Homicide Related

by Norah McClintock

  She pulled away from him a little, and the warmth that her body had imprinted on him cooled almost instantly.

  “You’re not jealous, are you, Dooley?” she said, frowning up at him. “He’s just someone I know. He gave me a lift, that’s all. I came over here to see you. I thought we could go to the library and do our homework together. How about it?”

  Dooley’s chest, which had been so tight that he could hardly breathe when he’d seen Beth sitting in the Jag, slowly relaxed. He pulled Beth close and noticed right away that, as usual, she didn’t resist. Sometimes they held each other for what seemed like forever. It was the best feeling in the world, better even than being high. If there was something between her and Nevin, she would have been pulling away from him, wouldn’t she? He would have been able to feel it—wouldn’t he?

  Then she did it. She wriggled free of him.

  “So,” she said. “Are we on?”

  Dooley reached into his pocket, feeling like a pathetic loser because now he had to do something that he bet Nevin never had to do. He had to call his uncle to ask—ask, for Christ’s sake—if he could go to the library because, as his uncle never tired of telling him, they had a deal. The deal was: Dooley went to school and then, unless he was scheduled to work, he went straight home. Any deviation from the deal required a phone call and the third degree.

  He pulled out the cell phone that his uncle had finally agreed to let him have to replace the stupid pager that was all his uncle had allowed at first.

  “Yeah,” Dooley said when his uncle asked him if he couldn’t just as easily do his homework at home, meaning where his uncle could call him on the home phone and know, when Dooley answered it, exactly where he was, whereas with a cell phone, well, who really knew where anyone was? “Yeah, I could do it at home. But I’m with Beth.”

  Beth took the phone from him and, with a smile in her voice that outdid the one on her face, said, “Hi, Mr. McCormack.” She chatted with Dooley’s uncle for a minute and laughed and said, yes, she bet it was hard to get used to, before finally handing the phone back to Dooley. “He wants to talk to you again,” she said.

  Dooley put the phone to his ear.

  “You gonna at least return those books?” his uncle said.

  Jesus. Dooley said goodbye and dropped his phone into his pocket.

  “You just bet what’s hard to get used to?” he said to Beth.

  “The thought of you in a library.”

  Dooley started to say he didn’t know what was so hard about that. His uncle knew he went to the library; where did he think he’d gotten those library books he kept nagging Dooley to return? But he was interrupted when his cell phone rang again. He checked the display. J. Eccles.

  Jeffie.

  What the—?

  Jeffie was never good news. But Dooley took the call anyway because Jeffie was one of those people, if you ignored him, he’d keep calling and calling until you finally found yourself answering just so you could tell him to leave you the fuck alone. The first thing he said to Jeffie was, “How did you get this number?”

  “I heard where you were working,” Jeffie said. “There’s this girl there.” Dooley bet he was referring to Linelle. “I told her how long I’ve known you and some of the shit we did together—nothing you probably wouldn’t tell her yourself.” Uh-huh, Dooley thought. “Hey, is she with someone, because she sounds—”

  “What do you want?” Dooley said.

  He listened to what Jeffie had to say and then thought about his request while Jeffie moaned about how important it was and about the shit he’d be in, clear up to his mouth, maybe even over his head; he’d be drowning in it, if Dooley didn’t help him out.

  “You owe me, Dooley,” Jeffie said. “If it hadn’t been for me, you would have ended up just like Tyler.”

  Just like Tyler? No way, Dooley thought. But, yeah, he owed Jeffie. He owed him big-time.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get the picture. I’ll see if I can get away.” Jeffie didn’t like the if part. Well, too bad for him. “I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee it,” Dooley said and then held the phone away from his ear—when it came to bitching and moaning, Jeffie was a champion.

  “Can’t guarantee what?” Beth said when Dooley dropped his cell phone back into his pocket. “Who was that?”

  “No one,” Dooley said. When she gave him a look— where had she heard that before?—he said, “Really, it’s nothing.” There were some things that it was better she didn’t know, especially if she was learning stuff from a guy named Nevin who drove a Jag.

