“Okay,” whispered Josh into his microphone. “There’s someone . . .”
On the monitor now, we saw a small cluster of kids coming closer and closer as Josh approached them. They were standing right at the edge of the field, near one corner of the parking lot. There were four of them, four guys standing together. They didn’t exactly look like Mr. Friendly and his Happyface Pals. They were big, dressed in denim, one dude with cut-off sleeves so you could see his enormous arm muscles. Two of them were smoking cigarettes. None of them were smiling. Over the two-way, we could hear them talking in low voices, almost grunts. They would nod and frown and steal a look around and talk some more, as if they were sharing secrets.
Beth, Rick, Miler, and I all looked at one another. We were all thinking the same thing: this was not a good idea.
“Josh,” I said into the two-way. “I don’t think you should . . .”
“Hi, guys!” Josh greeted these thugs in his squeaky, goofy voice. “I was wondering if you could help me out!”
The guy with the big muscular arms looked at Josh. It was the way you might look at a spider when you were thinking, Look at that disgusting little thing. I’m gonna step on it. He didn’t say anything. So Josh just plunged right on.
“I’m looking for a couple of guys I need to talk to for an article for my school paper. Their names are Paul Hunt and Frederick Brown. Any idea where I might find them?”
Beth and the guys and I stared at the laptop monitor. I think all four of us were holding our breath.
The guy with the big arms ran his eyes up and down Josh as if wondering just what kind of spider he might be. But the next minute, he kind of gestured with his head, giving it a little move that pointed across the field. The way he did it—it was like he thought Josh ought to be crushed to a green pulp, but he just couldn’t be bothered to take the trouble.
Josh turned and followed the gesture. As he did, his camera swung around, and for a second I had a look in the direction the big-armed guy was pointing. Right away, I spotted one of the thugs who had approached me that night with Alex in the Eastfield Mall.
“Josh, there he is!” I said into the two-way.
“Where?” said Josh.
“What?” said the guy with the muscular arms.
“Oh,” said Josh. “Uh, nothing.”
“Just thank the nice man and move away, Josh,” I said. “I’ll guide you to the guy.”
“Right,” said Josh. And then to Mr. Big Arms, he said, “Hey, thanks a lot, dude.”
Big Arms made another gesture with his chin, which I guess meant either You’re welcome or Get away from me, spider, before I change my mind and kill you. But whatever it meant, Josh gave him a jolly, finger-waggling wave and moved off across the field.
“He is so gonna die,” said Rick.
“Ssh,” said Beth, afraid Josh might hear him.
“I’m just saying,” said Rick.
Josh’s breathless whisper came over the two-way. “Okay. I’m on the move again. Where is this guy?”
I peered into the monitor, searching. “Turn more to the left,” I said. “Wait, turn back a little. There he is. You’re heading right for him.”
He was standing across the field. I didn’t know if he was Hunt or Brown, since they hadn’t introduced themselves when they were trying to bully me in the mall parking lot. At the time, I just thought of him as Crewcut Guy because he’d had his blond hair cut to a nub on his head. He was built like a low brick wall, short and thick and powerful. He was wearing a black jacket and black jeans.
Everyone else in the field was gathered in clusters with friends, but Crewcut Guy was alone. He was leaning against a diamond-link fence at the edge of the field. He had his thumbs hooked in his pockets and one of his legs bent back so his foot rested against the fence. His eyes were narrowed and his gaze moved slowly around the field, taking everything in. He reminded me of a gunfighter in an old cowboy movie, waiting for the shooting to start.
The picture of him on the laptop monitor bounced up and down as Josh approached him.
“If he didn’t walk like such a geek, we could see something,” muttered Rick.
“I’m starting to get motion sickness,” said Miler.
“You guys are so mean,” said Beth. “I thought Josh was your friend.”
“We let him live, don’t we?” said Rick and Miler at the same time.
