“Did you tell them that?”
He looked down at the coffee table. Boy, it’s never a good sign when people look down instead of right at you when they’re talking to you.
“I was scared, Mike,” he said. “After we got out of there, I was really jazzing, you know? I told them someone saw us run out of the store. I said the person who saw us could probably identify me for sure. I said, there was a girl in there, too. She saw everything.” He shook his head. “They really freaked out. That’s when I realized that if the girl went to the cops, it could be good for me. She could say I wasn’t involved.” He looked at me. “She’s some sharp girl, noticing those three Cokes with everything else that was happening.”
“She says you put them back in the cooler.”
He shrugged. “I have a record, Mike. They’ve got my prints. I thought if I put them back … ”
Right.
“Anyway, there I was, hoping the girl would show up so she could back me up when I said I had nothing to do with it. And there they were, hoping she wouldn’t show up because maybe she could identify them. Then nothing happened. The girl didn’t go to the cops.”
“But somehow they knew I was looking for her.”
Vin’s eyes met mine. “I know. There was a guy in there, Mike, that I shouldn’t have talked to, but I did. I was going crazy, you know, worrying about what was going to happen to me. I couldn’t talk to any of the staff—they write everything down. I couldn’t talk to my mother. So I talked to this guy who, it turns out, knows someone who knows the guy who had the gun. I didn’t know that, Mike. I swear I didn’t. I told him I was scared because someone had identified me. I told him you were my only chance.”
“You told this guy I was looking for the girl?”
He nodded. “I guess he passed it along, Mike. I’m sorry. But no harm done, right?”
“They followed us, Vin. They followed Rebecca and me. Because you told them we were looking for the girl.”
“Yeah,” Vin said. “But I didn’t tell them that you found her.”
“You didn’t know that until she went to the cops.”
“Yeah, I did,” Vin said. He grinned at me. “You never were a good liar, Mike. The last time you came to see me, when I asked you if you’d found the girl and you said no, I knew you were lying. But I didn’t tell anyone that. I told them what you told me. I told them that you struck out.”
He made it sound like that made him some kind of hero, when the truth was that if he’d passed the word along to his friends, and if they had got to Amanda … I shuddered when I remembered what they had done to Sal. If they’d done the same thing to Amanda, she never would have agreed to go to the cops. For sure she would never have agreed to identify them. I was having trouble breathing all of a sudden. I wanted to get out of there. But before I left, I had to know one more thing.
“How did they know where Sal lives?” I said.
“I already told you, Mike. I don’t know.” He looked me right in the eye when he said it. “When I told them someone saw us run out of the store and that I was pretty sure he could identify me, they asked me if I knew who it was. I said I thought it was some guy who used to go to the same school as me way back when. But I didn’t tell them his name, I swear it. Jeez, Mike, do you really think I’d fix it so those guys would go after Sal? I know these guys, Mike. I know what they’d do.”
“You didn’t tell them where he moved to?”
“What?” I don’t believe I’d ever seen Vin look so surprised. “When did he move?”
“A few months back. His mother had to sell the house on account of his dad being sick. They had to move.”
“No kidding. You’d have thought my mom would have mentioned it.” Vin’s house was on the next street over from Sal’s old house. You could see the house from Vin’s bedroom window. “His old man’s not doing so well then, huh?”
“No,” I said. “He’s not.”
Vin shook his head. “I didn’t tell them anything about Sal. I didn’t even tell them his name. I swear it.”
On his face, I saw sincerity. But what I saw on Vin’s face and what was in his heart didn’t always match up the way they used to when we were kids.
I started to get up. “Hey, Vin, what if I hadn’t found the girl and found a way to get her to tell the truth? What were you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was trying not to think about that. I was counting on you. You really came through for me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I gotta go, Vin.”
“Yeah. Sure. Hey, Mike, wish me luck, huh?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Riel was waiting for me when I got home.
So was Sal. They were in the kitchen together.
Riel got up from the table when I came in. He said, “I have some test papers to mark.” He glanced at me as he went into the other room.
I sat down at the table opposite Sal.
“I’ve been calling you,” I said.
He nodded but didn’t apologize for not taking my calls and not calling me back.
“How are you feeling?” I said.
“I went back to work last night. I’ll be back at school on Monday.” He looked at me. “There was a picture in the paper a couple of days ago, Mike. Did you see it? It was a picture of those two guys that got arrested for the shooting.”
“I saw them on TV.”
“The thing is,” Sal said, “I recognized one of the guys.”
“What?”