  “Oh,” she said. “Before I forget—I finally got my own cell phone.” She’d had a cell phone before, but her mother had paid for it and had got into the habit of borrowing it from time to time, which had led to a major screwup one time before Dooley realized what was going on. He’d punched in Beth’s number, had assumed the hello was hers, and had started in being cute—he thought. It turned out the hello had come from Beth’s mother, and she was not amused. “Here’s the number.” She wrote it down on a scrap of paper she tore from her school agenda. He put it in his pocket.

  Five hours later, Dooley was dancing from foot to foot and wishing he was still with Beth, partly because there was nothing better than being with her, partly because, if he was with her, he wouldn’t be freezing his ass off down in this godforsaken ravine, and mostly (he hated to admit it) because if he was with her, it meant that Nevin couldn’t be. His hands were buried in the pockets of his jean jacket and he was thinking he should have put on something warmer. It had been bright and sunny after school, but then the air had started to change. A sheet of cloud had rolled across the sky like a tarp across stadium turf, signaling fun over. In the past couple of hours, it had turned bitingly cold. The wind whipped away the protective layer of warmth that came off Dooley’s body, leaving the dampness in the air to close in until he felt like he was encased in a film of ice. He looked around. Where the hell was Jeffie? On the phone, he’d told Dooley ten o’clock. It was twenty after already and Dooley was still waiting. And why had Jeffie insisted on this place? Why outdoors? Why not a nice, warm restaurant? Even a not-so-nice restaurant would have been fine, just so long as it was heated.

  Dooley caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned toward it. He tensed up immediately. There, fifteen or twenty meters away up the path, was an animal of some kind. A raccoon, maybe? No, a dog. Jesus, a big one, too, and it was coming Dooley’s way. He scanned the ravine for human life, specifically, a dog owner dangling a leash from one hand, but he didn’t see anyone. In Dooley’s experience, dogs in dark, out-of-the-way places were like people in dark, out-of-the-way places. You never knew what they were doing there or what they might do. But a dog with an owner and a leash—that was a different story. It was almost comforting. Well, most of the time it was. There was a guy who used to live in Dooley’s old neighborhood. He strutted around with a pair of fight-hungry pit bulls at the end of a couple of chains. There was nothing comforting about that.

  Dooley averted his eyes from the dog and hoped it would change direction or walk on by. It didn’t. It stopped. Dooley ventured a quick peek. The dog was standing maybe ten meters up the path now, its eyes focused on Dooley, its body rigid. Dooley looked away quickly and forced himself 15 to breathe in and out at regular intervals. He tried to make like a tree or a rock, something immobile and uninteresting to a dog. Okay, so maybe a tree wasn’t the best idea.

  The dog didn’t move. It didn’t come down the path toward Dooley, which was good, but it didn’t retreat either. It seemed to be studying Dooley. Goddamn Jeffie. Dooley would give him five more minutes, less if the dog so much as twitched in Dooley’s direction, and that was it. It had been a major pain in the ass to get here in the first place. His uncle had wanted to know where the hell he was going at nine-thirty on a school night. Yeah, well, Dooley had been prepared for that one.

  “I’m going to drop off those library books you’ve been nagging me about.�
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  “The library’s closed.”

  “They have a drop box. The books are due tomorrow. I don’t want to forget.”

  “You told me you’d take care of it,” his uncle said.

  “And I’m going to. Right now. What’s the matter? You don’t trust me?”

  His uncle fixed him with that used-to-be-a-cop look of his that was supposed to tell Dooley that, no, as a matter of fact, he didn’t.

  “Give me a break,” Dooley said. “I’m holding down a job. I’m going to school, and so far I’m passing everything. You gonna give me a hard time for the rest of my life?”

  His uncle stuck with his cop look, but Dooley had been around him long enough by now to know that he wasn’t the one-hundred-percent tyrant that he worked hard at making himself out to be.

  “I spent two-and-a-half hours in the library this afternoon writing an essay for English,” Dooley said.

  “You couldn’t have returned the books then?”

  “We were at the reference library. You can’t borrow books from there and you can’t return them there. Besides, my brain feels like it’s gonna explode. I thought I’d take a walk, clear my head, return the books. That’s all.”

