by Stephen King
"If you didn't do it, who did?"
"I don't know."
It seems he will stop there, but then he goes on. Hodges listens peacefully, hoping Pete will say too much. The boy is obviously intelligent, but sometimes even the intelligent ones say too much. If you let them.
"You know how every Christmas they have stories on the news about some guy giving out hundred-dollar bills in Walmart or wherever?"
"Sure."
"I think it was that type of deal. Some rich guy decided to play Secret Santa with one of the people who got hurt that day at City Center, and he picked my dad's name out of a hat." He turns to face Hodges for the first time since they got in the car, eyes wide and earnest and totally untrustworthy. "For all I know, he's sending money to some of the others, too. Probably the ones who got hurt the worst, and couldn't work."
Hodges thinks, That's good, kiddo. It actually makes a degree of sense.
"Giving out a thousand dollars to ten or twenty random shoppers at Christmas is one thing. Giving well over twenty grand to one family over four years is something else. If you add in other families, you'd be talking about a small fortune."
"He could be a hedge fund dude," Pete says. "You know, one of those guys who got rich while everyone else was getting poor and felt guilty about it."
He's not looking at Hodges anymore, now he's looking straight out of the windshield. There's an aroma coming off him, or so it seems to Hodges; not sweat but fatalism. Again he thinks of soldiers preparing to go into battle, knowing the chances are at least fifty-fifty that they'll be killed or wounded.
"Listen to me, Pete. I don't care about the money."
"I didn't send it!"
Hodges pushes on. It's the thing he was always best at. "It was a windfall, and you used it to help your folks out of a tough spot. That's not a bad thing, it's an admirable thing."
"Lots of people might not think so," Pete says. "If it was true, that is."
"You're wrong about that. Most people would think so. And I'll tell you something you can take as a hundred percent dead-red certainty, because it's based on forty years of experience as a cop. No prosecutor in this city, no prosecutor in the whole country, would try bringing charges against a kid who found some money and used it to help his family after his dad first lost his job and then got his legs crushed by a lunatic. The press would crucify a man or woman who tried to prosecute that shit."
Pete is silent, but his throat is working, as if he's holding back a sob. He wants to tell, but something is holding him back. Not the money, but related to the money. Has to be. Hodges is curious about where the cash in those monthly envelopes came from--anyone would be--but he's far more curious about what's going on with this kid now.
"You sent them the money--"
"For the last time, I didn't!"
"--and that went smooth as silk, but then you got into some kind of jackpot. Tell me what it is, Pete. Let me help you fix it. Let me help you make it right."
For a moment the boy trembles on the brink of revelation. Then his eyes shift to his left. Hodges follows them and sees the card he put on the dashboard. It's yellow, the color of caution. The color of danger. POLICE CALL. He wishes to Christ he'd left it in the glove compartment and parked a hundred yards farther down the street. Jesus Christ, he walks every day. A hundred yards would have been easy.
"There's nothing wrong," Pete says. He now speaks as mechanically as the computer-generated voice that comes out of Hodges's dashboard GPS, but there's a pulse beating in his temples and his hands are clasped tightly in his lap and there's sweat on his face in spite of the air-conditioning. "I didn't send the money. I have to get my dad's pills."
"Pete, listen. Even if I was still a cop, this conversation would be inadmissible in court. You're a minor, and there's no responsible adult present to counsel you. In addition I never gave you the words--the Miranda warning--"
Hodges sees the boy's face slam shut like a bank vault door. All it took was two words: Miranda warning.
"I appreciate your concern," Pete says in that same polite robot voice. He opens the car door. "But there's nothing wrong. Really."
"There is, though," Hodges says. He takes one of his cards from his breast pocket and holds it out. "Take this. Call me if you change your mind. Whatever it is, I can hel--"
The door closes. Hodges watches Pete Saubers walk swiftly away, puts the card back in his pocket, and thinks, Fuck me, I blew it. Six years ago, maybe even two, I would have had him.
But blaming his age is too easy. A deeper part of him, more analytical and less emotional, knows he was never really close. Thinking he might have been was an illusion. Pete has geared himself up for battle so completely that he's psychologically incapable of standing down.
