Karen grimaced. “Dooley...”
“I had to get him to say it,” Dooley went on. “To say that he did it. To tell me where the last body was. I didn’t bother with why because I don’t even think he knew. How would a twelve year old know why they do that kind of thing?”
“Why are you thinking of him?”
“People that knew Jimmy all said that he was a good kid. When the detective from the town where this happened came to talk to me he said the suspects were all good, polite, smart little kids.” He snickered nervously, softly. “Later, when I was laying in bed, I remembered him saying that and my blood ran cold.”
As hers was now, Karen knew. That old fear trickled into her veins and she found herself staring at his wrists. “Why, Dooley? Why are you getting involved in this?”
He blew out a breath. “Ah, the sixty billion dollar question.”
“What’s the two dollar answer?” she pressed him sharply.
“I want to walk away from this one, Kare” Dooley said without having to mull the answer. “In one piece with no baggage. For twenty years that’s what I did. That’s how I survived. Catch the bad guy, lock him up, and leave. Let the scum rot. That worked. It worked fine until Jimmy Vincent.”
“So he was different. You did what you had to do.”
“Like I said, if he was just some scumbag killer it’d be me and my boat and an early retirement. But he wasn’t. Sure, something inside him was dark. Darker than dark. But I never saw it. I only knew a kid who let me be his friend and then told me about the dark things he did to those little boys. No reason, no rhyme. Just that he did it.” He looked into Karen’s strong, clear eyes and wondered if she understood.
“Damn, Dooley.”
Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe no one who hadn’t done what he had with Jimmy Vincent could ever understand. But he did. He knew he’d never be able to explain it, but it was still real. As real as a carnival ride whose arcs of steel cages spun and tipped and made you scream while you were on and dizzy when you got off.
“There were two Jimmy Vincents, Kare,” he said solemnly. “The one I got to know, and the one that never showed himself to me.”
“Hon...”
“It would have been easy to walk away from the one I never got to know. I could have done that.”
She watched him for a long moment as he sat motionless, wishing that he would do something. Cry, even. Anything to replace the futility that she sensed was his beacon of the moment. She feared where it might lead him, and her defense against the feeling was something approaching levity, but closer to gallows humor. “Can I take all your razor blades when I go?”
“You’re something when you worry,” Dooley observed, thinking as he stole her beauty with his eyes just how very red her lips were. His brain put the case away for now, because of those very red lips. And the very red dress. The very nice dress.
She smiled at him, and felt his presence shift without motion. He seemed now not to be across the room, his warmth sneaking up. “Dooley...”
He smiled back at her. That smile.
Her eyes bugged.
“No,” Karen said, standing. “No. No. No.” She hurried toward Dooley and planted a kiss on his forehead. When she eased back she moaned. “God, sometimes I just want to...” She caught herself and shook off the feeling. “Why are you so desirable now, and last year I was shredding your picture? Explain this to my hormones, will you?”
She was right. He knew that, knew it without a doubt. And still he wanted her more than oxygen right now. “Leave, before...”
She put a hand tenderly to his cheek, then scooted off into the living room. “He’s making me lamb. Wish me luck.”
“Luck,” Dooley said, then added, after the door had closed and the two inch heels tapped down the steps, “I hope he’s impotent.”
* * *
They met at eight, beneath the old, winking streetlamp a block from Windhaven, a fair halfway point between their houses. Michael was there first, planted on Old Man Green’s curb and rocking back and forth in the chill. When Joey appeared from around the corner he hopped to his feet and jogged across the street.
“What’d you end up telling your folks?” Joey asked.
“That I was going to your place to help you move your room around,” Michael said. “I hope they don’t call.”
From his jacket pocket Joey pulled a flip phone and snapped it open with a flick of his wrist. “My mom’s cell phone. I turned on the call forwarding on our phone so it’ll ring here.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Some award dinner,” Joey said, shrugging. “She sold like a bunch more houses than anyone else over the summer. She’ll be gone ‘til after eleven.”
Michael nodded, impressed with his friend’s forethought. “Man, you’re going places, Travers.”
“My dad says Harvard, if I make the grades.” Joey put the phone away and they began to walk, Michael leading the way. “He says he’ll pay for it all. So Bryce said he found something? What?”
“Something about the cop in our class yesterday. I thought he told you.”
“He’s your best friend,” Joey remarked. “All he told me was, ‘Call Mike and both of you come by about nine’. He didn’t tell you what?”
“No,” Michael said. He turned just before the school’s east fence, skirting the barrier. “I wish his folks weren’t so strict.”
“Does he really have to go to bed by nine?” Joey asked.
“On school nights. Why do you think we’re going to his house?”
“You sneak in a lot?”
“Sometimes,” Michael said.
Joey zipped his jacket up a bit further and looked ahead. They were walking right into the...
I can’t...
Joey’s feet turned from skin and bone to lead blocks, and a dizzying flock of star-bright somethings fluttered in orbit around his head. He heard laughter and smelled chocolate.
