by Tim Tharp
I’m like, “What’s going on?”
“It really is too bad you had to know about Hector Maldonado,” she said, her hard blue eyes fixed on me. “Things would’ve been so much easier if you had never found him in that Dumpster.”
I tried to speak, but suddenly my mouth wouldn’t work. My thoughts had sped to a blur. Then something strange happened—it was like a bottle rocket exploded in my mind. Everything around me glowed, especially Ashton.
My whirling thoughts lined up in order, and it was like I could turn them over one by one in rapid succession and inspect them from all sides. I knew what’d happened—the liquid-rubber aftertaste in my drink hadn’t come from some diet sweetener. It came from the drug Ashton added. The same drug she killed Hector with. Of course. There was no doubt. But how long would it take to kill me?
“You expect me to believe you’re gonna shoot us?” said Dickie. His voice rang like a gong. I felt like I could hear his whole life in it. “You don’t have the guts.”
She smiled. “You might ask your two compadres about that. I can see they’re starting to feel the effects of the deadly little cocktail I mixed for them.”
“I think I’m getting ready to puke,” Randy said. “You’d better let me out of here.”
“Sorry,” she said. “You should know by now I was never going to let you out of here, not even if you took the payoff. I just had to buy enough time until I was sure the drug was working. And you know what the beauty of it is? It’s not an illegal drug at all. They call it Dragon Ice. You can order it online. The company pretends it’s a type of bath salt, but it gives off a lovely little semi-hallucinogenic buzz if you take the right amount. There’s just one tiny problem—if you take too much, you die.”
“Just like Hector did,” I said. The words came out perfectly now as if my mouth was a mold forming them from silver. “You were just using him all along, weren’t you? Making him think he was your boyfriend, making him deliver meals for FOKC with you. He was the one the Ockle ladies saw you with. But that whole charity thing was an act. You only did it so you could dig up some poor guy like Hector to drag to Gangland, just like Nash did to me when he pretended to be my friend. Maybe you even wanted Hector to do some crime for you. Like rob a pharmacy. Rowan chickened out on that, so you dropped him and went looking for someone of your own to do it.”
“So you know about Rowan and the pharmacy, do you?” With her free hand, she flicked her hair away from her face, and waves of color wafted from her fingertips. “He was always a bunch of flash and no substance. It was so ridiculous that his father owned Gangland and Rowan and Nash paraded around as godfathers. They thought they were quite the pair of rulers, but they were wrong. If you want to rule, you have to be ready to do anything. And I mean anything.”
“I’m not kidding.” Randy leaned over and clamped his hands to his knees. “I’m going to puke any second now.”
I chuckled at that. Somehow, the idea of puking struck me as funny. I wondered if I might have to puke too. At the moment, it seemed like an interesting topic to explore, but I had to squeeze it out of my head and get back to the situation at hand.
I fixed my gaze on Ashton’s eyes. The blue in them vibrated to the tinkle of invisible wind chimes. “You were just playing with people’s lives, weren’t you? Everybody was a chess piece that you moved where you wanted so you could beat Nash and Rowan.”
She sneered. “They were small-time.”
“Sure,” I said. “Small-time. They only wanted to humiliate people and steal from them. They didn’t have what it took to actually kill someone.”
“Wait a minute,” Tres cut in. His little turtle face appeared to be melting into his shirt collar. “We didn’t set out to kill anybody. That was just a side effect of the plan. We were just about the pharmacy thing. That’s all.”
“Right,” I said. “But Hector didn’t want to go along with it, did he? He thought he was in love, but he was too honest to pull something like that, so you drugged him.”
“Hey,” said Ashton. “I just thought if I got him a little high, he’d loosen up and see we were just having fun. But he kept insisting he couldn’t go through with any kind of robbery, not even for me.”
“Then you kept on dosing him with that Dragon Ice crap.”
