Phil resumed his screaming. “This is leaving the scene of an accident! This is leaving the scene of an accident! We can’t leave the scene of an accident!”
For a moment I was afraid he was going to bail, leaving me to drive from the passenger seat.
Two blocks south of Mt. Vernon, sirens ripped the air and two black-and-whites, lights blazing, blew through the intersection ahead of us.
They were heading straight for Kelly’s apartment complex.
“We’re going too fast!” Phil shrieked.
Phil was right, but I didn’t realize it soon enough. When we got to Mt. Vernon, I grabbed the steering wheel and turned hard. I lifted up out of my seat as the van pulled the corner on two wheels.
Then one.
Then none.
Oops.
The van’s left panel slammed to the asphalt and skidded, metal howling. I flew backward onto the left side of the van, which was now the floor. Phil screamed in falsetto as we tumbled. Part of the panel tore away against the street, almost sucking me under the van as we flipped over again. We came to a sudden bone-rattling stop, sideways and into a telephone pole. I hit the opposite wall, whacking my head with a bang.
I threw my body against the rear doors and burst out, rolling into the street. The white blobs of light were growing dark. Phil was off like a hippie Usain Bolt, darting between two houses and vaulting a backyard fence. Cops were running at me, guns drawn. I could hear yelling, but they all sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
There was Junior. He was on the ground too, facing me, arms handcuffed behind his back. His face was a mask of pain, and I could see blood on his shoulder. He was yelling in the same tongue as the cops.
I tried to move. Tried to crawl. Nothing. Tried to move anything. I was paralyzed. I didn’t see Kelly anywhere. I couldn’t even scream her name. I was out of time, out of blood, and out of fight. The only thing I was in was my fucking underpants.
So tired.
The white-lights gang-rushed me and drew me down, down, down into a sweet nothing.
Where is she?
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I woke up to that annoying sound. Everything hurt. Everything hurt so bad I didn’t want to open my eyes. I wanted to slip back into that nothing.
Kelly.
I opened my lids and found myself staring into a pair of brown-yellow wolf’s eyes a foot from my own. The rest of the head came into focus. Ivory blond hair. Pink skin. I blinked to adjust the color levels before I realized who I was looking at.
Twitch.
Chapter Eighteen
And then there was Twitch.
I remember his entrance into St. Gabe’s even more vividly than Ollie’s spectacular debut. Junior and I were driving mops around the foyer when the batch of newbies got led in. I didn’t like looking at the new kids. Their fear, hurt, and loneliness was as solid in the air as the mop in my hands. Their pain reminded me of my own.
Junior had no such problem. I remember his words, too. “Aw shit,” he said. “This kid is gonna be meat.”
Sure enough, there was the meat. He was twelve years old, but he could pass for younger, he was that small. And lord, was he pink. Twitch looked like he was made out of milk and cotton candy. I felt bad for him, but there was only so much I could do for a kid who had a bull’s-eye tattooed on him by natural selection. His natural weaknesses would be noticed. Nobody wanted to be noticed at St. Gabe’s.
His left eye fluttered in a spastic twitch, breaking our gaze, and I saw the rest of the newbies. Two of the smaller kids were crying. Some tried to look their hardest, which isn’t that hard between the ages of seven and seventeen. All the weaknesses I feared in myself came flooding in.
Then there was Twitch. He looked right at me, into me, and Robert Shaw’s voice from Jaws echoed in my mind. “He’s got dead eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.”
No prerequisite fear. No heartbreak. Just cold, baby, cold.
We absorbed Twitch into our crew. At first, some of the boys thought it was charity for the kid. I knew better. I knew, deep down, that I wanted the kid with the wolf’s eyes on my team. Because I never ever wanted him to be an enemy.
All in all, he was safe at St. Gabe’s, and the world was safe from Twitch while he was there.
Twitch’s pink lips curled in a joyful smile. “So, who am I shooting?”
I tried to get up and fell back to the bed, jabs of pain peppering my whole body. I had more tubes in me than Radio Shack. I sat up again, trying to pull needles and tubes out of my arms, but my body seemed only peripherally under my control.
