“You can’t walk out of here you know,” she says cheerfully. “Consequence is twenty miles away.”

Oscar stares at her, thinking she must be speaking in rural American slang terms that haven’t found their way across the ocean. “The consequences are twenty miles away?”

“Consequence.  It’s a town.  It has a traffic light and a gas station and a bunch of really unhappy people who barely move between May and October.  That’s all there is in this area.  At least it’s something though.  I drive the girls out there to catch the school bus to Copper, which is another ten miles past that and the only high school between here and Phoenix.  But at least it’s summer now so I don’t need to worry about it.”

“Shit, you serious?”

“Always.”

Oscar processes her words.  “Why don’t you go to school with your sisters?”

Ren plays with the ends of her dark hair.  “Online school.  Spence does it too supposedly, although I damn well never him sitting down at the computer.  We get shitty Wi-Fi out here by the way.  A gust of wind knocks it out for an hour.  Monty dropped out last year and spends most of his time stealing Dad’s old pickup so he can whore it up with whatever female is dumb enough to plant her face in his crotch.”

Oscar lets out a chuckle.   The girl is weird, but there’s something innocently charming about her. “You sure don’t hold back, do you?  Where the hell are we going, anyway?”

“Over there.” She points.  “You’ll be staying at the little house right behind the brothel.”

“Words I didn’t expect to hear when I woke up this morning.”

“Ha!  I’ll bet.  The house was originally built for the caretaker or something.  It’s where the boys sleep.  Well, sort of.  Spencer camps out in the desert half the time even though Lita keeps warning him that he’ll get his nuts chewed off by a Gila monster.  And Monty just uses it as a fuck den so it might be kind of noisy in there. See that piece of crap in the foreground?  We call it the brothel since it used to serve as either a saloon or a bordello, depending on what the script called for.  Spence won’t be any trouble.  But you tell me if Monty gives you shit and I’ll talk to him.”

Oscar glances up and sees Monty still scowling on the balcony of the brothel.  The half rotted wood is completely bowed in the middle and Montgomery Savage seems to be tempting fate as he looms there with hulking menace.  Oscar wonders if he’s aware of just how closely he resembles his grandfather and decides it’s probably something Monty’s been hearing his whole life.  His dark eyes follow Oscar with a mute warning but other than that he doesn’t shift a muscle.

Oscar answers him back with a hard stare.  It would be more effective if he wasn’t twisting his neck to look up but he’s kicked his fair share of sullen ass in his day.  If it comes to it he would pit his muscle against Monty Savage any day.

Hopefully he won’t be hanging around here long enough for things to go that sour.

“Thanks, Loren,” he says, still holding Monty’s gaze until Monty smirks, drops his eyes and looks to the west where the sun is beginning to dip low.

They’ve reached the far side of the brothel.  Oscar can’t hear the voices of the adults any longer.  The other Savage girls have disappeared.  He watches Ren in the soft evening shadow and is struck by the sight of her.  Even without makeup she has a face that demands attention.   At the same time, a ray of sun filters through her loose cotton shirt and shows him the curve of her small breasts.  Despite himself, despite the fact that this girl is off limits and he’s been inside of girls that could body double as porn stars, he recognizes pure fucking quality when it’s in front of him. Something stirs powerfully in his core and he shifts the weight of his luggage.

Ren suddenly gives him an arch look. Oscar wonders if she has supernatural dick sensors and can tell he’s getting a little chubby in his pants.

“What?” he says defensively.

She smiles.  She has a perfect smile.  Perfect teeth surrounded by perfect lips.  “Thought you’d be more, I don’t know, European.  That’s how we thought of you; Aunt Mina’s exotic little European waif.”  She wrinkles her nose.  “You seem like you could be from from L.A.  Here’s the house.   Door’s never locked.”

Oscar stops.  “You said it was built for the caretaker?”

“Yeah, I think so.  My grandparents, sorry our grandparents, were too busy being fabulous in Los Angeles to spend more than a few months a year out here so they paid some poor sucker to sit around and sweep up the dust.  The rooms are really small in there but at least there’s central air.  My father had it installed when we moved out here last year.”

“It looks like one of the rest stops we passed on the interstate.”

“It probably doesn’t smell any better either.”  Ren’s voice takes on a defensive edge.  “Look, I know it’s not what you’re used to and before we wound up here it wasn’t what we were used to either, but it’s still better than what a lot of people have.”

A vague sense of shame pricks at him. There he stands with his elite education and his pricey clothes while the Savage kids have been reduced to this.  But why?  Mina had once mentioned that August was very bad with money.  He knows Atlantis was passed down from Rex Savage and he remembers his earlier thought about people who’d run out of options.

Who the hell is he to judge anyway?  A former slum kid himself.  He’s become a snobby jerk.

Ren is opening the door.  “You could stay in the big house, but then you’d be under Lita’s thumb and I can tell you from experience that life is not comfortable there.”

“I’m sure this’ll be fine,” he says, following Ren inside as she fumbles for a light.

“Welcome home,” she says and Oscar glimpses beer cans, strewn clothing and some mismatched furnishings.

“Nice,” he says, dropping his bags in the tiny living room, figuring that’ll do until he finds out where he’ll be sleeping.  Ren stands over by the light switch.  Her arms are crossed and she watches him.  Oscar has the feeling she is forming a series of opinions about him right then and there.

“New York,” he says, taking a step in her direction.  “I was born in New York.”  He looms over her, satisfied when she squirms.  “And I’m not especially waif-like.  Or little.”

“New York,” she repeats and Oscar can tell the news surprises her.  “I didn’t know that.”

“Seems like it would have been easy enough to find out if you cared to look into it.”

She smiles again and damn if that devilish grin doesn’t do all kinds of crazy shit to him.  “I guess I never cared, Oscar.  Still, seems like the kind of thing you ought to know about your cousin.”

He leans into the wall just to the right of her, resisting the urge to touch a stray lock of dark hair that’s fallen into her eyes.  “Usually my buddies call me Oz.  And I’m not really your cousin, Ren.”

“That’s right, you’re not.  Do you want to be?”

“Hell no.”

She nods.  “Good.”

He can’t tell what she means by that.  It isn’t a straight flirt.  This girls isn’t full of all the games and plots that occupy other girls.  Somehow he already knows this.  He also knows that no matter what kind of strangeness has transpired in the last two days and no matter what this girl’s fucking last name is he wants to grab her and commit a series of dirty acts right here in the cramped living room.

Ren cocks her head and does a strange thing.  She reaches out and tips his chin up.  It isn’t sexy and isn’t supposed to be.  It seems almost like a sorrowful gesture.  Why the hell would Loren Savage feel sorry for him?

“Are you thirsty?” she asks, brushing past him and heading for the galley kitchen.

He follows her.  “Depends.  What kind of poison you offering?”

She flicks the tap and begins rinsing out a crystal wine glass.  “Water.  You want something stronger you’ll have to beg it off the boys or steal it from August.  Actually if you ask him he’ll probably just give it to you.”  She fills the glass and extends it.  “We have water filtration even out here beyond civilization so you’re safe to drink from the tap if you don’t mind the dusty taste.”