Just me
Dalton finished, about to say something like Hey, that wasn’t really so bad, when Macy snatched it back, shaking her head.
“Such bloshite, right? On a level of suck, it’s an eleven out of ten.”
“Definitely.”
“It’s because those are the lyrics to ‘Exquisite Lies.’ The Pinker Casket song.”
Bam.
“I need to take a look in your brother’s room.”
Macy’s face darkened. “I don’t like to. I haven’t gone. In there. Since.”
“It’s okay,” he said gently. “Wait here.”
The room was a monument to prepubescent bliss. Too innocent for a kid Wesley’s age, no matter how nice he was. More like emotionally stunted. Cartoon posters, piggy banks, sports trophies, a rug shaped like a giant fuzzy duck. There were fourteen volumes of The Pesterton Boys Young Gentleman’s Tales. Then there were copies of Dragon Rider and Dragon Fire and Dragon Fist. And, of course, Return of the Dragon, Dragon’s Friend Wizard, Dragon Goes Shopping, and Fist’s Big Revenge. Dalton poked under the bed. A few crumpled tissues, an old Li’l Egghead’s 1,001-Piece Chemistry Set, some dust bunnies, and some board games, including Dragon Dice 2000 and Welcome to PesterTown! There was also the entire Slangy Fang trilogy, Bite Me Twice as Nice and Bite Me Even Harder, along with the well-thumbed third volume, Bite Me Totally Neckless. The closet was immaculately organized. In the back, behind nondescript dress clothes, hung a T-shirt. Dalton draped it over his chest. It said PINKERLOVE CASKETHURTS.
When he turned, Macy was in the doorway.
“Did you know about this?”
“Never seen it before,” she said disbelievingly. “What does it mean?”
“It’s just a shirt, right? Half the school has them.”
“I don’t.”
“You’re the other half.”
Dalton poked through Wesley’s desk. There were pencils and paper clips and a roll of tape. He looked through a few dresser drawers. Zip. He felt around the drawer bottoms. Nothing.
Except in the bottom one.
THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #15
It’s always the bottom one.
The drawer’s tacking pulled back with a tiny rip. Dalton coughed to hide the sound. Under the tacking was a thick paper rectangle. He slipped it in his jacket, then turned to find Macy standing right behind him, the last light of the day oozing through the window and framing her in a gauzy filmic white.
“Looking for something?”
She was less than an inch away. It was like a scene from a movie called Guy and Girl About to Kiss in Idyllic Setting II, starring Dumbass Rev. The orchestral soundtrack was about to swell. There was the danger of a slow-motion montage. Macy tilted her chin and closed her eyes. Dalton wanted to put his hands on her waist, feel the spot where her back ended. He wanted to let the warmth of his palms sink into her skin. He wanted to kiss her neck, gently, and then bite her earlobe a little too hard, feeling her body tremble against his.
THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #16
If the girl you’re about to make tremble has a gigantic boyfriend who not only looks like he was genetically engineered to pull a rusty plow through miles of pavement but has already demonstrated himself to be one of the biggest dangles in school, and she’s also your client, and her dad is right downstairs, and you’re standing in the creepily nostalgic bedroom of her murdered brother, you’d probably be wise to holster your totally unprofessional lips and even more unprofessional rodney and begin seriously channeling mental images a whole lot worse than Aunt Brenda.
“No way,” Dalton said.
“What?” Macy asked, flinching. Her eyes fluttered open.
“I don’t farcking believe it.”
“Believe what? What did I do?”
Dalton turned and ran. He ran down the stairs and out the screen door.
“Dalton?” Macy yelled. “Hey!’
“Everything okay?” Albert Payne yelled.
Dalton flung himself into the backyard, heading across the street, clomping through the grass like a halfback loose in the secondary.
Picking up speed and with each step…
Balling his fists…
Straight toward a leafy oak tree…
The exact same one he’d just spotted someone hiding behind.
Someone who’d been looking in the window, staring right at them.
CHAPTER 9
BINGO BANGO BONGO. DESTINY.