The kid reaches City Drug, takes his father's prescription out of his back pocket, and goes inside. Hodges speed-dials Jerome.
"Bill! How did it go?"
"Not so good. You know City Drug?"
"Sure."
"He's getting a scrip filled there. Haul ass around the block as fast as you can. He told me he's going home, and maybe he is, but if he's not, I want to know where he does go. Do you think you can tail him? He knows my car. He won't know yours."
"No prob. I'm on my way."
Less than three minutes later Jerome is coming around the corner. He nips into a space just vacated by a mom picking up a couple of kids that look way too shrimpy to be in high school. Hodges pulls out, gives Jerome a wave, and heads for Holly's position on Garner Street, punching in her number as he goes. They can wait for Jerome's report together.
22
Pete's father does take Vioxx, has ever since he finally kicked the OxyContin, but he currently has plenty. The folded sheet of paper Pete takes from his back pocket and glances at before going into City Drug is a stern note from the assistant principal reminding juniors that Junior Skip Day is a myth, and the office will examine all absences that day with particular care.
Pete doesn't brandish the note; Bill Hodges may be retired, but he sure didn't seem retarded. No, Pete just looks at it for a moment, as if making sure he has the right thing, and goes inside. He walks rapidly to the prescription counter at the back, where Mr. Pelkey throws him a friendly salute.
"Yo, Pete. What can I get you today?"
"Nothing, Mr. Pelkey, we're all fine, but there are a couple of kids after me because I wouldn't let them copy some answers from our take-home history test. I wondered if you could help me."
Mr. Pelkey frowns and starts for the swing-gate. He likes Pete, who is always cheerful even though his family has gone through incredibly tough times. "Point them out to me. I'll tell them to get lost."
"No, I can handle it, but tomorrow. After they have a chance to cool off. Just, you know, if I could slip out the back . . ."
Mr. Pelkey drops a conspiratorial wink that says he was a kid once, too. "Sure. Come through the gate."
He leads Pete between shelves filled with salves and pills, then into the little office at the back. Here is a door with a big red sign on it reading ALARM WILL SOUND. Mr. Pelkey shields the code box next to it with one hand and punches in some numbers with the other. There's a buzz.
"Out you go," he tells Pete.
Pete thanks him, nips out onto the loading dock behind the drugstore, and jumps down to the cracked cement. An alley takes him to Frederick Street. He looks both ways for the ex-detective's Prius, doesn't see it, and breaks into a run. It takes him twenty minutes to reach Lower Main Street, and although he never spots the blue Prius, he makes a couple of sudden diversions along the way, just to be safe. He's just turning onto Lacemaker Lane when his phone vibrates again. This time the text is from his sister.
Tina: Did u talk 2 Mr. Hodges? Hope u did. Mom knows. I didn't tell she KNEW. Please don't be mad at me.
As if I could, Pete thinks. Were they two years closer in age, maybe they could have gotten that sibling rivalry thing going, but maybe not even then. Sometimes he gets irritated with her, but really
mad has never happened, even when she's being a brat.
The truth about the money is out, but maybe he can say money was all he found, and hide the fact that he tried to sell a murdered man's most private property just so his sister could go to a school where she wouldn't have to shower in a pack. And where her dumb friend Ellen would be in the rearview mirror.
He knows his chances of getting out of this clean are slim approaching none, but at some point--maybe this very afternoon, watching the hands of the clock move steadily toward the hour of three--that has become of secondary importance. What he really wants is to send the notebooks, especially the ones containing the last two Jimmy Gold novels, to NYU. Or maybe The New Yorker, since they published almost all of Rothstein's short stories in the fifties. And stick it to Andrew Halliday. Yes, and hard. All the way up. No way can Halliday be allowed to sell any of Rothstein's later work to some rich crackpot collector who will keep it in a climate-controlled secret room along with his Renoirs or Picassos or his precious fifteenth-century Bible.
