Donny shook his head.
I lowered my voice, even though there was no one anywhere close. “Are they asking you about what happened to Cameron Maddox?”
“No,” he answered, angrily this time. “Why would they do that?”
I shrugged.
Donny didn’t push it. I could tell his mind was on something else. He spoke again, more to himself than to me. “Maybe I should call off deliveries this afternoon.” He thought for a minute, then frowned and said, “Ray wouldn’t like it, but—”
“Ray?” I said. “Who’s Ray?”
Donny looked startled, as if he hadn’t realized he’d been speaking out loud.
“Who’s Ray?” I repeated. “And why would he care if I did my delivery or not?” The more I thought about this, the more puzzled I became. “I thought nobody knew about this except you, me, and Jeff.”
From the window of the Tomahawk, we could see Jeff riding up the hill toward us. Donny turned to me and said urgently, “Forget Ray. He’s nobody. And don’t say anything to Manning.”
Things were getting stranger by the minute. All of a sudden I was Donny’s number one buddy, and Jeff was on the outs.
Jeff pulled up on his bike, calling, “Hi, guys. What’s up?”
I could feel Donny still staring at me. Jeff looked back and forth from Donny s face to mine. We must have appeared pretty serious, because Jeff lifted an eyebrow at me questioningly. I shrugged and waited for Donny to speak first.
“You got deliveries for us today or what?” Jeff asked, looking baffled.
“Yeah,” Donny said at last, in the tone of someone who had finally made up his mind. But he didn’t seem thrilled about his decision. He reached into the glove compartment and took out two envelopes identical to the ones he’d given us on the two previous days. He handed one to me and one to Jeff.
“More mail? I thought we were going to be delivering different kinds of stuff,” I said. “These packages all look the same.”
Donny swore irritably. “Daggett,” he said, “what’d I tell you before? Now, are you gonna do the job, or ask a bunch of stupid questions?”
Stung by this remark, which seemed unfair and unpartnerlike, I took the envelope from his hand and got out of the car. I was about to get on my bike and ride away without a backward glance, to let Donny know how ticked off I was, when I remembered I didn’t know where I was going. So much for a dramatic exit.
I turned around to face him and waited for him to tell me the directions. Then I sat astride my bike while Jeff received his, and we rode off together.
“What’s bugging him?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was nervous about Donny seeing us talking, afraid he’d think I was telling Jeff about Ray, At the same time I really wanted to tell Jeff. Something strange was going on. And there was definitely something Donny wasn’t telling us about our little delivery business.
“Listen,” I said. “Let’s meet at my house after we make these deliveries, okay? And don’t tell Donny.”
Jeff gave me an odd look, but we were at the corner where we had to go separate ways. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to go someplace with my parents.”
“Then call me later, okay? And just act like nothing’s up when you go back to Donny’s.”
I pedaled to the turnoff Donny had described, and headed down another sandy dirt lane. I was supposed to follow the red arrow at the fork, then turn at a hand-painted sign saying, PRIVATE WAY, NO BEACH ACCESS, and go to the third driveway after that.
I glanced behind me: no one in sight. There was no sign of anyone ahead, either. There was nothing but the smell of sun-baked dirt and the monotonous droning of insects in the undergrowth. I got off my bike and pushed it through the bushes that grew on both sides of the lane, sat down on a rock in a little clearing, and stared at the envelope in my hand.
Yes, something strange was going on. Donny was acting very weird. It was odd that all we’d been given to deliver were envelopes, all the same size, about the same weight, and, come to think of it, all with a little bulge at the bottom that indicated there was something more in them than just papers. From what Donny had said, I’d expected to be delivering sacks of groceries; or packets of mail containing people’s letters, magazines, and newspapers; or maybe supplies from the drug store, shampoo and suntan lotion, Band-Aids, stuff like that.
But for three days in a row, I’d been carrying the same tightly sealed manila envelope. Donny hadn’t told us the whole truth about our partnership, I was sure. And we’d been too dumb—too flattered by Donny’s attention and too greedy for the money—to think it through.
