Warrior Angel Read Online Free PDF Page B

here?
    â€œWhat an awful question,” said Mom.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhy are you here. We’re your family, Richard. We love you and care about you.”
    Starkey began to laugh. “Sorry. I didn’trealize I’d left the microphone on again.”
    Stepdad began yelling into both phones, showing off, and Starkey just nodded as Mom made small talk. She told PJ about Starkey’s sisters, half sisters really, both away at boarding school. Amy made the lacrosse team, blah-blah, Kate has the lead in an original rap opera written by an African-American student that Jeremy’s company was sponsoring. She didn’t tell PJ that the black kids’ scholarship was part of the deal to get their two halfwit daughters into the school. Then there was gossip about neighbors Starkey barely remembered. The husband had run off with the pool boy. PJ nodded as if she were interested.
    He slipped away and went upstairs. His old room was just the way he had left it when the judge had sent him to the Whitmore Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility after that bogus arson bust. When the librarian had stopped him from taking out all three copies of The Tomahawk Kid, he’d had to burn them so The Book wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He was never trying to burn down the library.
    He hadn’t minded Whitmore too much. Wising off to Capt. Deeks had gotten him aweek in solitary but gave him creds in the general population. The skinheads protected him from the blacks and the Latinos until one of them made Redskin jokes while they were watching a documentary on Sonny and he wouldn’t shut up until Starkey put a ballpoint between his ribs. The next time Starkey came out of solitary, the skinheads ambushed him in the latrine and he was lucky to escape with only a slashed arm.
    It worked out fine. Stepdad’s lawyers used that to spring him out of Whitmore and into the hospital. Where they wanted to zap his brains. Electroconvulsive therapy was back in style. It was the only time Starkey felt scared. It would mean not only aborting the Mission but not returning to Heaven. Electroshock breaks communications between a Warrior Angel and the Archies. He would forget he was an angel. He would be stranded on Earth for a natural life, just another Live One.
    Stepdad was all for it, zap the kid, but Mom wasn’t sure. Maybe she’d seen the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Maybe Dad had been zapped. They did it a lot in those days. The hospital came up with an alternative—one of itsdoctors ran a group home for adolescents, the Family Place. It was near where they lived in Connecticut. Last chance before we microwave your boy.
    And here we are, sports fans, back in the family place, lower case, please.
    The Sonny Bear posters were beginning to curl at the edges—he would have to repin them. The Sonny Bear headbands were made-in-China junk, but you have to support your man.
    â€œThere you are.” Mom came into the room. He could hear Stepdad booming at PJ downstairs. “We wondered where…”
    He pulled the Sonny Bear fringed buckskin jacket out of the closet. “I’ll wear this to the club tonight,” he said.
    His mother’s face tightened; she caught her breath but then decided to smile. “I was hoping you’d let me buy you a new shirt and tie to go with your good blazer. This is really important to your father.”
    â€œMy father’s dead—he won’t care.”
    She sighed, then decided not to go there. “Then for me, Richard, please.”
    â€œCan I drive?”
    That stopped her. “Well…”
    â€œThe Land Rover.”
    She took a very deep breath. She hated the buckskin jacket. If he wore it to the club tonight, their uptight friends would think he was still cuckoo. A blue blazer with brassy buttons, well, that’s an obvious proof of sanity.
    â€œAll right, Richard. You can drive, once we’re out of town.