by Paul Griffin
“First, you’re lying. You don’t have any money.” Her eyes had ticked right when she mentioned it. “Second, the idea of helping you halve your sentence and getting you back out and at large on the street two years earlier? Not terribly appealing.” I got up to go.
“It was a business transaction, Jay. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would’ve. It was unstoppable. Take comfort in that.”
“But it wasn’t somebody else, Angela. It was you. For the rest of your life, you’ll be the girl who burned Nicole Castro.”
“Dude, you are hilarious. So that’s her problem, then. And you really think people will remember any of this? It’s old news already, now that there isn’t going to be a trial. Then again, Nicole’ll probably remember it, right? But even you, Jay. Year from now, you’ll be moon-eyed over some other fantasy queen, and Nicole Castro will just fade from your heart. I’m saying cheer up, champ. Time heals all wounds, excluding burns. Hey Jay, how much are you hating on me right now, scale of one to ten?”
I turned back to take her in one last time. She showed just the slightest hint of a smile as she waited for my answer. She would be out in four years, maybe less. With therapy, counseling, meds, she’d recover, get a job, marry, have children. Her kids would never know what she had done. And then there was Nicole: How would she get through the next sixty or seventy years with half a face? “Angela, to be perfectly honest, you’re too much of a mess to hate. I feel sorry for you.”
Her half smile turned into a nasty little pout. Her lips quivered. She winced as she wiped her split lip. “Look at me. Look what they did to my face.” She glared at me now. “That bitch deserved it.” She pounded her fists into the Plexiglas. “I hate you, Jay. Seriously. You and Nicole.” She slammed her head into the Plexiglas, and then slammed it again. The guards were on her and pulling her away from the glass.
A horrible thought came to me only just then. “The storage place,” I said.
“I hate you, Nazzaro!”
“Was it in Marathon?”
“I hate you.” She sobbed as they dragged her around the corner and out of sight.
FIFTY
Angela Sammick was right. I needed a lot more than that wrestling match video to connect her to Dave. Somewhere she had to have something big on him. Why else wouldn’t he have come forward and told Detective Barrone about Angela?
The cops had her laptop, and she wouldn’t have kept anything incriminating on that drive anyway. She undoubtedly had it stored in the cloud somewhere. I could hack her password, but without a username, I had no chance of finding it. The best I could do was go back to those BinarTREE phone tower logs. I kept picking up on a data string that Angela repeatedly imported from a cutters’ chat room. I spent the rest of that Tuesday night throwing darts into the void, setting up my laptop to shoot endless combinations of usernames and passwords into iCloud and the thousands of other digital storage warehouses. I was firing scattershot. Finding Angela Sammick’s data was hopeless. I was feeling pretty down. Nicole still hadn’t called me back.
Wednesday morning, my father woke me, shaking my foot. He was on the phone. He tapped out a one-hand piano tune on the wall, and then he punched the air in silent triumph. “Mrs. Lyles, I cannot thank you enough. You’ve literally saved the boy’s life. Your compassion will inspire him to be a better man. He truly is sorry.” They talked for another minute, my father clicked off the phone, and we high-fived. Now all I had to do was get Detective Barrone to drop the obstruction of justice charge.
“You don’t seem so happy,” my father said.
I smiled, but I had a hard time maintaining eye contact with him. Steve Nazzaro was hiding something down in Marathon.
“Dude, chill, she’ll call,” Cherry said. This was Wednesday afternoon the tenth of November, though it felt like September. The weather was sixty degrees and sunny. We were hanging out in a skate park at the edge of the Meadowlands. “So if the detective gets the obstruction of justice charge to stick, where’s that leave you?”
I was showing her how to coast a curb rail. “For starters, forget about college with a felony on my record.”
“I thought you didn’t want to go anyway. Oh, I get it, we want to follow Nicole to school now.” Cherry landed hard on the recycled rubber. “I refuse to keep bruising my ass. I’ll do anything but this. Your call.”
