by C. S. Lakin
And how could his father be so happy—after hearing Joey’s earlier pronouncement? Did his dad think if he just pushed it out of his mind, the doom and gloom would go away? That maybe the expensive dinner and the varsity jacket would make Joey change his mind about his divine charge to go to the police and basically destroy his entire family, maybe all of them ending up in jail, but there Joey would be—off at college and pursuing his dream, maybe visiting his dad behind bars once a week, bringing him a care package or something?
Simon hated his dad at that moment, hated the way he had failed to put the real fear of God in Joey, failed to threaten him sufficiently, or punish him every time he mentioned Shane’s name over the past few years. Instead his dad had let Joey’s righteous cause fester and grow into a cancerous, toxic lump about to poison them all. And here his dad was, smiling for all the world like everything was just fine, fine indeed.
Simon tuned the rest of the conversation out, bided his time. They had already arranged the late-night out, which suited Simon’s plan perfectly. He and Reuben and Levi—taking Joey out to a comedy club in Westwood, the rest of them heading home, both Dinah and their dad leaving early the next morning to school and work respectively, Dinah carting Ben along with her as usual.
Simon chuckled inwardly. Comedy club. Yeah, the joke would be on the dreamer.
“What are we going to do about Reuben?” Levi asked. He’d had just enough to drink to make his head fuzz, and he found it hard to think. During the show he downed at least four or five scotches—he’d needed those drinks to calm his nerves, after Simon had told him his plan, whispered it to him in the men’s room at the club. Now they stood talking quietly against a back wall, eyeing Reuben and Joey at the small round café table, the noise in the room loud and boisterous, the show over and now people hanging and drinking, a lively Saturday night in the Village.
“I got it covered. I called some of his climbing buddies to come meet him here, have a few drinks with him. We can just slip out for a bit while he’s gabbing with his friends.”
“He’ll never loan you his car—”
Simon lifted his hand and dangled the keys in front of him, a smirk on his face.
“You’re cool, bro.” Levi blew out a breath. “Joey won’t even have a beer—he’s so pure.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll just slip it in his soda. It works fast, so once we’ve got Reuben distracted, we’ll just get Joey out the door and into the car. Piece of cake.”
Levi nodded. “And then what? Where do you plan to . . . you know . . .”
“Not sure yet. But I’ll know the spot when I find it. We won’t even be gone an hour, and by the time we’re back . . . well, we just play dumb and say we looked for him but don’t know where he wandered off to.”
“Okay.” Levi hated to think about the fallout to come. What his dad would do, how he’d freak. Dinah’s reaction, her grief that would consume her. He shut down his runaway imagination, all those incriminating accusations, the police showing up asking questions, the whole mess with Shane all over again but this time worse, way worse. But Simon was right. They had no other recourse. Joey planned to tell the world the truth, and they could not allow that to happen.
In a haze, Levi sat back and watched as Reuben’s friends showed up, as Simon went and got Joey another 7-Up, patted his little brother on the back, laughing and hamming it up, then saw the wooziness alight in Joey’s eyes, and Simon helping him, saying to Reuben how he was talking him outside for some fresh air, and Levi accompanying him, and within minutes there they were—driving down Doheny and getting on the Santa Monica Freeway heading east, Levi no longer paying any attention to the turns Simon was making but all his focus on Joey, who looked spaced-out and mumbled incoherently, leaning up against him in the backseat, his warm body too alive and personal.
After what felt like forever, with Levi’s head still thick from the booze, they arrived somewhere in the dark night, Simon having pulled off the freeway on the shoulder before an overpass, a half-dozen freeway lanes intertwining, tall brick buildings scribbled with graffiti flanking both sides of the eight-laner, cars whizzing by in both directions.
“This looks like a good spot.” Simon got out and came around to the back passenger door. When he opened it, Joey spoke, although his words came out garbled.
“Si, where are we? What are you doing?”