But now my mind was flooded with questions. And I was filled with anger at Donny. He couldn’t tell me what to do and what not to do, what I could say to Jeff and what I couldn’t. He couldn’t just blow me off, couldn’t just say, “Forget Ray. He’s nobody,” and expect me, the dumb little kid, to reply, “Okay, Donny, whatever you say.”
I was mad at myself, too, because I had been acting like a dumb little kid. But that didn’t mean I had to keep it up. I meant to find the answers to my questions, and soon.
There was one little mystery, however, that I could solve right then and there. The one sitting in my lap.
My hands were trembling slightly as I slid my index finger under the tape and ran it the width of the envelope. I had to pinch the wings of the little metal fastener up underneath the tape to free the flap. Then all I had to do was look inside.
I could feel my heart starting to hammer in my chest. Part of me wanted to stick the tape back down and deliver the envelope as I’d done before. It was a crime to read other people’s mail; what if that was all this was? How would I explain that I had opened it?
Looking at what I had done, I realized I was going to have to explain. There was no way I’d be able to get the tape to stick again and lie as smoothly as it had before. The damage was done. I might as well look.
I reached my hand inside the envelope, grasped the bulge at the bottom, and pulled out another envelope. Well, not an envelope, exactly, but a little bag. A little plastic bag just like the one Nicki had had with her on the boat.
One sniff and I knew exactly what it was.
The strange thing was, I wasn’t really surprised. I guess I had known before, right from the beginning, that there was something suspect about our delivery service. I just hadn’t wanted to think about it. I’d wanted to believe Donny, and to believe that it made perfect sense to deliver a package and be paid fifteen dollars.
“Easiest money you’ll ever make,” Donny had said, and I’d let him convince me because I wanted him to.
I felt like flinging the package into the bushes and leaving it there. I wanted to bike back home and pretend all of this hadn’t happened, and never have to see Donny again. But I couldn’t.
I had no idea how much the baggie in my hand was worth, but Donny was making enough of a profit to pay me fifteen dollars just to deliver it. And this Ray person who was going to be mad if Donny called off the deliveries, he had to be getting something out of it, too.
I imagined myself throwing the pot away and returning empty-handed. Donny would want his money. What would he do if he didn’t get it?
“When you get involved with that kind of thing, you put yourself in danger,” Mom had told me just that morning. I shivered, though I was drenched with sweat.
Cameron Maddox had been mixed up with selling drugs.
Cameron Maddox was dead.
Seventeen
I resealed the envelope as neatly as I could, but anyone could tell that it had been opened. Since I was afraid to throw it away, I didn’t see what else I could do except go through with the delivery.
And never make another one.
How was I going to explain that to Donny?
I sat in the clearing for a few more minutes, trying to fight the panic that kept welling inside me, trying to think. I decided to make the delivery, meet Donny afterward as if nothing
unusual had happened, then talk to Jeff and tell him what I’d discovered. Together, we would decide what to do next.
I wheeled my bike furtively back onto the sandy lane, and began looking for the red arrow at the fork in the road. I hated the way I kept looking back over my shoulder, hated the fear and paranoia I felt from knowing what was in the envelope.
At last I came to the third driveway after the PRIVATE WAY sign, and knocked on the door of the house. But first I pulled down the brim of my baseball cap to cover my face.
An oldish guy came to the door, which kind of surprised me. I’d never really thought about it much, but I guess I figured it was mostly kids who smoked pot. Behind the man I caught a glimpse of a woman in a long, floaty kind of dress. She went to get a small envelope, which she gave me as I handed the manila one to the guy. He turned it over and made a funny face. Before he could say anything about the rumpled tape job, I ran to my bike and fled.
I pedaled hard, looking over my shoulder again, this time to make sure the man wasn’t behind me. When I got to Donny’s, the Tomahawk was parked in the yard, and he was in it, waiting.
