Something tickled at my brain, but I set it aside. It wasn’t important. Not yet.
I caught Jimmy Corcoran’s eye and waved for him to come over. He grimaced. Willard and Hollis trailed after him. Mike and Luce looked at me questioningly.
When the three men reached the table, none of them took a chair.
“Hello, Lucille,” Hollis said to Luce. “Thanks for hosting the party.”
Corcoran nodded at me. “Sorry for your loss, kid.”
“I need your expert opinion, Jimmy,” I said. “How good are the white-collar cops here in Seattle? The computer-forensics unit.”
Corcoran looked at me like I was nuts. “You wanna talk here?”
“Just the basics. If the cops had somebody’s computer, what could they find out from it?”
“Okaaay,” he said. “Well, unless the guy was some genius type, I’d say the cops could find everything. What’s on the computer and every place that it had been on the Web, by stripping the internal drives and hunting around the net for traces of the machine’s IP address. Stop me if I’m going too fast for you.”
“I’ll manage. So wherever the computer’s owner hid something—”
“The cops would find it,” said Corcoran. “Might take a while, but I’ll give the pricks credit. They’re good.”
Willard nodded. “The cops even got some pet geeks on call. Those guys just love to hunt each other down, like some kind of pissing contest.”
Luce looked at me. “You’re talking about the laptop.”
“What laptop?” said Mike.
“I found a computer,” I said, “which belonged to a man who planted bugs in Dono’s house. He recorded everything that happened in the house, for weeks.”
“The night Dono was shot,” Mike said. “Holy shit.”
“I had the computer in my hand,” I said. “But I had to stash it in the truck, and then the truck went missing.”
Hollis nodded eagerly. “You told me the cops impounded it while you were avoiding their company. Don’t they have the damned gadget?”
I shook my head. “The police never got the chance. They weren’t the ones who took the truck. And they don’t have the computer.”
“So it’s gone?” said Corcoran. “All that work for fucking nothing?”
Luce put her hand over mine.
“And you’ll never know who did it?” said Davey.
“I already know who, Davey,” I said. “You killed him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
AROUND US THERE WAS still the buzz of conversation. But it retreated, shrank down until it felt like only Davey and I were at the table. Even Luce seemed miles away.
“If this is a joke, man,” said Davey, “you lost me somewhere.”
“I should’ve been clued by the money,” I said. “Dono always kept a stack of cash in the house, for emergencies. But there was no money when I searched his hiding place the day he was shot. I knew that some cop hadn’t found and pocketed the roll. Any cop would have also tagged the guns and other illegal shit hidden there as evidence.”
Davey frowned. “So maybe Dono was broke.”
“You knew that hiding place from when we were kids, Davey,” I said. “And how to get into it.”
“I didn’t take any money when I got that bag of clothes and stuff for you, Van. I swear.”
“You’d taken it already, and spent it. You were throwing fifties around, here at the bar when we first met last week. And you bought Juliet that expensive necklace the day after. I should have looked more closely at that, too. Back when we were teenagers, every time you had cash in your pocket, it never lasted more than a day.”
“Van, you’re not thinking right,” said Davey. “I mean, you’re wiped fucking out.”
“But even with all that, I still didn’t see you for Dono’s killer. Until yesterday.”
“Look at you, man. You’re so spaced you can barely sit up straight.”
“I found the truck, Davey.”
I felt the crowd press in a little. It was hard to read Davey’s face. His bright blue eyes held mine steadily.
“When you brought me the duffel bag from the house, you told me you’d looked for the truck where I’d left it in the garage. You said that it was gone when you got there. That was a lie.”
“I never saw the damn truck,” Davey said, loud enough to make Luce and Mike lean back in surprise. “That’s why I lent you Julie’s car, thanks very goddamn much.”
“You went to the truck. You knew that the laptop was inside, that it might lead me to Dono’s killer. You knew all that because I was dumb enough to tell you why the laptop was important, why you had to risk going to the truck with cops hunting through every inch of downtown for me. The laptop was there, and you had to get rid of it.”
