Burning Blue

by Paul Griffin

  “Seriously?”

  “Briefly. At a show he was covering. We didn’t get a chance to speak. My husband saw to that.” Her eyes were glazing over. “He and your father had words.”

  “My father hit on you?”

  “No, no, of course not. They were arguing about one of the paintings. Rafael can be a bit insecure, and maybe your dad had a little too much wine, and. . You know what, Jay? It was a long, long time ago. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Really, sweetheart, it was nothing more than a little tiff. Don’t mention this to Nicole, all right? She gets mad at me when I talk about her father behind his back, and she’s right to do so. Secret kept?”

  “I’ll let my father know you liked the book.”

  She smiled, but sadly. She nodded toward the bathroom. Nicole had left the door open. She and Emma were in a tickle fight at the sink. Nicole had an amazingly cool laugh, loud, nothing fake about it.

  “Isn’t it just awful?” Mrs. Castro said. “She was so beautiful.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Because I don’t want you driving at this hour,” Mrs. Castro said. We were crossing the atrium that led to the parking lot. “It’s not you, Nicole-”

  “It’s the other people on the road, I know, I know.”

  “With the glare?” Mrs. Castro said. “It’s impossible for anybody to see.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t drive either,” Nicole said.

  “You’re not supposed to be driving without an adult in the car anyway, especially after dark.”

  “Everybody-”

  “You’re not everybody. Are we really fighting about this?”

  “What about the car?” Nicole said.

  “I’ll come back later with Sylvia. Jay, we’ll drive you home.”

  “That’s okay, it’s the exact opposite direction.”

  “What’s with you two? Here’s how it works: Mom says, you do, everybody’s life is so much easier, see? We’ll grab a bite at the diner on the way.” She stroked my hair. “I love his hair,” she said to Nicole. “So soft.”

  “I know. I hate him. He doesn’t even put anything in it.”

  “I want to braid it.”

  “Just one long one, though,” Nicole said. “Right down the back.”

  “Yes, Snoop braids would be too much.”

  “Listen to you, getting all Snoop,” Nicole said.

  “Hello, Snoop is my age. Drop it like it’s hawt, drop it like it like it’s hawt.”

  “Oh my god, Mom, stop!”

  I was trying to remember when Nicole had touched my hair. Must have been while I was recovering from the seizure at the stables.

  “Call your mother, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said. “Let her know you’re eating with us.”

  I didn’t want to get into the whole thing about my mom or the fact that my dad was gone for the week. I pulled my phone and texted Grabbing dinner w a friend and sent it to my Gmail. I smiled at Mrs. Castro. She put her arm around me and said, “Thanks.” She was walking between Nicole and me, her arms over our backs. “Put your arm over my shoulder,” she said. “Now shorten your stride.”

  “Just do it,” Nicole said. “Now look.” She nodded at our feet. The three of us were walking in step.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, but they both laughed. And then they stopped laughing when we came to the exit. They scanned the parking lot, and then we hurried to Mrs. Castro’s Mercedes.

  Mrs. Castro paid the check, and then she and Nicole headed for the bathroom. Just as I was about to step outside, I saw Shane Puglisi’s battered old Honda in the back of the parking lot. The car was empty. I scanned the lot for Puglisi but didn’t see him. I doubled back through the diner to the fire exit and crossed the alarm wires to fry the circuit. I’d forgotten my pocketknife, but out back I found an old-fashioned glass soda bottle in a recycle rack. I wrapped it in wet cardboard I pulled from the Dumpster. I cracked the bottle until the neck was a short sharp point. I tucked it point up under the right front wheel of Puglisi’s Honda with the point between the tire seams. If I’d had more time, I would have just let the air out of the tire. On the way back in, I told a waitress the fire alarm door was broken. “How do you know?” she said.

  “I went through it, and the alarm didn’t go off.”

  Mrs. Castro and Nicole were waiting for me by the register. They were laughing and talking in low voices until they saw me, and then they stopped talking but kept laughing.