I took a deep breath and pulled up warily beside the driver’s side door. Something didn’t feel right. Then I realized the radio was quiet. So was Donny. He was smoking nervously, raking his hair back from his face and scowling.
I handed him the envelope.
“Anybody follow you?” he asked.
“Follow me?” I repeated, playing dumb. “Why would anyone follow me?”
He didn’t answer, but asked insistently, “So, nothing out of the ordinary happened?” It was strange to see Donny like this, not even pretending to act cool.
“No,” I lied. I even managed an offhand, “The usual. Piece of cake.”
Donny reached into the envelope, did a quick count, and handed me a ten and a five.
I was debating whether I should ask him what he was so worried about. Maybe I would have if I didn’t already have some idea of the answer. I decided instead to get out of there as quickly as I could. “See ya, then,” I said, getting ready to ride away.
I was hoping Donny wouldn’t call me back to set up a delivery for the following day. To my relief, he said, “Take the day off tomorrow, Daggett.” He tried to grin, but it didn’t quite come off. “Wouldn’t want you to work too hard.”
“Okay,” I said, pretending to be disappointed. “You’re the boss.”
I said it, but I didn’t believe it anymore. Donny was Jeff’s and my boss, but I was pretty sure somebody else was his boss. Namely, Ray.
I rode home, my hands shaking and my mind spinning like the light on top of Chief Widdiss’s police cruiser. The chief was on my mind, no doubt, because I had just finished making a drug delivery. The full realization of what I was involved in hit me, and I began trembling all over.
Jeff had said he was going somewhere with his parents, but when I got home I called him, hoping he hadn’t left yet. “Jeff?”
“Yeah, what’s up? You sound funny.”
“Did you make your delivery?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Did everything go okay?”
“Yeah. Donny kept asking me the same thing. What’s going on?”
“Listen, Jeff—” I began, then broke off, suddenly worried about talking over the telephone. In the movies, the cops were always tapping the bad guys’ phones and tape recording what they said. But I wasn’t one of the bad guys! And neither was Jeff.
Not really.
Even though it surely looked that way.
“How long are you going to be out tonight?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We’re going to my aunt’s birthday party. It could be pretty late.”
“Oh, great.” I moaned. Then, abandoning caution, I blurted out the news that we’d been delivering drugs for Donny. I couldn’t stand being the only one to know; I needed Jeff to tell me we weren’t in as big a mess as I thought.
But instead a long silence met my words. Then Jeff spoke, his voice sounding small and shaken. “No way, Ben. You’re kidding, right?”
When I didn’t say anything, he whispered, “What are we going to do?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t know,” I said.
Jeff whispered again. “My mom’s right here, so I can’t talk. I’ll call you when we get home, unless it’s really late.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t okay, of course. I was so wired, I couldn’t imagine sitting around, waiting for Jeff to come home, and I had no idea what I should do. The clock said a quarter after five. Fifteen minutes until Mom got home.
I decided to ride back to Donny’s house. Before I told anybody else, like Mom or Chief Widdiss, I figured I’d better talk to Donny. Maybe he didn’t know what was in the envelopes. Maybe this guy Ray, or whoever was the real boss, hadn’t clued Donny in, and that was why Donny hadn’t told Jeff and me.
Yeah, I thought, and maybe the stuff in the envelopes will turn out to be spices for making spaghetti sauce.
Still, even though I didn’t really think Donny was innocent, or at least as innocent as Jeff and I were, I wanted to talk to him. Maybe there was some explanation that would make everything all right again. Maybe he’d say something that would mean I wouldn’t have to rat on a guy who’d once been my hero, which also meant ratting on my best friend and myself.
There I went with the maybes again.
Eighteen
When I pulled into Donny’s driveway, the Tomahawk was gone. Donny wasn’t there, but the guy Donny had taken the reels to, the skinny little guy with the long, greasy ponytail, was.