Then we all fell silent again, so that the only noise in the empty parlor was Josh’s panting breaths coming through the two-way speaker and the sound of his laptop slapping against his side.
Crewcut Guy got larger and larger on the monitor as Josh drew near.
“That him?” Josh muttered.
“Yeah,” I told him. “Be careful, Josh. He’s not as nice as he looks.”
“He doesn’t look very nice.”
“Right.”
“Oh. I get it. Yikes.”
Now Crewcut Guy nearly filled the screen. He turned and looked directly at us through his squinty eyes as he noticed Josh coming toward him.
“Hi!” We heard Josh’s voice cracking over the two-way speaker. “You wouldn’t happen to be Paul Hunt or Frederick Brown, would you?”
“Hunt,” he grunted. “What’re you looking for?”
“Well, I’m doing a story for my school newspaper . . .”
The look on Hunt’s face changed. He looked around, as if he thought someone was pulling a not-very-funny practical joke on him, as if he expected to find a group of his friends watching from a distance and laughing at him. The narrowed stare returned to Josh, coming straight at us on the laptop screen. “Say what?”
“I’m doing a story . . .”
“You up for something or not?”
“Yeah,” said Josh. “I’m up to talk to you for a couple of minutes for my school newspaper.”
Next to me, Rick rolled his eyes. Miler put his head in his hands.
“Josh, you idiot, he means drugs,” I said into the two-way.
“Drugs?” said Josh.
“What do you need?” said Hunt.
“No, I didn’t mean you,” said Josh.
“Say what?” said Hunt. “Hey, what is this?”
“I’m doing a story for my school newspaper. It’s about the murder of Alex Hauser.”
Now, once again, Hunt’s expression changed. When Josh mentioned Alex’s name, he seemed to grow both wary and interested.
“What’re you talking about? What kind of a story?”
“A retrospective,” said Josh.
Hunt said, “Oh. Yeah,” and he nodded. But even on the laptop monitor, I could see that he didn’t know what the word retrospective meant.
“We’re just gonna talk about, you know, like, where the case stands now and so on.”
Hunt gave an elaborate shrug—like someone pretending he wasn’t interested when he really was. He brought out a cigarette and shot the filter between his lips. “What’s to talk about? They got the guy, right? He and Alex fought over some piece they both wanted.”
“Oh, nice,” said Beth. “I’m a ‘piece’ now.”
I held my finger to my lips.
“Ask him if he believes they got the right guy,” I said into the two-way.
“Do you believe they got the right guy?” said Josh.
Hunt clicked open a big metal lighter and torched his cigarette. He shrugged again. “Sure. Why not? I met him. He was a real . . .” Well, I won’t write what he called me. It’s not the sort of thing I’m planning to put on my résumé— if I live to have a résumé.
All this time, I was watching Hunt’s face. I could tell a lot about him just by looking at him. He had this kind of swaggering, belligerent attitude as if he was a big shot, really tough and important. But when you watched his eyes, they looked nervous, as if down deep he really felt small and insecure and afraid. I think those things go together a lot, you know? Swaggering around and secretly feeling scared. I think people act big when they feel small.
An
yway, it gave me an idea. I murmured into the two-way. “Josh, I think we gotta flatter this guy. Act like we think he’s important. He’s insecure—he’ll fall for that. Tell him the reason you want to interview him is because you think he has real inside knowledge of the case. Use the word interview. Like it’s some big deal. He’ll like that.”
We kidded Josh a lot, but there was no question he was smart. He understood exactly what I wanted. His camera went down for a moment, and we could see his hands. We saw him take a narrow pad and pen out of his coat pocket, just like a real reporter might use. “Listen, I know you’re a very busy person—everyone talks about how important you are around here—so I’m really grateful you consented to this interview.”
Perfect. You could see the flattery working right away. Hunt shifted his shoulders almost as if Josh had massaged them.
“Yeah,” he said with this sort of haughty frown. “Yeah. Sure. I consent.”
