I can’t let that happen.
Henry steps off my hand and hauls me to my feet. I see the knife. It’s near my foot. Jonny and Koob aren’t in front of the church anymore. They’re around the back, in the alley. I just need one clear shot, one punch to distract him. My thoughts are clear now. I know what I have to do.
My fist comes quick under Henry’s chin. His head jerks back and it’s enough time for me to bend down and grab the knife. I spin around and jam it into a soft part on his stomach. The blade goes in quick and I let go, stumbling backward. Henry stares at me in shock, then takes a swing with the iron. The knife hasn’t done enough damage. He’s still fighting. But I’m free. I can run down the stairs quicker than him, leap down the last few and land on the sidewalk. From the corner of my eye, I see him stumble, holding his gut. He wobbles and goes down. Maybe punctured something, found its mark. I turn away. Koob, I think. Get to Koob.
I go to the alley. I see Jonny on the other side of a dumpster. He’s got Koob up against the wall. Lying in the alley is a piece of wood, broken off from a pallet. I pick it up with my left hand. “Let my dad go,” Koob begs. “Please.”
“Jonny,” I say, and when he turns to look, I whack him across the face with the board. It takes all my strength, but the hit wipes the smug look off his face. He staggers, shaking his head. My hand aches. The board falls to the ground and Koob sees his chance. He picks it up, gets between me and Jonny, and takes another swing at Jonny’s head. He misses and hits Jonny’s arm.
I turn around. The alley is empty. Henry hasn’t followed me.
“Hit him in the head!” I shout at Koob, adrenaline coursing through me. Koob hesitates and Jonny comes at him, the tire iron like a baseball bat. I have nothing to lose, so I run at him, knocking him down. He tries to get up. Our spit and blood and sweat are all mixed together. I can see the stubble on his cheek, the way his hair grows in curly whorls around his face. He has a zit on his forehead. It’s all there, registering in my brain, but all I’m thinking about is getting the tire iron away from him. My hand hurts too much to do any good; it hangs useless. Jonny’s writhing under me, trying to get free. He whacks at my broken hand and the pain sends me reeling, falling off him.
And then Koob is there. He has the board in his hand and whacks Jonny’s head with it. It’s a sick thud and I’ve heard it before.
Jonny goes still.
The board clatters to the ground. The alley is silent except for our breathing and the far away wail of a siren.
Jakub
I stumble back and hit the dumpster. Lincoln stands up, untangling his feet from Jonny’s legs. He’s shaking and he holds his hand, wincing with pain. “Is he — did I?” The words don’t want to form on my tongue because I don’t want to know the answer.
My head starts to clear and I remember my dad, locked in the trunk. I can see the car from the alley and head toward it, limping, my leg numb with pain. Link’s beside me, then in front of me, running to it.
The car is still running, the rumbling engine drowning out the pound of blood in my brain. “Dad!” I yell. He’s not banging on the trunk anymore. There’s no noise at all. “Dad!” I shout again. Two police cars race through an intersection and screech to a stop, one behind the car, one in front.
An officer gets out of the first car. “Stop right there!” Link and I both freeze. His hands go up.
“Officer!” Father Dom’s voice rings out. He’s on the steps of the church and I wonder how much he saw. “Not them. They’re the victims.”
He doesn’t acknowledge Father Dom. “Move to the sidewalk, both of you. Now!” the officer shouts. The other cops get out of the cars and fan out. Two come to us and one goes toward the church.
That’s when I notice Henry. He’s lying on the steps of the church. A dark stain has spread across his middle. “We’re gonna need backup. And an ambulance,” the officer says into his radio.
“My dad.” Relief chokes my words. “He’s in the trunk of the car.” The cops look at each other. One stays with me and Link, and the other peers in the windows of the car. He pulls a glove out of his pocket and puts it on. He gets into the car and turns off the engine.
I close my eyes and pray. Please let him be okay.
The keys jangle in his hand as he walks around to the trunk. It creaks open and he holds the lid up with his gloved hand. “Make that two ambulances,” he says into his radio.
