“But you figured out the rest, didn’t you, Mike?” he said. “That’s how come you waited until you thought I was asleep before you made that phone call. Calling that cop, right?”
“No, Dan—”
“And that coin, right, Mike?” He shook his head. “Look, I’m sorry it worked out the way it did. But stuff happens.”
“Stuff like my mom, you mean?”
When someone has done something terrible, and when they have you locked in tight and they start talking about how you’re going to disappear and then they start giving you details, you know you’re in terminal trouble. I figured I had nothing to lose now. And if there was one thing I had to know—needed to know—it was what had happened to Mom, and why.
Dan didn’t answer. Instead he said to Lew, “Get some rope.”
I looked Lew straight in the eyes. Lew, who idolized Marilyn Monroe and Bart Simpson. Goofy Lew. Lew with his tire iron, tap-tap-tapping in the palm of his hand.
“Sorry, Mike,” was the best he could come up with.
You see it in movies—a fellow gets himself into a jam with some bad guys. The bad guys decide to deal with the situation, which is never good news for our hero. You feel for him. But you know he’s going to be fine—he’s smarter than the bad guys or stronger or he has an ace in the hole. Maybe he slipped a knife up his sleeve a scene or two back that the bad guys don’t know about. Maybe he has the ability to dislocate his shoulder at will, which he demonstrated in the first scene, so he can slip out of the ropes or the chains or whatever they tie him up with. You just know he’s going to be fine. That’s the movies.
But real life runs differently. You look at these guys, the bad guys, except they’re guys you’ve known forever, guys you’ve trusted—you look at them and you think, They’re not kidding. And the reason they’re not kidding is that they’re afraid. You can hurt them. You can tear their lives apart. You tell anyone what you know and, like Dan said, they’re looking at serious prison time. You know it and they know it, and the only thing they can think of to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure you don’t talk. You see them with their tire irons and their ropes and you check those padlocks one more time—there’s no way out. You’re done like Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty soon all that’s going to be left are the bones.
“How did she know?” I said. If it was going to come down to that, then at least I had a right to know. At least I could take that with me.
“What?” For a moment, Dan looked confused.
“My mom. You killed her because she knew, right?”
“Down on the floor, Mike,” he said. “Face down.”
I did what he told me, and I asked my question again.
“Put your arms behind your back. Lew, hurry up with that rope.”
I heard a shwok, and a coil of rope landed on the ground beside me.
“It was my fault,” Lew said.
I craned my neck around, trying to get a look at him, but he must have been standing somewhere behind Dan because I couldn’t locate him.
“It was stupid,” he said. Then he stopped talking. The silence almost drove me crazy.
“Jeez, Lew, you’ve been at my house a million times. You carry on like you’re someone special in my life. You can at least tell me what happened. You think I don’t deserve that?”
Dan wrenched my arms back, and I felt the rough rope bind me tightly.
“We were out there that night,” Lew said. “Just taking care of business, you know? And she stopped at a phone booth and was fumbling in her purse and then she saw us.” He came closer. I saw his feet and twisted my neck to look up, way up, at his face. “She asked if I had change for a five,” he said. “She was late, and she wanted to call home and tell you she was on her way.”
“You don’t have to,” Dan said. I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“I wasn’t thinking, I guess. I don’t know. I dug into my pocket and brought out all this change.” He stopped and looked at Dan. “The old man had that coin,” he said.
Mr. Jhun’s lucky gold coin. The one that had been stolen the night he was murdered. The one I had just seen in Lew’s room.
“Dan told me maybe a hundred times, get rid of that thing. But it was real gold, you know. You ever walked around with a real gold coin in your pocket?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Nancy saw it. She pretended like she didn’t, but she saw it. She said she changed her mind about making a call, she’d just go home, she was worried about you. Mike, we didn’t have any choice.”
We didn’t have any choice.
Dan stood up and tossed him a key ring.
“Unlock the door,” he said.
Lew’s feet stayed where they were for a moment. Then they walked away. Dan grabbed my hair and pulled my head back. When I opened my mouth to yell, he rammed a balled-up rag into it, almost choking me.
“Okay, Mike, on your feet,” Dan said. He grabbed the rope around my wrists and pulled, yanking my arms almost out of their sockets. I staggered to my feet.
I watched Lew unlock the padlock on the garage door. I know he was working at normal speed—inserting the key into the lock, turning the key, pulling on the lock to disengage it, unhooking the lock from the metal loops in the garage door, engaging the lock again and setting it aside, tossing the keys back to Dan, who caught them easily with the hand that didn’t have a firm grip on me. But it all seemed to move in slow, slow motion. Each step seemed to take minutes instead of seconds. And the whole time I was watching, I was thinking, This can’t be happening to me. These guys can’t possibly be going to do what I think they’re going to do. They can’t possibly have done what they just told me they did. I was on my feet only because Dan had such a firm grip on me. I couldn’t feel my legs. If Dan had let go, I’d have crashed to the floor.
I don’t know if I heard it first or if Dan did, but he tightened his grip on my arms and sshhed Lew. Then he yanked me back to the wall and shut off the lights. In the darkness, I heard thumping. It seemed to be close by. And then I realized: someone was knocking on the front door to Dan’s place.
