by Stephen King
It was a building called Kips Bay Court. When we got there, he just sat down on the curb. He wasn’t crying anymore, and he was starting to get that drifting-away look they all get. I didn’t like to leave him there, but I didn’t know what else to do. Before I left, I asked him his name and he said it was Richard Scarlatti. Then I knew where I’d seen him. His picture was on NY1. Some big boys drowned him in Swan Lake, which is in Central Park. Those boys all cried like blue fuck and said they had only been goofing around. Maybe that was true. Maybe I’ll understand all that stuff later, but actually I don’t think so.
53
By then we were doing well enough that I could have gone to a private school. My mother showed me brochures from the Dalton School and the Friends Seminary, but I chose to stay public and go to Roosevelt, home of the Mustangs. It was okay. Those were good years for Mom and me. She landed a super-big client who wrote stories about trolls and woods elves and noble guys who went on quests. I landed a girlfriend, sort of. Mary Lou Stein was kind of a goth intellectual in spite of her girl-next-door name and a huge cinephile. We went to the Angelika just about once every week and sat in the back row reading subtitles.
One day shortly after my birthday (I’d reached the grand old age of fifteen), Mom texted me and asked if I could drop by the agency office after school instead of going straight home—not a huge deal, she said, just some news she wanted to pass on in person.
When I got there she poured me a cup of coffee—unusual but not unheard-of by then—and asked if I remembered Jesus Hernandez. I told her I did. He had been Liz’s partner for a couple of years, and a couple of times Mom brought me along when she and Liz had meals with Detective Hernandez and his wife. That was quite awhile ago, but it’s hard to forget a six-foot-six detective named Jesus, even if it is pronounced Hay-soos.
“I loved his dreads,” I said. “They were cool.”
“He called to tell me Liz lost her job.” Mom and Liz had been quits a long time by then, but Mom still looked sad. “She finally got caught transporting drugs. Quite a lot of heroin, Jesus says.”
It hit me hard. Liz hadn’t been good for my mother after awhile, and she sure as shit hadn’t been good for me, but it was still a bummer. I remembered her tickling me until I almost wet my pants, and sitting between her and Mom on the couch, all of us making stupid cracks about the shows, and the time she took me to the Bronx Zoo and bought me a cone of cotton candy bigger than my head. Also, don’t forget that she saved fifty or maybe even a hundred lives that would have been lost if Thumper’s last bomb had gone off. Her motivation might have been good or bad, but those lives were saved either way.
That overheard phrase from their last argument came to me. Serious weight, Mom had said. “She isn’t going to jail, is she?”
Mom said, “Well, she’s out on bail now, Jesus said, but in the end…I think there’s a good chance she will, honey.”
“Oh, fuck.” I thought of Liz in an orange jumpsuit, like the women in that Netflix show my mother sometimes watched.
She took my hand. “Right right right.”
54
It was two or three weeks later when Liz kidnapped me. You could say she did that the first time, with Therriault, but you could call that a “soft snatch.” This time it was the real deal. She didn’t force me into her car kicking and screaming, but she still forced me. Which makes it kidnapping as far as I’m concerned.
I was on the tennis team, and on my way home from a bunch of practice matches (which our coach called “heats,” for some dumb reason). I had my pack on my back and my tennis duffle in one hand. I was headed for the bus stop and saw a woman leaning against a beat-up Toyota and looking at her phone. I walked past without a second glance. It never occurred to me that this scrawny chick—straw-blonde hair blowing around the collar of an unzipped duffle coat, oversized gray sweatshirt, beat-up cowboy boots disappearing into baggy jeans—was my mom’s old friend. My mom’s old friend had favored tapered slacks in dark colors and low-cut silk blouses. My mom’s old friend wore her hair slicked back and pulled into a short stump of ponytail. My mom’s old friend had looked healthy.
“Hey, Champ, not even a howya doin for an old friend?”