  “At nine-thirty at night?” his uncle said.

  Boy, once a cop … “You want to come with me, hold my hand?” Dooley said.

  “Yeah, and maybe keep you out of trouble?”

  “Jesus,” Dooley said, starting to pull off his jacket. “Forget it, okay? I’ll do it after school tomorrow, if I remember.” He wrestled free of the jacket, tossed it onto the back of a chair, and turned to leave the room.

  Worst case: Jeffie would have to wait a day.

  “Where were you planning to walk?” his uncle said pretty much on schedule, which is to say, when Dooley was halfway down the hall on his way to the stairs. One thing (but probably not the main thing) that Dooley had learned over the past few months was that a little credibility goes a long way. When he had first come to live with his uncle, he’d had none. He’d been, in the eyes of his uncle, a fuckup—someone who had screwed up so much and sunk so low that he was going to have to both eat and shovel shit for an eternity, and smile while he was doing it, just to prove that he could take whatever the straight-and-narrow world chose to dish out to him. Well, he’d done that. He’d paid those almighty dues. He’d abided by each and every condition dictated by his uncle and the court. And he had not, repeat not, fallen into that major sinkhole a while back. He’d left that to the rich kid.

  Dooley didn’t turn when his uncle asked him where he was planning to walk. He just glanced over his shoulder, like, what difference did it make now?

  “I was going to go to the library and then walk around and get some air. If I’m not at school, I’m at work. If I’m not at work, I’m here.” Well, most of the time. Sometimes he got sprung. Sometimes he got to be with Beth.

  And then there it was, that heavy sigh, the sweet sound of his uncle caving.

  “Be back by eleven at the latest,” his uncle said, laying out terms so that it was clear who was in charge.

  “Forget it,” Dooley said. “It’s not important.”

  “Jesus, Ryan,” his uncle said, exasperated. That was one thing Dooley could always count on: The pinched look on his uncle’s face and the impatient snap in his voice every time Dooley didn’t do whatever his uncle had it in mind that he should do. “You want to take a walk and return those damned books, then do it. All I’m saying is, be back by eleven.”

  “Well …” Dooley said, thinking it over. “Okay.”

  Down in the ravine now, books safely deposited into the library’s drop box, Dooley eased his arm out slowly—he wasn’t making any sudden moves as long as that dog was still there—and glanced at his watch. The only way he was going to be home by eleven was if he started back no later than twenty to. But what was the point in waiting that long?

  Jeffie had said ten. It was twenty-five after now—no, make that twenty-six-and-counting after. Fuck it.

  “Dooley. Hey, Dooley!”

  Dooley turned and saw a familiar figure scrambling down the path toward him. Jeffie, looking thinner and smaller than Dooley remembered, his baggy jeans so low on his hips that they looked like they were going to slide right off, his jacket—leather, Dooley noticed—unzipped, its cuffs half covering Jeffie’s hands. The dog saw him, too. It barked and growled. Jeffie stopped, bent down, picked up something—a rock?—and whipped it at the animal. He must have hit the mark, too, because the dog yelped and ran off in the other direction. Dooley shook his head.

  “What if you’d pissed it off and it attacked you?” he said when Jeffie was close enough to hear him.

  “Then I would have blasted it,” Jeffie said.

  Whoa.

  “You have a gun?” Dooley said. No way did he want to be around anyone who was armed. Not now. Not ever again.

  “Relax,” Jeffie said. “It’s a figure of speech.” Dooley wasn’t sure that his English teacher would agree, but that was another difference between Dooley and Jeffie: Dooley had an English teacher. “You think I’d take a chance like that?”

  Dooley didn’t know what to think. Except for a brief chance meeting on the street at the beginning of the summer, he hadn’t seen or spoken to Jeffie in a long time.

  “Besides,” Jeffie said, “I showed him who’s boss, didn’t I?”

  Right.

  “What took you so long to get here?” Dooley said. “You said ten. It’s nearly ten-thirty.” His voice echoed a little down under the bridge where he was standing, and he was startled to hear how much he sounded like his uncle. Was that where he was headed?