“Van, you’re not hearing me. I didn’t care about the fucking computer. Because I didn’t shoot Dono.”
“You had to get rid of the laptop. You couldn’t just remove it from the truck. It would be obvious who’d taken it. So you stole the whole damn truck instead. Jumped the engine and drove it right out of the garage. Ballsy.”
Davey was shaking his head no, over and over. But I thought I saw a flash of pride.
“You were in a hurry,” I said. “You had to meet me at the library. But you had to hide the truck first. Not a lot of places to do that near downtown, not if the cops might be combing every garage.”
Davey grabbed the bottle and poured himself another shot. Mike stared at his brother, looking as if someone had hit him in the back of the head with a plank.
“There’s a gravel lot off Steinbrueck Park,” I said to Mike, “under the viaduct. It’s a pay lot where some of the cruise-line people leave their rides. Sometimes for weeks at a time. Just drop twenty bucks and your keys in the box, then pay the rest when you come back. A good place to stash a car.”
I tried a second sip of the whiskey. It was warm from being in my hand, and it went down easier.
“It’s the same place Davey and I would use when we were kids and we’d boost a car to go joyriding. Or to sell it.”
Davey was staring at me. His mouth was set in a thin line. It wasn’t pride I had seen. It was defiance.
“You drove the truck out of the garage,” I said. “And you took it to the best place you knew to hide it. Trouble was, I knew it, too.”
“You fucking punk,” muttered Corcoran from where he stood. Davey shrank back.
While I’d been talking to Davey, a group had gathered around us. Maybe a dozen men or more. Luce had left the table. If there were any citizens left in the bar other than Mike, I didn’t see them.
“Last night,” I said, “I went looking. I found the truck in the lot off Steinbrueck. The cops have it now. And Julian Formes’s laptop. You had to leave that in the truck. You couldn’t be carrying it when you met me.”
“Van,” said Davey. He reached a hand across the table, placed it on my arm. “Van. The truck might have been where you say, all right? But I wasn’t the one who put it there.”
“You were,” I said. “It’ll be easy enough to prove. Fingerprints in the truck, maybe. You must have caught a cab back to the library, probably from in front of the Marriott or the Edgewater. The driver will remember you.”
“Circumstantial,” Davey said. If I hadn’t been watching his face, I wouldn’t have made out the word.
Willard was behind Davey, his shadow falling across Davey’s shoulder.
Hollis nudged me on the shoulder. “No reason to talk about all this now,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. “We can take our time later.”
I looked at Hollis and around the table at Corcoran and Willard and the others. Hard men. Angry.
“If anybody touches him,” I said, “it’ll be me.”
Hollis stared at me for a moment. He nodded and eased off.
I turned back to Davey. “Yeah, all of that is circumstantial,” I said. “But there’s still the laptop. Before long the cops will be able to listen to each of the recordi
ngs. Including the conversation between you and Dono, right before you put the gun up against his head. That will be as good as a confession.”
The bottle of Redbreast was almost empty. I poured the last of it into Davey’s tumbler. “Unless you want to say it to my face.”
He waited a long moment and then took the glass. His fingers were trembling. He wrapped his other hand around them.
“I told him,” Davey said. “I told Dono about that night with Bobby Sessions and those two skinhead freaks. I told him you pulled my ass out of the fire and I saved you right back, before they could blow you away. If Dono had a soul, he should be fucking proud of you.” Davey stared at his hands, holding the glass. “Instead you skipped town to get away from him, and now he leaves the bar to somebody else. He had to make it right.”
“And you had a gun.”
“I was wasted. I thought if Dono finally knew the whole story, he’d see that you deserved a fuck lot better from him.” Davey shook his head no again. “When I told him, his eyes went dead. And then I thought, ‘No, I’m dead. He’s going to kill me.’ He walked straight over to the side table, and I remembered that he kept a pistol in the drawer there. You showed it to me once.”
I’d probably told Davey about the gun way back when I’d shown him Dono’s hiding place. Just a kid, trying to seem cool.