I studied the highway. The I-95 traffic was moving fast. “Let’s go for a ride.”
Cherry’s duct-taped Civic chugged south down I-95 to the Marathon exit. “What are we looking for, by the way?” Cherry said.
“Something bad.”
“Gee, I hope we find it. Loving the specificity too.”
“Watch the-”
“I see it.”
The car practically bottomed out in a pothole that was more of a crevasse. “Then why did you drive through it?”
“I like scaring you.”
The service road cut through industrial wasteland and dead-ended at a strip mall. I didn’t see anything that looked like a storage/mail receiving facility. I pointed out one of the shops. “That one showed up on my father’s AmEx statement as food/bev.”
“The Saloon?” Cherry said.
“Actually the Salon. Wonder where the second o went.”
“Oprah took it.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I’m gonna go with a saloon is an establishment that serves alcoholic beverages. Guessing. You’re thinking it’s not a saloon, though. You’re thinking it’s more of a salon. Why would they put a whorehouse in the middle of a godforsaken industrial wasteland where the only customers you’re going to get are-”
“Truckers?”
“Oh.”
Inside was crushed velvet, tassel-trimmed tables, dusty chandeliers. “Doesn’t it feel like we’re in that historical museum they have out in Vegas?” Cherry said.
“I haven’t been there.”
“I haven’t either. I just watch a lot of TV.”
A cocktail waitress played piano, Debussy, “Clair de Lune.” The dude behind the bar said, “Help you?” He was chipping ice with a mini-harpoon.
“We work for Steve,” I said. “At the newspaper?”
The dude squinted. He was the son of Captain Ahab and Captain Hook. I nudged Cherry to get her to stop staring at the man’s eye patch. She hid behind me.
“He wanted us to pick up the jacket,” I said. “Blue blazer, size fifty-two tall? Said he left it here a week or so ago?”
“What was the last name again?”
“Would he have told you his real last name?” I said.
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Well, I mean, you know.”
The captain frowned. “My friend, this isn’t that kind of saloon.”
“Told you,” Cherry said.
“Steve Nazzaro,” I said.
“As in rhymes with Sbarro?”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, you mean Steve. Steve’s a sweetheart. So shy, you know?”
“That’s what we call him at the office,” Cherry said. “Shy Steve.”
“Yeah,” Ahab said. “He gets really nervous before he plays.”
“Plays?”
“The piano. We have these open mic nights, poetry, music, whatever you want. It’s a safe environment to experiment with new material or just to get yourself up in front of people. The truck drivers are a good audience, you know? They don’t expect Rachmaninoff, and they’ll clap sincerely for ‘Chopsticks’ too. Steve’s pretty good, though. He did just fine the other night. Seemed to be a lot more comfortable in front of the crowd. He’s in the newspaper business? I thought that business went out of business.” He gave us two sodas with cherries. We got hamburgers and left a big tip.
“Tell Steve I said sorry about the jacket,” that nice old pirate said.
Back in the car, Cherry patted my knee. “This must be very traumatizing for you. It’s not every day one finds out his father is actually a pretty nice guy.”
/> An hour and a half later, we were back in Brandywine. My boss had called to beg me to come in for a few hours to help stock the major shipment of Christmas crap that had landed that afternoon. I said yes because Jimmy did me a lot of favors with scheduling, and I was too out of my mind to hack anyway. I had no idea where to start looking for the person who contracted Angela to hit Nicole.
Cherry was going to drop me off at BJ’s, but when we stopped in at Starbucks to pick up her check, the girl working behind the counter was looking really sick, and Cherry covered for her. BJ’s was just a mile up the road, and I wanted to walk. I was hoping the fresh air would wake me up. I was about fifty feet from the warehouse entrance when a black BMW SUV pulled alongside me. The tinted window rolled down. “Heya Jay,” Dave Bendix said.
“Dave, I kind of feel like you’re following me.”