The lead blocks became anchors that connected him to this spot of earth, right here, stopped, not going in there no way! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ah ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Almost to the soft earth that marked the boundary of Galloway’s orchard, Michael noticed that he was walking alone. He looked back. “Joey?”
The gnarled gray trees shifted in the night breeze, their naked, gangly limbs reaching out like fingers into the space between the rows. Joey stared at them, each one ashen in the moonlight, a whisper passing among them. Witnesses all.
A fist balled in his chest, trying to choke him from within.
“What’s wrong?” Michael asked.
“Why...why are we going through there?”
“That’s the shortest way to Bryce’s. We could go over to Grant Street, but...” Michael did not close the distance to his friend, but very clearly he could see Joey’s eyes regarding the orchard with something he’d never seen in him before. A goulash of emotions. Fear. Hate. And something else. “Are you okay?”
Joey had the urge to spit, but his mouth had gone dry. “Let’s take Grant. Okay?”
Michael looked into the orchard and the blackness receding to its depths. What the hell could be in there that would make Joey freak out like that? he wondered.
“Okay, we...” Michael turned back to Joey, but his acquiescence was lost somewhere in the growing space between them. His friend was already backtracking toward the street.
* * *
Nine sharp, hiding in the tree line behind the Hool house on the edge of Bigfoot Woods, Joey and Michael waited for the lights in one of the back facing bedrooms to go out before approaching. They ran to the bushes bordering the house and snuck along until they were at the window. Its sill was eye high.
Michael peaked past the edge and tapped lightly on the glass. The curtains separated almost immediately. The window slid slowly up, pausing cautiously at each squeak.
Bryce leaned out when the window was open enough and whispered, “Be real quiet. My mom and dad are watching TV.”
Mi
chael stood aside and helped boost Joey through the window, following him through and easing it shut.
The floor of Bryce’s room, hardwood covered by a rug that went almost from wall to wall, shined in a yellowish oval that spilled from a flashlight in Bryce’s hand. “I’ve got it over here.”
“Got what?” Joey asked in a hushed voice. The orchard was gone from his thoughts now, put away like he’d put it away before.
“Come look,” Bryce said, and led them to the floor next to his bed. They sat in the shifting cone of light and watched their pajama-clad friend remove a handful of papers from under his mattress. A few five dollar bills slid out with the papers and tumbled silently to the floor. Bryce picked them up and tucked them back into his not-so-secret hiding place. “I downloaded this and printed it out.”
Joey and Michael each took a sheet and leaned into the light.
“What are these?” Michael asked.
“They’re articles,” Bryce explained. Worry slithered into his voice. “From different papers’ websites. All about the detective.”
Joey squinted at the type and read along until he came to a name that rang a bell. “Who’s Jimmy Vincent?”
“That kid that beat those really little kids to death.” Bryce blinked hard. “This is the cop that got him to confess to it.”
Michael looked long at Joey, then dove into the article.
“These things all say that he’s some sort of expert at getting kids to talk,” Bryce went on. “Jimmy Vincent, he was twelve. Just about our age. And after he confessed his family just cut him off.” He flipped through the pages until he found the one he wanted. “This one, it’s about how his family says they wish he was dead. They don’t even visit him in jail.”
Joey skimmed one page, then another.
“He’s here to make us talk,” Bryce said. The breath beneath his tone was frenzied. “I don’t want to go to jail.”
“You’re not going to jail,” Joey told him.
“I don’t want my parents to hate me,” Bryce almost whimpered. His mind was screaming at him: They’re going to give you back!
“Bryce,” Michael said. “Take it easy.”
Joey folded the pages in half and handed them, largely unread, back to Bryce. “These mean nothing. So this guy made Jimmy Vincent confess. So what? That kid was a criminal.”
Bryce, his small face stained by shadow from the light on his lap, thought about that for a moment. “What are we?”
“We’re kids,” Joey told him.
It was a statement of obvious fact, but, coming from Joey, Bryce thought it was starting to sound an awful lot like an excuse.
Ten
Debbie Travers was a whirlwind of activity, all confined to the space between the kitchen island and the hissing coffee maker. Her son entered buttoning his shirt, his hair freshly combed.
“Mornin’ babe,” she said, pulling the glass pot from the coffee maker prematurely and letting a stream of brackish drips spatter on the hot warmer. The wasted morning pick-me-up sizzled to steam before she got the pot back under the filter spout. “Damn.”
It was funny, Joey thought. Not what his mom had just done, but that she had done the same thing like a hundred times before. Not every day, but enough that it was like flipping on the TV every few nights and seeing the same rerun of Cheers with that dork mailman saying the same thing to the fat guy at the end of the bar.
“Have you seen my cell phone?”
Joey’s eyes bugged ominously, and he was instantly thankful that his mom was occupied checking her blouse for coffee stains. Shit! Double shit! It was still in his jacket pocket! He sucked the guilty look from his face and said, as innocently as possible, “Can’t you find it?”
“If I could find it, would I be asking if you’d seen it?” Both hands now moved to her right ear and fiddled with the simple gold hoop swinging from it. “Did you see the plaque I got last night?”
