Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [107]
Not even his old friend Stevie Ray would have anything to do with him anymore.
Brady hated himself for the example he was setting for Peter. When his brother visited, he looked more and more like Brady each time, and he talked tougher, sounding more cynical. Brady tried to tell him to be good, but who was he to talk? While Peter was no longer listening to Brady, it was clear he liked being known as the brother of a bad guy.
Terrific.
When he finally got out for what he hoped was the last time, Brady talked his mother into taking him back and letting him live in the trailer. He accomplished this by promising to pay rent. Embarrassed and humiliated though she might have been because of him, he knew she could never turn down the lure of cash.
Brady promised himself he would never smoke dope again, and when he landed a job driving a truck (or, as the drivers called it, driving truck), he was ready to get back on the straight and narrow once and for all.
Funny, what he’d missed most while in the joint (he loved calling it that, and it seemed to come up frequently in conversation) was seeing movies. He still fancied himself an actor, a natural, as Clancy Nabertowitz had once said.
Who knew? Maybe once he got on his feet financially he would be able to get his own car and be mobile enough to try some community theater after work. He would be just as much a curiosity there as he had been on the boards in the Little Theater at Forest View High School.
As soon as he got his first paycheck, Brady paid his mother, put a down payment on a junk car, then found he was forced by law to insure it. And so he did. Which put an idea in the back of his head. A bad place for any idea.
The new leaf he had turned over crisped up and blew away when “just one or two joints to relax” made a little crack cocaine sound interesting. Soon he began showing up late for work, then lost his job, then began missing car payments. When the loan company threatened repossession, Brady hid the car at Agatha’s, reported it stolen, and tried to collect the insurance.
When Agatha made the mistake of borrowing the car and was pulled over for a bad taillight—and possession of a stolen vehicle—she quickly broke down and admitted that Brady had put her up to it. Had he not recently tried to dump her by having someone else tell her he had enlisted in the army and been killed in a training accident, she might have been more loyal.
Brady turned on the charm—along with producing cash (from yet another drug sale—this time to three junior high girls, no less) for the missed payment and the next one—and talked the company into dropping the charges and letting him keep the car. It had all been a misunderstanding, you see.
Money talks, he learned.
As soon as he had the car back, Brady bought a can of charcoal lighter fluid, stuffed a rag in the top, set it afire, and tossed it into the backseat.
Fortunately, the automobile was insured for more than it was worth.
Unfortunately, it was all the fire department could do to keep the blaze from burning down Brady’s mother’s trailer, not to mention the rest of the park.
Most unfortunate? It took arson investigators less than an hour to identify the accelerant and trace it to the convenience store in the trailer park.
“Anybody buy charcoal lighter recently?”
“Yeah, matter of fact. We don’t get much demand for it this time of the year, but I just sold a can this morning to Brady Darby. Why?”
Brady tried to tell the cops he still had that new can, unless somebody stole it, and, yeah, hey, come to think of it, there had been a suspicious guy hanging around the trailer.
But Brady had been apprehended at the insurance office, where he had hitchhiked to file his claim. And he had both marijuana and crack on his person.
Two weeks later Brady stood before the same judge. “Last chance, Darby. Sending you downstate for eighteen