“I went into BJ’s, and they said you were on your way. Jay, man, I really screwed up. You’re the only person I can talk to about this. Nicole’s in trouble, and I need you to help me help her. We’ll grab a quick slice, five minutes of your time, max. It’s a life or death thing.”
I had this idea that if I nudged him just right, gently, I could get him to turn himself in; that maybe he wanted to turn himself in but just needed emotional support to get himself to go to the precinct. He was looking for a little compassion. I was ready to give it to him. He’d messed up, hooking up with Angela. They both had. He’d tried to cover his mistake. It was blowing up in his face now. He was coming clean and ready to accept the consequences. I respected that.
The shotgun seat was loaded with wrestling crap, a net bag filled with pads. Dave started to swing it into the back, but it was too big to squeeze over the seat back.
“I’ll get in the back,” I said.
“I’m really scared, Jay,” Dave said. “Word is you’re like this phenomenal hacker. Can you find out something for me?”
“Depends.”
“There’s this lie going around about me, and I want to know who’s spreading it. You heard it, right? That I was doubling on Nicole with Angela Sammick?”
I nodded, immediately regretting my yes. The theory that Dave and Angela were hooking up hadn’t gone public yet.
“That’s what I thought,” Dave said. His eyes flicked to the rearview. By the time I turned around to check the cargo spot, the arm was around my neck, and the chokehold was tightening.
Rick Kerns jerked me backward. My neck was pinned to the edge of the seat back. The BMW sped up and made a quick left toward the highway. I dug at Rick’s arm, but I couldn’t break the hold. I was fading out. It’s not the choke to the windpipe that takes you down. It’s cutting off the carotid arteries, the ones that feed oxygen to your brain. Rick was threatening me, Dave too. I kept hearing “if you ever” but that’s all I remember. When you can’t breathe, listening carefully to what people are saying isn’t exactly a priority.
Looking back, I can only assume they weren’t going to kill me. Dave had gone into BJ’s and asked where I was. He’s going to make me disappear an hour later? No. Then again, how could they just leave it at a threat? They actually thought I would keep my mouth shut about Dave and Angela? What could they have threatened? The only thing they could have said to make me keep quiet was that they would kill Nicole if I opened my mouth. Then again, that probably would’ve had me running to Detective Barrone. I really don’t know what they were going to do with me that night, and I never found out. But at that moment, my neck creaking, my lungs burning, I was sure they were going to kill me, and I panicked. With images of that childhood car crash blinding me, I drove my feet into and through the back of the driver’s seat.
My kick threw Bendix into the steering wheel. The horn sounded briefly as the BMW spun. I hugged the seat back as Kerns was thrown over the seat, into the windshield. The glass webbed around his skull. The car flipped over the guardrail and slid upside down into the gully. I don’t remember anything after that, until the ambulance lights. Somebody said, “Relax, buddy.” So I did. My eyes itched.
Dave had the airbag and made out okay. I was belted in and had the side bag and seatback. Kerns suffered a concussion and shattered a shoulder and both of his arms.
FIFTY-ONE
In the hospital that Wednesday night, or maybe it was into Thursday morning already, I was enjoying the painkillers too much to open my eyes, but I heard Detective Barrone just fine. “He admits to having sex with Angela but denies he put her up to burning Nicole. He insists his father would have disowned him if he found out he was in any way responsible for the acid attack, not to mention withholding information about the perpetrator. Apparently no Bendix has ever not been admitted to Harvard.”
“Those calls,” my father said. “What’d you want to talk with me about anyway?”
“I wanted your expertise. I’d interviewed Angela Sammick’s art teacher, and she’d shown me some of Angela’s work. Some of the pictures looked vaguely familiar, as if she’d copied some paintings that an art historian would be able to identify at a glance. I was looking for you to save me some time.”
“And why are you here now?” my father said.
“To check in on your son. I’m glad he’s all right.”
“So you’re dropping the obstruction of justice charge?”
“No.”