Ponytail was walking from Donny’s front door to his car, looking furious. It was too late to escape. He’d already seen me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked suspiciously.
I wanted to say, “I have as much right to be here as you do,” but he didn’t seem like the kind of guy I wanted to provoke. “Looking for Donny,” I said, trying to act cool, even though he gave me the creeps, big-time.
He looked closer at me. “Which one are you, Manning or Daggett?” he asked.
Surprised that he knew our names, I answered, “Daggett. Ben.”
Apparently, Ponytail had no intention of telling me his name. Instead he walked right up to me, grabbed me by the chin, and jerked my face up close to his. He wasn’t much taller than I was, and I got a better look than I cared to at his stubbly whiskers, bad complexion, and brownish stained teeth as he said, “You the one who got nosy this afternoon?”
“W-what are you talking about?” I said. With his hands roughly gripping my chin and his narrowed eyes boring into mine, I felt terrified and helpless. Nobody was home at Donny’s. Ponytail and I were alone in the yard, and no one knew where I was.
“You didn’t have a little look-see at your delivery today?” he said. “Didn’t snoop in other people’s private business? Maybe help yourself to a little product?”
“N-no,” I managed to choke out.
He gave my chin a twist to the side and let go. “If you’re lying, I’ll find out; you can bet on it,” he said. “In the meantime, remember this. And you can tell your pal Manning, too: you steal from me, and I promise you’ll be sorry. And if you’re thinking of running to the cops, forget it. You two are in this thing right up to your ears. If I go down or Donny goes down, you go with us. Got it?”
I nodded, too frightened to speak.
“Ever been to the juvie farm?”
“The what?” I asked.
“Juvenile reform school,” he said slowly, emphasizing every word.
I shook my head.
“Well, take it from me, you don’t want to go there.” He spat onto the sandy driveway, then added, “If you see our friend Donny, tell him I’m looking for him.”
He got into his car and drove away, but not before giving me a long, meaningful stare that kept me frozen in place until he was well out of sight.
I’d broken into a sweat in Ponytail’s grasp and now, in the breeze, my body was cov
ered with goosebumps. I rubbed my arms and then my face, trying to snap out of the terror that Ponytail had made me feel, and think.
Ponytail was Ray, I was pretty sure about that. Ray, who wouldn’t have been happy if Donny called off the day’s deliveries; Ray, who must have been informed that the manila envelope had been opened, and who suspected I’d taken some of the pot. Ray, who knew all about juvenile reform school.
Ray, Donny’s boss. My partner in crime.
I swallowed a sob that threatened to escape from my throat. How in the world had I gotten myself into such a screwed-up mess?
Getting in was easy, stupid, I answered myself. Getting out is going to be the hard part.
I’d never felt so alone in my life. And Pop had never seemed so far away.
I had to figure this out on my own. I hadn’t imagined the sense of menace Ray projected. If things started to fall apart, and it looked as if they had, what might Ray do?
The sight of Cameron Maddox’s body washing back and forth in the shallow waters off Devil’s Bridge filled my mind. I pushed the picture away, telling myself I was being ridiculous to make a connection between Ray and a kid from off-island who happened to come here and drown.
I had no idea where Donny was, and neither, apparently, did Ray. But I knew I wanted to find him before Ray did.
Nineteen
After sitting through an endless dinner with Mom and Barry, pretending everything was just fine and totally normal, I asked if I could go out for a while.
“Where, Ben?” Mom asked.
“Just up to Jeff’s,” I said.
“But I saw June today, and I’m sure she said they were having a surprise party for Anita tonight.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, acting as if I’d just remembered, and angry with myself for forgetting that Mom knew everything. “Well, then,” I went on, thinking hard, “I kind of feel like taking a few casts down at the beach. I heard the blues were in.” Lies piled on top of lies as I talked.
“Hey!” said Barry enthusiastically. “I’d like to go along with you, Ben. You were going to teach me to cast this summer, remember?”
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