I stopped and turned back. For a moment I still didn’t recognize her. Her face was bony and pale. There were blemishes, untouched by makeup, dotting her forehead. All the curves I’d admired—in a little-boy way, granted—were gone. The baggy sweatshirt beneath the coat showed only a hint of what had been generous breasts. At a guess, I’d say she was forty or even fifty pounds lighter and looked twenty years older.
“Liz?”
“None other.” She gave me a smile, then obscured it by wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. Strung out, I thought. She’s strung out.
“How are you?”
Maybe not the wisest question, but the only one I could think of under the circumstances. And I was careful to keep what I considered to be a safe distance from her, so I could outrun her if she tried anything weird. Which seemed like a possibility, because she looked weird. Not like actors pretending to be drug addicts on TV but like the real ones you saw from time to time, nodding out on park benches or in the doorways of abandoned buildings. I guess New York is a lot better than it used to be, but dopers are still an occasional part of the scenery.
“How do I look?” Then she laughed, but not in a happy way. “Don’t answer that. But hey, we did a mitzvah once upon a time, didn’t we? I deserved more credit for that than I got, but what the hell, we saved a bunch of lives.”
I thought of all I’d been through because of her. And it wasn’t just because of Therriault, either. She had fucked up my mom’s life, too. Liz Dutton had put us both through a bad time, and here she was again. A bad penny, turning up when you least expected it. I got mad.
“You didn’t deserve any of the credit. I was the one who made him talk. And I paid a price for it. You don’t want to know.”
She cocked her head. “Sure I do. Tell me about the price you paid, Champ. A few bad dreams about the hole in his head? You want bad dreams, take a look at three crispy critters in a burned-out SUV sometime, one of them just a kid in a car seat. So what price did you pay?”
“Forget it,” I said, and started walking again.
She reached out and grabbed the strap of my tennis duffle. “Not so fast. I need you again, Champ, so saddle up.”
“No way. And let go of my bag.”
She didn’t, so I pulled. There was nothing to her and she went to her knees, letting out a small cry and losing her grip on the strap.
A man who was passing stopped and gave me the look adults give a kid when they see him doing something mean. “You don’t do that to a woman, kid.”
“Fuck off,” Liz told him, getting to her feet. “I’m police.”
“Whatever, whatever,” the man said, and got walking again. He didn’t look back.
“You’re not police anymore,” I said, “and I’m not going anywhere with you. I don’t even want to talk to you, so leave me alone.” Still, I felt a little bad about pulling her so hard she went to her knees. I remembered her on her knees in our apartment, too, but because she was playing Matchbox cars with me. I tried to tell myself that was in another life, but it didn’t work because it wasn’t another life. It was my life.
“Oh, but you are coming. If you don’t want the whole world to know who really wrote Regis Thomas’s last book, that is. The big bestseller that pulled Tee away from bankruptcy just in time? The posthumous bestseller?”
“You wouldn’t do that.” Then, as the shock of what she’d said cleared away a little: “You can’t do that. It would be your word against Mom’s. The word of a drug trafficker. Plus a junkie, from the look of you, so who’d believe you? No one!”
She had put her phone in her back pocket. Now she took it out. “Tia wasn’t the only one recording that day. Listen to this.”
What I heard made my stomach drop. It was my voice—much younger, but mine
—telling Mom that Purity would find the key she’d been looking for under a rotted stump on the path to Roanoke Lake.
Mom: “How does she know which stump?”
Pause.
Me: “Martin Betancourt chalked a cross on it.”
Mom: “What does she do with it?”
Pause.
Me: “Takes it to Hannah Royden. They go into the swamp together and find the cave.”
Mom: “Hannah makes the Seeking Fire? The stuff that almost got her hung as a witch?”
Pause.
Me: “That’s right. And he says George Threadgill sneaks after them. And he says that looking at Hannah makes George tumescent. What’s that, Mom?”
Mom: “Never mi—”
Liz stopped the recording there. “I got a lot more. Not all of it, but an hour, at least. No doubt about it, Champ—that’s you telling your mother the plot of the book she wrote. And you would be a bigger part of the story. James Conklin, Boy Medium.”
