by Clare Kauter
“He’s our first aid guy.”
Oh, right. Of course. Did I mention that Adam is a doctor? One with about the same beside manner as Dr Gregory House.
Tim spoke on his phone for a few minutes before hanging up. “Adam is going to come and pick you up and make sure you’re OK.”
“How sweet,” I said.
Tim snorted. “Do you want me to ride with the two of you? Mediate the conversation, like?”
“Nah, it’s OK. Adam and I are basically besties now.”
Tim started laughing. “Yeah, right.”
“No, seriously! We hung out last night and it wasn’t even terrible. He smiled, Tim. I didn’t even know he could do that.”
Tim’s eyebrows were sky high. “Seriously? You made him smile? I didn’t think you were capable. Like, I think you’re hilarious, honey, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that Adam can be a little… taciturn.”
“I didn’t know you knew such long words,” I teased.
He smiled. “What did you do? To make him smile, I mean.”
“I, um…”
Tim grinned at my obvious hesitation. “Yes?”
“I cried.”
Tim began laughing, then caught the look on my face. “Wait – you’re serious?”
He doubled over and laughed even louder. I rolled my eyes and sat in the gutter, cringing as the newly formed scabs on my knees cracked as I bent them. Tim wiped away his tears and came to sit with me.
“I – sorry, honey,” he said. “I just can’t imagine you crying. And then that being the thing that Adam smiled at – like, it’s just too funny.”
I nodded. “I know.”
“Why were you crying? Are you OK?”
“Yeah,” I answered, not planning on elaborating.
“You were at McKenzie’s party, right?” he asked, obviously fishing for more details.
“Yes,” I sighed.
“And?”
“There was someone there who used to be a friend of mine. She isn’t anymore. I wasn’t expecting to see her, it brought back some things, and then McKenzie was a dick.”
“McKenzie made you cry?”
Tim’s face had grown serious. I tried to hide my surprise. Tim and James were friends, but I guess Tim liked me better, because he looked ready to take action on this information.
“I can look after myself,” I said.
“I know,” Tim said. “But if McKenzie was mean to you, then I’m on your side.”
“I don’t want you to bash him or anything.”
“Fine, sure.”
“I mean it! I’ll bash him myself if it comes to that. Less chance that he’ll have me arrested.”
“OK, maybe I’ll just punish him with the silent treatment instead.”
“Always a good option.”
Tim put his arm around my shoulder. “He’s a dick. You should seduce Adam instead.”
“I’m sure I look like a master seductress with the blood dripping down my legs, sitting in the gutter on the side of the road.”
He shrugged. “Adam’s into some weird stuff.”
I laughed. Shortly after, I noticed a black car approaching. It was still pretty early in the morning so there weren’t many cars on the road.
“I think my ride’s here,” I said.
We stood to let Adam pull up by the curb where we’d previously been sitting. He parked and stepped out of the vehicle, walking around to greet us. He glanced down at my knees briefly before turning to Tim.
“You need a ride?”
“No, I’ll jog back,” Tim responded. “I need the exercise.”
Adam nodded and gestured to me to get into the car. I said goodbye to Tim and stepped into the BMW (all the B-Co. company cars were ridiculously expensive brands – something to do with the luxury image of the company).
“How did I ever become friends with someone who says ‘I need the exercise’?” I mused aloud.
Adam rolled his eyes, but I thought I could see the corners of his mouth turning up slightly. Hah! I knew we were besties now.
He walked to the back door and took out a first aid kit. The car was parked parallel to the curb and I sat sideways in the passenger seat, door open, with my legs out. Adam crouched in the gutter, first aid kit beside him, and cleaned up my wounds.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I tripped.”
“Surprised that hasn’t happened before with your track record.”
It was a fair call.
“I was running a bit faster than normal,” I explained. “Some gross guy around the corner cat-called me.”
“So you murdered him and then ran away?”
“So I embarrassed him and jogged away angrily.”
“Did you cause him any physical injury?”
“No.”
“Did you initiate any physical contact at all?”
“Ew, no.”
“I meant violent contact.”
“I didn’t touch him.”
Adam looked impressed. “Personal growth.”
He finished bandaging up my knees and took off his gloves, bagging them up with the cloths he’d used to clean the wounds. After throwing them in someone’s garbage bin that was sitting by the side of the road, he stepped back into the car and we drove away.
“You didn’t comment on my tracksuit,” I said.
Adam slid me a sideways glance. “It’s a tracksuit.”
“Yeah, but, you know. It’s new.”
Only once that sentence was out of my mouth did I realise how lame it sounded. Come on, Adam, tell me how pretty I am!
Adam frowned at me. “OK, then you’re not fired.”
“Right, yeah,” I said, trying to play it cool. “That’s good, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I was just trying to be casual.”
“How about you just try to be yourself?”
“Am I growing on you?”
“Like a fungus.”
OK, so I guess Adam was back to insulting me now.