He reached the tree with three long strides, then almost fell while trying to stop his momentum, curling one arm around the trunk. There was no one there. He did a quick survey in each direction and saw a blue-clad leg disappearing behind the neighbor’s house. Dalton took off after it. Dogs began to bark in volleys, one egging on the next. They snapped at the ends of their chains, teeth gnashing as he zipped past in a white-shirted blur.
THE PRIVATE DICK HANDBOOK, RULE #17
Run faster!
The peeper ran diagonally across the street, trying to make the next alley. Dalton took a shorter route through a bunch of lawn furniture, knocking over red-hatted gnomes as he propelled himself onto the peeper’s back. Momentum carried them behind a Dumpster, the guy breaking down like a roped steer.
Dalton grabbed two handfuls of pin-striped collar. Blue pin-stripe. It was the same guy who’d been outside Inference’s window.
“You!”
He was, maybe, forty. Thin and pale, with a gray mustache. For an old man, he sure could run.
“Why the farck are you following me around?”
“I work… I work…”
“For Tarot? Huh? For Inference?”
“No,” the man managed, struggling to breathe.
“Who then? The Snouts?”
“I work… for the university.”
“What is that? Another clique?”
“Harvard University. I am Elisha Cook, head of the admissions department. I’ve been wanting to talk with you. About your application.”
“My application?” Dalton said incredulously. “What application?”
Elisha Cook reached into his double-breasted jacket, pulling out a sheaf of paper. The first page had Dalton’s name at the top. But it wasn’t his handwriting. Even though the handwriting was familiar. Very familiar. Unfarckingbelievable. Dalton inhaled deeply twice, exhaled deeply once, and then got off the man’s chest. He dabbed at his forehead with his tie, which was now too shiny to absorb much. He felt in his back pocket, half tempted to consult Lex Cole, but the pocket was empty. Shite. That one had been a first edition.
“May I stand now?”
Dalton stuck out a hand and helped him up. Elisha Cook did an odd little bow, brushing off his clothes and straightening his paisley tie with a degree of dignity.
“If you wanted to talk to me about some application, why didn’t you just say so? What’s with all the hiding behind trees? And why did you run?”
The man looked embarrassed. “You were charging at me like an enraged wildebeest. I was scared. Also, I wanted to be sure it was you. To be honest, from what I’ve observed so far, your campus posture doesn’t seem very… literate.”
“Very what?”
Elisha Cook removed the first page of Dalton’s application. Beneath it was a stack of short stories. The stories he’d been writing since he was thirteen. The stories he’d never shown anyone. The stories he kept locked in a steel box under a loose plank in his bedroom floor. The lockbox no one knew existed. The lockbox with a combination only he had the numbers to. The lockbox filled with his Private Dick earnings. All his Private Dick earnings. All his writing. And some other, even more embarrassing things.
“You’ve been in my lockbox?”
Elisha Cook looked terrified. “Excuse me? Your what?”
Dalton could tell the man’s confusion was real. He was ashen faced, and his hair was standing straight up. He looked ridiculous. Okay, so he hadn’t been in the lockbox.
“At any rate,” Elisha Cook continued, gesturing to
ward the two stories, “this ‘The Leaves Always Scream the Loudest’ is terrific. Really. Very advanced for a boy your age. Man. Young man. Teen… anyway, it shows true promise. The entire committee thought so. And although this one, ‘The A to Z of Possible Gods,’ was… somewhat more controversial, I personally found it to be very thought-provoking.”
“Thanks. Even though you had no right to read it.”
“You sent it to me.”
Dalton tried to come up with a response and failed.
“Nevertheless, I think you would make a great addition to our program.”
“What are you saying?”
“Even in light of this little contretemps, I’m offering you a scholarship. A full scholarship. To Harvard.”
Dalton rubbed his neck, kicking a rock in the dirt. It was completely ridiculous.
“But why?”
“The strength of your work, of course. I think you’re an extremely talented writer.”
“Who put you up to this? Cassiopeia? I mean, you’ve really got to be shite-ing me here.”
Elisha Cook coughed, spat dirt, and apologized, dabbing his lips.
“No. I am decidedly not… shy-it-ing you. I mean, there is also the matter of your extremely high scores on the SATs. And while at Harvard we don’t necessarily put so much stock in standardized—”
The dog barking ratcheted up a notch. There was a low rumble coming from one end of the alley.
