I don’t want to hurt his feelings, Bryce answered his own challenge, sensing something new, yet familiar in the way he was feeling about Dooley. Something unspoken, but there nonetheless, the way it had been there between he and Michael and Joey and PJ and Jeff and Elena that day, that very instant that they started this whole thing. With them, at that moment, it had been a connection born of their friendship, strong and almost overpowering. A kinship that seemed eternal, unbreakable. Yet so soon after that it had started to come apart, little by little, doubts filling the cracks that had opened in their friendships like water seeping into the fissures of some mighty rock. Water that, when troubling winds rose cold, would freeze to ice and fracture the mighty rock into so many pieces.
That was how it was with them now. They were coming apart. He was just the first piece to give way to the strain.
And the man in his room now? Was it the first buds of a new friendship that Bryce was feeling? The kind of lopsided friendship that a kid could have with an adult, where they were supposed to be the wiser one and keep their younger cohort from harm? Was that what was happening here?
Bryce thought it just might be.
“We’ll have to finish sometime,” Dooley told Bryce. “I’m not giving up on beating you yet.”
Bryce nodded and felt a thousand horded breaths leave him at once. “Okay.”
Dooley left the chess board behind and came again to the foot of the bed. “Hey, you got any plans for Saturday?” Bryce shook his head. “Have you seen that new outer space movie? The one with the three aliens?”
“It’s not playing here yet.”
“It’s playing in Seattle,” Dooley informed him. “I bet I can get your folks to let you go with me.”
“Seattle,” Bryce repeated, his fondness for the idea light but evident in his voice. Seattle would be great, if only for a few hours. Seattle wouldn’t be Bartlett.
“What do you say?” Dooley pressed.
Bryce straightened even more against the pillows and answered brightly, “I say okay.”
That’s it, Dooley thought to himself; it was all but over.
Something was.
Thirty Six
All Friday morning he had seemed different and distant, and had hardly said a word to any of his friends, or to Miss Austin. He looked lost within himself. Thinking hard about something. Agonizing over it.
Just before the noon bell he decided he was going to give it one more try. No, Michael thought, no ‘try’; he was going to talk to Bryce this time. He was going to make it happen.
At lunch, he found his longtime friend alone in the corner of the cafeteria staring at a comic book.
His eyes seemed fixed on one spot.
“Bryce. Hey.” Michael stepped over the lunch table’s bench seat and waited for his best friend to look up. “Bryce?”
His eyes stayed on the page, the same one he’d opened randomly to when arriving in the cafeteria just to give the appearance that he was doing something. So that he would be left alone.
He was wishing now he’d stayed out of school a second day. Tomorrow was Seattle with Dooley. Tomorrow he was out of Bartlett, away from everything, everyone. Free, he thought. It would be like being free.
Almost. He would have to do one more thing to be completely free. One thing. One very unsimple thing.
He was suddenly hating himself.
“Bryce? What’s going on? Why won’t you look at me?”
The bespectacled little eyes bore into the spot on the page, focused like a laser beam.
“Bryce, it’s me. C’mon. I’m your friend. I kept Bernstein from breaking your neck the other night.”
Bryce sniffed, the comic book jiggling mildly in his grip. “Are you saying I owe you for that?”
“No, Bryce. C’mon. You would have done the same thing for me. All I want is you to talk to me.”
Michael had saved his neck. Remembering the chalky limb of plaster crushing against his throat, Bryce believed that without a doubt. And it wasn’t the only time his best friend had stuck up for him. In fact, Michael’s only real confrontation with Guy had happened because he’d stepped in on one of the many occasions Guy was bullying Bryce, trying to shake him down for his juice money. That had gotten Michael the black eye and the trip to Mrs. Gray’s office. And Bryce hadn’t even asked him to stick up for him; Michael had just done it.
Michael Prentiss, for almost longer than Bryce could remember now, had been his very best friend.