“Whoa, whoa,” Twitch said. His voice hadn’t dropped a lick during puberty. He grabbed my shoulders and forced me back down. “Don’t want to be pulling those out yet, Boo. Especially not the morphine drip.”
“Guhhh,” I rasped. My throat was full of cotton balls dipped in lye. “Guhhhh,” I repeated, trying to stand again.
Twitch’s birdlike hands pressed me flat against the bed. I was so weak I couldn’t force off a guy who would lose a wrestling match to a gimpy kitten.
“Kelly,” I croaked. It hurt.
“That the brunette?”
I nodded. That hurt, too.
“She’s okay. Scared from here to bejeezus, but she’s fine.” The corner of Twitch’s eye spasmed in a wink.
The relief brought tears to my own eyes. “Water.”
Twitch handed me a red plastic cup that felt like a barbell in my hands. I emptied it in two huge gulps. The water backflipped a few times in my empty stomach, but stayed down.
I cleared my throat. “Junior. Where’s Junior?”
“Cops are talking to him.”
“What happened?”
“I only got here in the last act, man. All I know is Junior called me from lockup and told me to get over here.”
“He all right? He was bleeding.”
“He’ll live.” Twitch giggled. “He got to the girl’s house and heard screaming when he knocked. When he kicked in the door, the psycho broad whacked him with a mace or something.”
Kelly must have popped him with Spike. That’s my girl. “Where is she?”
“She’s in the lobby. Cops won’t let her in yet. You gonna eat that?” Twitch pointed to a tray on the bedside with a dried-out turkey sandwich, a mini can of ginger ale, and a deadly looking Jell-O brick.
“Go nuts. Why won’t they let her in?”
“They want to talk to you first. Cops already talked to her. She’s still pretty spooked.” So far, so good. Nobody, including Junior, knew a damned thing to tell the cops. It was going to stay that way. “You even got a patrolman standing outside the door.” Twitch held up the patrolman’s badge. “See?”
“For chrissakes, Twitch.” On top of everything else, Twitch was a master of sleight of hand—pickpocketing and the like. We’d all learned a lot of shady shit at The Home. But while the majority of us fought for the rest of our lives to erase the fucked-up habits The Home carved into us, Twitch continued to hone his long after his release. Then something hit me. “Wait a minute, how did you get in here?
Twitch smiled, and his eye jumped again. “The miracles of technology. Ollie made it in ten minutes.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a perfect Massachusetts license. “I told them I was your twin brother.” I looked closer. The name on the license read Marcus Malone. The birth date matched my own.
“And they believed this?”
“The more ridiculous the bullshit, the harder it is to disprove. What were they going to say?”
He had me there. “I’m very disturbed that worked.”
Twitch shrugged. “I’m a disturbing guy.”
“True that, Marcus.”
As Twitch stuck the license back into his pocket, the butt of a pistol peeked out from his waistband.
“Your dick is out,” I said.
“Oh, shit.” Twitch pulled his shirt back over the gun. “That reminds me, watch your hands.”
“Why do I have to watch my
hands?” I said, suspicious and weary.
“I got a present for you.”
Uh-oh. Twitch and his goddamn presents.
“Look under there.” Twitch nodded at the pillow, excited to give me his gift. Twitch only gets that excited about weaponry.
With more than a little dread, I reached underneath. My hands closed around something metal, and I pulled out a snub-nosed .38. I hate guns. I’ve always hated guns. Twitch knew that.
“You like it?”
I let my glare be my answer.
I held the gun out to him on open palms, barely able to hold it in my quaking hands. “Take it with you.”
“Hey, you know the saying. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Didn’t you say there was a cop right outside my door?”
“First of all, if a nutjob like me can make my way in, anybody can. Second, how do you know it wasn’t a cop who capped you in the first place?”
Good point. Then I remembered the scarred face. “I don’t think he was a cop.”
Twitch plucked a corner off the green Jell-O brick and sucked it wetly into his mouth. “You ever see the guy before?”