I run, ignoring the pain in my leg and the officer guarding me. The cop by the car holds me back, but I fight past him, pushing his arm away. Dad’s in the trunk, his face white. With fear or shock, I don’t know. I don’t even know if he’s breathing.
“Dad?” I gasp.
“Jakub,” he says weakly. My name a breath of air on his lips. One hand reaches up for mine. It’s trembling and bloody. The knuckles scraped raw.
I grab it, but my knees buckle. I’m too weak to lift him out. “Dad,” I sob, helpless.
Dad looks at me, his eyes pleading. “I thought they’d killed you,” he says. “I thought — I thought I’d lost you —” he breaks off, his voice a hoarse, anguished whisper. I try to pull him out again and this time, I have the strength.
Lincoln
The paramedics put Mr. K on a stretcher and wheel him to the ambulance. I watch it all from the sidewalk. I barely breathe when I see how pale Mr. K is, almost the same colour as the sheets. “You better come, too,” one says to me, looking at my hand. Swollen knuckles hang limp and useless. “Get that checked out.”
I shake my head, but then Koob looks my way, searching through all the cops and ambulance drivers to find me.
I duck. It’s my brother who hurt his dad. My friggin’ brother who wanted to kill him. How can I get in that ambulance beside him?
But the paramedic grabs my elbow and drags me toward the open doors. Koob moves away when he sees me coming, making room. I sit on a padded bench and watch as another guy in a blue outfit moves around the back of the ambulance, pulling things out of drawers and sticking a needle attached to a tube into Mr. K’s arm.
“Is he gonna be okay?” I ask real quiet. Koob doesn’t turn around, but his back stiffens, waiting to hear the answer.
“We’ll be at the hospital soon. You can ask a doctor.”
Feels like my chest is caving in watching the oxygen mask go over his face. Koob gets pushed out of the way and sits beside me so the paramedic can work. His face is worn out, like he’s been awake for a week.
It’s a long time before he says anything to me.
“I thought we were gonna die.” Koob’s voice shakes.
“Me too,” I say, but it’s just a whisper.
“I never should’ve done that piece,” Koob says.
I want to say all the stuff I never should’ve done. Spill it so it leaks out of me. But that’s not how it works. All that shit has to stay inside, buried deep somewhere so it doesn’t hurt anyone else.
Henry’s blood is on the sidewalk. Part of him staining the ground. Marking it.
Koob’s breathing gets jumpy, and when I look over, he’s got his eyes shut and his face screwed up, trying not to cry. I have to look away because my throat gets tight.
The siren wails as we pull into the street.
When we get to the hospital, they wheel Mr. K out first. Koob follows. I go a different way, to get my hand X-rayed. A cop takes me and we sit together in the waiting area.
“You know what happened to my brother?” I ask him. “The guy who got stabbed?” I can’t help it. I have to know. But the cop gives me a tight-lipped shake of his head.
“We’re going to take you to the police station after your hand gets looked at. Who should we call to meet you?”
I think about the phone ringing at my house. How pissed Mom will be when it wakes her. She might not even answer it. Might just take it off the hook, worried it’ll wake Dad or Dustin. I shrug at
the cop. “We can’t question you unless there’s someone present,” he says.
I give him the number and wonder how I’m gonna explain all this shit to Mom. What will she do when she finds out about Henry? That I’m the one who stabbed him? My foot starts jittering and I take a shaky breath. The lump in my throat gets bigger, harder to hide. I feel tears burning behind my eyes.
“You sure you can’t find out about my brother?” I ask again. My voice cracks. I’m trying to keep it together.
“Sorry,” the cop says and shakes his head.
“Lincoln Bear?” A nurse in a pale purple outfit calls my name. She’s young and pretty, and I wish I was following her for a different reason. “What happened?” she asks, glancing at my hand.
“Got in a fight,” I say. But she looks at the cop behind me and looks back at me.