“Not from the store,” Sal said. “After I heard the shots, I saw the two guys running down the alley. One of them glanced back over his shoulder—I remember now that I saw him turn. But by then Vin was coming out of the store. I focused on Vin, you know? But that guy, he must have remembered me because … ” He looked up at me. “The night I got beat up, I’d been at work.”
“Yeah?”
“It was really busy that night, but there were only two registers open. Mine was one of them. Anyway, I was pushing through orders, and I was hardly even looking at the customers. Then this guy ordered a couple of our extra value meals. You have to ask, Is that for here or to go?—you know, so you can either put the food on a tray or bag it for takeout. He said it was for here and, I don’t know, I looked up at him and, pop, his eyes went real wide, you know, like he was surprised. I didn’t think about it at the time. We get all kinds of people in there, Mike. And late at night, some of them have been partying or whatever. You never know.”
He shifted in his chair. His face was a papery color and seemed tight, like he was holding something back. I wondered if he was on painkillers.
“Anyway, this guy looked at me. He looked surprised. He paid for the food, but he said he’d changed his mind, he wanted his stuff bagged for takeout. So, big deal, right? People change their minds all the time. I bagged his stuff and he left. I didn’t watch him or anything—I had a whole line of customers. But I noticed he was with another guy.”
I wanted to tell him to say it, just say it. But this was Sal. Sal took his time with things.
“Then I opened the paper the other day, and I saw pictures of the two guys who robbed that store. And you know what, Mike? One of them was the guy who came into the restaurant the night I was beat up.”
Sal was the only person I knew who actually referred to his workplace as a restaurant. Maybe they’d pounded it into his head, the way they made everyone at the video store say, How may I help you? before they said anything else.
“I’m pretty sure now that he recognized me from the day of the robbery. That’s why he looked so surprised. And I think maybe the fact that I looked up at him the way I did when I hadn’t looked at anyone else who was in line ahead of him, I think maybe that made him worry that I’d seen something at the convenience store, you know, that maybe I was putting two and two together and was going to call the cops on him.”
It took a moment for me to get it.
“Those were the guys who beat you up?”
He was still looking at me, and I could tell he was sorry. But there was something else.
“Well, at the time you said it, it was the only thing that made sense to you.” I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been so quick to jump to the same conclusion if our places had been reversed. But he was apologizing. And he was my friend. And in the past week, I had realized how much things had changed between us and how I didn’t like that. I wanted things to be back to the way they used to be. “It’s okay,” I said. “So we’re good then?” I smiled at him. “Still friends?”
He didn’t smile back.
“There’s something else, Mike,” he said. He took in a deep breath and then winced. I guess he still hurt from the beating the two guys had given him. “I was pretty mad. I told Imogen that the only way those guys could have found me was if you told Vin. I—” He shook his head. “I told her you were so tight with Vin, maybe you were even in on it with him.”
I stared at him. Boy, he hadn’t thought much of me.
Sal has big black eyes that sparkle when he’s clowning around but that can look sad too. They looked sad now.
“Imogen told me what she did, Mike. She wanted to get even with you for what you did—for what she thought you did. So she called the cops on you.”
Wait a minute …
“She didn’t tell me she was going to do it. She didn’t tell me until a couple of days ago. I’m sorry, Mike. If I’d known—”
“Imogen called Crime Stoppers on me?”
Sal nodded. “I’m not going out with her anymore, Mike. I told her we’re through.”
I guess that explained all her tears.
“I was wrong to say what I did to Imogen. I was wrong to accuse you of something you didn’t do,” Sal said. “But Mike? I wasn’t wrong about Vin. Maybe he didn’t pull the trigger, but he didn’t try to stop it, either. And he lied to the cops. He tried to protect those guys.”
“He was scared, Sal. He thought those guys were going to—”
“He was scared?” Sal’s whole face changed. It got red. “My mom was scared, Mike. She thought if I kept doing what I was doing, which is telling the truth, someone was going to kill me. For telling the truth, Mike. I was scared. I was scared she was right. You know what it’s like to be beat up like that, Mike? You know what goes through your head when two big guys jump you and start pounding on you and you don’t know what’s going on—it comes into your head, Mike, that maybe they’re trying to kill you. Or, even if they aren’t, that they’re going to kick too hard or they’re going to try to use your head as a football and you’re going to end up a vegetable. That’s what you think about, Mike. You lie there on the ground and you try to curl up and you cover your head with your arms as best you can and you pray they don’t do any permanent damage.”
Jeez.
“I’m sorry, Sal.”