“Take a sniff,” Dalton said, his voice becoming hard.
“Excuse me?”
“Go away, suit. You’re complicating my play.”
“But… but… do you not understand what I’m offer—”
“Do you not listen? That’s a roll of fish wrap I’m not buying. So beat it. Now!”
Elisha Cook, his face still flushed, turned on one wing-tipped heel and walked around the corner, just as a jacked-up ’72 Nova idled over. The paint job was a combo of candy-apple red and rust-apple rust. The engine was incredibly loud. It made Dalton’s scooter sound like an asthmatic goat. The driver had a camera slung around his neck and a slicked-back pompadour. Ronnie Newport. He lit a cigarette with the one he’d half finished and flicked the butt expertly past Dalton’s left shoulder. The three Ginny Slims in the back laughed, lighting their own. The car smelled like a rolling ashtray and looked like the set from a forties Sherlock Holmes movie, wave after wave of smoke rolling in off the moors.
“Strange place for you to be cruising, no?”
“CRUISING FOR A BRUISING!” The girls yelled, then devolved into laughter. Their teeth seemed too big for their mouths. “HEY, ISN’T THIS CAR BOLSHEVIK? HUH? ISN’T IT? IT’S TOTALLY FREAKIN’ BOLSHEVIK!” They slapped five and sucked in their cheeks and adopted modeling poses. Ronnie Newport slid the camera off his neck and pointed it at them, the flash incredibly powerful, bang bang bang! It shut the girls up. Newport lit another cigarette, this time flicking the old one over Dalton’s right shoulder.
“So who’s the suit? Snout? Or you joining the Fack Cult?”
“Neither. Guy’s some old perv. A creeper. Wants to make home movies. Wants to know do I have any friends interested in free candy.”
“GROSS!” the girls said in unison.
“It’s an ugly world. I just live in it.”
Newport nodded, the barest fraction of a smile skating across his lips. He kicked open the passenger door. “Get in. Chuff wants to talk to you.”
“Seems like I talked to him plenty already this morning.”
Newport shrugged. He revved the engine. The car practically swayed with pent-up aggression.
“What’s he want to talk about?”
The wheels ticked in the heat. Two birds flew overhead. In A Fistful of Cholera, Lex Cole had taken out four rival dealers with a garden shovel in order to be accepted into the inner circle of the drug lord Genghis Tom. But Dalton didn’t have a garden shovel.
Run. Now. Do it.
Newport stared straight ahead, like he couldn’t care less either way.
Quick. Split. Go.
Macy was probably waiting for him to come back and explain. Macy was probably angry.
Bingo.
Dalton slid into the front seat and wrenched the door closed. The Nova immediately accelerated out of the alley at a nausea-inducing speed, leaving a patch for a hundred feet. Ronnie Newport took the corner with the flat of his palm, generating enough g-force to snap the necks of half the Apollo mission. The girls in the back braced themselves like pros, one hand against the roof, the other against the back of the seat.
“You work for Chuff now?” Dalton asked, as the car careened around slower traffic, which was pretty much every other car on the road.
“Smoke don’t work for nobody,” Newport said curtly, blowing through a stop sign. “My racket’s transpo. Chuff asked me to give you a ride, so here you are. Chuff runs a tab. At the end of the month, Chuff pays. Same as anyone else.”
“Who else? Tarot?”
Newport ignored the question, breaking into a long, sheering left that sent them onto the highway ramp. One of the girls pulled a bottle of Rush from her purse and took a swig. Newport grabbed it from her mouth and tossed it out the window. Then he pulled out a business card. It had a tiny picture of a jacked-up car spitting a long gout of flame. Above that it said:
Ron Newport
transpo
426-3690
“So tell me about Populahs,” Dalton said, slipping the card into his wallet.
“About who?”
“You heard me.”
Newport turned his head ninety degrees and looked at Dalton, not turning back even though he continued to accelerate.
Eight seconds.
Ten.
Twelve.
The car whined feverishly. Newport kept his eyes locked on Dalton, calm and dark.