“Mike? You in there?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Mike?”
It was Riel. He wasn’t more than a few feet from me, but I couldn’t call out and tell him that.
“The door,” Dan hissed. “Lock it.”
I heard Lew fumble to find the lock in the now dark garage. Dan cursed in my ear. He yanked me toward the workbench and scrabbled around for a few moments, opening and closing drawers.
“I can’t find it,” Lew said, his voice sharp with panic.
I heard a click. Then a rumbling, scraping sound as the garage door started to roll upward. Silvery light from the moon and outside lights appeared first at the ground level, then crept higher and higher. Lew scrambled back toward Dan, looking around wildly for where he had left his tire iron.
I saw a pair of boots, a pair of legs, a torso, then Riel, standing alone, framed in the double-wide opening. He peered inside.
“Mike, you okay?”
I nodded, even though there wasn’t a sane person anywhere on the planet who would call my situation anywhere near okay. I was tied up. Something hard was jammed into my back. Dan’s fingers bit into my arm.
“You boys want to come out of there?” Riel said, as if he were asking if Johnny could come out and play.
Lew edged closer to Dan and glanced nervously at him.
“It’s Dan, right?” Riel said, still friendly, trying to keep things light, I guess. He stepped into the garage.
“Stop there,” Dan said. He pulled his hand away from my back and held it up to show Riel what he was holding. A gun.
Riel stopped and raised his hands slightly so that Dan could see they were empty. But he held his ground.
“Why don’t you let the kid go?” he said. “Things are bad enough already, wouldn’t you say?”
Dan brought the gun down, in front of me this time, pointing it righ
t at my chest.
“The police had a long talk with an Arthur Sullivan today,” Riel said.
A tiny part of my brain wondered who Arthur Sullivan was. The rest of my brain was 100 percent focused on the gun in Dan’s hand. From where I was standing, it looked as big as a cannon.
“He told them the whole story, Dan,” Riel said. “He said that all he was looking for was a new car and a little relief from his insurance company. He said he didn’t plan on his car being used to kill anyone.”
I locked onto the answer fast and hard. Arthur Sullivan was the guy who owned the car that had killed Mom. The car that had been reported stolen. The car that Billy had chopped.
“He told them who arranged things for him,” Riel said. “He described you so well, Dan, even a blind man could make an identification.”
Dan glanced at Lew. “Start the car,” he said.
Lew took a step toward the car.
From clear across the garage, I heard Riel sigh. “You really think that’s a good idea?” he said.
Lew froze.
“Hey, you got nothing to say about this,” Dan said. He sounded angry, which made me nervous. He was still pointing his gun right at me. “I’ve got the kid. I’ve got the gun. I make the decisions.” He looked at Lew again. “Start the car!”
“How far do you think you’re going to get?” Riel said. I couldn’t figure him out. He was standing alone, framed in the garage door. If he had a gun, I didn’t see it. But there he was, talking like he was holding all the cards. “I know you have the kid. The cops know you were in possession of the car that killed Nancy McGill. It’s not going to be much of a stretch to tie at least one of you to the restaurant killing, either. I guess you know they found blood at the scene that didn’t belong to the victim. Which one of you boys sustained injuries?”
Lew’s eyes were wild now.
“Jeez,” he said. “Now what are we going to do?”
“Let the kid go,” Riel said.
“Who’s going to make me?” Dan said. Slowly the gun moved away from me and toward Riel. “You?”
Even in the dim interior of the garage, I could see the shadow of a smile on Riel’s lips.
“What? You’re going to shoot me?” he said.
As he took a step forward, one of his hands swung behind his back. I felt Dan’s hand tighten on me again. The gun he was holding swung all the way toward Riel. I struggled. I saw Riel’s hand come back up. Then a light sliced across my face, blinding me and Dan. A gun went off, the shot almost deafening me. The beam of light vanished as the flashlight Riel had been holding crashed to the ground. Riel crumpled. I kicked Dan as hard as I could, and in that instant he released his grip on me. Then someone yelled, “Down!” and suddenly the garage was flooded with lights and filled with cops. Lew stood perfectly still, eyes wide, hands above his head. He kept saying, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.” Dan was ordered to lie spread-eagled on the floor of the garage. Two cops with guns drawn stood above him while a third cop handcuffed him. Another cop—Detective Jones—helped me to my feet. He pulled the rag out of my mouth and then turned me around and worked at untying my hands.
“You okay?” he asked.
I kept trying to twist around to see how Riel was. But when I could finally see, he wasn’t there anymore. I felt like I had just been locked in a deep freeze. Everything went cold. I saw spots in front of my eyes. I swung around, scanning faces.
Then I saw him.
On his feet. Another cop was with him. Detective Jones’s partner, Detective London. He was helping Riel with something. It took me a moment to figure it out. He was helping Riel take off a vest. Riel handed it to the detective and came over to me.
“You okay, Mike?”
I nodded. A great big lump in my throat was making it hard to breathe. I felt like I could burst into tears at any moment.