  “He’s outside,” I said. “The photographer dude.”

  Now they stopped laughing. They followed me out the back way. Two waitresses were checking out the door. The one I’d talked to said to the other, “See?”

  Puglisi was out front, his eyes on the entrance. He didn’t see us coming around the side of the building as we headed for Mrs. Castro’s Mercedes.

  “Nicole!” somebody behind us said. We spun into the camera flash. It was Puglisi’s partner Meyers, the dude who acted like he was trying to pick up Nicole in CVS. We hurried for the car, bunching around Nicole.

  “Show it to us, Nicole,” a third dude yelled from Nicole’s blind side, jumping up from between two parked cars with another camera flash.

  Puglisi was in on it now too. The three of them circled us and clicked away. Mrs. Castro reached into her bag and pulled what appeared to be a foot-long club. She swung it, and it extended into a reflective silver umbrella. We clustered behind it as we pushed forward for the Mercedes.

  “How bad is the burn, Nicole?”

  “What about the eye? Did they have to take it out?”

  They were right on top of us but careful not to touch us, because, I would find out later, any physical contact was considered assault.

  Puglisi’s telephoto lens was in Nicole’s face as Mrs. Castro opened the car door and pushed Nicole into the back. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?” Puglisi said.

  “I’m not her boyfriend, Shane. I’m her bodyguard.”

  The three of them laughed at that.

  “How are things down at 14–98 34th Avenue?” I said. That was Puglisi’s address.

  “Things at 14–98 are fabulous.” He kept right on clicking away.

  I grabbed his camera and smashed it on the pavement.

  “Seriously, dude?” Puglisi said. “Fuck you.” He pulled another camera from his pocket. The flashes were messing with me. I was dizzy.

  “Get into the car, Jay,” Mrs. Castro said.

  “Jay, is it?” Puglisi said. One of his crew, the CVS dude, ran for Puglisi’s Honda.

  We were pulling out of the lot when Mrs. Castro said, “Call the police, Jay. Tell them we’re being followed.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about that.” I looked back toward the diner. The three of them were around the car, in the middle of the lot, checking out the flat tire. Puglisi laughed and waved to me, his hand going from five fingers to one.

  I turned to Nicole with a smile. She was shaking.

  “You can just drop me here,” I said.

  “Absolutely not,” Mrs. Castro said. “What’s the address?”

  I didn’t want them seeing where I lived. Once in a while people hung out in the lot and smoked weed and drank and yelled and fought. It wasn’t that bad really, but coming from Brandywine Heights, they would have thought it was pretty low-life. “I have to get milk anyway.” We’d come to a red light. I opened the door and got out.

  “Call me,” Nicole said.

  “Jay?” her mom said. “Thank you.”

  Somebody honked. The light had turned green. I nodded bye and headed into the 7-Eleven. My phone buzzed with a text. The caller ID stopped me mid-stride: Angela Sammick. The text said: We need to talk.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I called her. “How’d you get my number?”

  “Are you serious?” Angela said.

  “Amazing. I truly believed you were a newb in comp sci.”

  “I didn’t believe you for a second with that corny, ‘Duh, how do you send a text message?’”
>
  “What’s up?”

  “Not over the phone.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “Home, but we can’t meet here. My father’s an idiot. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Classon and Route 22.”

  “Okay, I’m like a mile away-”

  “I know where you live. Meet me at the McDonald’s on 22. You know what this is about, right?”

  “Nicole, obviously.”

  “Obviously.” Click.

  On the way there, I ran a search on her address. It checked out: Michael Sammick, 1714 Classon Boulevard, not a great area.

  She was waiting for me at the order counter. “You have any money?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She said to the woman behind the counter, “Two vanilla shakes, two fries.” She turned to me. “What are you getting?”

  We grabbed a booth in the back. Angela drew her phone and clicked up an email from Arachnomorph: I know you’re looking for me. It’s over on my end, unless you start me up again. If you keep stirring the nest, I’ll bite you too.

