Snow Job

by Charles Benoit

  I should have been dead.

  When the stacks hit the table, and it was clear it wasn’t money, I figured that was going to be the last thing I ever saw.

  Obviously, it wasn’t.

  What I did see was Reg’s coked eyes bug out as he pounded the table with his fist.

  I saw Lester pick up a fat stack of newspaper clippings, give it a thumb-through, then toss it back on the pile, not even trying to hide his smirk.

  And when I glanced over at Steve, expecting to see a knife, I saw him looking at me, his hand moving slow and just enough for me to notice, palm down and patting the air. If he was trying to tell me not to move, he didn’t have to bother. I could barely breathe, let alone run.

  Reg swept his arm across the table, sending the stacks flying, then spun around and started pacing the room, kicking in a stereo speaker and hurling the bong at the TV, colored glass and dirty water spraying the wall. Then he ran down the hallway, shouting, swearing, punching the air as he went into one of the bedrooms. Steve turned and put a finger in my face. “Don’t say shit.” He looked at Lester. “You in?”

  Lester paused, then nodded.

  There was the muffled sound of something smashing, then Reg stormed back, his arm straight out in front of him, the pistol level with my head as he shouted, “Give it to me!”

  Steve had warned me, but I was the one looking down the black hole of the barrel. Before I could say a thing, Reg clocked me on the jaw with the butt of the pistol. I staggered. “Come on, come on,” Reg was shouting, “Diesel’s address. Now!”

  My hands moved on their own, digging into the pockets of my jeans, finding the slip of paper.

  Reg snapped it out of my hand. “Shithead here’s too smart to try to play me, ain’t that right, shithead?”

  I stood there, waiting.

  “Problem is, shithead, you’re dumb enough to get taken by Diesel.” He made a noise like a laugh. “Tell ’em, Steve. Tell ’em what I’m gonna do.”

  Steve said, “He’s gonna go up to Watertown and get his money.”

  “Damn straight. Nobody messes with me. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted that fat bastard. But it’s cool, man, it’s real cool—I know where we stand now, him and me. It’s all clear. I see it, I see his little punk-ass play.” He tossed Steve a set of keys. “Start my car. Lester here’s gonna cut me three fat lines. Then I’m gonna go get what’s mine.”

  Steve grabbed a fistful of my sleeve, knocking me off balance. “Let’s go, Nicky,” he said, and started walking—out the door, down the porch stairs, and into the shadows, shoving me hard up against his Camaro. Through gritted teeth he said, “You stupid, stupid shit.”

  “I . . . I didn’t know . . . I just—”

  “Not you, dipshit,” he said. “Me.”

  I turned, ready to fight if I had to. But Steve was smiling.

  “I should have figured she was up to something,” he said, shaking his head. “Asking too many damn questions, telling Reg what a good little boy you were, buying that bag. I should have figured it out.”

  I was still struggling with it. “So Dawn . . . she . . . you think . . .”

  “Oh, hell yeah. I should have seen it coming. She’s been acting weird, all nice and happy. Been like that for a week. No. Before that.” He looked at me. “Since you’ve been around.”

  “Me? Wait. You think that Dawn and I . . .”

  He grunted. “You wish.” He shook a smoke from a pack of Marlboros, lit it. “Eighty grand. Looks like she’s getting outta here after all,” he said, and shook his head, his smile growing. “She’s something else.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” I said, not sure how I felt. Or wanted to feel.

  “Listen. I’ve been talking with the higher-highers. From what I’ve been telling them, they’ll assume Reg was trying to rip ’em off. They’ll put me in charge. And the first thing they’re gonna tell me to do is clean house. The higher-highers know Lester and Cory, so those two are safe.” Then he looked at me. “But they don’t know you.”

  He took a drag off his cigarette, the red glow lighting his face. I didn’t like where this was going.

  “There’s two ways I can handle this,” he said. “The smart, easy way or the stupid, risky way. The stupid thing would be for me to let you squirm outta this, since you actually ended up doing me a favor. But there’d always be a chance you’d say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and I’d end up paying for it. The smart thing I’m sure you can guess.”

