“I know.”
“I know that.”
Bill shook his head. Aaron 2’s voice still sounded like the real Aaron, but he was doing all he could to recognize her occasional robotic inflection. He had to keep things straight in his head now. Had to. It was the only way to know what was real.
Goff rapped his knuckles on the driver’s-side window, and Bill rolled it down. The moving van was old enough it didn’t have automatic windows. He was forced to use the crank.
“Hey, Goff.”
“Hey, Bill. You’re just in time.”
“Plane crash?” Bill asked. He had seen HMS through the trees. It looked bad. He almost didn’t want to know, ’cept it was his job to.
More than anything, Bill wanted to be up there helping people. Teachers. Staff. Kids. But the wheel had spun so far out of his control, he didn’t know whether Goff was about to arrest him for Marvin’s homicide.
“What’d old Mr. Bevilacqua there do?” he asked.
“Pedophile,” Goff said.
“Jesus, really? So you beat him?”
Not that he doesn’t deserve it, Bill thought, but some lines cops shouldn’t cross themselves. Let the guys at the jail cross it for you.
“All right,” Goff said, “go ahead and pull the van up to HMS.” He waved to the other deputies, who started to move the caution-colored sawhorses out of the road.
One of them, Caruthers, dragged Mr. Bevilacqua out of the road, too. Sitting but slumped over, Bevilacqua trailed spatters of blood.
“Up? To the school?” Bill said.
“Yep, that’s where we want it.” Some sort of graph appeared on Goff’s left lens, sketching out various colored lines. Bill felt his guts spill onto the floor.
“No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Bill replied, being careful of what he said and how he phrased it. He patted the side of the moving van’s door, where an old logo had been scraped off. “Bertha here is evidence. She doesn’t belong at any school.”
“You may think that’s true,” Goff said, “but I know what this van is. I know what’s in it. And I know what you’ve done, so please. Spare me and listen to reason here.”
Bill watched the lie detector while Goff spoke, hoping to see Goff’s lies register as well. Apparently, Goff’s version wasn’t like Bill’s. Apparently, it didn’t throw Goff’s own lies back in his face.
“Take the van up to the school, Bill.”
Sweat broke out on Bill’s forehead and nose. He hated his body for betraying him like this. He could see elevated jags in the graph. Would those register as lies, too, even when he was telling the truth? After all, lie detectors didn’t detect lies. They detected bodily responses consistent with lies. The truth was all inference.
Bill lowered his voice. “Listen, Deputy, I don’t answer to you. You answer to me. And I’m telling you right now, there’s no way I’m taking this van up to a burning school. I need to take it in, call in a bomb squad, and then I need to come right back here and help those poor kids out, you understand?”
“Just pull it on up and leave it where the teachers usually park,” Goff said, gesturing up the long drive. “That’s what we want you to do with it.”
“We?” Bill asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t Aaron tell you?”
Aaron? Bill thought. He hadn’t spoken to the real Aaron since . . . Bill blinked, realizing something.
“Well,” Goff said, “move her on out; road’s clear.” He slapped the side of the van, and Bill glanced at him.
He didn’t know whether it was his proximity to the citadel or what, but instantly Bill started scrambling for strategy.
What would Goff do if Bill tried to flee? If Bill just up and drove away? And how much had Aaron 2 put in her report?
“Hey, Aaron,” Bill said, pressing his earwig tight against his ear. “Pull up my lie detector app, would you?”
Just like Goff’s, Bill’s graph materialized on his left lens. “All right, Deputy, you need to answer some questions here. Why are you so adamant I take this van up to a burning school?”
“’Cause,” Goff said, “we want what’s inside.”
“And what do you think’s inside?”
“You tell me, Bill. What is inside your van?”
“Not my van,” Bill said, feeling a spark of vindication when he saw Goff’s lie detector react. He thought for a second about what to do next. He couldn’t keep asking questions Goff refused to answer. Bill had to keep changing his tack.
“You keep saying we. Who are we talking about here, Goff? You talking about PCo? That guy Graham?”
A flat lizard grin tugged at Goff’s mouth.
“All right,” Bill continued, “you said you knew what I’d done. What’d you mean by that?”
“You killed Marvin.”
Bill blinked. He managed to keep his jaw closed, but barely. Part of him, the part that wasn’t in denial, the part that even admitted, if only to itself, that Bill had a drinking problem—that part had known the truth all along.
He couldn’t remember anything after catching JJ in that barbwire fence. Bill didn’t know why or how, but last night he’d killed someone he’d known all his life.
Wait a sec, Bill thought. Was it really true, or did Goff only think it was? Was this polygraph sophisticated enough to detect the difference?
“Sheriff Perkins killed Marvin,” Bill said, voicing his theory; more than a theory, actually—he really believed it. With all but that one part of himself.
In the end it didn’t matter what he believed. His own lie detector called it a lie. He’d forgotten his app wasn’t like Goff’s.
Well that seals it, the small, nasty piece of him said, shouting out from his subconscious. You’re a murderer. And a liar. Always have been. Case closed.