Sadness filled Bryce as the realization hit hard that that was no longer enough. Not with all that had happened.
“I can’t do it, Mike. I can’t do it anymore.”
Michael glanced nervously around. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t keep this all in anymore.”
“Bryce...”
His eyes peeked over the top of the comic book. “Mike, we almost killed Dooley the other night.”
“Dooley?” Michael parroted, puzzled at first, then unnerved by the familiarity in Bryce’s manner. “That was the idea, Bryce.”
“He never did anything to us.”
Michael leaned onto the table and pushed the comic book slowly down. “He wants to put us in jail.”
“Maybe that’s where we should be.”
Oh, man, Michael thought. His friend was losing it. Really losing it. “Bryce, listen to me. I know what you mean. Right after, I was like, this isn’t right. It was like even though it was better with Guy gone, it wasn’t right that he was gone that way. I know what you’re feeling.”
Bryce stared skeptically at his friend.
“But think about it; it really is better since he’s gone.”
“It’s quieter,” Bryce allowed. “That’s what I notice most.”
“It’s better Bryce. We’re doing the right thing.”
Bryce’s head swayed almost imperceptibly side to side, his eyes drifting toward the tabletop. “I don’t think I can lie anymore, Mike.”
Jeez, Bryce... “Listen...”
Bryce got up from the table, gathering the comic book and his unopened lunch sack. “I need some help on the work I missed.”
It was Friday, the day Miss Austin stayed in the room at lunch to help anyone who needed some extra tutoring on a subject. The other teachers guarded their breaks like jewels.
“Bryce...”
“I’ve gotta go.”
Michael stood and came around the table, blocking his friend’s path. “Bryce.”
“What?”
“Let’s talk about this. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Mike... It hurts.” His voice cracked slightly. “It really, really hurts. It’s the lie. It’s like it’s chewing up my guts.”
“Tonight. Let’s talk about it tonight. Okay? I’ll come by late and sneak in. Okay? We can talk then. Okay?”
Bryce sensed his friend’s desperation. He didn’t want to be ratted on. Who would?
But he also doubted there was anything Michael could say to change the way he felt. Some word to stop the spike of pain that twisted almost constantly in his stomach. But Michael was his best friend. Even if that was changing, it still wasn’t small potatoes.
“All right.”
Michael nodded. “About ten?”
“All right,” Bryce said, his voice spent.
Michael stepped aside and let his friend by, watching him leave the crowded, noisy room. He wondered how the Kiddie Catcher had gotten Bryce to want to tell.
He also wondered if he’d be able to stop him.
* * *
Mandy knelt next to the dresser in her room, its top free of clutter and polished to a sheen that reflected the simmering rose light of the setting sun. Her nose touched the edge of the long, flat surface, and just an inch or so from its blushing tip a blue marble lay still. She’d found it at the bottom of her drawer of pictures, and took it out to demonstrate a point.
Charlie stood nearby, watching.
“It’s very easy, Charlie,” Mandy said, the
n raised her head a smidge and gave a gentle toot of breath toward the marble. It began to roll toward the far edge. “A little push is all it takes sometimes.” The foggy azure sphere spun a straight and true line and tumbled off the dresser, landing at Charlie’s feet. His vapid eyes considered it for a moment before returning to Mandy. “It works that way with people, too.”
Mandy’s face sank below the edge of the dresser again until only her eyes were above its surface, but her smiling eyes, her smiling pretty eyes, made it clear she was pleased with herself.
“What did you do, Mandy?”
Her eyes twinkled the sun’s sleepy red shine back at Charlie. “Nothing, Charlie. I haven’t done anything. I’m not going to do anything.”
Charlie nodded, his dead face not reacting to his friend’s proclamation, nor to the phone suddenly ringing to life behind in the living room.
The quick electronic pulsing did draw a response from Mandy, her face rising slowly above the dresser, her lips pressed tight and straight together, the twinkle gone from her eyes. Where the sun had lit them with color a moment before, the pretty eyes now burned by themselves, hot like the midday sun as she came to her feet and left her room to answer the phone.