“Everything would’ve been all right if he’d just gone along with the plan,” Ashton explained. “But he started freaking out, said he saw the devil in my eyes. It was pretty funny until he started turning blue. They really should include better instructions with that stuff. But when you’re playing to win, sometimes you end up with a little collateral damage along the way.”
“So this whole thing was just a game,” I said.
She shrugged. “Isn’t everything?”
“You’re one cold bitch,” Dickie told her.
Ashton laughed. It came out of her mouth in silver swirls. “Why am I a bitch?” she asked. “You wouldn’t say that if I were a guy.”
“No,” Dickie said. “If you were a guy, I’d say you were a cold bastard.”
I pressed my hand to the desktop to steady myself. “But why the phony kidnapping? Why drag Beto into it if you weren’t trying to hide from Tres?” I didn’t have to wait for the answer—it flashed in my mind like my own personal true-crime-show reenactment. “Oh, wait, I get it. Beto knew you were with Hector that night. He would’ve given you up to the cops if you didn’t come up with some phony story—like that the North Side Monarchs had threatened Hector. And you probably threw in a few other suspects to confuse things. I can see it—you run into Beto’s arms, sobbing, telling him he’s got to hide you because whoever killed Hector would be after you next, and that’s when the kidnapping plan kicked in. If you made people think Beto kidnapped you, you could probably blame him for Hector too.”
“You know what?” Ashton smiled. “You’re pretty good. You should take Dragon Ice more often. But sadly, you won’t get the chance.”
“What I don’t get is why you stayed with Beto for so long. I would think even you wouldn’t want to make your friends and your parents go through something like that.”
She laughed. “Friends? Don’t you know there’s no such thing as real friends? There are only competitors. That was one of the funniest parts of it—fooling my so-called friends into thinking I had suddenly developed some kind of warm, fuzzy social conscience. And as for my parents—it was pure pleasure watching them come on the news and pretend they cared what happened to me. I mean, they don’t even know who I am. One of their cars or paintings could’ve been stolen and they would’ve cared just as much. It was hilarious watching my father play the suffering parent who lost his golden girl. I figured I would hide out until he raised the reward to a half a million dollars or so. But did he ever do it? Not a chance.”
“A half million?” Dickie interrupted. “And you were only gonna cut me in for ten grand?”
“So that’s it.” It took all my concentration to stay focused on what I needed to say. “Instead of robbing a pharmacy, you were going to rip off your own parents without even having to bother with a phony ransom. You’d just get someone to collect the reward and then pay them off. But you knew you couldn’t get Beto to go in on that part. You had to recruit Dickie to pretend he found you, and you knew the cops would never believe Beto’s story over yours.”
“Beto had a terminal weakness—he wanted to help people.” She sneered. “He wouldn’t rest until he found out who slipped Hector the overdose. It was Hector this, Hector that. All the while I was in that cramped apartment or over at his ridiculous friend Oscar’s or his stupid little grandmother’s place. That’s really why I dyed my hair black—so I wouldn’t stand out too much around that filthy neighborhood. Still, I could’ve held out a little longer to see if the reward would go up, but you had to come along. You were a real pest. When Tres told me about Nash’s plan to trick you into fighting in the rumbles, I thought, Hey, we’ll just get rid of you by having Beto beat your brains out. Then he got b
ack from Gangland that night and started going on about how you and he were big buddies now, and I knew it was only a matter of time before you found me.”
I’m like, “Wow, you must be some kind of actress to fool all those people into thinking you were this fabulous, funny, heart-of-gold chick.”
She smiled. “That’s easy. People want to believe you’re good—all you have to do is throw them a few scraps to confirm it.”
Next to me, Randy started sobbing. “Why is the floor covered with water? There’s too much water.”
I patted him on the back. “There’s no water, Randy. It’s just your imagination. Hold on, buddy, you’ll be all right.”
That wasn’t easy to believe, though. My body ached all over. My stomach began folding itself into little squares. The hallucinations multiplied. For a second, I could’ve sworn I glimpsed Audrey in the hall behind Ashton and Tres, but she disappeared back into the liquid darkness.