Goff’s scaly grin hadn’t grown, but it hadn’t shrunk any either. “Take the bomb on up to the school there, Bill. We’ll talk about this in a bit.”
Ah, Bill thought, there it was. The bomb. The elephant in the van. So Aaron 2 had reported everything back to the sheriff’s office. The bomb, her personal conversations with Bill—all of it.
Now the sweat had started soaking through Bill’s undershirt. “Am I under arrest here, Goff?”
“If you follow orders? I told you, we’ll talk.”
Bill nodded, gazing out the dirty windshield at the road. “And if I don’t?”
Goff shrugged. His hand came to rest on the butt of his holstered gun.
Bill, still nodding, peered at the school. Steve. JJ. They were in enough danger already. He didn’t need to go driving a bomb up there only to stoke the flames.
But, he thought, what other choice?
Doesn’t matter, said the nasty voice. Wouldn’t be the first kid you killed.
“All right,” Bill said, “okay.”
“All right, what?” Goff asked, his eyes fixed on Bill’s pulse, awaiting the lie.
“I plan to pull in up there.” Bill wiped the sweat off his brow and pointed up the school’s drive.
Goff took a second to consult his lie detector app. He nodded and patted Bill’s door. “Moving out!”
Gripping the wheel hard enough to stop his hands from trembling, Bill pulled around Bevilacqua’s van. The passenger looked over at him, tears streaming down her face.
Oh my God—Sarah?
Bill braked for a second. He couldn’t leave her here. Not with these weirdoes. But what was he going to do?
He’d told Goff he planned to “pull in up there,” which was true enough; Bill planned to pull his nos
e into the driveway of HMS—only to wrench his wheel back and go crashing through the far roadblock.
What was he supposed to do, take Sarah for a wild police chase? Throw her in back with the body and the bomb?
At least Sarah was with cops. Bill didn’t like Goff much, but he knew the man well enough, after all these years. Goff would take care of an innocent civilian. He’d proven that; he’d taken bullets to prove it.
Mouthing “sorry” to Sarah, Bill pulled past Bevilacqua’s van. He nosed toward HMS and had a split second to decide. If I just listen, he thought, maybe they’ll let me get Sarah out of here. Or actually help.
Bill nodded, then made a sharp turn and blasted right through the north end of the roadblock, sending the sawhorses flying.
“And what, let them catch me?” Bill said, checking his mirrors as he careened around a corner.
“I’m wanted for murder! Fucking armed and dangerous!”
Snarling, Bill threw the Dragnet glasses to the floor of the van. He tore his earwig out as well and tossed it aside. A few turns in the road later, he checked his mirrors.
No one.
Empty road.
Double yellow lines and trees.
Aaron 2 said.
Bill yelped and tore at his face, swerving, overcorrecting. The glasses! The earwig! Somehow, at some point, without even realizing it, he’d donned them again.
And somehow, somewhere—who on God’s green earth knew how?—Bill had found his binocular flask.
He’d been drinking from it.
Swilling.
A wet stain of it stank up the breast of his uniform.
Bill cranked down his window and tossed the gadgets out, along with the flask. He watched them bounce across the pavement into the ditch, then watched them disappear in the side mirror as he whipped around the next bend. He blinked and must have blacked out for a second.
* * *
Steve awoke in an ambulance, hooked to monitoring equipment and breathing through a mask.
“You’re awake,” his EMT said. An earpiece was blinking away behind a blond feather of the man’s hair.
Steve sat up and grabbed the EMT by his blue jacket; the jacket had a symbol on it, a staff, sort of like the caduceus with snakes twined around it, except instead of snakes it was an old coiled phone cord.
“The boy I was with. Mark. Mark, uh—”
“He’s fine,” the EMT said. “But you sound terrible, Mr. Gregory. Please. Rest.”
Steve cleared his throat. It was true, it sounded like he was talking through a voice box. His trachea, his esophagus, his face, and hands all felt sunburnt.
“I know you,” Steve said, letting go of the man’s coat. “Don’t I?”
“Yes, I believe we’ve met. I’m Graham.”
Steve shrank back on his bed. “What are you doing here?”
“Saving your life. You’d better thank me, too. I had to give you mouth to mouth. I breathed life right back into you, Mr. Gregory.”
“Get away from me! Where’s my EMT?”
“Steve, it’s me. I am. I’m right here.”
“No! Not you! You sell phones!”
Graham smiled. “And other things.”
“Where’s my son? Where’s JJ?” Steve ripped the monitoring equipment off his skin and pushed past Graham, out the back doors of the ambulance. He stood there coughing for a bit, waiting for a head rush to clear, staring up at HMS.
The cafeteria smoked before him, charred, collapsed, partially smothered in white foam. Steve had been working at this school most of his adult life. The structure looked alien to him now.
Most of the blaze had been extinguished. Firemen and other rescue workers were busy removing debris from the crash and collapse.
