Stain by Francette Phal Read Free Book Online

side of the city. My foster dad was a blue-collar sort of guy, a welder by the name of Droski who liked his booze like he liked his women. Cheap and wet. He dealt drugs on the side. Heroin, pills, and weed.
    “The government check I get from feeding your ass ain’t enough, kid. You wanna stay here, you’re gonna earn your keep.” Dealing came surprisingly easy for me. But then again, it wasn’t like it was that difficult selling drugs to high schoolers looking for a good time. I moved the pills and weed pretty damn quick. It was a good flow of cash. Dro took his cut, which was a huge-ass percentage, but he wasn’t a complete dick. He let me keep some of the money I made.
    I’ve learned a lot from him.
    “You don’t shit where you eat.” I learned that lesson the hard way. Two broken ribs, a busted lip, and a broken nose. “You gonna work for me, kid, you better remember not to fuck with my shit.” My mistake had been thinking I could take a few of his drugs for my own personal use. Apparently Dro had full count of his product. “Here.” On the floor, feeling like I’d gotten hit by a Mack truck and with the taste of my own blood coating the inside of my mouth, I looked past his extended hand at his hard, bearded face, his beady eyes like marbles staring back at me. There was a lot that was said in those few, prolonged seconds of tense silence that words couldn’t have properly expressed. But when I finally took his calloused hand and he hauled me to my feet, I could tell something had changed. Mutual respect and understanding. He didn’t take me to the hospital. He did the next best thing. Lit up a joint and gave it to me. Best fucking medicine of my life.
    The second thing I learned from Dro was how to cut up the merchandise to double up on profit. We did this for obvious reasons; more money in our pockets. There was also the fact we had a dirty cop we needed to pay off each month in order to keep dealing. Dro always did the payoffs and occasionally he’d let me tag along. It was roughly a year into showing me the ropes that he let me make my first drop-off. Saturday night, quarter past nine, I headed to the meet-up spot. Driving the white, beat-up truck I picked up a few months back at a salvage yard and was slowly restoring, I had nearly three grand on me and a few bags of pills stashed under the passenger seat. So of course the fucking cops chose that exact moment to pull me over. Seeing the flashing red and blue lights in my rearview, I was tempted to stomp on the gas and hightail it the fuck out of there. The only thing that stopped me from doing exactly that was the pickup truck wouldn’t go that fast if my life depended on it. Pulling up to the left shoulder of the road, I knew I was fucked six ways to Sunday. Not only did the inside of the truck smell like the bud I smoked earlier in the night, but I had a warrant out for my arrest. I’d skipped out on my court date two months earlier for beating up that kid who’d talked shit about Noah. They found the money and the drugs, slapped a pair of shiny cuffs on me, and hauled my ass to jail. I was looking at hard time. Nearly eighteen, they could technically charge me as an adult. I wasn’t stupid enough to call Droski. I had only one other option, and it took me practically the entire night before I finally folded and called Jan.
    ***
    “This is it, Maddox. After today you don’t get any more chances.” She turned and said as we came out of the court house. The expression on her face was supposed to be serious. But she couldn’t really pull it off when she looked like a twelve-year-old year rather than the thirty-three-year-old she was supposed to be. “I had to call in a lot of favors to get Judge Sims to go easy on you."
    I scoffed, raking a hand through my hair in agitation. “You call a thousand hours of community service and anger management classes getting off easy?”
    “Yes,” she hissed through clenched teeth that looked flawlessly