I stared at her, my shoulders sagging. “Why didn’t you play that for me before? When we went looking for Therriault?”
She looked at me as if I was stupid. Probably because I was. “I didn’t need to. Back then you were basically a sweet kid who wanted to do the right thing. Now you’re fifteen, old enough to be a pain in the ass. Which could be your right as a teenager, I guess, but that’s a discussion for another day. Right now the question is this: do you get in the car and take a ride with me, or do I go to this reporter I know on the Post and give him a juicy scoop about the literary agent who faked her dead client’s last book with the help of her ESP son?”
“Take a ride where?”
“It’s a mystery tour, Champ. Get in and find out.”
I didn’t see any choice. “Okay, but one thing. Stop calling me Champ, like I was your pet horse.”
“Okay, Champ.” She smiled. “Joking, just joking. Get in, Jamie.”
I got in.
55
“Which dead person am I supposed to talk to this time? Whoever it is and whatever they know, I don’t think it will keep you from going to jail.”
“Oh, I’m not going to jail,” she said. “I don’t think I’d like the food, let alone the company.”
We passed a sign pointing to the Cuomo Bridge, which everybody in New York still calls the Tappan Zee, or just the Tap. I didn’t like that. “Where are we going?”
“Renfield.”
The only Renfield I knew was the Count’s fly-eating helper in Dracula. “Where’s that? Someplace in Tarrytown?”
“Nope. Little town just north of New Paltz. It’ll take us two or three hours, so settle back and enjoy the ride.”
I stared at her, more than alarmed, almost horrified. “You’ve got to be kidding! I’m supposed to be home for supper!”
“Looks like Tia’s going to be eating in solitary splendor tonight.” She took a small bottle of whitish-yellow powder from the pocket of her duffle coat, the kind that has a little gold spoon attached to the cap. She unscrewed it one-handed, tapped some of the powder onto the back of the hand she was using to drive, and snorted it up. She screwed the cap back on—still one-handed—and repocketed the vial. The quick dexterity of the process spoke of long practice.
She saw my expression and smiled. Her eyes had a new brightness. “Never seen anyone do that before? What a sheltered life you’ve led, Jamie.”
I had seen kids smoke the herb, had even tried it myself, but the harder stuff? No. I’d been offered ecstasy at a school dance and turned it down.
She ran the palm of her hand up over her nose again, not a charming gesture. “I’d offer you some, I believe in sharing, but this is my own special blend: coke and heroin two-to-one, with just a dash of fentanyl. I’ve built up a tolerance. It would blow your head off.”
Maybe she did have a tolerance, but I could tell when it hit her. She sat up straighter and talked faster, but at least she was still driving straight and keeping to the speed limit.
“This is your mother’s fault, you know. For years, all I did was carry dope from Point A, which was usually the 79th Street Boat Basin or Stuart Airport, to Point B, which could be anywhere in the five boroughs. At first it was mostly cocaine, but times changed because of OxyContin. That shit hooks people fast, I mean kabang. When their doctors stopped supplying it, the dopers bought it on the street. Then the price went up and they realized they could get about the same high from the big white nurse, and cheaper. So they went to that. It’s what the man we’re going to see supplied.”
“The man who’s dead.”
She frowned. “Don’t interrupt me, kiddo. You wanted to know, I’m telling you.”
The only thing I could remember wanting to know was where we were going, but I didn’t say that. I was trying not to be scared. It was working a little because this was still Liz, but not very much because this didn’t seem like the Liz I’d known at all.
“Don’t get high on your own supply, that’s what they say, that’s the mantra, but after Tia kicked me out, I started chipping a little. Just to keep from being too depressed. Then I started chipping a lot. After awhile you couldn’t really call it chipping at all. I was using.”
“My mom kicked you out because you brought junk into the house,” I said. “It was your own fault.” Probably would have been smarter to keep quiet, but I couldn’t help it. Her trying to blame Mom for what she’d become made me mad all over again. In any case, she paid no attention.
