Burning Blue

by Paul Griffin

  I was standing in front of the car, penning her in. “Maybe this isn’t your car.”

  She turned over the ignition.

  “Okay, so it is your car,” I said. Which meant that Cherry DiBenneditto was not the Recluse. This also meant maybe the driver of the black Civic was. Were Detective Barrone and Schmidt right? Was the acid thrower a woman after all? Any male on my suspect list-Kerns, Dave Bendix-was if not absolutely safe, then safer. Or maybe the woman in the car really was working for Shane Puglisi or another gossip rag, stalking Nicole for a picture. Or maybe she wasn’t connected to Nicole at all. She hadn’t followed Nicole out of the lot. She’d gone the opposite direction. Then again, if I didn’t check her out, and she was the Recluse, I would have to hold myself responsible for anything that might happen to Nicole.

  A flicker zigzagged in my peripheral vision. I sat on the hood of Cherry’s Civic to catch my breath. She came out brandishing the Club, but when she saw I was kind of out of it, she lowered her weapon. “Jay?”

  “Cherry, I’m sorry. I had you mixed up with the spider.”

  “Happens all the time. The spider. Sure. What are you on?”

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Are you trying to be a jerk?”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Hello, you know where I work?” Her eyes softened. “You can buy me a slice.”

  “Pizza’s great,” I said, even though my stomach was twisting to accommodate the ever-expanding, four-pound-ball of cheese there after my pizza slam with Nicole.

  “Sbarro?” she said.

  “Hardy har.”

  She had no idea what I was talking about. “Dude, what is your problem?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  I ended up forgetting my wallet, and she had to pay. Not that I touched my slice. I told her why I hadn’t texted her back, that I was crushing on Nicole.

  “I figured,” she said. “What’s she like?”

  I told her.

  She’d heard about the attack. She rolled her eyes. “You know, of course, that this only makes me like you more. Crushing on a disfigured girl? That’s like an OWN movie waiting to happen. You really think somebody’s spying on you guys?”

  “I’m somewhere between possibly and probably. Her engine coughed before it rolled over. Means it was cold. Means she was sitting there for a while, watching.”

  “Or talking on the phone. Or taking a nap because she’d worked a double and started to fall asleep at the wheel on her way home. Or you’re totally paranoid. I actually do need coffee now. You?”

  “Definitely.”

  She headed for the counter. I pulled my Nokia to see if Angela had run down the license plate, but my battery was dead. Cherry had left her phone on the table. I messed with it to make it untraceable. She’d notice next month when her data bill was zero.

  “Jay?” Cherry was looking over my shoulder.

  “What the hell are you doing, sneaking up on me like that?” I said.

  “Getting my wallet, which, as you can see, I left next to my brand-new phone that cost me thirty hours worth of slinging lattes. What the hell are you doing? My poor Droid. What’d you do to her?”

  My head was pounding. “You’ll get much better reception now.”

  “You’re the dude who asked me for help texting Dad, right? Wait, you’re a hacker.”

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

  “It is bad!”

  I needed sleep. I was really losing it. I had willingly let Nicole know I was a hacker, and Angela had found me out on her own, but getting caught by Cherry was just sloppy. Too late now. “I have to use your phone.”

  “I don’t have a ton of minutes.”

  “You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “How did you get into the DMV? You know that says Restricted Access, right?”

  “I’m a member.”

  “Of what?”

  I ran the plates I’d seen on the black Civic. Sure enough, they tracked back to a red RAV4 that reported its plates stolen that afternoon. “She boosted somebody’s tags,” I said. “She tacks them onto her car when she wants to be anonymous. She can’t be driving around in her real plates in case a street camera picks her up doing the loitering thing. If the cops pull her over for speeding or whatever with the bad plates, she plays dumb. ‘What? Those aren’t my license plates.’”

  “I think I might have seen something like this on-”

  “The Shield?”

  “Except on The Shield, they need court orders to do what you’re doing.”

  “I know, so lame. Want to know how many older model black Civics there are in the tri-state area?”

  “I think I may just need to kill myself if I don’t have that information. This is crazy, that you can get into government institutions like this. Imagine if you could hack into the Department of Defense?”

  “Imagine.” I ran the search command into the DMV database.

  “I had you pegged for stoner sexy, but you’re actually geeky sexy. Um, why is my phone flashing red?”

  “Eight thousand, two hundred and twenty-two 1990s model Civics, black, are puttering around New Jersey. That’s too big a list for me to go through on my own. You’d need industrial computing power to work up owner profiles, and then you’d have to cross-reference the potentials with information only the investigating officers have. Cherry, I was right. Somebody’s stalking her.”

  “Or you.”

  “This was so much easier when I thought you were stalking me.”

  “I’ll stalk you, if you want.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to catch this freak.”

  “You’re not,” she said. “You have to call the cops.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Because?”

  “They’d want to know how we got our information about the bad plates.”

  “How you got the information. I just watched you break my phone.” She frowned. “I could do it. Let the cops know, I mean.”

  “No, I don’t want to get you involved.”

