Chapter 1

Beginnings

Nicholas Carter was a child of the projects. Cheap apartments where the elevators and stairwells smelled of urine and weed and the litter of discarded needles that made going barefoot foolish. neghborhoods where gunshots and police sirens sounded more regularly than alarm clocks.

His life hadn’t always been that way. His mom, Janet, had once been a skilled accountant. Their life had turned hellish by happenstance when he was nine years old. Her Volkswagen was rear-ended by a pickup at a stop light.

No harm ordinarily. The car was totaled but was replaced. The bigger problem was the chronic back and neck pain afterwards. Again, no problem ordinarily, she had insurance, and the pickup driver had insurance, so she was able to get treatment. A nice doctor at her HMO proscribed pain medication; a new type that he assured her would work wonders and the good news was that it wasn’t at all addictive. So, Janet went to the pharmacy with her prescription for OxyContin and got it filled.

It worked great until the nice doctor became concerned that she might be getting addicted. He stopped her refills.

Then the downward slide began.

Their nice house in the suburbs was downgraded to an apartment when she couldn’t afford the payment and the cost of black-market Oxy. Their nice apartment became not so nice when she lost her job because she had switched to heroin and got caught shooting up in the ladies’ room at work.

The slide accelerated.

The little family slid down into the projects. By then sweet middle-class Janet Carter was a full blown junkie doing things that she never dreamed of to get that little packet of H. What Janet didn’t know or probably didn’t care was that street heroin doesn’t pass any quality control standards--along with the usual powdered milk this latest batch was cut with a tiny bit of fentanyl to give a little bit of an added kick.

Thirteen-year-old Nicholas woke up one morning to find his mother on their dilapidated green couch well into rigor mortis.

The social worker had tired eyes and a coffee stain on her blouse. She barely looked at Nicholas as she filled out paperwork, her pen scratching against forms that would determine his fate. There were no relatives willing to take him. No family friends stepping forward. Just another case number in an overwhelmed system.

“Riverdale Group Home has an opening,” she mumbled, more to herself than to Nicholas. “It’s not ideal, but there’s nowhere else right now.”

Riverdale turned out to be a converted boarding house on the south side of the city. A three-story Victorian with of peeling paint and a chain-link fence. The van dropped Nicholas off with his plastic garbage bag of belongings—all that was left of his old life.

The house mother glanced at his paperwork. She led him upstairs to a room with four bunk beds. She pointed to the bunk by the door.

“Take that one. Don’t make trouble. Supper is at five. The school bus is out front at seven thirty.”

He found out at dinner, that the home held sixteen kids, nine boys and seven girls. His room was occupied by three other boys. The oldest, a lanky sixteen-year-old named Darius, looked him up and down.

“Fresh meat,” Darius announced to the others.

The beds were metal frames with thin mattresses. Nicholas’s was by the window—a mixed blessing. The window let in light but also the chill of winter through the ill-fitting windows.

That night he sat on his bunk wondering why he didn’t feel anything. He guessed it was because his mom had been a long time dying. Towards the end she hadn’t really been a mom, just a person he needed to take care of. He guessed he wasn’t a normal kid. A normal kid would be crying.

In the coming days, Nicholas learned the unwritten rules of Riverdale. Don’t leave anything valuable unattended. Don’t use the showers after 9 PM or when the older boys claimed them. Don’t show weakness. Don’t expect the staff to intervene in anything.

The staff consisted of Mrs. Harmon, who spent most of her time sipping what she called hot toddy’s and watching TV in her office. Mr. Wexler the janitor who so creepy everybody avoided him. And a fat women who spoke broken English who was the cook.

Meals were served cafeteria style on four chipped Formica tables. Breakfast was cold cereal and milk that sometimes smelled off. Lunch was sandwiches with a single slice of bologna or cheese. Dinner varied between overcooked spaghetti, mystery meat in gravy, or casseroles.

Nicholas’s first week at Riverdale, someone stole his shoes while he slept. His second week, he got a black eye for sitting at the wrong table in the cafeteria. By the third week, he turned feral. He put a couple of handfuls of sand in a sock and put it to good use. He got his shoes back, the thief suffered a black eye, missing teeth and bloody nose. Nobody bothered him after that. He sat where he wanted to sit.

School was a bus ride away, but Nicholas stopped going after a month. Despite his size, Nicholas was a big kid, the other kids still made fun of the group home kids. He was soon in trouble for fighting. After that, he quit going. No one cared. Instead, he spent his days hanging around with others like him in Flanders Park, a half acre patch of dirt with a basketball court the hoop missing its net.

At night, lying on his thin mattress listening to the snores and occasional sobs of his roommates, Nicholas would close his eyes and try to remember his mother’s face—not the gray, lifeless mask he’d found that morning, but her face before the bad times came. The smile lines around her eyes. The way she’d tuck him into bed with a kiss. He had no memory of his father who had died when he was four. He was sad because the memories of those good days were fading faster than he could hold onto them.

Darius caught him crying in once, silent tears that Nicholas thought were safe in the darkness.

“You crying for your mama?” Darius said not unkindly. “Don’t. Ain’t nobody here got a mama worth crying over.”

Darius had been in the system since he was seven. Riverdale was his fifth placement. “This place ain’t even the worst,” he told Nicholas. “At least the staff here mostly leave you alone.”

There was a hierarchy at Riverdale. The boys who had been there longest and who were biggest or meanest ruled. Nobody messed with the girls. At the bottom were the newcomers, the ones who still believed someone might adopt them.

At night, after lights out, the boys would sometimes talk about their plans. Darius was going to join the marines the day he turned eighteen. Miguel was going back to his cousin’s place in Arizona. Tyler was sure his mom would get clean and come get him any day now.

Nicholas had no plans. The future was a blank wall he couldn’t see beyond.

Fear gripped fifteen-year-old Nicholas Carter when he spotted the flashing lights of the cop car in the rear-view mirror. He had just stolen a sweet, fire-engine red GT-500 Cobra.

For the past eight months, he’d had a nice little gig stealing cars for a guy named Half-Ear, who owned a junkyard and a garage on the edge of town. One of Half-Ear’s guys, a fat man by the name of Junior had taught him and Darius how to drive and had showed them all the tricks of boosting cars. It had been a good gig; the money gave them considerable status on the street.

Nicholas was a quick study. He became an excellent thief.

He briefly entertained the thought of trying to outrun the cops. He knew those streets better than any cop, but in the end, he pulled over, got out and dropped to his knees and laced his hands behind his head. This wasn’t his first time being arrested.