“Never, but I think I know the wheres and the whys.” I filled Twitch in, including names. If there are two things Twitch does well, one of them is keeping information to himself. The other is causing havoc. He sat and listened, his only response a rippling eyelid now and then.
Then I got to the point where I got shot. “I opened the door and a guy in a suit has a gun to my face, and he had—”
“Wait a minute. A suit?” He stopped mid-chew on a Jell-O grape.
“Yeah.”
“Aw, shit.”
“What?”
“Suits aren’t good.” Double twitch.
“Why?”
“You’re planning on shooting somebody, they’re going to bleed, right?” He was explaining it to me like I was in kindergarten.
I remembered the serpentine path of blood across my hardwood. “I guess so.”
“Well, they are. Why you gonna wear a suit and get blood all over it?”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t like what he was implying.
“You don’t wear a suit unless you know what you’re doing, have good aim, and know what’s gonna come squirting out where and when you pull the trigger.” Twitch made a gun with index finger and fired with his thumb. “In other words, you’ve probably done it lots of times before.”
“I still don’t get it.” I couldn’t imagine Snake having the juice for a pro.
“It’s not for you to get. You’ve been warned. The note was a scare tactic.”
Fucking worked. The side effect was that it pissed me off, too. “When I get my hands around that one-eyed fucker, I’m gonna pull out his good eye with my teeth.”
Twitch stopped chewing, his eyelid fluttering like a hummingbird on meth. “You say one eye?”
Shit.
“Don’t even tell me he had a blind eye.”
“Why do I get the distinct impression you’re going to make a bad day worse?”
Twitch’s baby-pink skin went light pink, which is as close as he gets to going pale. He ran a finger across his temple. “And a long scar along here?”
I nodded. “That’s the guy. How did you know that?”
“Holy fuck! Dude, you are one lucky man.” Twitch’s burst of exuberance sent tiny flecks of Jell-O from his mouth across my legs. He wiped the green mess into the sheet. “Sorry.”
“How in sweet fuck-all am I lucky?”
“Lucky that you’re not in a meat locker in the basement.”
Before I could ask questions, the door handle shifted with a click. Fluidly, instinctively, Twitch slipped behind the opening door. As Barnes came walking in, Twitch slid neatly behind him and out as the door closed. Barnes never even knew he was in the room.
“So,” Barnes said.
“So,” I croaked.
“You’ve got some detectives on your ass over this.” He clucked his tongue in mock pity. He probably wished the bullet had gone into my face.
“Why?”
“Why?” Barnes huffed a laugh. “Gunshot wound. Always gonna be questions asked where gunshots are concerned. That and a panicked young lady who works for the DA calling the cops, a battalion of cruisers, a smashed van with no driver or plates, and two bleeding jackasses at the scene. You wanna ask me why again?”
“I got shot? No wonder my leg hurts.”
“Don’t try to pull that shit. I made a couple calls, and the detectives agreed to let me talk to you first. So, what happened?”
“I got shot, apparently.” The truth didn’t exactly set me free, but it did loosen up some capillaries in Barnes’s head.
“You wanna tell me who?”
“I think they were Canadian.”
“Canadian?”
“They had French accents. I had a problem with them at the bar. Must’ve followed me home for some payback.” The IV needle was starting to itch.
“And they waited until the next morning?”
“Those Canucks are a patient lot, eh?”
Barnes wiped his eyes in frustration. “So, you expect me to go back to these detectives—who are doing us both a favor here—and tell them a gang of Canadians followed you home, waited all night for you to get up, then shot you.”
“Sure.”
“And these Canadians went after Kelly because…” He held onto the last syllable, waiting for me to answer. I didn’t. It was too early in the morning, and I’d been shot. My tank was low on smartass juice. “Because?”
“Because of the wonderful things she does?” No, wait. Had a little left.
Barnes grabbed the front of my johnnie and slammed me back onto the bed. I was too weak to offer much resistance. “Play your games, Malone. Play your little fucking games.”
