Mojo

by Tim Tharp

  And he goes, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter with me? Are you kidding? You set me up. You had this whole thing planned all along.”

  And he’s like, “How could I know it would end up like this? I thought you were supposed to be some kind of hard-boiled investigator guy, fighting off thugs with switchblades and everything. I didn’t know you’d turn out to be such a wimp.”

  I looked at Brett. “And you—I’ll bet you knew about this too. Both of you going around acting like you’re my friends, but you’re just a couple of phonies.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “Are you telling me you didn’t enjoy the steak and the limo ride?”

  “Maybe I did, but that’s when I thought we were friends. But we never were, not even for a second. All you are is a user. You might think that makes you better than us, but you’re wrong.”

  “That’s right,” said Chastity. “You aren’t any better than us.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Nash told her. “You got paid.”

  “Don’t tell her to shut up,” said Dancin’ Dan from over my shoulder. “She can talk anytime she wants to.”

  “Yeah,” confirmed Robo-Troy. “Anytime she wants to.”

  “You suck,” added Melody.

  Nash backed up, obviously uncomfortable with the bristling attitude in the room. “Wow, talk about ingratitude,” he said. “We didn’t do anything but hire you out of the kindness of our hearts. And on top of that, do you know where this city would be without my dad and his business and all the jobs it provides? Right in the toilet.”

  “You know what?” Beto said. “We don’t care who your dad is because he’s probably a pendejo just like you.”

  “Just like you,” Dancin’ Dan agreed.

  “Anyway,” Beto went on. “I don’t care about your daddy’s money. What’d you ever do but sit back and sponge off him? All you had to do was get born. That’s no kind of accomplishment to brag about.”

  And Nash’s like, “That’s big talk coming from an illegal. You better make sure your papers are in order.”

  Beto didn’t respond to him, though. “Put your shirt on, Dylan,” he told me. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait for me,” Melody said. “I’ve had enough of this scene for the night.”

  Dancin’ Dan and Robo-Troy chimed in that they were ready to go too.

  As we started out of the room, Nash is like, “Go on, slink out, Dylan. Go pretend you’re somebody because you’re nobody to any of us.”

  The words had barely dropped out of his mouth when Beto’s fist launched. This time it didn’t fly in slow motion either. It landed square against Nash’s jaw, dropping him to the floor on his butt. The look on his face told me he’d never imagined a world where something like this could happen to someone like him.

  “See you later, douche bag,” said Melody as we walked around him.

  In the main room, everyone stared at us. They didn’t look the same as they had before. They were much smaller.

  CHAPTER 37

  Beto drove a sleek green lowrider with awesome chrome rims, which I decided was way cooler than any limo or Lexus or Mercedes. Melody rode up front with Beto, and I squeezed into the back with Robo-Troy and Dancin’ Dan, who had already become the best of buddies despite their fifteen-minute rumble. In fact, we all became instant friends. When we got tired of talking about how funny it was to see Nash land on his butt, the conversation switched to how each of us ended up at Gangland in the first place.

  Dancin’ Dan’s story was loaded with a bombshell. Originally, Nash hadn’t wanted to hire him as a fighter at all. The two met through one of Dan’s buddies, a guy named Dickie, who had rumbled for Nash before, also losing to Robo-Troy.

  “That’s kind of why I wanted to get in there and try to kick your ass,” Dan told Troy, and Troy’s like, “That’s all right. I would’ve felt the same way.”

  “But the thing was,” Dan continued, “at first he wasn’t about fighting. He wanted me to do some burglaries for him.”

  I’m like, “Burglaries? No kidding?”

  “That’s right. He had him some floor plans and all kinds of other information on these mansions he’d been to. He knew how to get in without setting off the alarm and where all the good stuff was to steal and everything. The deal was supposed to be he’d pay me, and I’d also get to keep everything I stole except for a few items he could use to prove to his friends he was in on it.”