“I’ll tell you one thing, though, Cha—Jamie. I have never used the spike.” She said this with a kind of defiant pride. “Never once. Because when you snort, you’ve got a shot at getting clean. Shoot that stuff, and you’re never coming back.”
“Your nose is bleeding.” Just a trickle down that little gutter between her nose and upper lip.
“Yeah? Thanks.” She wiped with the heel of her palm again, then turned to me for a second. “Did I get it all?”
“Uh-huh. Now look at the road.”
“Yessir, Mr. Backseat Driver, sir,” she said, and for just a moment she sounded like the old Liz. It didn’t break my heart, but it squeezed it a little.
We drove. The traffic wasn’t too bad for a weekday afternoon. I thought about my mother. She’d still be at the agency now, but she’d be home soon. At first she wouldn’t worry. Then she would worry a little. Then she’d worry a lot.
“Can I call Mom? I won’t tell her where I am, just that I’m okay.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
I took my phone out of my pocket and then it was gone. She grabbed it with the speed of a lizard snaring a bug. Before I had even quite realized what was happening, she had opened her window and dropped it onto the highway.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted. “That was mine!”
“I’m glad you reminded me about your phone.” Now we were following signs to I-87, the Thruway. “I totally forgot. They don’t call it dope for nothing, you know.” And she laughed.
I punched her on the shoulder. The car swerved, then straightened. Someone gave us a honk. Liz whipped another glance at me, and she wasn’t smiling now. She had the look she probably got on her face when she was reading people their rights. You know, perps. “Hit me again, Jamie, and I’ll hit you back in the balls hard enough to make you puke. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time someone puked in this fucking beater.”
“You want to try fighting me while you’re driving?”
Now the smile came back, her lips parting just enough to show the tops of her teeth. “Try me.”
I didn’t. I didn’t try anything, including (if you’re wondering) yelling for the creature inhabiting Therriault, although it was now theoretically at my command—whistle and you’ll come to me, my lad, remember that? The truth is, he—or it—never crossed my mind. I forgot, just like Liz forgot to take my phone at first, and I didn’t even have a snoutful of dope to blame. I might not have done it, anyway. Who knew if it would actually come? And if it did…well, I was scared of Liz
, but more scared of the deadlight thing. Death, madness, the destruction of your very soul, the professor had said.
“Think about it, kiddo. If you called and said you were fine but taking a little ride with your old friend Lizzy Dutton, do you think she’d just say ‘Okay, Jamie, that’s fine, make her buy you dinner?’ ”
I said nothing.
“She’d call the cops. But that isn’t the biggest thing. I should have gotten rid of your cell right away, because she can track it.”
My eyes widened. “Bullshit she can!”
Liz nodded, smiling again, eyes on the road again as we pulled past a double-box semi. “She put a locater app on the first phone she gave you, when you were ten. I was the one who told her how to hide it, so you wouldn’t find it and get all pissy about it.”
“I got a new phone two years ago,” I muttered. There were tears prickling the corners of my eyes, I don’t know why. I felt…I don’t know the word. Wait a minute, maybe I do. Whipsawed. That’s how I felt, whipsawed.
“You think she didn’t put that app on the new one?” Liz gave a harsh laugh. “Are you kidding? You’re her one and only, kiddo, her little princeling. She’ll still be tracking you ten years from now, when you’re married and changing your first kid’s diapers.”
“Fucking liar,” I said, but I was talking to my own lap.
She snorted some more of her special blend once we were clear of the city, the movements just as agile and practiced, but this time the car did swerve a little, and we got another disapproving honk. I thought of some cop lighting us up, and at first I thought that would be good, that it would end this nightmare, but maybe it wouldn’t be good. In her current wired-up state, Liz might try to outrun a cop, and manage to kill us both. I thought of the Central Park man. His face and upper body had been covered with somebody’s jacket so the bystanders couldn’t see the worst of it, but I had seen.
Liz brightened up again. “You’d make a hell of a detective, Jamie. With your particular skill, you’d be a star. No murderer would escape you, because you could talk to the vics.”