  “Untraceable?” I said.

  “Would I be here if it was traceable?” She was slamming the fries and shake. For somebody who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, she could put it down.

  “Why are you doing this?” I said. “Trying to help Nicole. What’s in it for you?”

  “Hello, moron, the reward money? That and she was nice to me.”

  “Nice doesn’t mean you risk your life for her.”

  “She was very nice, okay? Last year, while you were gone. Things sucked and I’d had a few too many drinks.” She saw I wasn’t too surprised. “In school, Spaceman. I went to the bathroom to throw up. I’d been suspended once already for cutting too many classes. One more suspension, and I was done for the semester. I purged and was feeling better, or at least well enough to fake my way through the rest of the day. I’m walking out of the bathroom, feeling like I just might get away with it when I run into Nicole in the hall. She pushes me back inside the bathroom. At first I’m like, are you seriously looking for me to dig your eyes out of your head with my thumbnails? But then she pointed to my pants. I had missed the bowl and splattered vomit all over my jeans. Lucky me, I happened to be wearing white that day. Nicole gave me hers.”

  “Her pants? And she wore yours?”

  “Dude, I’m like size zero. You think Nicole Castro would fit into my jeans? She told me to wait in the stall, and then she went to the music room and came back with band pants and we made the switch.”

  “Band pants? Those goofy things that go up to your chest?”

  “Baggy as eighties disco, exactly. She wore those and gave me her jeans.”

  “Why didn’t she just stay in her jeans and give you the, like-”

  “Band pants? I wondered the same thing. She said she didn’t want me to risk drawing attention to myself.”

  “So then she’s walking around like the goof, and everybody’s looking at her?”

  “Everybody was looking at her anyway, and she wasn’t drunk. Look,” she said between long pulls on her milkshake, “I don’t know why people do these things, screwing themselves for other people, but they do. It’s annoyingly inexplicable. They’re just freaks, what can I tell you? Are you gonna eat those fries?”

  I pushed them her way. My stomach was weak. I was suddenly panicked. If Angela had traced the leaking of the Arachnomorph emails back to me, then Detective Barrone and the NJPD cyber crime team easily could have too. “How’d you know I leaked the emails?”

  “I didn’t, till now. Not for sure, anyway. I mean, I suspected it, of course. Jay, c’mon, the way you were looking at Nicole in Schmidt’s office? In love with her even after the burn, huh? I don’t know if that’s super-sweet or super-weird.”

  “I’m not in love with-”

  “Right, okay, whatever, here’s my proposal: We team up and split the reward.”

  “I’m not doing this for the money.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, more for me. Look, whatever your reasoning, you know by now this is too big a job for one person. Even if the Recluse is somebody from school, if you include staff, that’s almost thirty-eight hundred suspects to check out. Then you throw in people outside of school who could be jealous of her, and you’re dealing with like half the population of New Jersey. What are you riding for taps?”

  “Conficker88.”

  “Please tell me you’re not serious.”

  “What?”

  “Freeware punched holes in that thing ages ago.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You’re kidding. Riding 88 and expecting to stay anonymous? Maybe teaming up with you is a bad idea.”

  “When was it blown?”

  “At least yesterday. Maybe even the day before.”

  Somebody who could talk my language. Very cool. “What’s your horse?”

  “The Sleeze321 worm.”

  “Charming.”

  “At least she can keep a secret.”

  “Infect me.”

  “Thought you’d never ask.” She zipped it to my phone with a patch that I opened first to prevent the worm from vaporizing my hard drive. We compared notes. We had the exact same suspect list. I told her I had ruled out Sabbatini, Schmidt and Mr. Sager.

  “Let’s get back to Bendix,” she said. “What’s your take on him?”

  “Long shot.”

  “Right,” she said. “No motivation. You’re sure he asked her to lie about something?”

  “What else could he have been doing?”