  “That must’ve been one of his games,” I said. “He figured he’d pull off a real crime instead of just this fake-gangster stuff.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dan said. “It seemed real important to him. But I wasn’t about to get involved in all that. Sure, me and Dickie done a couple burglaries when I was a kid, but I’m through with that kind of stuff.”

  And Troy goes, “How do you like that? Same thing happened to me.”

  It turned out Troy had been hired by Rowan toward the end of summer, but after the first two fights, Rowan approached him about robbing a pharmacy.

  “Can you believe that?” Troy asked. “Like just because I’m black, I’m gonna knock over some pharmacy for his punk ass. He don’t even know I’m only doing these fights so I can get some extra money and get back in the community college. But I pretended like I was all for doing a holdup if he’d drive, just to see how far he’d go. He kept putting it off until one night I tell him, ‘Hey, bro, tonight’s the night. We gotta hit that pharmacy, man.’ It was just like I thought—he couldn’t go through with it. I thought he was gonna start crying. Nothing but big talk, that’s all he was.”

  Things started to come clear. The Gangland boys wanted to pull something big—an authentic crime they could brag about on Saturday night after ten o’clock, something that would push them into the all-time winner’s circle of their pathetic competition. Sure, Rowan was too chicken to drive the getaway car, but maybe he thought he could still find someone who’d pull the deal off without him anywhere near it.

  I asked Beto if Rowan wanted him to do a crime too, and he said no. “I never seen that dude before tonight,” he said. “It was the little skinny one who hired me.”

  “Tres?” I asked.

  “That’s right—Tres. From what he told me, he just took over half that club. He didn’t ask me to do no crime, though. He just wanted a fighter.”

  More ideas started clicking. Tres had a deeper stake in Gangland than I thought. Now somehow he’d managed to take over Rowan’s half interest in the club. At least he hadn’t tried to recruit Beto to do any dirty work besides fighting for him. Not yet anyway. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a creep. After all, he never tried to stop the fight between Beto and me. Only Rowan had that to his credit. Maybe Tres had his sights set on making himself the one and only godfather of Gangland, and Nash knew it all along. Now that I knew what a lying dog Nash was, I could see him snatching Ashton as a way to gain an advantage on Tres in the Gangland wars, and maybe Hector got in the way.

  It sounded plausible, but who could I get to believe me?

  Since I lived the furthest away, Beto dropped everyone else off first, and I told them all to Facebook me. In the Virgo Club parking lot, I opened the car door for Melody, and she told me to bend down. When I did, she said I looked great for having just been punched in the face, and then she gave me a kiss on the cheek.

  “When you get old enough,” she said, “come by the V. You can buy me a drink.”

  “You bet,” I told her, but I hoped when I got old enough, she wouldn’t be working at the V anymore.

  As Beto and I cruised to my house, the streetlights shimmering on the green hood of the lowrider, I figured I ought to try to dig a little deeper into what he knew about things. There were just too many coincidences concerning him and Hector, Ashton Browning and Gangland.

  “So,” I said, “how did Tres happen to get in touch with you about fighting for him?”

  Beto kept his eyes on the road. “He didn’t ge
t in touch with me. I got in touch with him.”

  “You got in touch with him?”

  “Yeah, only he didn’t know it. He thought he was doing it all.”

  “But why? What interest did you have in it?”

  “I been wanting to get in that place for a while. That’s why I called you that time. I heard you was involved. But you never called me back, so I had to go about it like this.”

  This was getting more interesting all the time, so I’m like, “Yeah, sorry I didn’t call, but how did you know anything about me ever going to Gangland?”

  Still staring at the road, he goes, “I got a friend who used to have something to do with that place—until things got too weird.”

  “Yeah? Who was it? One of the other fighters?”

  “Nah. You don’t know ’em.”

  “But you thought Gangland might have something to do with Hector’s death, right?”

  Now he looked at me. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because the first time we met, you said something about the North Side Monarchs. And anyway, why else would you want to go there? I don’t peg you for someone who wants to make money by pummeling a guy.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You can never tell what people will do for money, man. But you’re right. Hector went to that place at least once that I know of. I can’t say which one hired him, but I think it was someone on the Monarchs’ side. He didn’t fight nobody, though. Hector never was much of a fighter, and besides, I talked to that Troy dude in the dressing room, and he said he never saw Hector do a rumble.”

  “But you think someone there was responsible for what happened to him?”

  “Like I say, he wasn’t no fighter, but he wasn’t no druggie either.”

  “Did he need money for something?”

  “He didn’t need it, but he wanted it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can understand that. So what do you think happened?”

  He scratched his chin. “I haven’t figured that out yet, but I’m going to.”

  “So that’s what you’re interested in?” I asked. “Not the reward for finding Ashton Browning?”

  “Hector was family. I don’t let nobody mess with my family.” He looked at me. “Or my friends.”

  “Thanks, Beto,” I said. “That means a lot to me.”

  “That’s okay. You’re a good dude. I like how you never thought Hector OD’d himself. And it’s cool how you been sticking with trying to find that rich girl. You and me got a lot in common—we don’t let nothing get in our way when it comes to someone important to us. I gotta really give you props for coming out to fight like that. You got a lot of guts and a lot of loyalty. You’re the kind of dude wants to help people. I like that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.” I didn’t let on that the reward was also pretty important.

  When we finally reached my house, we shook hands before I got out of the car, and he goes, “You know you can call me if you need to. You still got my number?”

  “Yeah, I still have it. Thanks. And thanks for not kicking my butt too bad tonight.”

  He smiled. “Anytime, man.”

  Since I’d blown the hell out of my curfew, I let myself into the house as quietly as I could. A monster flick played on the TV in the living room, where my dad snored away in the recliner. Mom must have gone to bed and left him on duty to wait up for me. If I was lucky, he’d fallen asleep early and would never know what time I got home.

  First thing I did was go to the bathroom to check my battle scars. Besides my nose shining like a tomato, there wasn’t a mark on me. I decided I did have a pretty hard head after all. If I could get my speed up, I might even make a decent fighter.

  For appearances, I went back to the living room and scrunched down on the couch, where I could pretend I’d been since before curfew in case Dad or Mom woke up. It was weird how they hadn’t seemed to notice how I’d grown up. That’s why I couldn’t tell them about all this Gangland stuff. They’d never understand in a million years.

  Back when I was a kid, I pretty much told them everything, and they always came up with some way to try to fix things. What parents don’t understand is that there comes a time when you don’t want them to fix everything for you. You want to do it yourself. Otherwise, you don’t have any mojo at all.

  But as I sat looking at my dad in the TV glow, this warm wave surged up inside me. I was glad he waited up for me—or tried to. I was glad he had his job teaching second grade and my mom had hers as a nurse. They didn’t go around worrying about what anyone thought of how much money they had. They were the ones who really helped people. That’s what they did with their lives. And that was another weird thing—for too long I’d forgotten how proud I was of them.

  CHAPTER 38

  When I woke up Sunday morning, the main thought that burned in my head was that I owed a big fat apology to Audrey and Trix. Obviously, the story about Trix and her dad was just another one of Nash’s lies. I should have seen that before. If he’d been telling the truth, the newspapers would have been all over the story days ago. Trix was right—I’d been kidding myself that I could be a real friend of someone like Nash.

  Now, as far as I was concerned, the lying scumbag topped my list of suspects in the Ashton Browning case.

  That afternoon, I tried Audrey’s cell phone but got no answer. Then I tried her mom and she told me Audrey went to see a movie with Trix. So I got my mom to drop me off at the theater. It was a gamble. If they didn’t forgive me, I’d be stuck without a ride home until either my mom or dad could come get me.

  The theater had a little juice and coffee shop inside, so I waited there for about thirty minutes until the movie let out. With probably about twenty different movies playing at different times, the theater’s lobby always had a crowd, but Audrey and Trix weren’t exactly ones to blend in. I spotted them right where I expected—at the rear of the latest pack to stroll into view. Audrey always liked to watch a movie until the last credit rolled.

  I bushwhacked them before they got to the front door. Audrey’s smile instantly drooped, and Trix’s eyes popped so wide you would’ve thought I’d pulled a gun on her.

  I’m like, “Hey, don’t freak out. I’m here to apologize if you just give me a chance.”

  They traded looks and Trix goes, “Okay, I guess we can at least listen to what you have to say.”

  And Audrey’s like, “But it better be good.”

  I led them to my table in the juice and coffee place, where the girl behind the counter looked at me like I was a loser for coming back instead of going to a movie. Audrey and Trix sat down and waited for me to start. I felt like I was on the witness stand and they were expecting a confession. This was no time for small talk or jokes, so I just launched into the apology.

  “First of all, I’m sorry. You were right all along about Nash. I’m sorry for not trusting both of you. I was an idiot.”

  “Yes, you were,” said Audrey. “But I guess I probably shouldn’t have punched you in the stomach.”

  “Yeah, you shouldn’t have.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I didn’t really deserve that because even though I was kind of an idiot, I wasn’t a mean idiot. I didn’t do anything out of hate or prejudice or anything. Sure, maybe I was a little jealous of you, Trix. After all, Audrey and I have been like the two musketeers for almost as long as I can remember. But that’s not why I showed up at the park that night throwing those stupid accusations around.”

  “Then why did you do it, Dylan?” Trix asked.

  “Because I was scared out of my head. I mean, someone just told me my best friend was hanging out with a girl whose dad might be some kind of hideous serial killer. Do you know what will run through your mind at a time like that? I was flipping out. I had to do something. Okay, yes, I should’ve thought it over more first, but it was hard to stay cool.”

  Tears started to burn in my eyes, and I thought, Oh, great, now I look like a big wimp, but I was on a roll, so I k
ept going.

  “Audrey, believe me, I want you to be happy. Never doubt that, okay? But if anything happened to you, like something bad—well, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Now we were all tearing up, Trix included, and Audrey’s like, “I’m sorry too, Dylan. I know you were just trying to look out for me, and you hadn’t even been around Trix enough to know what she’s really like. And the truth is, I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you either.”

  “You two can’t let anything get between you.” Trix patted us on the arms. “Your friendship’s too important.”

  I guess we looked pretty pathetic, but I didn’t care.

  “It was so stupid of me to believe Nash,” I said. “That guy’s such a dick. He makes Rowan Adams look like the Dalai Lama.”

  “Well, at least you saw through him,” Audrey said. “I should’ve known you’d get around to it.”

  “I don’t deserve much credit for that,” I admitted. “A sledgehammer pretty much had to pound it into me.” I went on to explain the whole ugly Gangland night, including all the humiliating details.

  When I was done, Audrey’s like, “There was a dwarf stripper?”

  And Trix goes, “Yeah, that’s the part I was wondering about too.”

  “You’re missing the point,” I told them. “These Gangland idiots aren’t just creeps. They’re like real live criminals, and they’ll use anybody to get what they want. I should’ve known Nash was lying about Tres saying your dad was some kind of molester serial killer. I mean, that’s too far-fetched even for an episode of Andromeda Man.”

  “Wait a minute,” Trix said. “Nash told you it was Tres who said that?”

  “Yeah, I guess it sounded more believable that way.”

  Trix leaned forward. “Maybe Nash wasn’t lying after all,” she said. “Maybe Tres is the one who made that story up.”

  I’m like, “Tres? Why would he lie about something like that? I mean, it’s his own sister who’s missing. He wouldn’t have any reason to invent a story that would probably just make it harder to find her.”