Carousel Court Read Online Free Page A

calls out, meets Nick on his side of the black, windswept street. Whatever he carries by his side is dark, a crowbar or baseball bat maybe. Nick doesn’t want to know.
    Kostya didn’t fasten the lid on his recycling can and the wind knocked it over, spilled plastic two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew and Sunny D and beer bottles all over the street.
    â€œAnd his park job.” The truck is half backed out onto the street. “Is it that hard to pull your fifty-thousand-dollar Tundra up the driveway? Fucking Armenians.”
    Nick laughs. “Ukraine. I think.”
    Metzger’s pissed off about a lot of things: the pain in his partially torn Achilles that will require surgery he can’t afford. The weight he can’t shed. Gas prices. The deserted house next to his. The insaneneighbor next to Nick and Phoebe. Kostya’s dirty, skinny kids. One night Metzger’s thick green lawn was empty; the next morning the orange tent appeared. His is a military-style double-wall combat tent with a vestibule providing twenty square feet of storage space. The atomic orange structure rests a few feet from the curb, putting the neighborhood on notice: Things have changed and aren’t changing back anytime soon.
    â€œClose your eyes,” Metzger says.
    The gun Metzger puts in Nick’s hands is a Mossberg 500 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. It’s black and cool to the touch, and Nick likes the feel of the matte finish, of the butt and pump, though he’s never fired a gun, so he says very little about it.
    â€œNice,” Nick manages. It’s heavier than he would have expected.
    â€¢ •
    A lone, illegible graffiti tag recently appeared on the wall of the drained pool in the house next to Metzger’s: a five-bedroom, three-bath new construction left behind a month ago. It was the first house to drop on their cul-de-sac. Cars, three or four young men deep, recently started appearing, crawling along Carousel Court on weekend nights. Nick gets the sense, and confirmed with Kostya and Metzger, that they’re surveying the terrain, zeroing in on the next target. Metzger in his tent with his new Mossberg is the first and maybe only line of defense so far. For that much, Nick is grateful. Metzger worked at Bank of the West until last month. Nick doesn’t know what he did there.
    â€œKeep an eye out tonight?” Nick asks. This is the favor he needs.
    Instead of responding, Metzger says, “Look at that mess,” and trains the beam of light from his police-style flashlight on another spilled recycling container. The mess is in front of the house belonging to the Vietnamese family. The mother is a former teacher and apparently now a very good nanny, someone Nick and Phoebe have been saving money for, wanting Jackson somewhere other than Bouncin’ Babies. The Vietnamese family’s recycling is all one-gallon plastic water bottles and newspapers, no soda, no beer.
    â€œKostya’s mangy dogs.” Metzger spits.
    â€œOr kids.”
    â€œSame difference,” Metzger says, and laughs. “Russian mutts.” Both men instinctively direct their attention to Kostya’s house, the biggest on the block.
    A string of white lights dangles from a tall palm at the edge of Kostya and Marina’s property. Of all the generically grand properties erected in the last five years, theirs is the grandest. All of the houses went up cheap and quick, but theirs sits slightly above the rest, on a modest incline with a winding stone walkway and a wide sloped asphalt driveway big enough for his Tundra and her Suburban. The lights that mark the top end of the cul-de-sac are the first thing you see when you turn on to the street at night. Kostya, obsessed with the palm trees, saw a Corona commercial that came on around ­Christmas—that’s where he got the idea for the lights. But they were such a pain in the ass to string up that once he’d done it, he decided to