  “We better check him out, then. I’ll run strings on him.”

  “I already did,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  She popped a fistful of fries. “Look, that thing that happened back at that house party freshman year: Obviously I was bombed.”

  “I’m surprised you remember it.”

  “Caitlin told me what you did for me.” She frowned. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “You can relax, though. I’m not into you that way. You’re a little too clean for my taste, no offense.”

  “Absolutely none taken.”

  “Good.”

  “Hey, this is crazy, but do you think she could have done it to herself?”

  “Why would Nicole Castro burn herself?”

  “Right.” I sipped my shake, studying Angela as she looked at her phone and Nicole’s Facebook page. I was getting into business with a girl who drank in school, but did I have any choice? Angela was right: I needed a hand. She was going to hack at this thing anyway, until she got her reward money. She would be happy to do the one thing I couldn’t: hack Nicole. I didn’t want to violate whatever was going on between us, friendship or certainly the beginnings of it. Also, I was afraid of what I might find in her files. If nothing was there, Angela wouldn’t bother to tell me about them. She didn’t strike me as the type to waste time on gossip. If she did find something scary, she would tell me. I was okay with that. My ears were open to any information that would help Nicole, or help her help herself, if she did in fact burn herself. Whether Angela was an alcoholic or not, I had to work with her. That didn’t mean I had to trust her, yet.

  THIRTY

  A little after one in the morning the phone rang. My father. I was sure he’d talked with Detective Barrone. He said, “You couldn’t call me to check in?”

  “You couldn’t call me?”

  “You sound weird. I don’t know, afraid or something.”

  “You’re leaving me alone since I’m thirteen. I’m just mainlining a little heroin.”

  “Jay? I’m sorry, okay?”

  Now I knew he was drinking. I’d been about to ask him what went down between Mr. Castro and him all those years ago, but no way I was going to get anything substantive out of him when he was smashed.

  “Jay?”

  “I heard you. Look, just go to
bed.”

  “I didn’t mean it, Jay.”

  “I know. I gotta go.”

  “Okay. Okay. Jay?”

  “Yes, Dad?” Rolling my eyes.

  “I’ll see you Saturday. Maybe we’ll go to the driving range.”

  “Or we could just smash our hands with sledgehammers and guzzle Drano.”

  “Why do you have to. . Look, just stay out of trouble.” Click.

  “Right,” I said to the dial tone. “’Night.” I tapped into his phone account and scanned his Calls Made list. He still hadn’t returned Detective Barrone’s call.

  Around two a.m., Angela sent me a link that had helped her worm her way through the NJPD firewall. She’d planted an evercookie when somebody somewhere in the NJPD clicked a link that promised three more inches. The girl was good. More than that, sharing information like this, she was beginning to win my trust. She’d only gotten to the gate, though. It was up to me kick it down. I used the code that listed Detective Barrone’s call to my father to wiggle into the Division of Detectives mainframe. I probably had two minutes before the I.T. guys would notice the breach.

  Folder: RECLUSE

  Folder: DAVID BENDIX

  Folder: VIDEO INT. 09 Sept.

  I ripped it and got out of there. I played the video through the TV to get a better look at the faces, the eyes. They had Dave in a conference room. An older dude in a tailored suit sat with him. Dave was pale. Barrone was off-screen, pacing. Dave tracked her with glossy eyes.

  Barrone: “Again, David, where were you?”

  Bendix: “Ma’am, I told you.”

  Barrone: “And I told you, she said you weren’t in the cutout.”

  Bendix: “I was.”

  Barrone: “I don’t buy it. Here’s my thing: It would be odd that you were just hanging out in the hall when the second bell had rung and you were late for class.”

  Bendix: “It was English. Mrs. Nally never cares if you’re late. Seriously, ask her. We were doing the metaphysical poets. Would you be in a rush to get yourself some pastoral elegy of John Donne?”

  Barrone: “You mean Edmund Spenser.”