34. Sweet sins

Nelly careened his Chrysler 300 onto 3rd Street, cruising to a slow stop at her gate, while dialing her number on his cell with one hand.

“Outside,” he said when her soft, virginal voice answered.

Buju Banton’s rugged voice chanted Make My Day through the car speakers, but he quickly ejected his favorite reggae artist and switched to Pink instead. He didn’t exactly care for the freakish, pink-haired girl’s music, but she loved her music, and that was all that mattered.

He looked at her shabby, grassless, gardenless yard. The small, crooked bungalow seemed it hadn’t been painted in over a decade, because if he could tell what color that house really was, he’d be lying. Broken chunks of stones led up to the rickety porch, and only about three of the wooden steps seemed safe enough to walk on—he noticed she always hopped over them whenever she was leaving the house.

That decrepit building, it gutted him. But what could he do while she was still seventeen? Her eighteenth birthday couldn’