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
Dalton finally broke away. Ronnie Newport looked back over the steering wheel just in time to yank it around a van whose tailpipe he was about to drive into.
“So, okay,” Dalton said, swallowing hard. “You don’t want to talk about Populahs.”
“People talk a lot. People will tell you anything if you ask the right way.”
“Did I not ask the right way?”
“You’re not the right people.”
Dalton gripped the dash with both hands. “You killed Wesley Payne.”
“No,” Newport said, in a way that made it clear why he’d once been a Crop Crème. “I didn’t.”
“Well, then who—”
“I tell you what. You don’t want to go see Chuff? Pay me more than he does, I’ll drive you somewhere else.”
“How much is more?”
“Two hundred.”
“I’ll go see Chuff.”
“Suit yourself.”
The car roared into the fast lane, the horizon closer with every foot. Dalton pulled the roll from his pocket. “How about forty bucks to tell me who Wes Payne’s girlfriend was?”
Ronnie Newport gave Dalton a disappointed look. After a minute he took the twenties and tossed them into the backseat. “Why don’t you ask the girls?”
There was a loud squeal. The Ginny Slims grabbed each other’s wrists and necks and collars. The ones on each end secured a bill, while the one in the middle started to cry.
“Well?” Dalton asked the winners, who stared at him dumbly. “Who… was… Wes… Payne’s… girlfriend?”
“OOH! I was!” the first one said. “I was Wes Payne’s girlfriend!’
She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself, imagining it.
“No! I was! I was Wes Payne’s girlfriend!” the second one insisted.
“No! Me!” the one in the middle said.
Dalton gave up and turned toward the front. Newport laughed, if you could call his ossified bark a laugh.
“Thanks for saving my bacon in the nurse’s office, by the way. Was about to get tuned up for the third time.”
�
��Snouts,” Ronnie Newport said, shaking his head.
“So, you take pictures for Yearbook, huh?”
“Yup.”
Dalton pointed at the enormous camera. “Wouldn’t digital be easier?”
“Digital’s for purses.”
“It is?”
“Also, one of the cliques stole all our computers last year.”
“Going old school by force?”
“Pretty much.”
For a while, there was just the hum of the car and the forward motion. Eventually, they hit the exit and began passing fast-food signs, causing the Ginny Slims to yammer, “RON-EEE!… WE’RE HUN-GREE!”
“Shut up,” Ronnie Newport said.
And so they did.
CHAPTER 10
TWO HALF-BEEF PATTIES,
NOT-SO-SPECIAL SAUCE
Ronnie Newport screed into the lot of a Burger Barn. A huge banner above the red plastic roof said HOME OF THAT PHAT BURGER and NOW WITH HALF THE PHAT!
“Yay!” said the Ginny Slims.
“Silver door behind the Dumpster,” Newport said, then pulled away, the girls squealing “BUT RON-EEE!” all the way down the street. Dalton took a second to check out what he’d palmed from Wesley Payne’s drawer. The thick rectangle was actually an envelope. Dalton slit it open with his thumbnail. Inside was a sheaf of bills sporting Ben Franklin’s bemused mug. Ten grand, easy. Taped to the first bill was a small key, like one to a foot locker. Or a lockbox that a person could, say, hide his once-private short stories in. Dalton pulled out his own key ring and compared his with the silver one. Nearly identical. Except this key had a number 9 stamped on it. In every book ever written and movie ever made, a locker was for hiding money in. Then coming back to get it later, right before you double-crossed the bad guys. So why should it be different now? Everyone watched movies, and almost no one had original ideas. Yeah, a bus locker is exactly the place you’d stuff a stolen hundred grand. But Wes Payne and stolen cash? Those two things didn’t fit at all.
Dalton was thumbing the key’s awkward groove when a blue van screed up to where he was standing. The kind of van a band and its roadies and equipment and Aleister Crowley, lead singer, might be packed into. Dalton stuffed the money into his boxers and turned, prepared to swing or run or both, as a half dozen screaming kids got out and tooled by, arguing about what to order: CreamCheeser! BaconBucket! AngioLoad! Der Meatmeister! A weary mom rested her head on the hood for a second, rolling her eyes at Dalton before trudging by.
You Killed Wesley Payne Page 6