PCo men scurried everywhere, equipped with respirators and identical blue coats, scanning whole sections of the school with their phones. Whenever their Tether indicated something interesting, the PCo men would point out the section to the rescue workers, who’d go at the charred debris with shovels or an axe. Steve watched as they pulled out a corpse.
JoAnn, the lunch lady.
She didn’t look real. She looked like something molded out of wet ash, like clay. Steve could barely feel anything, looking at her body. Just a distant pinch somewhere deep inside his chest.
The PCo men found something else with their phones, and the rescue workers pulled out yet another corpse. There wasn’t much left of Red Beard, or his beard, but Steve recognized what was left of his boots. Red Beard had worn those same boots for years.
“It’s a tragedy, isn’t it?” Graham asked behind Steve.
“Aren’t there any more survivors?”
“I don’t know. They’re looking.”
“Is that what the phones do? Help them look?”
“What, the Corpse Sniffer app?” Graham said. “I suppose so. After a fashion.”
The PCo men moved on from the cafeteria to what remained of the eighth grade hall. They started waving their phones over the rubble. “We got some more here!” one of them said. An earthmover began to peel back a wall of cracked brick and shattered supports, revealing a classroom inside.
“JJ,” Steve said, moving forward, getting winded far too fast. Every breath burned as if Graham had filled him, not with air, but fire.
He stopped when the workers cried out and waved for the earthmover to pull back. They’d found something. A hand poking out of the wreckage, covered in dust, its knuckles bloodied.
The pinch inside Steve’s chest became a deep pang.
The hand.
It belonged to a child.
CHAPTER 31
“No, not dead. Missing,” Steve said. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning. Before the crash.”
“What was his name?” the receptionist asked.
“JJ Gregory.”
“Okay, here’s the list.”
She lifted her Tether through the service window, and Steve glimpsed the junior deputy sticker stuck on the back. The phone played a slideshow of school pictures, both HMS faculty and HMS staff, along with everyone else the town had lost yesterday.
All those smiling faces, kids who thought they were so grown-up, but who, in yearbooks, ended up looking even younger and more innocent than they actually were.
“Thirteen by our count,” the receptionist said.
Steve tried to ignore the slideshow.
He was actively maintaining his shock. He knew that, as soon as it thawed, he’d end up like Sarah, so snowed-in with grief and used tissues he couldn’t crawl out of bed. The crash had been an accident, but Steve felt sure Sarah found it way too reminiscent of That Day.
He certainly did.
Find JJ.
Then deal with this.
That was his plan, at least.
The receptionist popped her bubblegum, and George Ingram’s picture slid onscreen. Steve never had liked Ingram. The man cared way more about summer vacation than the education of his students.
Seeing Ingram’s picture, though, Steve couldn’t help but feel that pinch for George, that sharp pressure somewhere in his chest. He coughed and coughed, still messed up from the fire.
The next picture glided onscreen.
“Hey, what the f—what’s he doing on there?” Steve said.
“Who?”
“My son!”
The receptionist looked at her phone, then at Steve. “These are the casualt—”
“I know who they are! PCo found all the, um .
. .” He let out a cough. “They had this app. They never did find my son.”
“What was his name?”
“You mean ‘is’? It’s JJ Gregory. I filed a report. Please take him off there. He doesn’t belong in your little show.”
“Yes, of course. Apologies, Mr. Gregory.”
Steve started to feel bad for chewing her out. The truth was, he didn’t know whether JJ belonged in the show. His whole search smacked of desperation. But what else could he do? Go lie in bed all day, crying?
“The status of all missing person reports can be checked on your Teth—”
“Look, is Bill here? Deputy Biggs?”
“Uh, one second.” The receptionist typed something into her Tether. “Someone will be right with you, sir.”
So now he was a “sir.”
Steve tapped the desktop while he waited. The receptionist continued to blow bubblegum and play on her phone. Unbelievable. He could have been out there, putting up posters or talking with JJ’s friends. Coming here had been a waste.
“Steve?” a woman said, walking up behind the receptionist. He didn’t recognize her at first. Apparently, she had gone blonde since they’d last met.
“Aaron?”
She poked her head out the service window. “Steve, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry about what happened! How are you, are you okay? How are the kids?”
“Not good,” Steve said. “Is Bill around?”
“Oooh, sweetie.”
Steve didn’t like the way Aaron frowned.
“Let’s go someplace and talk, okay?”
With a hand on his arm, Aaron led Steve into the briefing room. He sat at the long table, and Aaron, wearing a skirt, took the chair next to him, sitting so close her bare knee touched Steve’s. He was glad he was wearing pants.
Aaron had always been touchy-feely, always giving hugs, even to acquaintances. For Steve it had always been uncomfortable, seeing as how she’d been his student. It was weird enough hearing her call him by first name.
Steve cleared his throat and glanced around at the maps on the wall: world, county, state.
At least Aaron’s friendliness was genuine. It kept her from being truly annoying.
“Is he all right?” Steve asked. “I didn’t see him. You know, at the school, but. . . . It wasn’t the fire, was it? Please tell me he’s okay.”
The Phone Company Page 30