“Okay. We’ll get it fixed up for you.” Her voice is real gentle and I want to curl up in a corner with the kindness of it. I hold my mouth tight, glad she’s not asking any more questions.
When we get to the police station, Mom’s already there. She’s got on a T-shirt and old sweatpants and that stupid track jacket of Henry’s. She stands up when she sees me. Her eyes go to the bandage on my hand. “You okay?” she says.
I nod. Three broken bones, the doctor said, but small ones. No point in casting it. As long as I don’t move it, they should heal.
“This way.” The officer opens a door to a room. It’s not like the movies; there’s no two-way glass. Just a window with steel mesh on the other side of it and blinds pulled halfway down. It’s still dark out. Night’s on the other side of the window.
A new cop comes in, a woman, and asks me a bunch of questions. She writes my answers down on a pad of paper. The whole time, I feel Mom’s eyes on me and I wish they’d never called her. “You arresting him?” she asks, suspiciously.
“No, just asking questions. Trying to find out what happened. So,” she turns to me, “Why were you at the church?”
I peek at Mom. She narrows her eyes at me. There’s no way to tell the story without talking about Lester. I stall.
The cop taps her pen on the desk.
“To get Koob.”
“Why?”
“Cuz.”
She puts her pen down, like she’s prepared to be here for a while, wait me out. “Were the two of you going somewhere? Meeting someone?”
I blink. Not once, lots. I can’t help it. Mom leans in and I can hear her breathing. “Henry told me to find him.”
It goes on like this for a while. It’s tiring. My hand’s on fire, the pain’s intense even though they gave me T-3’s at the hospital. I want to go to sleep. I don’t know what time it is, but the night sky outside is getting lighter. “When your brother showed up, you got into a fight. What was it about?”
“He wanted to hurt Koob.”
“You haven’t told me why. Why did he want to hurt your friend?”
I’ve been dancing around it all night. The only way I’m getting out of here is if I tell her. When I look at her face, I think she already knows. Koob probably told her, spilled everything. I try to wiggle my fingers under the bandages, but pains stabs through my hand.
“Cuz Koob found out about Lester.”
“Who’s Lester?”
“He lived in Koob’s building.” I pause, not sure if I can do it, but the words are right there. “Henry killed him.” It’s like all the air gets sucked out of the room when I say those words. Mom makes a choking noise beside me.
“Shut up,” she hisses. Her eyes dart to the cop.
But I shake my head at her. They probably know everything, anyway. Or maybe they saw Koob’s piece, same as Henry did, and are fishing for information. It doesn’t matter. I’m dead either way. “Screw it,” I mutter under my breath. No point in stopping now.
I trace the events back to the beginning, like following a vein in my arm, back to the first meeting at the fast food place with Henry and his plans for stealing cars. I’m done protecting the Red Bloodz, done playing by their rules. I’m out of the game. It never made sense to me, anyway.
I start to shake when I tell her about what we did to Lester in the alley. She leans across the desk, frowning.
“And you left him there?”
I nod.
“Your brother, Henry, he was the one to deliver the final blow. The one you think killed him?”
I nod again. Puke rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. I stare at my hands. Another cop comes in the room and calls the woman cop out. Her chair scrapes the floor when she leaves.
I look at Mom when she’s gone. She’s fiddling with the strap of her purse, but a tear rolls down her cheek and lands on the T-shirt. I wonder if she’s gonna say anything, but she doesn’t. Just wipes her cheek and sniffles.
When the cop comes back in, she sits down and looks at me. There’s another cop behind her, a tall guy in a uniform. “Your brother’s dead, Lincoln.” She sighs. “I’m charging you for the murder of Henry Bear,” she says.
Mom’s purse falls to the floor, stuff clatters out. She doesn’t pick it up, just stares at the cop, shaking her head. “No,” she says. “He told you what happened! Weren’t you listening?” She stretches her arm across my chest, keeping them away. “Henry would have killed him!”
