball would have been watching the shop. He had to know the old man’s routine.
    My whole body tensed as Eight Ball walked over and stood in front of the Range Rover. He folded his arms across his massive chest and stood there staring at me. He was wearing a satin tank top, satin workout pants, and more gold chains than I could count. Two Tone, his shadow, took the same pose.
    “Break yo’self,” Eight Ball told Kip and Nathan.
    “What?” said Kip.
    “Take a walk,” Ajax translated.
    Ajax and Spider, the only white guys in the BSB, wore nothing on their upper bodies but shirts of spider web tattoos. A web meant you’d been involved in a plot to kill somebody. Kip and Nathan took one look at their body art and disappeared out the back door.
    The really creepy thing about Ajax and Spider was that when they covered up their tattoos, they looked almost respectable. They knew how to dress so they could mix in with a crowd and pick up unsuspecting beach girls—their favorite pastime.
    Wade slouched his shoulders and started bopping his head, trying to look like a homie but resembling a plastic Chihuahua on a dashboard. “Wassup, bro?” he said to Eight Ball.
    “Ain’t nobody told you to talk,” Eight Ball said. Then he turned to me. “Thought you might cruise by the hood when you got out.”
    “We’re on probation.”
    “So’s half the set. You been out for a while.”
    “Three months,” I admitted.
    “Some reason you been keepin’ your distance?”
    “Wade and I did our time. We didn’t rat.” We had stuck to our lame story about finding Ellen Carter’s car on the side of the road, even after the DA showed us pictures of the old woman in a coma and I started making bargains with God. Even when she died and the lawyers threatened to charge us with accessory to murder. Wade and I had alibis for the night she got run over, so all we served was eight months in juvie for possession of a stolen vehicle.
    Ellen Carter had been an innocent little old lady who ran aflorist shop in El Segundo. Not the type of person you’d expect to jump out in front of a twenty-year-old Honda Civic, waving her arms to try to stop a bunch of gangbangers from stealing her car.
    Eight Ball kept staring at me. I didn’t understand. We weren’t members of the gang, just associates. Associates came and went as the gang found them useful.
    “We did our time,” I repeated.
    “Anybody ask you ’bout doin’ your time?” yelled Two Tone, puffing out his scrawny chest and trying to sound like his brother.
    “Don’t act the man, Two Tone,” Eight Ball reprimanded him. A smile flickered across Ajax’s face, and Two Tone looked at the floor of the garage, trying to hide his embarrassment. Two Tone should have been second in command, but Eight Ball wouldn’t allow it. After watching his older brother die, he refused to let the younger one do anything even slightly dangerous. And so Two Tone was left painting stolen cars, making fake IDs, and performing other meaningless jobs.
    “Wade and Dylan, they been down for the crew,” said Eight Ball. “They kept their lips sewed. We ’preciate that, ’specially Ajax, since he be the one who ran down the old lady.” Eight Ball threw Ajax a look of disapproval. Eight Ball was dangerous, but he had a code, and I was pretty sure it didn’t include killing defenseless old women.
    Ajax didn’t live by any kind of code, which made him more dangerous than any of the rest of them. “You got a tight little place here,” he said, looking around the garage. “Real clean. Make for a nice chop shop.”
    “No!” I said, a little too forcefully. Gomez