On the third ring she lifted it to her ear and said nothing.
There was silence for a moment on the other end, then a man said, “Hello? Hello?”
The fire in Mandy’s eyes flared, like a bonfire stoked with gasoline. Her lips pursed stiffly, two sides of a wound fighting to close. Fighting to stay closed.
“Hello,” the man said again. “Is Ma—”
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers!” Mandy shouted into the handset, then hung it up. She stared at the silent instrument for a moment before taking the cord in hand and unplugging it from the back of the phone.
“Is anything wrong, Mandy?” Charlie asked.
Her head snapped angrily back at him, her stare blazing.
“No, Charlie,” she said through gritted teeth, the phone cord held tight in one hand like the head of a dead and dangerous snake. “Everything is fine. Just fucking fine.”
Thirty Seven
Saturdays were much like the weekdays in the Hool household, except the day started about an hour later.
With nowhere to be and no time to be there, Caroline Hool let her son sleep in and got the girls up first, dressing them and fixing breakfast before going to his door and giving a few taps to wake him up.
“Eight o’clock, Bryce,” she said almost melodically. “Time to start the day.”
She returned to the kitchen and broke up an argument over a piece of toast.
Ten minutes later she went to her son’s room again. “Come on, Bryce. Up and at ‘em. You don’t want to be in bed when Dooley gets here, do you? Don’t want to miss the movie.”
Not a grunt, not a protesting groan. Nothing. Nothing but...
She looked down at her feet. Chilly air was streaming over them, flowing under the door from her son’s room. “Bryce...”
She opened the door, stepped in, saw the window wide open, a terrified, otherworldly scream leaping from within as she saw her son and ran to his bed.
* * *
It was pouring an almost icy rain, making the healing wounds on his face ache like someone had taken the toothy head of a meat tenderizer to them, but Dooley pressed on, putting one foot in front of the other, striding hard and fast through the park, getting his heartbeat up and his tension level down.
He hadn’t run regularly since before taking the box knife to his wrists. What was the conventional wisdom? Exercise and live longer? It was right in that sense.
But today he had decided to run. They called it jogging, but he was running. Faster than any of the ‘joggers’ in the park this early Saturday morn, passing them with ease, thinking back to his uniformed days when he’d get into a foot chase and feel the adrenalin pump. It was a drug back then—the chase, not the hormone. Get the bad guy. Get him. Get him. Take him down. Get the cuffs on. If he was a scum or a smart mouth, maybe make him trip on the way to the squad car. Or maybe on his way into booking.
It was the getting that was good, Dooley knew. Getting your man, or woman, or anything in between. Or your kid. The catch was what satisfied. Hell, it even worked that way for the K-9s. They’d get a bite in at the end of a good chase, and then a biscuit.
Today, Dooley expected, he was going to get his biscuit. Bryce was going to give it/them to him, maybe in the flickering, hushed darkness of the theater, maybe on the drive home. Maybe on the drive there, even. But he was going to get them today. He felt it inside just the way he had the day Jimmy Vincent told him everything. Back then it had come only a few minutes before the almost casual confession of the twelve year old. Like the little jiggle in the line just before the fish bites down and the hook is set. He felt it then, and he’d felt it two days before with Bryce.
Yes, it was going to end today. It was going to end, and this time the kid he used would walk away. Would have another shot at a life. A real life. And he would walk away as well, and his wrists would remain intact, and there’d be no need for a stomach pump, nor for a boat to pluck his body from the sound. No, he was going to put it all behind and move on. Forget it all. Forget them all.
Except for Mary.