  “Not me. My father. He knows a lot of detectives. He could drop a tip about the Civic, and if he asked them to keep it anonymous, they would.”

  “Okay, you couldn’t tell me your dad’s a cop before I hacked the DMV in front of you?”

  “He’s an undertaker, but the funeral home has a contract with the state, special discounts for civil servants, their families. They do a ton of business with the police. What do you want me to tell him to do?”

  “Ask him to give the cops the plate number and tell them that the driver of this vehicle, a black Civic, was acting suspiciously in the environs of Valedale Boulevard.”

  “Acting suspiciously how?”

  “Driving around parking lots, checking out parked cars or something. The anonymous witness said the driver was probably a woman. Have your dad say she was particularly interested in cars with baby seats. Actually, that’s pretty good. The kidnapping thing always gets the cops hopping. They’ll check all the local security cameras, maybe get a picture of the woman’s face, run it against the mug-shot database with face recognition software. You never know, we might get lucky.”

  “You don’t have a better description than ‘a woman’?”

  “She was in silhouette with the sun behind her, but she had nice hair. You know, long, a little wavy. Pretty, like yours.”

  “Like mine. Great.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Cherry dropped me off at the gate to Nicole’s community, or “the village,” as she liked to say. “I’ll call you when my dad gets that info,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “I do.” She waved as she left. I wasn’t exactly sure how, but she reminded me of me. In spite of that, I liked her.

  The gate guard phoned the Castros, and another guard drove me to the house. Nicole’s neighborhood was too quiet. The house was big and old. Placard out front: “Histori
cal Landmark, Est. 1844.” The doorknocker was this huge Siberian tiger head, something out of Anna Karenina, a book I never read but told everybody I did to sound smart. I felt like I should have been wearing a top hat and cape as I rang the bell.

  Mrs. Castro was happy to see me. She said Nicole was out with her dad, but she was supposed to be back soon. “I just made pizza, super-healthy, whole wheat crust, no cheese, just vegetables.”

  “Sounds amazing.” Blehk.

  She led me through this enormous house toward the kitchen. The rug tassels had been combed. Even the fire burned neatly, three perfect plumes. “That real?”

  “Of course not.”

  They needed a golden retriever, and they would have nailed the center spread in Better Homes and Gardens. “No dog?”

  She made a face and tapped her nose. “Nicole’s allergies.”

  She served me this huge slice of vegetable pizza. Alfalfa sprouts on pizza should be a capital crime. “Best I ever had,” I said.

  “Do you think you could get your father to sign my copy of his book?”

  “No problem.”

  She scanned a bookshelf built into the kitchen wall, all art books. She hit the intercom. “Sylvia?”

  “What?” Definitely not pleased. Brief snippet of talent show TV in the background, the final round, crowd roaring.

  “Did you see my book, the old one, Steven Nazzaro, After Beauty?”

  “It’s in your studio, on that small table by the easel.” She huffed, “I’ll get it.”

  “No, darling, I’ll get it.”

  “I’ll get it, I said.”

  Mrs. Castro slumped back in her chair and closed her eyes. “I thought having an only child was the way to do it, you know? Shower her with happiness. But they still get ruined, no matter your watchfulness, your worry, your singular devotion. Ruin. It’s just what comes. People see beauty, and they have to destroy it.” Her blouse was light pink, and tears splattered darkly. She could have been shot twice in the chest. She wiped her eyes and collected herself. “I’m so sorry. Don’t listen to me. Eat your pizza, Jay. Please.” She went to the refrigerator. “They were supposed to be back by now. ‘Just a quick ride,’ he said.” She poured me a glass of milk. “Jay, what are you not telling me?”

  I told her about the black Civic and gave her the plate number. I didn’t have to tell her the plates were stolen. Detective Barrone would find that out fast enough.

  “They said it wouldn’t happen again, the police,” Mrs. Castro said. “And that godawful Schmidt.” She grabbed the phone. She lit a cigarette while she waited for the call to go through. Her hands shook. “He’s not picking up. They turn their phones off when they’re with each other, because they think they don’t spend enough time together. Now he wants to spend all this time with her.” She was talking to herself. I heard the beep. “Rafael, I need you to bring Nicole home. Immediately.” She clicked the phone off and then on. I watched her key in the numbers, Barrone’s.

  Sylvia came in.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Sylvia nodded Mrs. Castro’s way. “Now you got her all upset. When she’s upset, she’s not happy until she makes me upset.” She dropped my father’s book onto the table. It was a wreck, thumbed and gripped to the point the cover was coming off.

  The security company put a car on the Castros’ house. Nicole and I hung out in the kitchen. Her parents were having a low-voices fight upstairs. Sylvia was stabbing a bunch of yarn into something that resembled a sweater in the living room, with a direct line of sight to me. She nailed me with eyes that said if I so much as tried to hold Nicole’s hand, she was going to run a knitting needle through the back of my head. Nicole was eyeing me too. “Are you hacking me?”

  “No. No, I’m not, and I won’t.”

  “Promise.”

  “Promise.”

  Her mother was really yelling now. “I want to go up there,” Nicole said. “I want to make them just shut up and look at each other and remember what it was like back when I was little, when they were young, and they were always holding hands. I used to swing from the bridge. You know, the bridge their hands made?”