  I could. It didn’t make it any better.

  We stood there looking at each other. Then he put Reg’s keys in his pocket and gave me a shove toward my car. “If I ever see you again, I will do the smart thing. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  He gave me one last look, then started back for the front door. “Time for you to move on, Nick.”

  So I did.

  IT TOOK ME a few days, but I got to where I was going.

  The sun was just coming up when I pulled into the parking lot. I put my hands on the steering wheel and stretched. A road map on the seat next to me, the Runaways on the radio. And Dawn on my mind.

  I suppose I should have hated her. She’d set me up from day one, knowing there was a good chance she was going to get me killed. And she let me waltz into Reg’s place with a bag full of cut-up newspapers while she took off with the money.

  That was one way of looking at it.

  You could also say that she loved her sister, and she wanted a better life for both of them. She just needed the help of a good person to get it. Maybe I didn’t get the ending I wanted, but she gave me the start I needed. Because without her, odds are I wouldn’t have changed at all.

  And that’s how I’d always remember her.

  I turned off the car and climbed out. It was too warm for a winter coat, but it’s all I had, so I put it on over my black T-shirt. My white button-down shirt was in the trunk with my other clothes. The tie was hanging on a road sign, somewhere in West Virginia.

  I took out my wallet and checked my finances—eighty-five dollars and whatever change had accumulated in the ashtray. Stuck in between a couple of bills was my list. I took it out, unfolded it, read the words in the dim light.

  STAND OUT.

  STAND UP.

  STAND BY.

  STAND FAST.

  If only it was that easy.

  I folded the list into a tight square, then flicked it away.

  Across the street was the Del Mar Hotel and, just past that, the Gulf of Mexico.

  A good place to start over.

  If it was going to happen—and it was happening—it had to start sometime. That morning looked right to me.

  One

  THE PHONE RANG AND HE ANSWERED IT.

  Later, when it looked like it was over, he’d think back on that moment and what he could have done different.

  But that was weeks away, and it was just a phone call.

  No number came up on caller ID. It was weird, but it happened now and then, somebody calling from a pay phone or using a cheap throwaway. If he had recognized the number—Nick or Duane or Andrew or Yousef or one of the guys from the team—he would have said something that sounded like “’Zup.” If it had been Kate or Tabitha or Felicia or Emma or any girl—even April—he would have said, “Hey.”

  It wouldn’t have been April, though. It was still too early to say if they’d even get back to being just friends.

  With no number to recognize, he went with “’Zup?”

  There was a pause on the other end and the sound of air being sucked through a straw, then two quick clicks, and then a voice, computer generated and pitched low like distant thunder. “Eric Hamilton.”

  At first he thought it was the library. They had an automated system that called when a book went overdue, and the calls would come around that time in the evening, not so early that it disturbed dinner, not so late that it was rude. But he hadn’t been in any library since June. Besides, their message started friendly before g
etting into the details. There was nothing friendly in this voice.

  More clicks, static. “Eric Hamilton.”

  Somebody screwing around. The stupid kind of thing you did in sixth grade, or the first time you got high. And it wasn’t even funny then. He pressed END, tossed the phone onto his bed, and went back to Gears of War.

  Ten minutes later, the phone buzzed and he answered without thinking.

  That hollow air sound, the clicks. “Eric Hamilton.”

  If he was outside or home alone, he would have rattled off some f-bombs and hung up, but he could hear his mother outside his door, shifting things around in the hall closet, and he didn’t talk like that when she could hear him. And maybe it wasn’t a prank. Maybe it was some new computerized program telling him there’d be no school tomorrow.

  Probably not, but it was worth checking.

  “Yeah, this is Eric,” he said, then heard himself saying it, a faint echo that swirled out into the airy static.

  There was a pause and something that sounded like a breath.

  Then a single whispered sentence that made his stomach drop.

  Then nothing.

  He held the phone tight to his ear, waiting for more, holding it there until three quick beeps told him the call was over.

  He sat at the edge of his bed, the phone in his lap, his thumb hovering above the keypad, the caller’s whispered words still in his head.