“You owe me, by the way,” he said.
“What?” I asked. My heart began to pound. Owing Adam Baxter couldn’t be a good thing.
“You promised to tell me why you were crying last night.”
“Oh, that.” Of course. It was time to reveal my weaknesses. “Well, it’s kind of a long story.”
“Just tell me.”
I sighed.
“Fine. Well…” Where did I start? At the beginning, I guess. “OK, so that girl there last night – Celia – we used to be friends. A long time ago.”
“OK, Veronica Mars.” I looked at Adam in shock. He was the last person I expected to hear making pop culture references, and yet here we were. “Sorry, continue.”
“Right, well, we were friends in high school.”
“Good friends?”
“Best buds.”
“She got with McKenzie, you were jealous, and now you hate her?”
“No!” I answered indignantly. It wasn’t even a lie. That wasn’t how it went down. Well, not exactly. OK, so there were elements of that. But it wasn’t the whole reason!
“So what happened?”
“Well…” I didn’t really know how to approach this next bit of the story. I was pretty sure Adam would already know bits of it, so I decided to just jump in. “You know how my brother disappeared?”
Adam was silent for a moment. “I admit,” he said finally, “This is not where I thought this story was going.”
I didn’t really want to keep telling the story, but I also didn’t want to wimp out in front of Adam, so I kept going.
“Right before he went missing there was this party and we were all there – me, Celia, James and Topher – and, well, it got a bit weird.”
It had been a house party for someone’s 18th birthday – I couldn’t even remember whose party it was. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever known. Topher had been so insistent that we go that eventually he’d worn us down to a point whe
re we agreed to attend just to shut him up.
“Alcohol weird?”
“Yeah.” Not that I had been drinking – I’d only been 14, and James McKenzie (the killjoy) had seen to it that I remained sober. “James and my brother got into this huge fight, and then the next day my brother was gone.”
Not strictly lying, I reasoned. Just leaving out certain details. Key details.
“Which explains why you don’t like McKenzie, but the other girl?”
“She and James got together at the party. I, uh, wasn’t too happy about my friend dating the guy that I blamed for my brother’s disappearance.”
Although I was pretty sure Adam was trustworthy, I’d fed him the official party line – the story I’d told police at the time, and everyone who asked me about it since. There were certain other… elements to the whole thing – things that kind of mattered to the story – that I wasn’t yet willing to disclose.
Adam’s facial expression was impassive, but I suspected that he knew I wasn’t telling him the whole truth about that backstory. He didn’t push it, though. “And last night?”
“I wasn’t expecting to see her and I was a little… brusque. Then James said something mean to me.”
“Of course he did. What did he say?”
“He told me to grow up,” I mumbled.
“What?”
I repeated myself, louder.
“He said to grow up? And that made you cry?”
“It wasn’t just that. He kind of accused me of being the reason my brother left.”
“The guy you blame for your brother leaving blamed you for your brother leaving and that made you cry?”
Now that he said it like that, it sounded kind of stupid. I nodded.
“Right,” he said. “And tell me, Charlie, how much of that story did you think I was going to buy?”
Oh, OK.
I guess he was going to push me for the full story.
“Um…”
“We made a deal, Charlie. You can’t back out now.”
“And what if I refuse to tell you?” I demanded.
“You won’t,” he replied.
“Oh? And why not?”
“You’re not that stupid.”
Compliment, insult and threat all wrapped up in one. Adam’s banter was on point today.
I groaned. Was I actually about to do this?
“Argh, fine. But if you tell anyone –”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
I believed him.
Sigh. “James was off socialising with everyone while I was hanging out with Will – that’s his brother –”
“McKenzie has a brother?”
“Yeah, but they don’t talk since Will got James kicked out of their parents’ house.”
“Right. So you were hanging out with him?”
“Yeah, with Will and my brother. We were in some random bedroom and they were both getting wasted – like, falling over each other – and smoking something and trying to get me to join in.”
“Wow, you smoked some weed? What a rebel.”
The sarcasm was strong with this one.
“Well, actually, I was about to have a puff when James McKenzie walked in.”
“What did he do? Citizen’s arrest?”
“He lost it with them. Leading me astray or whatever. Like, he was full-on yelling.”
“He doesn’t really strike me as the yelling type.”
“Exactly.”
You might not know this about James McKenzie, but he’s not really an aggressive kind of guy. Even after all our years of feuding, that was the only time I had ever heard him raise his voice. Even after I bashed in his windshield with a metal bar, he’d just been quietly sarcastic and then fetched my crutches for me.
“Anyway, he caught us and then he pulled me into another room and interrogated me – kind of like you’re doing now, ” I said with a pointed look. “And then, um…”
Urgh, did I have to keep going?
Adam looked at me, unimpressed. “You kissed him, didn’t you?”
“I – it wasn’t – Joe Winton came in and offered us a hundred bucks and – ” I stopped and sighed. Why was I telling Adam this? “It wasn’t like that! It was just as a dare.”