“I thought—”
“It’s okay, Mike,” he said and threw an arm over my shoulders. “It’s all okay.”
It turned out that Billy had done one good thing—he had told me about the car. That little piece of information had led the police to question the owner of the one car they couldn’t account for, the one that had been reported stolen. At first, Riel said, Arthur Sullivan played the good citizen. His car was stolen, he reported it, he was a straight-shooter. Then the detectives told him about the hit-and-run and how they knew it was his car that had been involved. They told him how much trouble he could be in because his car had been used in a homicide. That’s when he had crumbled and told them everything he knew, which was just enough to identify Dan.
“Yeah, but how did you know where I was?” I asked Riel. We were at a police station. Riel was drinking coffee. I was drinking hot chocolate.
“One of the uniformed guys saw you walk by the house this afternoon. He saw you get into a car. Your friend Vin filled us in on Billy’s friends and gave us Dan’s name. I took a chance. I couldn’t figure out where else you might be.”
I was at the police station for a long time, telling the detectives what had happened and what Dan and Lew had told me. Riel sat with me the whole time. When I had finished telling them everything I knew, Detective Jones looked at Riel. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there was something else, something they hadn’t told me yet.
“What?” I said.
“It’s about your uncle,” Detective Jones said. He looked at Riel again. Riel turned to me.
“Billy didn’t kill himself,” he said.
“I know.”
Riel frowned.
Dan had said, “What would make a guy do something like that?” It had taken a long time for it to register. I guess I hadn’t wanted to believe it. Dan and Lew were Billy’s friends. They’d been buddies for almost as long as I could remember.
“Dan knew … how Billy died,” I said. “I didn’t tell him, and it wasn’t in the papers. What I don’t get is why.”
“They figured if Billy had told you, he might decide to tell the police, too. I’m sorry, Mike.”
I wished I could go home. I wished I had a home to go to.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
With his best friends sitting in jail, waiting to go to trial for murder, Billy’s funeral turned out to be a lot smaller than I had planned. Some of the guys he worked with showed up. So did Carla and a couple of his exgirlfriends, including Kathy, who had stayed with me the night Mom had died. She cried more than anyone else there. Vin showed up with his parents, both of whom came up to me afterwards and told me I would always be welcome at their house. Always. Sal and his dad came, too. His dad shook my hand but didn’t say anything. Jen showed up, which surprised me. She hung back until everyone else had gone, then she approached me. Her eyes were red.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek and sort of hung there for a moment, like there was something else she was going to say. But I guess there wasn’t, because finally she just turned and walked away.
Mr. Scorza came. I saw him sitting near the back of the room, and I kept hoping he would leave right afterwards so that I wouldn’t have to talk to him. I still felt ashamed about what had happened. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he walked straight up to me and shook my hand and told me how sorry he had been to hear about Billy. I told him thank you. He didn’t offer to give me back my job. I hadn’t expected him to, but, really, I had been hoping.
One month to the day after Billy’s funeral, I went down to Children’s Aid and sat in a windowless office and talked to Margaret Phillips for more than an hour. Mostly she kept asking me if I was sure.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“It can be a difficult adjustment,” she said.
As if I didn’t know that. But what was the alternative? “I’m sure,” I said again.
“It will be just on a trial basis at first,” she said. “And you’ll have a caseworker checking on everything. If there are any problems, or if you change your mind, we can always talk about it. It doesn’t have to be foreve
r, you know.”
I told her I knew.
Riel was waiting for me when I came out of the office.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“She kept asking me if I was sure.”
He smiled. “They asked me the same thing,” he said. “They kept telling me how hard it is to be a foster parent.”
“And?”
“I said I was sure. I told them any kid who was soft on old ladies would probably work out just fine.”
“Huh?”
“That’s when I knew you were okay, Mike. When I talked to Mrs. Jhun’s neighbors. When I found out how you visited her and helped her.” He smiled. “You’re still going to have to go to court on that other thing, though.”
“I know.” But I wasn’t dreading that nearly as much as I had been. “What about you?”
He looked surprised. “What about me?”
“You going to stay teaching school?” I kept thinking about him saying, We looked into it.
He smiled and shook his head. “We’re only six weeks into the school year,” he said. Then, with a sigh, “I guess I haven’t decided yet.”
I went home to a house that wasn’t my own, a house that looked like no one had really lived in it, even though Riel had been there for a couple of years. While I set myself up in the back bedroom, Riel got busy in the kitchen. Then he went upstairs to change. When the doorbell rang, he called from upstairs for me to answer it. Dr. Susan Thomas was at the door. She had a bottle of wine in one hand and some cut flowers in the other.
“Hello, Mike,” she said.
When Riel came downstairs, he looked less scruffy. He also smelled of aftershave. He took the wine, asked me to find something to put the flowers in, and showed Dr. Thomas into the kitchen.
Supper was good. After I had cleared the table, when the two of them were still sitting there, sipping wine and smiling at each other, I said, “Okay if I go over to Vin’s?”
Riel thought about it a moment.
“Okay,” he said. “But home by midnight, okay?”
Home by midnight.
“Okay,” I said.
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