“See, the thing is, when I was researching the case, it was pretty obvious that you were the guy with the most inside knowledge.”
“That’s great, Josh,” I said. “Now ask him if he thinks there was any other reason someone might’ve killed Alex. Besides the piece, I mean.”
Beth leaned over and punched my shoulder. I had to grit my teeth to keep from letting out a yelp into the two-way. She had a pretty good punch for a girl.
Over the two-way speaker, I heard Josh repeating the question, really laying the flattery on thick, making it sound as if Hunt were some expert on criminology or something.
“In your considered opinion, judging Alex Hauser’s psychology and all the other aspects of the crime, do you think it possible the police overlooked some other of his activities that might’ve led to the murder?”
Hunt preened and shifted his shoulders some more, feeling important. Josh had him now. Hunt wanted to show him what an expert he was. He wagged his cigarette at Josh as if giving him a lecture. “Well, you know, I’ll tell you something. Not everybody understood Alex the way I did. He was a very deep guy.”
“Really? Deep, huh.”
As Josh pretended to take notes, the camera went up and down. Watching in the parlor, we could see Hunt’s face and then the pad where Josh was scribbling stuff and then Hunt’s face again.
“Oh yeah,” said Hunt. “A real deep thinker type. You look around here . . .” Hunt gestured at the playing field. “Most of these guys, they wouldn’t know an idea if it jumped out of the ground and bit them. They go around doing stuff until they get arrested or get out of town. But Alex was smart, you know. He wasn’t into gangs or any really heavy drugs or anything like that. He knew where the real action in town was. That’s what he was after.”
“Ask him . . .” I started to say.
But Josh was already there. “What do you mean, ‘the real action’?”
Now Hunt had been totally sucked in. He was really proud of his inside knowledge, really eager to show it off to Josh. He took a quick hit of his cigarette every time he spoke. He seemed to think this made him look smarter. “See, here’s the thing. A person like you, you might look at a town like Spring Hill and think it’s a pretty regular, straight-arrow place. But people like me and Alex, we see past the surface, you understand what I’m saying? We know things aren’t always what they seem.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Hunt. Could you explain that?”
“Mr. Hunt!” Miler laughed. “Go, Josh.”
“Well,” Mr. Hunt explained in a ridiculously lofty tone, “you look around this town, if you don’t have inside knowledge like me, you see guys walking down the street, you might think they’re upstanding citizens. But the truth is: you never really know what business someone is into. I mean, the kids around here, they may do some small-time stuff. But if you want the really dirty business— the stuff where the real money is—you gotta go to the people who look clean and respectable. They’re the ones pulling the strings.”
“Ah,” said Josh. “I see.”
“Alex wasn’t wasting his time doing business around here with high school kids. No way.”
“You mean, he was doing business with adults?”
“Oh yeah. And you can quote me on that.”
“Did you tell the police any of this?” Josh asked.
Hunt shrugged. He took a long, thoughtful drag on his cigarette. The smoke unfolded from his mouth as he talked. “I told the police what they needed to know to put that West kid in the slammer. I’m not exactly what you would call the policemen’s friend, if you know what I mean.”
“Right, right. Of course not.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t quote that.”
“I won’t. Anything you say.”
“Ask him who, Josh,” I said into the two-way. “Who was Alex doing business with? Was he doing business the night he died?”
“Who—,” Josh started.
“No, wait,” I said. “Make it sound like you think he doesn’t know. Say something like . . .”
“I got it,” Josh told me.
“Say what?” said Hunt.
“Oh . . . uh, I got what you’re saying. But these people, these adults, Alex was hanging out with—I mean, that’s not something he would share with you, was it? I mean, he couldn’t trust just anyone with information like that.”
“Nice,” I murmured. Josh was good at this.