Davey looked up finally, held my gaze. “I shot him. I didn’t mean to.” Somebody standing behind Willard cursed. Davey flinched at the sound. “I swear it.”
“You should have told me what happened,” I said. “Even if you couldn’t turn yourself in, you should’ve told me.”
“It was for you. I messed up, but I was trying to help. You know that, right?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what the answer was.
“Van,” Willard said. “Clear out of here.”
Jimmy Corcoran nodded. “We got this.” Someone behind him laughed, one single humorless bark.
I looked across the table at the press of men.
“Davey’s turning himself in,” I said.
“Dono is our guy, too,” said Corcoran. “Don’t make this into something worse.”
“Hey,” Hollis said to him.
I stood up. “Nobody’s stopped me yet, Jimmy.”
Willard edged forward, half a step. Corcoran smiled.
“The police are coming.” It was Luce. She elbowed her way through the circle. “I called them.”
We all looked at her. Was she bluffing?
“Detective Guerin said they have a squad car on the block already,” Luce said.
Hollis exhaled heavily. “Clever girl.”
“Lucky,” said Willard. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to Davey or to me.
Luce glared at the men. “No more trouble over Davey Tolan. He isn’t worth it.”
I took Davey by the arm and got him up. He was nearly limp with fear. We could wait for Guerin outside.
The men blocking our way moved, just enough.
AGE ELEVEN
I’d been living in the Rolfssons’ foster home for one hundred forty-two days. I knew the number exactly because I wrote it in the corner of each day on the Amazing Spider-Man calendar on my bedroom wall. I’d done the same thing every night at the Garbers’ house before the Rolfssons—it had been a NASCAR calendar there—and at the foster home I’d been placed at before that one.
Added up, it was two hundred twelve days plus one hundred seventy-seven days plus the hundred forty-two at the Rolfssons’ for a grand total of five hundred thirty-two. Five hundred thirty-three, really, counting the day that Granddad had been arrested at Farrelly’s.
Twelve hundred and ninety-four days to go, in his five-year sentence. But I tried not to think about that.
Out in the living room, Aidan and little Roberta were shrieking at each other over whose turn it was to have the beanbag chair. Aidan was seven, and Roberta was six and much smaller, but she usually got her way.
It was the same every night. Carl and Loreen would let the little kids fight it out until Wheel of Fortune started, and then Carl would tell them to hush up. Everything Carl said sounded flat. He never looked at any of us when he talked.
He and Loreen weren’t bad. Lazy, I guess. They liked to sit on the couch all the time. They took up most of it. But they never hit the little kids, and only Loreen would yell when things got too crazy. And they ordered pizza a lot.
There had been a fourth kid living with Carl and Loreen when I’d first arrived. A fourteen-year-old named Hunter. Hunter was fat—like Carl—but really strong and PO’d that he had to split his bedroom with a turd like me. He knew how to punch in the stomach, where it wouldn’t show. The one time I’d tried to fight back, he’d hit me three hard smacks until I threw up on the lawn and had to clean up the mess with the garden hose before Loreen saw.
Carl and Loreen smoked pot a couple of times a week. Not in front of us. I knew because when I came home from school, the back patio would smell like old socks and burning wet leaves. Granddad used to cuss about the same smell wafting over from our neighbor’s yard, back in the house.
One night I went into Loreen’s purse and found the pot—I’d known what it looked like from cop shows—and took a few clumps of it out of her plastic bag. The clumps were sticky and smelled a lot stronger than the back patio did. I wrapped them up in a wad of paper towels to keep the smell down. Then I took a bunch of aluminum foil and wrapped it around the pot and one of Hunter’s toy guns.
The toy looked pretty stupid, all covered in foil with lumps where the pot was. But I didn’t know if the metal detectors at Ringdall High that Hunter was always bragging about—his new school was “tough, turd,” he said, it was “hardcore”—if the detectors would beep at anything metal or if they could actually see what stuff looked like inside kids’ bags.