Later, I woke hungry. My father was still there, dozing in a chair at my bedside. I pretended to be asleep, enjoying the fact that we could be in the same room and relatively peaceful, even if it was a hospital room. The doctor came in. I watched through slit eyes as he showed my father the latest MRI on his iPad. “He’ll be fine,” the doctor said. “I’m releasing him tomorrow. But I just wanted to make you aware that your son has significant scar tissue buildup in his frontal lobe.”
“I am aware of that, Doctor,” my father said.
“This is not from what happened last night,” the doctor said.
“I know.”
“This is from an older injury-”
“I get it, okay? I get it.” He got up and went to the window and ran his hands through his hair, pulling it.
The next morning, Thursday, I felt a soft hand on my cheek. I opened my eyes. Nicole looked beat up, but she was trying to smile. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house.”
“I snuck out.”
“Can you sneak me out?” I took the saline IV out myself, got dressed, and we just walked out, no problem. We stopped in the hospital cafeteria to pick up my father. He’d gone down to grab coffee, but now he wasn’t there. I tried his cell, no pickup. I texted him to let him know I would meet him at home.
We went to the diner. Nicole seemed oddly relaxed-not happy, but calm. The real Recluse was still out there, and Nicole didn’t seem to care. I was beginning to think Schmidt was right. The guy who paid to have Nicole burned had gotten what he’d wanted, and he’d gotten away with it.
Nicole picked up on my anger. “It doesn’t help,” she said. “Believe me, if it did, I’d have no problem hating them day and night, Angela and whoever put her up to this.”
“And Dave?”
She looked down at her burger. She’d only had a bite. She pushed her plate away.
FIFTY-TWO
We went back to Nicole’s. She wanted to hang. All I’d wanted to do was get her back home safe, and now I had to get home myself, back to my computer. “I have to check in with my dad,” I said. Nicole seemed sleepy anyway.
Mrs. Castro drove me home. She had this meditation track playing, the word om hummed over and over. It was making me drowsy.
“Jay, I want you to know how grateful I am for all you’ve done for Nicole.”
“I didn’t do anything, ma’am.”
“You got yourself arrested for her. Mr. Castro insists that you let him hire a lawyer for you.”
“My father’ll never go for it.”
“You have to let the police do their job, Jay. I see it. Your anger. You have
to let this go. We all have to move on.”
“Okay,” I said. “I will.”
She frowned and mussed my hair. “You’re horrible.”
My father wanted to go to the Palisades. He went there sometimes to smoke a cigar. “Pete says there’s a regatta going on. We could watch the boats, catch some fresh air, the sunset, grab dinner after?”
“Gotta sleep,” I said. “You go, though. Hang with Pete.”
He hadn’t gotten any decent sleep the night before either, at the hospital. He hit the couch and clicked to a hoops game he’d DVR-ed. He was snoring in five minutes. He was lying on his side, and his gut was hanging out of his undershirt. I wondered if he’d live to fifty.
I kept my bedroom door open with one eye on my father. I had some bullshit history assignment on my laptop screen in case he walked in on me. I followed the BinarTREE maps tracking Angela’s data flow into a chat room called Cutter’s Way. Angela had been using the site heavily. And then there it was again. She’d been calling herself GBAM. It was just such sad stuff. I kept looking at a string Angela was into the night before she was arrested:
GBAM: Blood?
Blood Princess: Howdy GBAM. You stay dry last night?
GBAM: Epic fail. I was going to be good, but at 3am, after my mother was asleep, I couldn’t hold off anymore.
bOYS cUT tOO: Carved the letters WOL into myself. I feel real when I see them.
Up Not Sideways: WOL?
bOYS cUT tOO: Waste of life. Why can’t I stop?
GBAM: Oh bct. I want you to love you. I want to help you stop. I want to help me. But how? It feels too good, burning blue.
Reading that last line in the string, I can’t say I forgave Angela Sammick, but I hated her a little less. That was the best I could do.
I didn’t have time to try to figure out what GBAM meant, but I figured if it was her username for Cutter’s Way, maybe she’d used it as the access name for her online storage vault. I took a shot at the major cloud vaults: