“No,” she says. “You can’t, and you never could. Tyne, you stay in the truck. If things go bad—don’t think, just get out of there.”
The elevator finally arrives. I rush in and jab the lobby button.
As the doors are closing Dad tells Mom, “I’ll make this right. I’ll fix it.”
But it’s too late for that.
Maybe too late for Stick.
“FASTER,” I TELL Dad.
“I go any faster we’ll get pulled over.”
“How much longer?”
“Twenty minutes.”
The sun’s gone down and it’s getting dark out, dropping below freezing.
The salvage yard is where Jake stores construction supplies and stuff from demolished buildings.
I’ve got the pill bottle in my hand, turning it over and over, wondering how everything got so bad, so fast. Stick had a bad feeling about where all this was headed. He was right.
“I’m sorry,” Dad says. “I thought I’d convinced you that you were just seeing things.”
“That I believed your lie?”
He swallows hard. “Yeah. I just— I thought it was the only way to get you to put it behind you. Never guessed that you’d kept looking. There seemed no other way out.”
“How about the truth?”
“How could I tell you? What could I say that wouldn’t open the whole rotten thing up? I couldn’t ask you to keep that secret. I didn’t want to make you part of it, for it to touch you.”
“How could you…” It’s impossible to find the words, to ask for answers I really don’t want to hear. But I have to try. “How could you be part of it, of what happened to that girl?”
“It was an accident. All of it.”
“An accident? I saw the body. She was butchered.”
“It’s not how it looks.”
“What!”
“It wasn’t murder. Not really.”
In the dark interior of the truck I try to read his face in the shadows. He sounds like he’s choking on his words.
“How did you get mixed up in it?” I ask.
He takes a shaky breath. “I was only supposed to be a lookout. This was twenty-five years ago. I was fourteen. Jake said he needed my help. He was in trouble and wanted me to guard one of the storage rooms in the basement, make sure nobody came near it. He was caught up in something bad. I didn’t know what he was hiding. He told me not to look, to just wait in the hall and guard the door while he ran to get something. Said he’d only be twenty minutes.”
I stare straight ahead, needing to find out the truth, but wanting to be at the yard already. Getting Stick is all that matters.
“When I was waiting for Jake, I heard moaning coming from the room. I was scared to death. Didn’t know what to do. I called through the door, ‘You okay in there?’ Nobody answered. The moaning got louder. Then there was a scream that cut right through me. There was a girl inside, and something was really wrong. I had to look. So I used the master key to open the door.”
Dad guns the engine to make the next light and we fly through an intersection.
“There was a girl. I knew her from the neighborhood. She was lying on a piece of foam on the floor, shrieking in pain, shaking and soaked with sweat. Her eyes were wide open and staring at me. But she couldn’t speak without screaming. I told her I’d get help. I was running for the elevator when Jake came rushing back. I said to call an ambulance, but he told me no. She was overdosing, and he’d got the meds he needed to help her. When we got to the room it was too late. She was already seizing. Too far gone. Right then, she stopped shaking and went stiff, stopped breathing, stopped everything. I got down and started pumping her chest, trying CPR, blowing into her mouth. I tried, really. But she was gone.”
I’m shaking my head, trying to keep up with Dad. “No. She couldn’t have died that way. I saw how she was, her body cut open.”
Dad tries to clear his throat. “Jake did that after. When she was already dead.”
“What? Why?”
“Because…he had to get the drugs out of her.”
“What?”
“The girl, she was a mule. She was carrying a shipment of cocaine inside her. She’d just got off a plane from Mexico, on a drug run.”
I stare at him as we speed through the streets.
“Jake was a dealer?”
“No, but he worked for one. Jake was a recruiter. He found the girls and taught them to be mules to carry the drugs. The girl would fly down to Mexico with a handler who posed as her aunt, pretending they were on vacation. And before they flew back to Toronto she’d swallow a bunch of condoms filled with cocaine.”
“She was a mule?”
“Jake convinced the girls it was easy money. When they got back from a run, he’d pick them up at the airport, after they cleared customs, and deliver them to the dealer’s doctor, where they’d get the drugs safely out of them. It had always worked okay.”
“So how…how did she end up at the Zoo?”
“Things got screwed up. The dealer’s place was raided, so Jake had nowhere to deliver the girl. The handler was only paid to get her past customs. After that, she gave her over to Jake. He had to find somewhere private and secure so the girl could pass the drugs out of her system. The Zoo had all those empty rooms where nobody ever went, and we had the keys. So he brought her there.”
“What went wrong?”
“Everything. Jake had never done more than sell the girls on it and drive them to the dealer to get the shipment taken out of them. But time is a big factor. You can’t leave the condoms inside too long, because they might break, or get damaged by stomach acids. That can be deadly. You can OD. When you swallow the drugs, they give you something to make you constipated so you don’t pass the drugs before you get to your destination. But the handler gave the girl too much of that stuff, and then the flight was delayed. When Jake left me to guard the room, he was going for laxatives, trying to save her. But one of the condoms burst. She never had a chance.”
Dad’s breathing hard, caught in the memory.
I don’t want to hear any more, but I have to. “And after?”
“After that he…got the drugs out. Said if he didn’t get the coke to the dealer, he’d be dead too. I—I waited outside. Just sat on the floor, heaving. When he was done, he called me back in. It was…unbelievable, horrific. I puked till there was nothing left in me. Jake said he’d take care of the body, and told me to clean up the blood. I said I couldn’t do it. Then he said we were in this together now, both of us.” Dad wipes the sweat from his forehead. “So I cleaned it up.”
I check the time on my cell. “Dad! We’ve got five minutes. Almost there?”
“We’ll make it.”
I’m sick at what he told me, but more frantic for Stick.
Dad keeps going. “I’m sorry. So sorry. Back then I was scared, stupid and fourteen. Didn’t know what else to do. And I never knew what Jake did with the body. Not till you found her.”
“Why did you go and bury her?”
We turn off the main road into an industrial area. It’s fully dark now.
He shakes his head. “I panicked. If the cops found out, that would be it. I’d lose everything. You, Mom, Squirrel. I was trying to protect us. Thought I could make it go away. I couldn’t ask you to live with knowing what I’d done back then. So I lied. Tried to make you think you were seeing things. But I was wrong, about everything.”
“And now Jake wants the finger back, to get rid of the evidence. But there’s still her body buried out in the woods.”
Dad shakes his head. “After I buried it, I called him and we fought about it. How could he dump her in the wall like that? He wanted to know where I’d put her. And I told him. So he’s got her body.”
I look down at the pill bottle. “He just needs this.”
Dad hits the brakes in front of a tall chain-link gate topped with barbed wire.
We’re here.
IN THE GLARE of our headlights Dad runs up
to the gate. There’s a guardhouse trailer on the other side, but nobody in sight. The yard is lit by floodlights on tall poles around the perimeter. Most of the place lies in shadow. Dad reaches out and pulls the gate back. Somewhere beyond, Jake’s got Stick.
As I watch Dad, I catch something moving from behind the trailer. Two low figures jump out toward him. No time to shout a warning before the silence is broken by angry barking. Big dogs rush Dad, but they’re pulled up short by their chains.
Dad comes back. “He knows we’re here now.”
“Any more dogs inside?”
“Don’t think so.”
He pulls the truck through. Leaving the gate open, we cruise the yard. The place is huge, with towering stacks of lumber and shipping containers forming dark corridors. We pass piles of bent girders and pipes heaped into hills of twisted metal.
Where are you, Stick?
We turn a corner into at a dead end lit by the high beams of a car. Jake’s Mustang.
Dad pulls to a stop about twenty feet from it. When he cuts the engine the night goes quiet. Even the dogs quit howling.
Squinting against the headlights, I make out a lone figure slumped in the Mustang’s passenger seat. I see curly spiked hair.
“Stick!” I reach for the door, but Dad holds me back.
“No, Tyne. Listen, you stay here. Let me do this.”
He gets out and steps away from the truck.
I crack open my door and climb out too. Can’t sit and wait with Stick so close. I hold up one hand, shielding my eyes from the beams, desperately willing Stick to move. Look up.
But the only movement comes from the shadows behind the car.
“We’ve got a family reunion,” Jake says, breath steaming in the frozen air. He’s keeping his distance.
Dad steps in front of the truck. “What have you done?”
“What we do best, bro. Fix and clean.”
He’s drunk. That’s not good.
“Give me the kid,” Dad says. “He never did anything.”
Jake leans on his car. “He went dragging out what should’ve been left alone. Him and your girl. Hey, Tiny.”
“It’s over now,” Dad tells him.
“Not for me.”
Dad takes two steps toward the Mustang and Jake pushes off from it.
“Hold on, Teddy.”
Jake’s holding something in his right hand.
“Dad! He’s got a gun!”
“Listen to her, bro. Don’t be stupid. Let’s trade. You’ve got something that belongs to me.”
I hold the plastic bottle up. “Here it is.”
“Toss it over, Tiny.”
I throw it to him and the bottle lands at his feet. He picks it up, goes to the front of his car and bends, holding the bottle up to the headlights, while leaning his gun hand on the hood.
“That’s my mark,” he says. “She never made a sound when I branded her. She was tough, my little Lucy. You think I’m some kind of monster for what I did. But I tried to save her.”
“She was just a kid, Jake.”
“She knew what she was getting into. Her dying, that’s not on me.”
“Give us the boy.”
Jake has to steady himself on the hood. Drunker than I thought. Stuffing the bottle in his pocket, he goes to the passenger side and taps on the window with the gun barrel.
I hold my breath. Stick. Move! Let’s go. Stick doesn’t even twitch.
Jake opens the door and nudges him. “Out.”
Finally, Stick flinches. And I can breathe again.
“Out, kid. Go.”
Stick slides slowly out of the car, grabbing on to the roof to pull himself up.
I start forward.
“Wait,” Dad tells me as Jake turns the gun in my direction.
But I can’t wait. Stick staggers to the front of the Mustang, barely keeping on his feet.
“Easy, Tiny,” Jake warns.
I get there just as Stick starts to fall, and catch him. I stand frozen, shocked. The swelling has deformed his face, with one eye squeezed shut. Dried blood is crusted all over, his nose a lump. Skin bruised dark purple. His good eye focuses on me.
“Ty,” he wheezes. “Came for me.”
“I got you now.” I force the words past the choke in my throat.
Then he sags against me and I half carry him toward the truck.
“Jake, what did you do?” Dad sees Stick’s mutilated face.
“What I had to. Kid had it coming, poking in my business. Not gonna let anybody try and take me down. I fought too hard to get what I’ve got.”
“We’re over, Jake. I never want to see you again, or hear from you.”
“Whatever you say. Once I get rid of this”—he holds up the bottle—“there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing left to show of her. But make sure your girl keeps her mouth shut. Or else.”
Dad was turning to leave, but that stops him. “No,” he says, his voice a low growl.
“No what, Teddy?”
“You don’t threaten her. Don’t you ever.”
“Hey, Tiny stays quiet, she’s got nothing to worry about.”
“You don’t come anywhere near her. Never.”
“Just make her understand. So she won’t get hurt.”
I reach the truck with Stick as Dad closes in on Jake.
“Dad, no!” My shout echoes.
The dogs at the gate start barking and howling.
“Don’t be dumb, Teddy. We both know you don’t got it in you. The old man beat the fight out of you. Tiny’s safe as long as she stays silent.”
But Dad keeps going, even as Jake raises the gun.
My heart thunders.
And then everything goes slow motion on me—Jake, gun pointed at Dad as he rushes forward, the dogs raging and snarling so loud, like they’ve broken free and are racing toward us, while I open my mouth for a last scream—
Then time snaps forward.
Dad chops down on Jake’s gun hand as he crashes into him. The gun doesn’t fire, but falls to the side. Dad tackles him onto his car.
Dad’s way bigger, but Jake has his legs up to kick him off. They roll on the hood. Jake gets him in a headlock. But then Dad rises up and brings his weight down, crushing Jake with an impact that rocks the car and breaks his hold.
Dad starts beating on him. Wild punches, fists swinging, elbows hammering down. Jake tries to shield himself, arms raised to block.
Dad never fought back before, but it’s exploding out of him now. Jake’s head bangs off the hood again and again, till he can’t keep his arms up and goes limp.
“Stop!” I scream. But Dad’s way past hearing me.
I’ve got to break it up before he kills Jake. But Stick’s hanging on to me. I lean down until he’s sitting on the truck’s bumper and then race over.
I’ve pulled girls out of scraps on the court. But Dad’s heavier than me. Raging blind. Got to get him off.
So I jump him from behind, knocking him off-balance. We slide across the hood. He tries to shake me, but I grab on tight and bear-hug him, trying to heave him backward. For a second I get his feet off the ground, and we crash to the gravel.
We roll away from each other, gasping. The anger in his eyes gives way as he sees me.
“You okay?” he pants.
“Yeah. You?”
He nods.
We stand up.
Jake sprawls motionless on the hood of the car. With his arms and legs bent at awkward angles, he looks like he’s fallen from a high place, his impact denting the hood. His face is bloody. Can’t even tell if he’s breathing, he’s so still.
We wait for a long minute.
Then a shudder runs through his limp body. Coughing, wet and harsh, turns into a strange choking sound. It goes on and on—but he’s not choking.
He’s laughing.
Rolling on his side, he spits out a mouthful of blood. And keeps on laughing.
“Teddy,” he wheezes. “You got the Mad Dog in you after
all. Feels good, right? Letting it out.”
Dad shakes his head. “We’re done.”
Then he turns to the truck and I follow him. I gently lift Stick from his crouch on the bumper.
“It’s in our blood, Teddy,” Jake calls after Dad. “We’re mad dogs.”
I ease Stick into the truck so he can lie down with his head in my lap.
We back out. Frozen in our lights, Jake is propped up on one elbow, his face a bloody mask, laughing. We speed out of there.
“Hospital,” I tell Dad.
Looking at Stick, I want to cry. “Hang in there. We’ll get you help. Fix you up. Where’s it hurt?”
Dumb question, I know. He whispers, “Everywhere.”
“I’m so sorry.” I brush my hand over his curls, stiff with dried blood and dirt.
“S’okay,” he mumbles. “Not my first beatin’. Just…worst.” And he breaks my heart by trying to smile. “Tell ’em…say I got jumped…or mugged.”
Even now, his brain’s still firing, working up a cover story for this mess.
“You saved me. My girl.”
“Shhh, now. Just breathe. Keep breathing.”
Even though we’re speeding through the night, it seems to take forever, but it can’t be more than fifteen minutes before we’re pulling up to the emergency loading zone at the hospital.
Stick’s passed out by then. I pull him out of the truck and hold him up. Dad comes around to help me.
“I’ll take him,” he says.
“No. You can’t come in. Look at you. They’ll think you did this.”
Dad glances down at himself and sees his shirt torn, dirty and dusty, the bloody mess of his fists, all scratched and cut up. He looks at his hands like they belong to somebody else.
“Just go home.”
“Home?” He sounds confused. As if he’s forgotten the way.
“Mom’s waiting. Tell her…tell her we’re safe.”
“Safe.” He nods. “Okay.”
I leave him there, and carry Stick inside. He’s a skinny guy, only right now he’s dead weight, arms and legs hanging.
But I’m a giant. I could carry him for miles. As I step into the bright lights of the hospital, he lets out a whimper like a scared, lost thing.
“It’s all right. I’ve got you.”
Defender Page 13