“You know what, Mike? I don’t care if Vin was scared. If you ask me, he had a right to be, hanging out with guys like that. But that was his choice. He decided to hang with those guys. He decided to keep his mouth shut instead of telling the truth. He watched them do what they did, and then he pretended he was just an innocent bystander, he didn’t know anything, he didn’t know those guys. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all, Mike.”
Boy, he was yelling the words at me now.
“Hey, Sal, I didn’t know that.”
Sal didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I’m not mad at you, Mike,” he said finally. “But Vin?” He shook his head. “I don’t care if I never see him again, you know?”
I nodded.
Sal winced again as he got to his feet.
“I gotta go,” he said. “I fell behind in school. I have to catch up.”
“You want to borrow some of my notes?” I said. It was all I had to offer.
He smiled. For the first time in a long time, my friend Sal smiled at me.
“I’m shooting for As this year, Mike,” he said. “And so far I’m doing pretty well. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to take Rebecca up on her offer.”
“Rebecca?”
“Yeah. She said she’d lend me her notes. Plus, I can actually read her writing. See you at school on Monday, okay, Mike?”
I said okay. The truth was, I was looking forward to it.
Riel came into the kitchen after Sal had left.
“So,” he said, “everything’s back to normal?”
“Sort of, I guess.”
Riel sat down where Sal had been sitting just a minute before.
“Mike, there’s something I have to talk to you about.”
Uh-oh. Here it came.
“It’s about Kate, right?” I said.
Riel looked surprised.
“How do you know about Kate?” he said.
I just shrugged.
“Is Susan upset?” I said.
“Upset?”
“You know, because you changed your mind.”
“Susan supports my decision,” Riel said. “I just want to make sure you’re going to be okay with it.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I like Susan,” I said slowly.
“I know you do. And there are going to be a lot of changes around here, what with the wedding and Susan moving in and her crazy schedule, and now mine is going to be even crazier.”
I stared at him.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I thought you were getting back with Kate. I thought you and Susan—”
The look he gave me made me nervous.
“I heard you talking to Dave Jones one day after school,” I said, embarrassed to be admitting to eavesdropping. “It sounded like you were going to break up with Susan, only she didn’t know it yet. Then someone named Kate called you one night and you left the house right away. I thought you were going to meet her.”
He looked at me a little longer, probably to make a point about listening in on other people’s conversations. Then he said, “You’ve got it wrong, Mike. I’m not breaking up with Susan. I’m going back to my old job. And when you’ve been away as long as I have, they make you jump through a lot of hoops first. In my case, they wanted to make sure I was making the right decision.” He meant because he had been shot that time. “I wanted to make sure, too. So I had a few talks with Kate. She works for the police, in human resources. I talked to other people, too. I had to.”
“That’s where you were when you were supposed to be trying out wedding menus, right?” I said.
He nodded. “Susan and I had a long talk that night. She’s okay with it, Mike. As for that night when I went to see Kate … Kate really helped me, Mike. She arranged everything. She’s also an old friend, so I told her if there was ever anything I could do for her, all she had to do was ask.”
Oh.
“She asked, huh?” I said.
“Yeah,” Riel said. “The carpet she waited six months for finally arrived. She had to move all the furniture out of her living room and dining room that night so that the installers could put the carpet in first thing the next morning. I helped her.”
“So you and Susan are still getting married?”
“Of
course we are. I love Susan, Mike.”
“But you’re going to be a cop—police officer—not a teacher?”
“Yeah. You okay with that?”
“I guess so.” If it was what he wanted. “Sure.”
“My hours are going to be a whole lot less regular.”
“I’m going to be sixteen soon,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“You sure? Because—”
“I’ll be fine,” I said again. But, boy, it felt good that he cared enough to ask.
“There one’s more thing,” he said. I braced myself. “We have to go downtown tomorrow after school. To try on tuxedos. Susan wants to cross that off her list.”
Which reminded me. “Susan said I’m in the wedding party, but she didn’t say as what. You want me to be an usher or something?”
“I’m sorry, Mike. With everything else that was going on, I forgot to ask you. I was hoping you’d be groomsman.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an attendant to the groom. Dave’s going to be best man.” He meant Dave Jones, who was his best friend. “You have to be at least eighteen for that job, so he more than fits the bill. But I want you up there with Susan and me when we get married. How about it?”
I told him I’d be honored.
And I meant it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Norah McClintock is the author of several mystery series for teenagers and a five-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile Crime Novel. McClintock was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec. She lives in Toronto with her husband and children.
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