When he was a kid, Pete saw the notebooks only as buried treasure. His treasure. He knows better now, and not just because he's fallen in love with John Rothstein's nasty, funny, and sometimes wildly moving prose. The notebooks were never just his. They were never just Rothstein's, either, no matter what he might have thought, hidden away in his New Hampshire farmhouse. They deserve to be seen and read by everyone. Maybe the little landslide that exposed the trunk on that winter day had been nothing but happenstance, but Pete doesn't believe it. He believes that, like the blood of Abel, the notebooks cried out from the ground. If that makes him a dipshit romantic, so be it. Some shit does mean shit.
Halfway down Lacemaker Lane, he spots the bookshop's old-fashioned scrolled sign. It's like something you might see outside an English pub, although this one reads Andrew Halliday Rare Editions instead of The Plowman's Rest, or whatever. Looking at it, Pete's last doubts disappear like smoke.
He thinks, John Rothstein is not your birthday fuck, either, Mr. Halliday. Not now and never was. You get none of the notebooks. Bupkes, honey, as Jimmy Gold would say. If you go to the police, I'll tell them everything, and after that business you went through with the James Agee book, we'll see who they believe.
A weight--invisible but very heavy--slips from his shoulders. Something in his heart seems to have come back into true for the first time in a long time. Pete starts for Halliday's at a fast walk, unaware that his fists are clenched.
23
At a few minutes past three--around the time Pete is getting into Hodges's Prius--a customer does come into the bookshop. He's a pudgy fellow whose thick glasses and gray-flecked goatee do not disguise his resemblance to Elmer Fudd.
"Can I help you?" Morris asks, although what first occurs to him is Ehhh, what's up, Doc?
"I don't know," Elmer says dubiously. "Where is Drew?"
"There was sort of a family emergency in Michigan." Morris knows Andy came from Michigan, so that's okay, but he'll have to be cagey about the family angle; if Andy ever talked about relatives, Morris has forgotten. "I'm an old friend. He asked if I'd mind the store this afternoon."
Elmer considers this. Morris's left hand, meanwhile, creeps around to the small of his back and touches the reassuring shape of the little automatic. He doesn't want to shoot this guy, doesn't want to risk the noise, but he will if he has to. There's plenty of room for Elmer back there in Andy's private office.
"He was holding a book for me, on which I have made a deposit. A first edition of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? It's by--"
"Horace McCoy," Morris finishes for him. The books on the shelf to the left of the desk--the ones the security DVDs were hiding behind--had slips sticking out of them, and since entering the bookstore today, Morris has examined them all. They're customer orders, and the McCoy is among them. "Fine copy, signed. Flat signature, no dedication. Some foxing on the spine."
Elmer smiles. "That's the one."
Morris takes it down from the shelf, sneaking a glance at his watch as he does. 3:13. Northfield High classes end at three, which means the boy should be here by three-thirty at the latest.
He pulls the slip and sees Irving Yankovic, $750. He hands the book to Elmer with a smile. "I remember this one especially. Andy--I guess he prefers Drew these days--told me he's only going to charge you five hundred. He got a better deal on it than he expected, and wanted to pass the savings along."
Any suspicion Elmer might have felt at finding a stranger in Drew's customary spot evaporates at the prospect of saving two hundred and fifty dollars. He takes out his checkbook. "So . . . with the deposit, that comes to . . ."
Morris waves a magnanimous hand. "He neglected to tell me what the deposit was. Just deduct it. I'm sure he trusts you."
"After all these years, he certainly ought to." Elmer bends over the counter and begins writing the check. He does this with excruciating slowness. Morris checks the clock. 3:16. "Have you read They Shoot Horses?"
"No," Morris says. "I missed that one."
What will he do if the kid comes in while this pretentious goateed asshole is still dithering over his checkbook? He won't be able to tell Saubers that Andy's in back, not after he's told Elmer Fudd he's in Michigan. Sweat begins to trickle out of his hairline and down his cheeks. He can feel it. He used to sweat like that in prison, while he was waiting to be raped.
"Marvelous book," Elmer says, pausing with his pen poised over the half-written check. "Marvelous noir, and a piece of social commentary to rival The Grapes of Wrath." He pauses, thinking instead of writing, and now it's 3:18. "Well . . . perhaps not Grapes, that might be going too far, but it certainly rivals In Dubious Battle, which is more of a socialist tract than a novel, don't you agree?"