“Get out, Joey, come on.” Simon pulled on Joey’s arm but Joey resisted, leaned into Levi.
“Levi, help me. Push him out.”
“No,” Joey protested, his head bobbing as he tried to look out the window. “Take me home.”
“Nope. You’re getting out.”
To Levi’s shock, Joey started bawling. “Si, please. I want to go home.”
“Not gonna happen. Now get out.”
Levi’s heart thumped hard. This felt wrong, very wrong. Wasn’t Joey supposed to be unconscious? “Simon, maybe this isn’t such a good —”
“Levi, shut up. Now push him out, and come over here and help me.”
Levi gritted his teeth, tried not to listen to Joey as his pleas grew more frantic, as they hauled him out the backseat and onto the concrete, hidden by the car as the light traffic sped by fast, headlights striking them with beams of light as they grabbed Joey’s arms and legs and lifted him. “Si, someone’s gonna see us.”
“Shut up and lift.”
Joey had little strength but what he did have he used, kicking out at them and trying to squirm out of Simon’s grasp, even managing to get one hand free then smacking Simon in the jaw. Simon punched Joey’s cheek and Levi heard bone connect with bone and cringed. Joey burst out crying and Levi shook his head, began to drop Joey.
“I can’t do this, Simon. I just can’t.”
“Then are you ready to go to jail for the rest of your life for killing Shane? Because that’s your future staring in your face.”
Levi broke out in an instant sweat in the cool night and the demon in his dream reappeared in his head, calling his name, his fangs dripping with slime. “Okay, but let’s get this over with. Fast.”
Levi let Simon take the lead. They picked Joey back up, who was still crying, and once the last wave of cars passed and the road was dark and empty once more, Simon said, “Hurry.”
They stumbled as fast as they could onto the overpass. Levi looked over the edge, saw the road far below them, some street, dark and gloomy, no streetlamps giving the place any light. Levi shuddered thinking of the kind of people who lived in this squalor, with trash piled on the corners and an urban stench in the air.
Simon felt in Joey’s pockets, pulled out his wallet. “So he’ll be harder to ID,” Simon said. “Guess his pretty little jacket’s gonna get a little messed up.”
Maybe the drugs finally kicked in because Joey now stopped struggling and lay on the road whimpering, muttering. The memory of that night, when they’d lifted Shane’s body and stuffed him into the car, sent him over the cliff, came flooding back into Levi’s mind, this moment so alike, with them lifting Joey up and balancing him for a second on the railing, then giving a slight shove and off and over he went, tumbling down, down, and Levi stopping his ears with his hands so he didn’t have to hear the splat of his brother hitting the pavement below.
Simon elbowed him and he opened his eyes that he’d so tightly clenched shut. “Let’s go.”
All Levi could do was nod. They had to get back to Reuben, and then all hell would break loose—the panic, the searching, the tears, the accusations. There was no turning back now.
Levi glanced over at Simon, and then turned and looked out the window as his brother, with his face unexpressive and staring straight ahead, drove Reuben’s car down the highway, over the overpass where Joey’s body now lay among the dirt and filth of the street below. He gulped and pressed his head back against the headrest, wondering if the demons in his dreams would go away, or if they would now haunt him even more.
“Where on earth have you guys been? I’ve be
en outside looking for you for a half hour. And don’t lie to me, Simon. I know you took my car.”
Reuben put his hands on his hips, standing outside the club on the sidewalk, his friends still inside. When he’d felt in his coat pocket for his wallet, to pay for the round of beers, he immediately noticed his keys missing, and his thoughts went directly to Simon. All through dinner, Reuben had watched Simon, saw that look he knew all too well—Simon up to something.
Simon and Levi came toward him, and it only took one quick assessment to know something was very wrong.
“Where’s Joey?”
Reuben had no patience for their obvious collusion of silence. He grabbed Levi by the shoulders and asked again, forcefully.