  “You know how Teresa can be,” Jeffie said.

  “You still with her?” Dooley said, surprised. Teresa was small and dark and, when she was out in public with Jeffie, she came across as kind of cute and helpless. But Dooley had seen them alone together. Then she was always at Jeffie for something: Why hadn’t he remembered this, why hadn’t he done that, always sounding like she was mad at him for something, which made Dooley wonder why she stayed with Jeffie. She sure didn’t seem to like him much. More important, he couldn’t figure out why Jeffie put up with her and her constant carping.

  “Yeah,” Jeffie said. “It’s okay, I guess. She keeps saying we’ve been together long enough, we should make it legal. And she’s been hinting around about a kid.” Dooley couldn’t figure how any of that fell into the category of okay. “She keeps telling me what a great father I’d be.”

  Dooley tried to picture Jeffie soothing a baby who was teething or giving it a bottle, but couldn’t. For one thing, Jeffie was in the wrong line of work. Also, he was too impulsive. He’d get an idea to do something and, boom, off he’d go and do it without thinking about the stuff he was supposed to be doing in the first place. He wasn’t that bright, either. Mostly it was because he had a learning disability—Dooley knew a lot of guys like that. He’d heard somewhere that a high percentage of guys who got into trouble had either a learning disability or some kind of mental problem. Jeffie couldn’t spell for shit. He was a disaster at math. And his memory? Tell him a phone number or an address, and chances were he’d forget it within five minutes. Plus, he had no reference point, no idea what a father was, let alone a great one.

  “You gonna do it?” Dooley said. “You gonna have a kid with her?”

  “Are you crazy? I’m nineteen. Who wants a kid at nineteen?”

  Dooley couldn’t think of a single person.

  “What about you?” Jeffie said.

  “What about me?”

  “You with someone?”

  Dooley didn’t answer. Jeffie was past tense. Beth was the present and, he hoped, the future. Jeffie didn’t push it. He had other things on his mind.

  “I really appreciate it, Dooley,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t have asked, but—”

  “What’s it for, Jeffie?”

  Most of the time, Jeffie had a goofy-sweet expression on his face, like h
e was only catching about eighty percent of what was going on. But what you saw with Jeffie wasn’t always what you got. Jeffie was no genius, but he was no fool, either. Nor was he a pushover. Anger flashed in his eyes.

  “What difference does it make?” he said.

  “I want it back, that’s what,” Dooley said. “If you’re just gonna piss it away on some game—”

  Jeffie bristled. When he was wearing his normal, befuddled expression, he looked harmless. Make him angry though, and you’d better watch out. But he didn’t scare

  Dooley, who had worked out exactly how many hours he’d put in at the video store to earn what he was about to hand over to Jeffie.

  “You’re good for it, right, Jeffie?” he said.

  “I said I was, didn’t I?” Jeffie was trying to make himself as tall as Dooley. They locked eyes for a few seconds, Jeffie breathing hard at first and then, gradually, slowing it down, maybe figuring he’d better back off a little if he wanted Dooley to deliver. “One week, that’s all I’m asking,” he said. “There’s this guy, Dooley. He’s one of those downtown guys, you know, in one of those big towers. He has more money than he knows what to do with. He was looking for a connection. The guy could be a gold mine. He likes to party. Hey, and you know what? He reminds me of you.”

  Right. Ryan Dooley, party animal. He wanted to tell Jeffie, I don’t do that anymore; I’ve cleaned up my life. But what were the chances that Jeffie would believe him?

  “This guy,” Jeffie said. “If I deliver, I’m set.”

  “So why do you need me?” Dooley said.

  Jeffie shrugged, as if it was no big deal, but Dooley caught the shadow of fear in his eyes. “There’s this guy I owe. He’s insistent, you know? He doesn’t want to wait. If I tell him he’s got nothing to worry about, all he needs is to give me another couple of days, he’s gonna—”

  “Okay, whatever,” Dooley said, cutting it short. He didn’t want to know what Jeffie was into. He just wanted to know that he wasn’t flushing hard-earned money down the toilet. “I need it back, that’s all I’m saying. Some people work for a living, Jeffie.”