In the morning I shoved the toy way down to the bottom of Hunter’s school backpack. About ten minutes later, he did his waddle-run out the door to catch the bus to Ringdall.
When I got home from school, Mr. Benbie was there. Mr. Benbie was the man from Social who shuffled me and other kids around homes. He was in the TV room talking to Aidan and Roberta, his thin body hunched forward and almost vibrating. He told me to have a seat—I plopped down in the beanbag chair—and Mr. Benbie went back to asking questions. Had they seen Mr. or Mrs. Rolfsson smoke anything, like a cigarette? The little kids kept shaking their heads no without saying a word. Roberta was trying not to cry. Carl and Loreen were in the kitchen, talking in quick whispers.
When Mr. Benbie let the kids go and talked to me, I said yes, I knew what marijuana was, and no, I hadn’t seen any here. I told him I didn’t think Mr. and Mrs. Rolfsson did anything like that. They’d told us drugs were very bad.
Mr. Benbie asked the same questions a couple of times, in different ways. It was easy.
Pretty soon Mr. Benbie nodded and went into the kitchen. I stayed in the living room and played with Roberta and Aidan until he left, pushing Hunter along in front of him. Hunter was carrying his suitcase. His fat face was white and sweaty. As he glanced at us, I mimed taking a drag off a joint. His eyes got wide and his mouth opened, but Mr. Benbie was already shoving him out the door.
After that day it was just Roberta and Aidan and me living at the Rolfssons’. Carl and Loreen let me stay in my room most of the time, except when I had to help with the kids. I always said I had homework, and after the first couple of weeks they never checked to see if I was doing it.
Tonight it was language arts. The book was open on my bed. The assignment was to write something about the theme of the story we’d read in class. Instead I was concentrating on tying and untying knots in a shoelace using only one hand. I had two square knots and one granny in it already, but untying was harder. I worked at it while listening to the TV. The audience clapping for every guess sounded like waves.
At the Garber foster house, I’d been able to see Davey once in a while—that was the only good thing about the place—b
ut at the Rolfssons’ I was farther away and Carl wouldn’t drive me. Maybe after school was over for the year, I could take a bus.
The doorbell rang.
“Who is it?” Carl hollered. He wouldn’t get off the couch for people selling stuff.
I just barely heard the answer over the blare of a commercial. Ron Benbie.
I was up and out of my room right away. Was it another kid? I’d have to give up half my bedroom. Carl heaved himself off the couch and trudged through the dining room to open the door. Aidan had snuck onto the beanbag next to Roberta. They were both focused on what was happening, just like me.
After a few moments, Carl stepped aside and Mr. Benbie came in.
My grandfather walked in right behind him.
He looked over Mr. Benbie’s shoulder and saw me. My head was spinning a little. Granddad had a beard. A big one. It was like fireplace ash. And his hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost down to his shoulders.
Next to Carl and Mr. Benbie, he looked like a wolf. Big and lean and mean.
“What’s wrong, Carl?” Loreen said over the TV.
“Nothing, Mrs. Rolfsson,” said Mr. Benbie, “just checking in.” Carl waved Mr. Benbie and my grandfather toward the kitchen. Roberta peeked at the men from behind me. I started toward Granddad, and he held up a hand to stop me.
“Pack up your things,” he said to me, his voice just like I remembered it.
“Why’s Mr. Benbie here, Van?” Aidan said.
“It’s good,” I said, and turned and ran down the hall toward my bedroom. I had a small canvas suitcase, given to me when I’d moved from the Social hall to my first foster home. I opened the suitcase and dumped out the old clothes inside and began stuffing it full of things I really needed. My Game Boy. A heavy leather coat, which was my grandfather’s but which I’d told the counselors was mine before they whisked me out of our house to Social. A travel set of tools. And from under the bottom drawer of my dresser where I’d taped them, my set of lockpicks. I grabbed my school backpack and shoved the language-arts book into it and slung it over my shoulder and ran with it and the suitcase back down the hall.
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