Morris says he does. His hands feel numb. If he has to pull out the gun, he's apt to drop it. Or shoot himself straight down the crack of his ass. This makes him yawp a sudden laugh, a startling sound in this narrow, book-lined space.
Elmer looks up, frowning. "Something funny? About Steinbeck, perhaps?"
"Absolutely not," Morris says. "It's . . . I have a medical condition." He runs a hand down one damp cheek. "It makes me sweat, and then I start laughing." The look on Elmer Fudd's face makes him laugh again. He wonders if Andy and Elmer ever had sex, and the thought of that bouncing, slapping flesh makes him laugh some more. "I'm sorry, Mr. Yankovic. It's not you. And by the way . . . are you related to the noted popular-music humorist Weird Al Yankovic?"
"No, not at all." Yankovic scribbles his signature in a hurry, rips the check loose from his checkbook, and passes it to Morris, who is grinning and thinking that this is a scene John Rothstein could have written. During the exchange, Yankovic takes care that their fingers should not touch.
"Sorry about the laughing," Morris says, laughing harder. He's remembering that they used to call the noted popular-musical humorist Weird Al Yank-My-Dick. "I really can't control it." The clock now reads 3:21, and even that is funny.
"I understand." Elmer is backing away with the book clutched to his chest. "Thank you."
He hurries toward the door. Morris calls after him, "Make sure you tell Andy I gave you the discount. When you see him."
This makes Morris laugh harder than ever, because that's a good one. When you see him! Get it?
When the fit finally passes, it's 3:25, and for the first time it occurs to Morris that maybe he hurried Mr. Irving "Elmer Fudd" Yankovic out for no reason at all. Maybe the boy has changed his mind. Maybe he's not coming, and there's nothing funny about that.
Well, Morris thinks, if he doesn't show up here, I'll just have to pay a house call. Then the joke will be on him. Won't it?
24
Twenty to four.
There's no need to park on a yellow curb now; the parents who clogged the area around the high school earlier, waiting to pick up their kids, have all departed. The buses are gone, too. Hodges, Holly, and Jerome are in a Mercedes sedan that once belonged to Holly's cousin Olivia.
It was used as a murder weapon at City Center, but none of them is thinking about that now. They have other things in mind, chiefly Thomas Saubers's son.
"The kid may be in trouble, but you have to admit he's a quick thinker," Jerome says. After ten minutes parked down the street from City Drug, he went inside and ascertained that the boy he was tasked to follow had departed. "A pro couldn't have done much better."
"True," Hodges says. The boy has turned into a challenge, certainly more of a challenge than the airplane-stealing Mr. Madden. Hodges hasn't questioned the pharmacist himself and doesn't need to. Pete's been getting prescriptions filled there for years, he knows the pharmacist and the pharmacist knows him. The kid made up some bullshit story, the pharmacist let him use the back door, and pop goes the weasel. They never covered Frederick Street, because there seemed to be no need.
"Now what?" Jerome asks.
"I think we should go over to the Saubers house. We had a slim chance of keeping his parents out of this, per Tina's request, but I think that just went by the boards."
"They must already have some idea it was him," Jerome says. "I mean, they're his folks."
Hodges thinks of saying There are none so blind as those who will not see, and shrugs instead.
Holly has contributed nothing to the discussion so far, has just sat behind the wheel of her big boat of a car, arms crossed over her bosom, fingers tapping lightly at her shoulders. Now she turns to Hodges, who is sprawled in the backseat. "Did you ask Peter about the notebook?"
"I never got a chance," Hodges says. Holly's got a bee in her hat about that notebook, and he should have asked, just to satisfy her, but the truth is, it never even crossed his mind. "He decided to go, and boogied. Wouldn't even take my card."
Holly points to the school. "I think we should talk to Ricky the Hippie before we leave." And when neither of them replies: "Peter's house will still be there, you know. It's not going to fly away, or anything."
"Guess it wouldn't hurt," Jerome says.
Hodges sighs. "And tell him what, exactly? That one of his students found or stole a stack of money and doled it out to his parents like a monthly allowance? The parents should find that out before some teacher who probably doesn't know jack-shit about anything. And Pete should be the one to tell them. It'll let his sister off the hook, for one thing."