“D-don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
Simon shrugged. “We went for a walk around the Village, and then some guys started harassing us, trying to pick a fight. Levi and me, back behind the theater. Then I looked and Joey was gone.”
“We l-looked everywhere for him.”
Reuben didn’t believe a word. “Really.”
“Rube, I swear it. We need to find a cop. Maybe something happened to him,” Simon said.
“W-we’ll take you to where we s-saw him last—” Levi turned, started to walk down the sidewalk.
Reuben didn’t move. “You took my car, Simon. Where’d you go? What did you do to Joey?”
Simon lowered his voice as a couple came out of the club, walked by them. Reuben edged up into Simon’s face. Levi backed away, clearly frightened. “We didn’t do anything—”
Reuben hissed and shook his head. “I saw you, your face, when Joey started in on going to the police, his plan to tell them all about Shane. Right then, I could see you scheming, the way you always do. I’m only going to say this once more, and if you don’t tell me the truth, then I’m hauling you both to the local police station and I’m going to tell them everything I know.”
“Okay, okay!” Simon growled. He scrunched up his face, kicked at the brick building. “You drive. I’ll tell you the way.”
Reuben pursed his lips tight, wanting to smack Simon alongside the head, thinking of all the years of trouble Simon had fomented, and Reuben always trying to get him in line, trying to be a good role model for him but Simon just plain incorrigible. And Levi—still letting himself be manipulated and used by Simon, ready to go along with anything Simon wanted to do, and look what trouble it’d brought him. Reuben knew all about Levi’s nightmares and the counseling sessions. His dad had told him how Levi constantly took one drug or another to try to forget the incident with that kid, Reuben totally understanding everyone’s rage over Dinah getting raped, even understanding the need to beat the kid up, teach him a lesson. It was a terrible crime, an accident, and something they would all carry to their graves. But Reuben had thought after so many years it would fade, like a nightmare upon awakening that over time loses its potency, eventually gone altogether. And that should have been the case had Joey not kept bringing it up, resurrecting it, like trying to resurrect Shane himself through sheer determination not to let the incident be forgotten.
Reuben mulled over his feelings as he drove, as Simon led him farther and farther away from the nicer Westside and into South-central LA, toward the part of town no one in their right mind would go, especially not at night. He gripped the wheel tighter as Simon pointed and told him to pull over along a dark stretch of highway just past Vermont Avenue, not wanting to let his mind go where it wanted to go—an unthinkable conclusion he resisted with all his heart.
Reuben put on his emergency blinkers to make sure no one rammed into him on the shoulder of the freeway. He stopped but kept the engine running, worried if they lingered too long they’d get carjacked. “Why am I here?” He glared at Simon sitting next to him in the front seat.
Simon wouldn’t look at him, but he set his face, scowled. “We had to do it, Rube. We had no choice. He was going to go to the police. We would all end up in jail—Dad too. Even you could be busted for covering up the truth.”
“What, Simon? What did you do?”
“We threw him off the overpass. Over there.”
“You what!”
Simon didn’t answer.
“He’s p-probably still d-down there,” Levi added, worry in his voice.
“You just left him there? You didn’t even check on him?”
Neither brother answered. Reuben fumed, put the car into Drive and headed for the off-ramp looming a quarter-mile ahead on the freeway. He turned right at the bottom of the ramp, followed the dark, grungy street, some of the streetlights burned out or shot out, passing a derelict gas station, a car paint-and-body shop, nobody walking the street this late, no doubt smarter than they were, cruising such a neighborhood, alone, a moving target for any number of criminals just looking for some easy pickings. Simon peered out the window, looking up toward the freeway, and finally said, “Slow down, here’s the overpass. He’d be somewhere around here.”
Reuben pulled up to a curb and stopped. The blackness of night and the weight of the situation filled him with such terrible trepidation that his hands started shaking and his legs felt weak as he shut off the engine and got out of the car, hugging his body close to the warm chassis, afraid to step too far away from his lifeline, his escape from danger. He scanned the street, took in the dingy tenement buildings, old wooden houses barricaded with wire fencing and bars across the windows, didn’t see anyone around, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being watched from the shadows, from some tenement window overhead.
