Falling Angels Read Online Free Page B

shopping-centre parking lot, over bumps where tire tracks had frozen in the snow. Halfway across she had to stop and rest on the running board of a truck.
    “I’ve got too many jobs,” she said to herself. “I’m carrying too much on my shoulders.”
    She decided that she didn’t give a damn what was happening at home, she was going to sit here for a few minutes. She tookout one of her Mars bars, and as she was ripping off the wrapper, she noticed a boy who was crossing the road, walking right out into traffic and holding up his hand for the cars to brake. He started coming toward her, and then she recognized him. Lance Nipper. The boy with the metal plate in his head.
    She watched him closely. He was as unpredictable as a police dog. The plate was supposed to make him normal after he got a head injury in a car accident, but instead it made him different, a loner without fear, and it left him crazy for other metal things—nails and screws that he carried in his pockets; even knives and guns, somebody said.
    When he was only a few feet away, he gave her a glance. He would have kept walking.
    But she had a compulsion to stop him. His dangerous glance struck her as a dare, and she was in no mood right at that minute to back down.
    “Hi,” she said.
    He halted, looked at her. “Gimme a bite,” he said.
    “You can have a whole one,” she said, standing up and pulling another chocolate bar out of a shopping bag.
    He took it and tore the wrapper off with his teeth. There were bits of black hair on his upper lip and chin, like how you’d draw them on a jailbird. He
was
a jailbird; he’d been to reform school for stealing a car and driving it to the airport.
    “You’re Field or something,” he said.
    “Yeah, Lou Field.” How did he know her? she wondered, thrilling. He was in grade seven, three years ahead of her. He’d failed twice anyway. “You’re Lance Nipper,” she said. She watched him eat, surprised at how handsome his head was close up. She couldn’t see any scars or lumps. She’d expected him to have a bit of a ridge where the plate went in. The only noticeable side effect was how his black hair shone blue, like black comic-book hair.
    “What’d you buy?” he asked.
    “Oh, just groceries.” Out of habit, forgetting it was true, she added,“My mother’s sick.”
    He crumpled up his wrapper and shoved it in the truck’s tailpipe. “Maybe I’ll come to your house,” he said.
    “No!” she said quickly. “You can’t because of my mother.” What she meant was because of their father. Their father knew about Lance, said he was the garbage you got in the subdivision when you let apartments go up. If their father found out that Lance had even stepped on their property, he’d call the police.
    “No big deal,” Lance said. “You come to my place.”
    “When?”
    “Now.”
    “But my groceries.”
    “Bring ‘em along.”
    She looked at the bulky paper bags leaning against each other in her old red wagon. She was more inclined to ditch them, along with every other dissuasion.
    It was as if she were hypnotized. Magnetized. Trying to keep up with him, pulling along the wagon after all, she imagined she felt his metal plate tugging at the zipper on her jacket and the buckles on her boots. He jingled the screws and nails in his pockets. From the back he looked like a short man.
    In the lobby of his apartment building he lifted the intercom phone and punched one of the buttons. “Lemme in,” he said.
    There was a loud buzzing. As he opened the door, he told her to leave the wagon, but she worried about her groceries being stolen. He motioned her over, and while she held the door ajar, he drew a couple of nails out of his jeans pocket and stuck them through the tops of two bags. “Nobody’ll take your groceries now,” he said. Nails and screws in unlikely places were his calling card.
    She hesitated. “Not everyone knows what they mean,” she said.
    “Anybody who’d steal your groceries