He slowed to a jog, thinking of her, wishing somehow that he wasn’t. It would be easier that way. No string left to bind him to what he had done in Bartlett. No string like Jimmy Vincent to tie him to an unpleasant but necessary endeavor. But she was there, in his thoughts as he ran, and whatever there was with her could not be swept away as just part of the whole that had simply happened. What had happened between them was unfinished, and he knew he couldn’t leave it that way. It would either have to become something more, something for both of them, something of both of them, or it would have to die and fade with time as memories would.
But the thought of Mary Austin existing for him as only a memory was too sad to contemplate right now.
His beeper going off nearly scared him off the pavement and onto the slick grass. He stopped under a tree and turned it off, checking the number.
When he reached the pay phone at the deserted picnic pavilion the rain became a steady, wet wind blowing straight down, thundering off the pavement.
He cupped one ear and leaned into the skimpy phone shelter and dialed. “Joel, what is it?”
He listened for a full minute, his head bowing just seconds into the call. Rain percolated off the hard ground.
“I’ll leave right now.”
The rain roared on the roof of the picnic pavilion. Dooley hung the phone up and stared at the plastic black handle for a moment, breathing. He started to walk away, then spun and stalked back to the phone shelter, taking the handset and beating it hard against the cradle until it was a shell of wire and plastic junk.
He let the shattered object fall and dangle from the cord. ‘Destruction of telecommunications equipment or devices.’ Sometimes a felony was therapeutic.
* * *
Dooley found Joel in the back yard, standing beneath an umbrella and staring at Bryce Hool’s open window. He stole part of the covering and stood there, externally numb, his seething buried deep for now. For now. “Who found him?”
“His mother.” Joel’s eyes robotically traced the frame of the window. He seemed in as much shock as Dooley. “He was strangled.”
“You told me that already.”
“Right.”
Dooley visually examined the ground beneath the window, working on instinct now. Working this...crime scene as he had a thousand others. A thousand others where the victims were all anonymous, a good portion of them likely deserving what had come to them. Worked this one just like those and made himself forget the victim as best he could. Worked it, looking for evidence. A wide bed of flowers was muddy. Rain jumped from the puddles. “No tracks, obviously.”
“It’s been raining since about seven,” Joel explained.
“Did they leave the
murder weapon?”
“No. They’re dusting inside right now.”
Dooley looked at the window sill. The eaves protected it from the weather. Black splotches dotted it, and in those he could see clearly several veiny ovals. “How many have you lifted?”
“I don’t know.”
“The parents didn’t hear anything?”
Joel’s face grimaced mildly. “They saw him last about nine last night when he went into his room to bed.”
“Nine? On a Friday night? That’s a little early for an eleven year old.”
“He wanted to go to bed, his parents said.”
In the window, Hugo, the department’s lead print guy, looked out and motioned for Joel to come closer. Both he and Dooley did.
“You always call me a witch, Bauer,” Hugo said. He was old and fat and had a mind that held onto details like a steel trap grasped its victims. “Ready for some more?”
“What do you have, Hugo?” Joel asked.
“I’ve got prints on the outside sill, on the inside sill, on the bedpost, on the hardwood floor. On the inside doorknob. I’ve got lots of prints. Little prints.”
“What?” Joel reacted. No. No way. They wouldn’t... Why would they...
“Now do you want the part where I use my magical sorcerer ways?” Hugo asked. Joel nodded. “I did all the prints on that bat, and on the kids when they were brought in. I recognize this one. It’s got a goofy little whorl. I know whose it is.”
Dooley looked to Joel, stunned to silence it seemed, and then to Hugo and asked, “Whose is it?”
* * *
Jack Prentiss opened the door to his son’s room and stepped in ahead of Dooley and Joel.
Michael sat on the edge of his bed. His eyes glowed red.
“Mikey...” Jack Prentiss said in a prolonged gasp.
Dooley motioned with two fingers, and Michael stood. He put his hands out just like he’d seen criminals do in the movies. Joel put the handcuffs on him and let him out of the room first.
Jack Prentiss grasped the door for support and wept as his son was taken away.
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