Simon and Levi got out, looked around cautiously, Levi holding onto the car door even after he shut it. Reuben wished he kept a flashlight in the car, but slowly his eyes adjusted to the dim light.
As he walked around the street, widening his search into larger and larger circles, ignoring his brothers as they checked along the sidewalk directly below the overpass railing, he thought about Joey, his sensitive conscience, his godly fear, his need for confession and a right standing before God. Reuben had some of that himself, although not as obsessive. But he could relate to Joey’s discomfort. Understandably, carrying around the knowledge of Shane’s death greatly distressed him, but Joey just didn’t think through the consequences of telling the police the truth. Reuben thought he had made it so clear to his little brother when they’d talked last year. Told him to let God be the judge, in the end, and not throw his family at the mercy and whims of the human justice system. But now—with Joey declaring God had spoken, told him to expose the murder . . . Well, Reuben had to admit, he felt a desperate need, too, to do whatever it took to keep Joey quiet. But this—he would have never done something like this . . .
“Over here,” Levi called out in a loud whisper.
Reuben’s heart pounded blood into his ears, dreading what he might see, trying to prepare himself for Joey’s broken, bloody body but knowing you couldn’t ever prepare for that. He loved his brother, even though he hardly knew him, hadn’t spent much time with him, but he was his sibling and he felt a natural affection and attachment to him, knowing more than tragedy linked them together, more than blood. Tears welled in his eyes as he hurried to Levi’s side, Simon standing next to Levi and both of them looking at the ground.
But it wasn’t a body they were examining. It took Reuben a moment to recognize the shape and when Simon lifted it in the air he could see Joey’s letterman jacket all scuffed up but the leather too dark to tell whether it was bloodstained or ripped. Reuben searched around, now feeling frantic, panic filling him as he couldn’t make sense of this—the expensive jacket left on the ground but Joey’s body gone. He looked for blood, anything wet on the asphalt, felt only cool dirt and grit under his palm. He could move the car and shine the headlights on this spot, but that would only draw more attention to their presence in the ‘hood.
Levi voiced Reuben’s next thought. “Maybe someone f-found him and c-called an ambulance. He’s probably at a h-hospital somewhere.
”
“Why would they leave his jacket?” Simon asked. He spun first in one direction, then another. “He couldn’t have just gotten up and walked away. Not again.”
“Again?” Reuben asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Simon answered, scowling.
Reuben shook his head, thoroughly frustrated. “We have to call Dad. The police have probably already called him. Joey’s wallet had his driver’s license in there with his phone number.”
Simon reached into his pocket and held something up. “I’ve got his wallet.”
“Great,” Reuben said, shaking his head. “Look, it’s evident Joey isn’t here, and we’re just asking for trouble standing around on this street. Let’s go, and we’ll look for a pay phone in a safer neighborhood, call some of the hospitals.”
“You aren’t going to c-call Dad?” Levi asked.
“Not yet. Not until we find Joey, find out is he’s . . . alive or what.” He looked at his two pathetic brothers and wanted to scream. “How could you? How could you do this to Joey? To Dad? He’ll go down to his grave in grief!” He kicked at the street, send a rock flying. “Come on. This place gives me the creeps.” He tucked Joey’s coat under his arm, careful not to get blood on his nice suit coat.
His brothers hurried back into the car, and Reuben locked the doors and started up the engine, driving back the way they came, toward the nearest freeway onramp, leaving the scary neighborhood behind, Reuben feeling like he left a part of himself behind, certainly a part of his innocence, whatever shred was left of that, and knowing he would never get it back, not ever.
Jake sat at the detective’s desk, waiting for him to get off the phone. He’d lost count how many times he’d sat in this room, this precinct, how many questions he’d asked and answered, none of them the right answer, the only acceptable answer.