Hunt reacted just like I thought he would. “Hey, are you kidding me? Alex and I were like this . . .” He held up the two fingers holding his cigarette, squeezing them close together around the filter to show what great friends he and Alex were. “I mean, he couldn’t always tell me things until they were all set up, you know, but I knew a lot, that’s for sure—a lot more than people might think.”
“Well, give me . . . just so my readers can get the gist here. Give me a for-instance.”
“Well, like, for instance—here’s something nobody knows but me practically—well, me and Brownie maybe. That night Alex died, we didn’t go to the mall that night just to meet with the West character. I mean, we knew he would be there, we knew we were gonna give him a hard time. But after that, Alex was supposed to go in and have some kind of secret get-together with the teacher. This was very important, very secret stuff we weren’t supposed to tell anyone. Alex was very clear about that. That’s why we never told the police. We didn’t know if we’d be stepping on important toes, if you see what I mean. You don’t want to start trouble with the kind of people Alex knew.”
“Wait, okay, go back a minute,” said Josh. “The night he was killed, Alex went to the mall to see a teacher? What teacher?”
“The karate guy. What was his name? Mike.”
“Mike?” I whispered. Rick and Miler and Beth all looked at me. I shook my head like a dog throwing off water, trying to clear my thoughts. Why would Alex have been arranging a secret meeting with Sensei Mike? What kind of “business” could they have been up to? And what, if anything, did it have to do with Alex getting killed?
I brought the two-way to my mouth, about to tell Josh to start asking more questions.
But just then, Hunt’s image on the laptop monitor jumped violently.
Josh’s voice came loudly over the two-way: “Ow!”
Now there were other voices. “Hey.”
“Dude.”
“Hunt.”
“Who’s this punk?”
Josh turned—the camera on his jacket turned—and there, in the Ghost Mansion parlor, Beth and Rick and Miler and I saw a nasty-looking face—and then another face just as nasty—and then a third face, even nastier still—staring at us through the monitor.
Josh, suddenly, was surrounded by thugs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fighting by Remote Control
“Uh-oh,” said Rick. “This isn’t good.”
He was right. It wasn’t. In fact, it was exactly what I’d been afraid of. It was one of the two or three hundred things I’d been afraid of, anyway.
For a few minutes there, I’d
been so wrapped up in helping Josh question Hunt that I’d forgotten where he was, his surroundings. All those punks and gangsters on every side of him: they had slipped my mind. Now here they were—up close—and they didn’t look happy.
“What’s going on?” said one of them.
I recognized him as soon as Josh turned to him, as soon as the webcam brought his face onto the monitor. It was Frederick Brown, the other guy who’d been at the Eastfield Mall that long-ago day. He had dark skin and jet-black hair and a sort of slickly handsome face, like a guy in a cheap magazine ad. He was bigger than he was when I’d seen him last, bulked-up as if he’d been lifting weights. He had his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his dark blue track jacket, his shoulders hunched aggressively.
“You doing business here or you standing around blabbering?” he asked Hunt.
The camera swung back to Hunt. Hunt flipped his cigarette into the dirt. He felt guilty—I could see it in his eyes—as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. He was supposed to be dealing drugs and instead Josh had gotten him talking. It was as if the flattery Josh had used on him had hypnotized him, but now the arrival of his friends had awakened him from his trance.
He put his hands in his pockets and gave a guilty shrug. “What? We’re just talking, Brownie.”
“Talking?” This was Brown again. “That what I sent you over here to do? Talk?”
“And who’s this punk?” said one of the other thugs. “What are you talking to him about?” Josh looked at him and we saw on the monitor that he was pushing at Josh’s laptop case, looking it over as if it might be something threatening—a bomb or something. If these guys found out Josh was wired, was broadcasting sound and pictures somewhere, he’d be toast. There wouldn’t even be enough left of him to be toast. He’d be something you could spread on toast.
I guess Rick was thinking the same thing. “This is bad,” he said. “Tell him to get out, Charlie.”
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