The cop keeps talking. “And for the assault of Lester McFarlane. For car theft and conspiracy to commit —” but her words are drowned out by Mom’s cries and the pounding in my head.
Jakub
I visit Link once a week. I did the math when he got sentenced. Figured out how many Saturday afternoon visits we’d have before his three-year sentence was up. Five down, one hundred-fifty-one to go.
The room at the Youth Correction Centre is blank. Nothing in it but a table and some chairs. The door clicks open. Link walks in, and the door shuts after him. There’s a guard outside, peering in through the window.
He cut his hair for court, but it’s grown out again, shaggy around his ears. Without a baseball hat on, I can see his whole face. How much he looks like Henry.
“Hey,” he says, and holds his fist up for a bump.
“Hey, man.” I grin bigger than I mean to, trying to cover up how hard it is to see him like this. There’s so much I want to say, but not here. Not now.
“Father Dom came by yesterday. Said you start at your new school this week,” Link says.
“Should be good. Closer to home.” It’s less high-end than St. Bart’s, but Father Dom pleaded my case with Father O’Shea, and together they got me in. The school is called Holy Redeemer Academy, so I guess they kind of had to take me. If anyone is looking for redemption, it’s me. I got community service for helping Link steal the car, but Jonny survived the blow to the head I gave him. Lucky for me.
Henry’s death and the raid on the chop shop and the clubhouse left the Red Bloodz in tatters. All the guys went away for something. Link would be out first. His confession helped the cops nail the others, but the other gang members don’t know that. The threat of retribution hangs heavy over him. He’ll spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. Even when it’s just the two of us, he checks the exits. His eyes are watchful, darting to the door, at the windows. He doesn’t sleep much; there’s dark circles under his eyes. He’s talked about the guilt that weighs on him. I see it in his shuffling walk. Head bowed, shoulders slumped. Each time I visit, I hope for a smile, a flicker of the Lincoln I knew before.
It’s almost time for me to go when Link leans across the table and stares at me. His scar shines pink, highlighted by the fluorescent lights. “I been doing a lot of thinking, you know. About how things got like this. How I ended up here.”
He pulls a paper out of the pocket of his overalls. He unfolds it slowly and lays it on the table in front of me. “I thought maybe you could do something to remember Lester. I know he never had a fun
eral or nothing.” The sketch is of Lester’s face. Even with his messed-up hand, it’s the best thing he’s ever done.
He’s blinking, waiting for my reaction. I stare at it for a long moment. “It’s good, Link. Really good.”
His Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows. His eyes get wet and I wish there was something I could do or say to make it easier for him. To let him know I wish things were different.
The guard outside raps on the door. Our time is up. “Stay in the room, Lincoln. You have another visitor,” he says. Link’s face lights up and he looks at me, expectantly.
I shake my head. It’s not Dad. Every week, Link asks about him, desperate to see him. Dad says he might be ready one day, but not yet. He thought he was going to die in that trunk. He thought they’d killed me. He’s not a heavy sleeper anymore; his nightmares keep us both awake.
“Guess I’ll get going.” I slide the paper back to him.
But he shakes his head. “Keep it. Take a picture when you throw it up, okay?”
I fold it and put it in my pocket. My heart’s heavy.
He holds his fist up for a bump. I hesitate. I want to give him more, but there isn’t anything else. Our fists collide.
On my way out, I pass Dustin and Lincoln’s mom. Dustin’s jumping up and down, so excited to see Lincoln. I look back through the glass window on the door and watch for a minute.
Dustin races into the room and jumps into Lincoln’s arms. The kid clutches him around the neck and Link picks him up, holding him close. They don’t let go of each other for a long time.
Dad’s waiting outside for me on a bench. He stands up when he sees me coming, resting on the cane he finally agreed to use. “How was it?” he asks.
I pull out Lincoln’s sketch of Lester and hand it to Dad. The paper trembles in his hand when he looks at it, gripping his cane tighter. There are tears in his eyes when he gives it back to me.
Blood Brothers Page 16