“Where is it?” Joey asked, hopping onto one of the stools lining the nook side of the island. His mom aimed a frown at him, her eyes pointing to the slab of granite right in front of him. A scalloped piece of dark wood, shaped like a knight’s shield, lay right there, a second smaller shield of shiny gold metal fixed to it. Congratulations to his mom for the highest quarter sales in the blahbity blah blah blah were carved into the golden shield, but all Joey could think of was how stupid he was for leaving his mom’s cell phone in his jacket.
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah,” Joey said, making himself look a little closer at it now so his mom didn’t think he didn’t care. “It’s pretty cool.”
“Isn’t it?” Debbie Travers agreed. As she smiled at her not so little boy she caught a glimpse of the clock on the coffee maker and was suddenly thrown back into frantic motion. “Damn. Babe, do a big favor this morning and make your own breakfast?” She paused for a moment, just long enough to check her makeup in the reflection of the refrigerator’s stainless-steel front. “I’ve got an early showing in Holly Village.”
“This early?”
“People with big money start their days early,” Debbie said, examining her maroon skirt now, adjusting its waist higher. She turned to her son and asked, “Do I look fat?”
Joey picked dried apple chips from a bag, nibbled at one, and shook his head. He really didn’t know if she looked fat or not. She was his mom, for crying out loud. But his dad had told him, ‘If a woman ever asks you if she looks fat, tell her no. Even if she’s a walking eclipse.’
Debbie prodded her tummy with fingers whose nails matched her skirt. “I’ve gotta join a gym.”
“Mom, when do you think dad’s going to call?” Joey pinched at one of the apple chips and tried to sound unconcerned in a ‘just wondering’ kind of way.
“I don’t know, babe,” Debbie answered, honestly, almost apologetically, her son’s question stopping her momentarily cold. If there was one other person on the planet who deserved a bat over the head as much as that Edmond boy... “He’ll call when he can. I’m sure.” She pulled a commuter mug from the cupboard and tossed Joey her car keys. In her thoughts she damned Gordon Travers. “Start the Benz for me, babe, will ya?”
Joey nodded and hopped off the stool. He went through the laundry room and into the garage, and slid behind the wheel of his mom’s white 540. A tap on the garage opener made the door swing up, and then he slid the key in the ignition and started the big car’s smooth motor just like his mom had showed him. He’d been starting her car at least once a week now since he was nine. The steering wheel was hardly an obstacle anymore, just enough that there was no way his mom would let him back it out for her. Next year, a few more inches...who knew?
He made sure the door was unlocked— he’d absently done the opposite once after starting the car, and the only good to come of that was that his mom had gotten a spare key made —and got out, heading back for the door through the laundry room.
Two steps were all he managed.
At the Mercedes’ wide rear end he stopped, his gaze pulled down the driveway, past the hedges and across the street. A car was parked in front of the Grissom’s house. A black four-by-four. Joey rested a hand on the Mercedes’ trunk lid and watched as the driver’s window of the strange car slid down.
Even this far away he recognized who it was. It was the cop.
“Thank you, babe,” Debbie Travers said as she came out, coat draped over one arm and a thin folio tucked beneath the same, her commuter mug steaming in hand. She kissed her son and got behind the wheel.
The cop looked right at him, Joey saw, and he had the funny feeling that it was more than a glimpse he was taking. More than an observation. The man one of the articles had called the Kiddie Catcher was scrutinizing him as if there were a microscope spanning the distance between them. Like he was fascinated by some minuscule new disease.
The Mercedes’ horn made Joey jump.
Debbie Travers rolled her window down a bit and said, “Do you want me to run you over? Careful.”
“Sorry,” Joey said, stepping clear. His mom backed out of the garage, blowing him a kiss just before the garage door tipped shut. He ran inside, past the washer and dryer, through the kitchen and into the living room, his final destination the big bay window overlooking the front yard. He parted the sheer curtains slightly and peered out.
His mom’s white Mercedes was easing down Wasatch Avenue. The black four-by-four was right behind it.
* * *
Thirty minutes later Joey was walking down Maple toward Peyton, picking apple chips from the bag he’d settled on as breakfast. His backpack hung low on his back, but it was far from the weightiest thing he carried with him toward school.
Why would he be following my mo—
“Hey there.”
Joey spun left, startled, toward the voice. His mother was obviously not being followed anymore.
Dooley stepped away from a tree gracing a large, leaf-covered yard and onto the sidewalk. “S-T-R-U-T-H-I-O-M-I-M-U-S. How’s that?”
Joey did not respond, his feet choosing to move once again and take him away from the detective.
Dooley double-timed to catch up. “You’re Joey Travers.”
So you know me. Well, I know you, too. “And you’re the kiddie catcher.”
“I haven’t heard that in a while.”
“Maybe you need a fan club,” Joey suggested sarcastically.
“You’re not only quick at spelling,” Dooley observed.
“What are you doing here?”
“Out for a walk. I thought we could talk.”
Joey snickered. “Yeah, right. Do you always park in front of other peoples’ houses when you go for a stroll?”
“Sometimes,” Dooley said, ignoring the attitude. He had experienced it before in another.
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