“So you are in love with him.”
“We only did it because we wanted the money and we knew Joe was too wasted to remember.”
“And then he and Celia got together, and you hate her because you’re jealous. I’m not going to lie, I was hoping for something a little more original.”
“That’s not –”
“Then what was the point of telling me that? If that’s not the reason then you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“I told you so that you know I’m not lying to you! The reason I’m angry at Celia is because she sided with James instead of looking out for me.”
“Charlie, you and I both know that’s not –”
“It’s the truth! You knew I was hiding something from you. Now you know what it is. But the reason I’m not pals with her any more is because she was a crappy friend, not because I’m jealous.”
“Sure.”
“It is!”
“Whatever you say.”
I crossed my arms and looked out the window, annoyed. Why had I told him any of that? Well, OK, I knew why. He would have made my life miserable if I didn’t make good on our deal. I still wasn’t thrilled with the whole situation, though. Oh god, what if he told Tim? Sure, he’d said he wouldn’t, but still…
We were silent for a while, until I realised we weren’t headed back to the office. “Where are we going?”
“Back to the site of the break-in,” he said. “I’m not done there yet. The owner hadn’t arrived when I left and I need to speak to her in order to sort out a contract.”
“What, she’s not suing you or anything?”
“It wasn’t one of our properties that was broken into. They called me in to check it out and get me to take care of the security for it from now on. Look for weak spots, give them a quote, you know.”
“Oh, OK,” I said. I thought for a second. “They called you at three in the morning for that?”
“It’s kind of urgent. You’ll understand when we get there.”
We were heading for the industrial area of town, down by Tanner River. The Tanner ran through the middle of the town, right by the CBD, but exited through the outskirts in the manufacturing quarter of Gerongate. The water came in clean and left laden with syringes, used condoms and chemical sludge. (Just like the tourists.)
Adam pulled the car to a stop on a patch of gravel outside a construction site. The site was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, through which I could see a number of police officers and fire fighters pacing the area, alongside a large fire truck and several police cars. Oh, OK. Something had really gone down here.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Adam before climbing out of the car. I followed him to the entrance, hurrying to catch up as I hobbled along behind him.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked.
A woman who had been talking to a police officer broke off her conversation and began to walk towards us when she saw Adam.
“I’ll explain later,” he said quietly, obviously not wanting to go into details in front of anyone else.
The woman was tall with brown hair pulled back in a tight bun. She wore a pinstriped skirt suit and mid-height pumps. I admired the way she made the trek over the uneven terrain of the construction site so gracefully in that footwear. I hadn’t even managed to remain upright in joggers on flat concrete this morning.
The lady extended a hand to Adam. “Sheila Schneider. You’re Adam Baxter, I presume.”
Sheila Schneider? OK, this woman deserved some respect for getting through life with a name like that.
Adam nodded and shook her hand.
“Who’s the child?” Sheila asked, looking at me.
Ordinarily, that might have offended me, but I h
ad my hair in a ponytail and my knees were grazed, plus I was about a foot shorter than Sheila. I didn’t exactly look like a crime fighting professional.
“She works for me,” Adam answered.
“Isn’t there some sort of age restriction?”
Adam shrugged. “No one ever suspects her of spying on them.”
Sheila nodded. “I guess I can see that. Let’s go to my office to talk.”
We followed Sheila to the site office, a little portable building with one window, a desk and a filing cabinet. There were plans stuck up on the walls and the desk was covered in paper. I wondered silently if the vandals had broken in here or if it was always this messy.
“Do you know the extent of the damage?” Adam asked.
“We haven’t calculated the monetary value yet, but I’ve written a list of the damage we’ve discovered so far.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and began reading from the screen. “Broke seven panes of glass in the building, removed bolts from framework and scaffolding, set fire to construction materials, poured tonnes of concrete onto various pieces of equipment and into our foundations, attacked all pieces of hired machinery with wrecking bars.” Adam slid a glance my way after hearing that last one. I shrugged at him. Sure, I had been known to use that particular MO in the past, but I had been with him when this was happening. I had an alibi. And also, like, no motive. “Basically, they trashed everything.”
“Do you have any footage of it?”
Sheila sighed. “Apparently not. The security company my husband hired didn’t seem to think installing cameras was worthwhile.”
“And you didn’t have a guard here?”
“No.”
“So if you don’t mind my asking, what exactly did this company do?”
“So far as I can tell, nothing.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, not really sorry at all, but trying to seem polite and less childish than I really was, “But did you say they poured concrete?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t that kind of a specialist skill? Like don’t you have to mix it up before you pour it, and use special machinery and stuff?”
“Yes, that struck me as odd, as well,” said Shelia. “It’s a lot of effort to go to.”
“That’s some next level vandalism,” I said incredulously. I doubted this was some random act of destruction. It was far too well executed.
“I don’t think this is simple vandalism,” said Adam, echoing my thoughts.