  Her father came downstairs, heavy footsteps. “Nicole, time to change that bandage.”

  “Dad-”

  “Now, sweetheart. Your mother’s waiting for you.” He eyed me with a frown. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “Thanks, but I have my skateboard.”

  “That wasn’t a question.” He was about three inches shorter than I was, weighed less too, but I had no doubt he could tune me up. His eyes were just scary. Blue like Nicole’s, but cold.

  The interior of Mr. Castro’s BMW was immaculate. He drove right at the speed limit. “I know your father,” he said. “Rather, I met him. But you knew that.”

  “Yessir.”

  “My wife was never great at keeping secrets. Bit of a hothead, your father, if you don’t mind my saying. How is it for you, living with a critic?”

  “Terrific,” I said.

  “You smoke?” Maybe it wasn’t a question. “I smell it on you.”

  “I think that was Mrs. Castro.”

  “She was smoking in the house? Just what Nicole needs, cancer in the air.” We’d come to a light. “Look, we’re both men here. We know that when women are vulnerable, some men will try to take advantage. Now, I know you’re not one of those types of fellows.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “That’s fine. Good. Because I think my little girl has gone through quite enough these past few weeks, ey?”

  The light had turned green. The guy behind us honked, but Mr. Castro stayed put. He kept giving me those mean eyes, sharp green now in the reflection of the traffic light.

  “Mr. Castro? I’m not out to hurt your daughter. I’m simply trying to be her friend.”

  He nodded and drove. “She likes you a lot. She doesn’t know you, but she thinks she does. And isn’t it always that way, for all of us? But you can’t, son. Right?”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Ever really know anybody. Not even yourself. Do you agree? Don’t be afraid to disagree with me.”

  “I’d like to think that’s not true.”

  “Indeed. We all want to think that way. But the sooner you confront reality, the sooner you’ll be able to move on. Forward. We must keep moving forward.”

  I wanted to get out of that car so bad. “I’m over there, next right onto Valedale. I can get out at the corner.”

  He kept driving, right into the lot.

  “I can get out here, sir, or just by the mailbox there would be great.”

  He drove me all the way up to the lobby. The takeout containers were still there, but the rats had licked them clean. Mr. Castro frowned. “Is he home?”

  “My father? Why?”

  “Not that I think anybody would be foolish enough to try anything with you, but I promised Nicole and her mother I wouldn’t leave you alone.”

  “He’ll be home soon.” Okay, so in this case soon meant two days, but I would have said anything to get out of that car.

  He gave me a hard nod and wink. “Thank you.”

  “Sir?”

  “For the information about that car. For being alert enough to get the license plate. That was well done.”

  “No problem.” I tried the door but it was locked with the child-proof safety.

  “You were looking out for my daughter. You have my gratitude.” He shook my hand. I thought he was going to break it. “You need a haircut.

  “Yessir, I’ll get right on that.”

  “Do.” He pulled his hand away quickly and the automatic locks clunked up. I got out, and the BMW zipped out of the lot. On my way in, I picked up the takeout trash and chucked it into the Dumpster.

  The Castros had private security, but in my building we didn’t even have security cameras. That woman in the Civic knew where I lived. Now I was the one peeking around corners. I went through the apartment room by room, closet by closet, wondering just w
hat I would do if I found somebody in there. I plugged in my phone for a recharge, and two texts from Angela popped up. The first told me what I already knew, that the license plates on the black Civic backtracked to a red RAV4. The second let me scratch Chrissie Vratos from my suspect list. Angela was able to confirm that Chrissie was at her dentist’s when Nicole was hit. She’d filed a note from her mother with the attendance office, requesting that Chrissie be allowed to leave school early that day for a root canal, but records at the dentist’s office showed Chrissie had come in to get her teeth whitened. All of my female suspects had been crossed off the list, except one: Nicole. I was desperate for any information that would rule her out as somebody somehow involved in the attack.

  On the kitchen counter the clunky old landline message machine blinked. I hit PLAY, expecting to hear my father’s voice and an apology for being bombed when he called in the night before. The caller was Detective Jessica Barrone: “This is a message for Steven Nazzaro. Steve, I’ve left word for you twice now. I’d appreciate a call back.”

  After my ride with Mr. Castro, I had to face the possibility that my father was somehow involved in this thing-inadvertently, not as the acid thrower, of course, but maybe as an unwitting causal agent. Whatever had gone down between Mr. Castro and him must have been pretty bad to keep Mr. Castro mad so many years later.

  I wormed into my father’s email. He’d gotten a warning from E-ZPass about approaching a tollbooth too quickly, seventy miles south of Brandywine, down I-95, at an exit called Marathon. I didn’t know anything about the place, except that it wasn’t near Philadelphia, where he was supposed to be. I clicked up some history on the area, heavily industrial, at least until the economy tanked. Now it was a wasteland of abandoned factories. He’d gotten off the highway at 21:36 last night, and then back on at 23:19. What was he doing down in no-man’s-land for an hour and forty-three minutes?