  After a minute, he swiped the phone back on and went to the list of recent calls. It showed only one that day—a missed call from his mother around noon. So either he imagined the whole thing or whoever it was knew a few clever phone tricks.

  He knew he hadn’t imagined the call, but maybe he had imagined what he heard. Or maybe he was just reading too much into the static, making words out of the random sounds, putting them together into that sentence.

  Besides, even if he did hear it right, it was the kind of thing you can say to anybody and it would make them nervous.

  Eric put the phone on his desk, then pulled a sweatshirt out of the bottom drawer of his dresser. It was a warm night, but still he shivered. He went back to the game, and after a dozen stupid mistakes and restarts in a row, he closed out, set his alarm for six, turned off the light, and stared at the ceiling for an hour until he fell asleep.

  The fifth time the buzz sounded, he hit the snooze on his alarm. Then the buzz sounded again, and he realized it was his phone.

  One eye open, he lifted his head enough to see the red 2:47 on the clock. He reached for the phone, knocking it off the desk. It fell onto the carpet and under the bed. He listened through his pillow as it buzzed seven more times. It stopped and he waited, picturing the call going to voice mail, then the hang-up and the redial.

  It started again, and on the ninth buzz he leaned over the side and fumbled until he found it. The blue light from the screen lit up the dark room, the swoosh of the static roaring in the silence. He was squinting to see the keypad, trying to remember what buttons to push to activate call blocking, when the voice said, “Check your inbox.” Then the line went dead and the blue light faded down to a soft glow.

  Eric dropped the phone back on the floor and rolled over, wrapping the pillow around his head. He lay like that for fifteen, twenty minutes, not moving, telling himself he was just about to fall asleep, when he gave in, sat up, and tapped on his iPad.

  He had opened a Gmail account a couple of years back but never used it. Everybody was on Facebook or they just sent a text. He needed an email address to put on college applications, and he checked it now and then, but all he got were generic ads and personalized invitations from the army and marines.

  It took him three tries to get the password right.

  He had a dozen unopened messages—the first several were weeks old, the last one had come in at midnight.

  There was nothing in the subject line, and the return email address was a bunch of question marks from an EarthLink account. He clicked it open, and when it loaded, a pasted-in picture filled the screen.

  A black rectangle at the top, a rough white area in the middle, a dark brown bar along the bottom.

  No people, no words, nothing else in the shot.

  Eric rubbed his eyes and leaned in to the screen.

  It was obviously a zoomed-in part of a bigger picture, with the squared-off edges and boxy patches of computer pixels. But a picture of what?

  The brown part could be leather or wood or paint or dirt.

  The black part looked shiny, so maybe it was metal. But then, it could’ve been the way the camera flashed.

  The white space was too rough to be paper and too smooth to be concrete, and not white like milk—more like vanilla ice cream.

  Whatever it was, the voice had assumed he would recognize it and would know what it meant.

  But he didn’t.

  Eric studied it until his eyes went heavy, then turned off the screen and crawled back into bed.

  Eight hours later, he was sitting in history class, supposedly watching a video on the Electoral College, when it hit him.

  He knew the parts in the photo.

  He could see how it fit in place, see the other parts the photo didn’t show.

  The black rectangle was the bottom left corner of a Maxim swimsuit-model poster.

  The brown bar was the top of a wooden headboard.

  The white area was a bedroom wall.

  His bedroom wall.

  His headboard.

  His poster.

  It took a minute for it to click, but it came, rolling like a bead of cold sweat down his spine.

  Whoever had taken the picture had been in his room.

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  About the Author

  KYRT BROWNELL PHOTOGRAPHY

  CHARLES BENOIT’s teen novels include Cold Calls, Fall from Grace, and You, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. Charles is a former high school teacher and the Edgar-nominated author of three adult mysteries. A 1977 high school grad, Charles maintains that any re­semblance between himself and Nick is not coincidental. On the weekends, he plays tenor sax with Some Ska Band in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Visit him at www.charlesbenoit.com or follow him on Twitter (@BenoitTheWriter).