“It won’t take long now,” Ashton guaranteed. “Hector thought he saw water everywhere too.”
“What about me?” Dickie asked. “You think you’re gonna make me take some of that Dragon whatever stuff you gave them? Because that ain’t gonna happen.”
“Now, now,” Ashton said. “How could we make you take it? You’re the one who gave the overdose to them.”
“What? I didn’t give them nothing.”
“Yes, but that’s how it’s going to look to the police when we get done.”
Just then Randy puked on the floor in a rolling brown wave, and Tres is like, “Dammit, can’t you at least use the trash can?”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s it. We’re leaving.”
Ashton pointed her pistol directly at my face. “I wouldn’t try it. That would be inconvenient.”
“You can’t stop all three of us,” Dickie said.
“Oh, you don’t think so?” She waved the gun in his direction. “Let me be clear—I’ll gladly shoot you first if I have to. The shape these other two are in, even Tres can take care of them. The only problem we’ll have then is figuring out which Dumpster to throw you in.”
I stared at the black barrel of her pistol. The idea occurred to me that it might be made of licorice. All I had to do was take a bite out of it. But then a better idea hit me.
“You know what?” I said. “I don’t even think you have real pistols. I know all about your Gangland squirt-gun wars. You’re not fooling me. If Randy and I decide to leave, all you can do is shower us with Kool-Aid.”
Ashton smirked. “Really? Do you want to try me?”
“Come on, you can still claim Hector’s death was just an accident. You don’t want real murders hanging over you.” I took a step forward.
She cocked her head to the side. “Last warning.”
I took another step, and she pulled the trigger. The gunshot banged so loud I swore I heard it with my kneecaps. A bullet dug into the floor just in front of me.
Her lips moved, but with the ringing in my ears I couldn’t hear what she said. Randy crouched next to me, throwing up again. Tres grinned with satisfaction.
Then the image of Audrey flashed in the corridor again. But it was no hallucination. She blazed into the room like a comet with pigtails, crashing straight into Ashton’s back. The gun flew into the air and the two of them hit the floor.
Tres’s eyes popped wide. His hand trembled as he attempted to train the gun on the three of us in front of the desk. For a split second, I looked straight into the barrel, into that deep black hole, and then I screamed.
I screamed and it filled every inch of Gangland as I charged. The pistol fired, and for all I knew the bullet got me straight between the eyes. It didn’t matter. I was on top of Tres, pinning his arms to the floor, looking into his eyes, the sounds of scuffling around us.
“Get off of me, you fat pig,” he yelped, but I just kept staring into his eyes.
“You lose,” I said.
And then my stomach came unfolded, and I puked and puked, in a dazzling display of yellow and gold, straight into his pale turtle face. Somewhere the Beatles were playing “Here Comes the Sun.”
CHAPTER 44
But it wasn’t “Here Comes the Sun.” It was the wail of sirens. Shouts and the noise of stampeding feet battered the air. Trix’s voice sounded like a trumpet. Colors whizzed everywhere. Then I was on my back, the light in the ceiling showering me with warmth. A huge face replaced the light, but I didn’t recognize it. Jigsaw pieces of voices whirled around me. Then another strange face appeared. “Can you hear me?” said the face. “Can you hear me?” Was that another Beatles song? I couldn’t be sure. Hands grabbed hold of me, and I lifted into the air. Everything swirled. Straps snapped across my chest and legs. Wheels whirred underneath whatever I was lying on. Staring up, I rolled into the darkness, and then the ceiling of Gangland’s main room gazed at me in awe. Outside—blue sky shimmering. A shake and a clatter, and I lowered down the concrete steps, and people surrounded me.
“Open the ambulance door,” someone shouted.
The image of my own funeral popped into my mind. The place was crowded, but it was too late for that to matter.
Then Audrey appeared, tears singing in her eyes. “You’re going to be okay,” she cried. “You’re going to be okay.”
