Fade To Midnight by Shannon McKenna

clenched.
    â€œMore like seven. Eight, with Steven’s quad Queen draw,” Kev replied quietly. “You were the 4:1 favorite. I just got lucky.”
    Chilikers muttered something obscene under his breath. “Asshole,” he growled. “You didn’t even have the fucking odds to call.”
    â€œNo. I didn’t.” Kev gazed at him for a long moment. He fished the title and keys out of his pocket, and held them out.
    Chilikers stared. “You won that,” he said slowly. “It’s yours.”
    â€œYou paid,” Kev replied. “But I don’t need it. Got no place to park it. Don’t want to insure it, or deal with selling it. Take it back. Please.”
    Chilikers looked tempted, but then his mouth hardened. He flung his cigarette down, stomped it. “What, feeling sorry for me, now? I don’t need any fucking favors, freak. You won it. You keep it.”
    Kev held his breath, teeth clenched. Whew. Before Twin Tail Falls, that interchange wouldn’t have registered on his radar screen. Walk away. He already had a lawsuit in course for assault and battery.
    He walked away, careful not to limp. So he was driving home, with Chiliker’s unwanted fucking car. He refused to let himself feel grateful. His leg was better, but it would have taken forty painful minutes to stagger home on foot with a headache like this.
    He peered up at the sky as he got into his new car. It smelled like Chilikers, he noted. Not good. But he’d unload the car soon. It was later than usual, and when the sun rose, it would drive long, cruel nails of light into his throbbing brain tissue. But with the wheels, he could afford to make a detour before he holed up in his dark lair.
    He parked by the battered brick front building on NE Stark. A sign by the door read “ANY PORT IN A STORM.” It was a shelter for runaway teens. It provided twenty-four-hour-a-day crisis intervention, emergency shelter, individual and family counseling, transitional living programs for homeless youths, street outreach, emergency housing, help for kids who were addicted to drugs. He’d done some cyber snooping, and he liked the place. He pulled the wad of cash out, shoved it into the brown envelope he’d shoved into his coat pocket for that purpose, scribbled the name of the director, and sealed it up. He’d give them the car, too, if it would fit through the slot, but he wasn’t up for anything that would require human interaction. His head hurt, his jaw hurt. He worked the envelope through the letter slot, waited for the thud . Saved him the bother of writing out a bank deposit slip.
    He’d had some incidents, on these morning walks. He’d once brought a young prostitute to the door of Any Port, after saving her from being beaten up by her john. The john he left where he lay, moaning in the gutter. Fuck him. Punching a teenage girl in the face. Kev tried to be tolerant, but there were limits. Another time, he’d been ambushed by a couple thugs near this very shelter, but he’d flattened them with no trouble. All in all, though, his morning walks were mostly uneventful.
    But Christ, his thigh hurt. And his ribs. His arm. Everything.
    His reflection in the glass window in the door caught his eye. So thin, haggard, cheekbones jutting, cheeks hollowed. He stared at himself, seeking recognition in the face he saw. But it eluded him.
    All he had now was what he’d made of himself since Tony found the bashed up wreck of his body eighteen years ago. That ought to be enough, but it wasn’t anymore. Not since the waterfall. Memories were stirring, and his hunger to know more itched and burned, prodding him along with nasty, anxious urgency. Almost as if something terrible might happen if he did not succeed in remembering.
    He parked by the unlovely brick warehouse building on NW Lenox that housed his loft apartment, an alley in the less swank, not-quite-gentrified-yet