Chapter One

The door was locked, and I sure as hell didn't have the key.

I was standing on a front porch, and the door before me was tall and wide and arched, with a fancy black iron handle and hinges, like the door to a church or a haunted house. I should know -- I'd been dragged into a whole lot of different churches over the years, and while none of the many houses I'd lived in had actually been haunted, most of them had been plenty scary.

But this wasn't the door to a church or a house like any I'd been in before. No, it was the entrance to this big mother of a mansion looking out over the bay. Years ago, back when this place was the home of Mr. Rich Bastard, Esquire, and his wife, Greedula, the house had probably even had a name. I'm-So-Impressed Manor, or something like that.

But that had been a long time ago, and the door had taken its share of scratches and scuffs since then. The rest of the house had pretty much gone to the dogs too, with peeling paint and crooked gutters and a shaggy yard where all the plants seemed to be overgrown and dying at exactly the same time. So now the place had a different name. Kindle Home. It had a different purpose too, about as far as you could get from the one it had been built for, which was to house filthy-rich people and impress the neighbors. Now it was a group home for teenagers in "state custodial care." Orphans and shit. It also happened to be my new home.

Why am I spending so much time describing this house and its damn front door? Because this is partly the story of that house, and I figured I should start at the very beginning. And unless you break in through a window, which I've been known to do, you first enter a house through its front door. Which, as I've already told you, in this case was locked.

"It's not locked," Leon said. "Sometimes you just need to give it a good kick." Leon was the guy standing behind me on the front porch. He was the Kindle Home counselor who'd picked me up at my former group home that morning to bring me here. He was a little like the house itself, because he hadn't been what I was expecting at all. For one thing, he was Native American. "Lucy Pitt?" he'd said to me thirty minutes earlier, in the front room of my old group home. "I'm Leon Dogman." In group homes, the best way to tell the difference between the kids and the counselors is usually the color of their skin, and just for the record, it's not the counselors who are black and brown and red. Leon was also younger than most counselors, probably still in his twenties, and he had a scraggly black beard and a pierced eyebrow and three visible tattoos.

But even if Leon didn't look like the other group home counselors I'd seen, I knew he'd act just like them. I'd been in the foster care system since I was seven years old -- a grand total of eight years -- and I knew how the adults operated. The first few times I'd screwed up, back when I was seven or eight years old, everyone had said I'd just been upset over the death of my parents. But I was fifteen now, past the Point of No Return, and no counselor or therapist or foster parent had the time or energy to spend on a lost cause like me.

Leon had said to give that front door a kick, so I gave it a swift one, and what do you know, it opened. Being in foster care as long as I had, I guess I'd learned a lot about swift kicks.

"What'd I tell you?" Leon said. "That's the thing about a big old house like this. Everything is one-of-a-kind. When something breaks, you can't just run over to the hardware store and replace it. So you learn to live with things the way they are." He grinned a little and kind of rolled his eyes. "There's hardly anything in Kindle Home that isn't broken somehow."

I nodded once, trying hard not to look too interested, and pushed my way inside. I found myself in a front room that led off into other rooms -- a foyer, I guess they're called. Directly in front of us was this giant carved stairway that flowed down from a landing halfway to the second floor like a great river of wood.

Leon was still right behind me. "Well, this is it," he said. "Welcome to Kindle Home." He didn't overdo it with the phony enthusiasm, which I appreciated.

I glanced around. There were holes in the walls and burns in the carpet, and the smell of Pine-Sol and burned popcorn in the air. What the hell is it about group homes and burned popcorn? But that staircase was pretty cool. And there was this explosion of a chandelier hanging from the ceiling way over our heads. A few of the bulbs were burned out and it was dusty, but the crystal jingly things still sort of sparkled, and I don't think I'd been that close to anything like it in my life.

"Come on, I'll show you around," Leon said. He looked over at my backpack. "You wanna set that down for a second? We won't go far."

"No," I said. It was heavy, but when everything you own fits into one bag, you learn to keep a pretty good grip on it.

Excerpted from THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO © Copyright 2005 by Brent Hartinger. Reprinted with permission by Tempest, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.