I closed my eyes, held on to those words, and forgot all about measuring my life by how many people showed up for my death.
I woke up in a hospital bed the next day. Every muscle in my body ached. My stomach felt like a sumo wrestler had used it for a trampoline. For the first time since I had the flu in seventh grade, if someone had set a burger down in front of me I couldn’t have taken a single bite, not even if it came from Topper’s. There was a tube stuck to my arm dealing out saline solution. Flowers crowded the side of the room where the window let in the afternoon light.
A soft hand touched my forehead. It was my mother’s.
“He’s awake,” she said, and then my dad appeared at her side.
“You had us scared there for a little while, Dylan,” he said with a big grin.
My mouth was drier than the sun, but I still managed to form some words. “Did I get shot?”
“No, you didn’t get shot,” Mom said. “But you had some pretty bad stuff in you.”
I remembered the drug—Dragon Ice. “That wasn’t my fault,” I explained. “I did not take any drugs. Not on purpose anyway. I swear. There was something in this diet soda I drank.”
Mom patted my shoulder. “We know, Dylan. We know.”
Dad goes, “That doesn’t mean you’re totally off the hook, young man.”
But Mom’s like, “Not now. We can talk about that later.”
“How about Randy?” I asked. “Is he okay?”
Dad nodded. “He’s okay. It was a close call for both of you.”
“And Ashton Browning?”
Mom and Dad glanced at each other, then Dad goes, “Audrey got her whole confession recorded on her phone. Pretty smart girl.”
And Mom’s like, “You know what? It looks like you may have your biggest news story yet.”
CHAPTER 45
Mom was right—my next article for the school paper was big. You might even say it was a corker. This time Ms. Jansen pretty much ran it as written, except for fixing some spelling and punctuation. But it wasn’t the whole story. The district attorney banned me from telling that until the trial.
Of course, by the time the school paper came out, Audrey, Trix, Randy, and I had been all over the real news—photos and/or videos of me at the hospital, the four of us at a press conference, outside our high school, in front of Gangland with our arms looped around each other’s shoulders. One photographer even got me to wear the old porkpie for a picture—it had a bullet hole through the crown.
Ashton and Tres were all over the news too. This time it was their turn to star in a video that showed them fighting through the mob of journalists on their way from the cop car to the jail while questions whizzed at them like fastbal
ls. Ashton threw her hands in front of her face. Tres draped his black-leather sport coat over his head like a hood. They weren’t in jail long, not with their daddy’s money behind them.
But they would be someday. The DA pledged to try them as adults so they wouldn’t get away with nothing but a couple of years in juvie.
By the time my article came out in the school paper, I’ll admit I was pretty famous, though that didn’t stop us from throwing a celebration at Topper’s later that afternoon. On the way to the front door, Audrey, Trix, and Randy walked in front of me so Rockin’ Rhonda couldn’t see what I was carrying. Ever since she busted her old stringless guitar over Dickie’s shoulder blades, she’d had to make do with an imaginary one. But no more.
She was singing “Jailhouse Rock” when I walked around my crew and showed her what I had for her: a brand-new acoustic guitar. Well, it wasn’t exactly brand new—I bought it at a secondhand store—but it did have all the strings intact and in tune.
“Lord, have mercy,” she said as I laid it in her hands.
Then she started crying and I started crying and everybody started crying.
“You deserve a better one for what you did for me,” I told her. “But this is all I could afford right now.”
She whanged a good loud strum across the strings and started singing the chorus to “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
I patted her shoulder. “We’ll catch you with some change on the way out.”
Inside, we took our regular booth, and Brenda brought the menus over. “You all order as much as you want,” she said. “It’s on the house.”
I’m like, “For real?”
She grinned. “It’s not all the time we get people off the news in here.”
As she walked away, Randy goes, “Well, it’s not a hundred grand, but I’ll take it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’d probably drink another dose of Dragon Ice if it was free.”