“Get your fucking hands off me, Barnes.” I grabbed his thumb and twisted it back. The knuckle popped, straining. “You want to dance sometime, we’ll dance. You want to get hard on me when I’m too weak to stand? I’ll still rip your fucking thumb off.” I wrenched the thumb harder, close to the breaking point. Barnes didn’t so much as flinch, even though it must have hurt like hell.
“Let’s do that sometime.” Murderous fires blazed in his eyes. “Soon.” With that, he let me go and I released his thumb. He exited, trying to slam the door, but the hydraulics just hissed violently as he stormed out. It was nice to know we were still buds.
My heart was still pounding, hands shaking, five minutes after he’d left. Barnes could have jacked my ass up into the next millennium, if he’d chosen to. Cop right outside the door or not. Shit, the cop probably would have given him a hand.
I figured Donnelly would be worried about damage control. The bullet wasn’t an act of God. I’m sure they wished I’d come up with a more plausible line of bullshit to cover their asses, but I was doped up and pissed off. Let them cover their own asses if they needed to. I wasn’t lying for them. I was lying for Cassie. Besides, fuck Canada.
The rest was the standard battery of bullshit. Not satisfied with what Barnes told them, another detective came in and tried the threatening approach. I stuck to my story about the rogue gang of gun-toting Canadians. Twitch’s theory about disproving an absurd lie seemed to hold true. The second cop didn’t seem any happier with my answers than Barnes was, but what were they going to do?
The doctors grudgingly gave me my walking papers. Junior brought me a set of clothes, which was an improvement on the pantsless state I’d arrived in.
Armed with a pair of crutches and a prescription for painkillers, I hobbled out with slightly more strength and muscle control than a rubber chicken. What I needed more than anything was to get back out and rip the world a new asshole. I planned on starting with Snake and Scarface.
Chapter Nineteen
It’s funny how sometimes the worst idea can seem like brilliance to a bunch of liberal hippies living as far awa
y as possible from the problem they’re trying to help. Camp Freshwood was one of those ideas. Every summer for two weeks, we got trudged deep into western Massachusetts for some fresh air and macramé lessons. Sounds good, don’t it?
Two to three different Homes occupied parts of Camp Freshwood at any given time. Still sound good? We were supposed to make friends interacting with others in the same situation as us. Guess what? We hated each other. We weren’t peers; we were soldiers all thrown abruptly into one another’s company, and we all had something to prove. The only arts and crafts I learned were the art of war and the craft of being crafty.
In the seven years I fought in the wars of Camp Freshwood, three kids mysteriously drowned, countless others got bizarre food poisoning. One kid “fell” off a cliff, and another hung himself with a macraméd noose. I shit you not.
But nothing compared with the summer Twitch vacationed at Camp Freshwood. Incidentally, it was the last summer of that ill-planned social experiment.
We were hardcore kids, but we were still a step behind the Roxbury boys. They were just a little bit bigger, a little bit meaner, and carried weightier chips on their shoulders. They’d also earned themselves quite a rep as a gleeful bunch of ass-rapers. That summer, we got shifted into the camp at the same time.
Twitch caught the first offensive, of course. They found him in the woods. Alone. What he was doing out there alone, I’ll never know. I’ll never ask, either. I didn’t even know he was gone from the group. At mess hall that night, in he limped, wincing each time he brought his left leg around. As he made his way over to our table, I heard chuckling from the Roxbury table. One of the boys made kissy sounds. A thin line of blood dribbled down the back of Twitch’s thigh, one sock soaked bright red.
Later that night, the rest of us tossed around ideas for payback. Twitch sat apart from us in the corner, head between his hands like he was trying to hold his skull together. We all went to bed, ready to start the day fresh for blood.
We never got the chance.
All that night, rain beat down on the camp, pounding a wet cadence onto the corrugated metal sheets that passed for roofing. Wet and miserable in our cots, we were woken by a wild-eyed counselor on the edge of full-blown panic. We were herded quickly onto a waiting school bus. The sobbing middle-aged hippie didn’t give us an explanation until the bus was tearing down the highway.
The Hard Bounce Page 20