I shut the door and locked it. Riel insisted on that, too. When I first moved in, I used to be as bad with the lock as I was with the lights. That’s because when I lived with my uncle Billy, he always used to tell me not to lock the door when I went to bed. Billy partied a lot, which meant he came home drunk a lot, and he hated to fumble around for his keys.
As soon as I shut the door, the light at the top of the stairs went off. Maybe it had burned out. I decided to take a look, but before I even put my foot on the bottom step, someone came hurtling down the stairs.
“Hey!” I shouted.
At first I thought he was going to run right out of the house. But he didn’t. Instead, he grabbed me. He was tall and strong. He was wearing gloves and a balaclava, so I couldn’t see his face, just angry-looking eyes and a twisted mouth.
“Where is she?” he said.
I struggled to get away from him, but his hands were biting into my arms. He shook me so hard my teeth rattled.
That’s when I saw that he had something else in his hands besides my arms. It was an envelope. A pink envelope. The love letter from Imogen that had been in Sal’s locker. What did he want that for?
“Where is she?” he said again.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
He pushed me backward across the front hall and slammed me up against the wall.
“You said you were his best friend. He must have said something to you. Where is she?”
When I didn’t answer, he slammed me into the wall again. It felt like all the air had been knocked out of my lungs.
“Where is she?”
I wanted to shout for help, but I couldn’t catch my breath. He slammed me into the wall a third time, harder this time, so hard that I felt like I had fallen ten stories onto a concrete floor. His hands were like vices. I tried to work myself free, but his grip only got tighter. I looked into his eyes. That’s when I knew, I just knew, that he was going to kill me. I could see it in his eyes. They were brown—I know they were—but there was a cold blackness in them. He pulled me off the wall again. He was going to slam me back against it. He was going to do it over and over again. He was going to kill me.
After that, everything slowed down. I felt myself being pulled forward. I looked into those cold, dead eyes. I remembered the look on Sal’s face the day before he died. I saw the man holding me now. I felt his arms start to move again as he got ready to slam me backward. I couldn’t move my arms. I couldn’t resist.
So I kneed him.
I kneed him as hard as I could in the most vulnerable place I could.
He grunted. His knees buckled. But he didn’t let go of me. If anything, his hands bit more deeply into my arms. I kneed him again, as hard as I could.
He let out a roar. His grip slipped for a split second, and I got one arm free. I reached out and grabbed the balaclava off his head.
It was him.
It was the same guy I had seen outside my school, the one who had told me he was a reporter.
I tried to get my other arm free, but before I could he had me pinned against the wall again.
I decided to kick him and to keep on kicking him as many times as it took. But he slammed me into the wall so hard this time that pain exploded in my back and I couldn’t breathe. I would have slid to the floor if he hadn’t been holding onto me. He had been mad enough before. Now he was enraged.
Maybe that was why he didn’t hear the little scrabbly sound of a key going into a lock. Maybe it was why he didn’t hear the key turn.
Please don’t let it be Susan, I thought. Please.
I wanted to shout out a warning. But I was gasping for breath, and he was getting ready to hammer me for a fifth time.
Riel stepped into the front hall.
He looked at me.
He looked at the man.
He started toward him.
But by then the guy had seen Riel. He let go of me and ran through the living room and into the kitchen. He was heading for the back door.
Riel gave me an once-over. “Are you okay?” he said.
I nodded.
“Call 911,” Riel said. He sprinted out the front door to try to intercept the guy.
I slumped to the floor and sat there for a moment, trying to catch my breath. When I tried to get to my feet, my knees buckled. I crawled to the phone, reached up for it, and called 911 like Riel had said. I told the dispatcher what had happened. I also told her that it was Riel’s house and that he was a police officer and that he was chasing the guy.
Riel was back a couple of minutes later.
“I lost him,” he said, panting. He sounded disgusted with himself. “Are you okay, Mike?”
“My back,” I said. Riel reached down to help me up. I winced when he pulled my arm. Riel frowned. When he got me to my feet, he turned me around and lifted my T-shirt to take a look. I told him what had happened. “I thought he was going to kill me,” I said.
Riel looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “Come and sit down. As soon as the police get here, I’ll take you to the ER and have you checked out.”
When we got into the living room, I saw a pink envelope lying on the floor.
“He had that in his hand,” I said. “It’s from Sal’s locker.” I explained to Riel what I was doing with it. “I was bringing the box home when that guy bumped into me at school. A bunch of stuff fell out, and he helped me pick it up.” I thought back to exactly what had happened. “He was looking at that envelope like he was dying to see what was in it. I thought he was just some nosy reporter. I thought it was a love letter to Sal from Imogen. But if that’s all it was, why did he have it in his hands when he attacked me?”
Riel opened the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of pink paper. He scanned it.
“It’s not from Imogen,” he said. “It’s from someone named Carole.” He looked at the envelope again. “There’s no return address. None inside, either. This Carole, she’s thanking Sal for everything he did.”
“What did he do?”
“She doesn’t say. All she says is that she’s safe and that he shouldn’t worry about her and that she’ll keep in touch. That’s it.”
I wondered who this Carole was and why the guy had wanted that letter so badly.
The police came. Riel talked to them and told them that Homicide was looking for the guy who had attacked me. He called Dave and spoke to him while one of the cops took a statement from me. Then Riel locked up the house and took me to the hospital to have me checked out. It turned out I didn’t have any broken bones, but the doctor who looked at me said he would be surprised if my whole back didn’t turn black and blue. I had to sleep on my stomach that night. Even so, my back felt like it was on fire. Susan gave me some extra-strength pain reliever when we got home. She said it would also help me sleep, but she was wrong. I woke up two or three times, each time because I’d had a nightmare. Each time it was the same nightmare. The guy was slamming me against the wall again and again and again, but in my dream, Riel didn’t show up to stop him. In my dream, I was on my own.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Riel knocked on my door the next morning. I couldn’t believe how much it hurt when I tried to sit up. My back felt like a five-hundred-pound gorilla had been using it as a trampoline—which, I guess, was pretty close to what had happened.
“You asked me to make sure you got up on time,” Riel said. “You said you wanted to meet Rebecca’s bus. How about I run you down there?”
I said okay. Then I said, “Did they find the guy yet?”
“Not yet. But they’re looking, Mike. They’ve got his full name now, they know where he lives, and they’ve got some pictures from his place. They’re checking that letter for fingerprints, too. They’ll get him.”
“Do they know why he did it?”
“Not yet. It’s a safe bet it has something to do with this Carole, though. Apparently she was his girlfriend—and she used to work at the same McDonald’s as Sal. O
ne of his neighbors says he suspects Hanson—that’s his name, Daniel Hanson—was physically abusive to this Carole.”
I remembered what the letter had said.
“Do you think Sal helped her? Do you think that’s why she wrote him?”
“Maybe. They found Sal’s laptop at Hanson’s place.”
“So he’s the one who broke into Sal’s place?”
“It looks like it,” Riel said. “Maybe he was looking for some information about Carole. Hurry up and get dressed, Mike. You don’t want to disappoint Rebecca.”
I was waiting in the school parking lot when the bus pulled in. Rebecca ran to me as soon as she got off. She threw her arms around me and hugged me so tightly that I thought I would faint from the pain. I didn’t mean to, but I groaned. She pulled back a little so that she could look at me.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
When I finally told her—after she had loaded her suitcase into her parents’ car and told her mother she would be home in a little while, and after we had gone into a coffee place near school and ordered something to drink—she held both my hands and said in a small voice, “He could have killed you, Mike.” A tear ran down her cheeks. I squeezed her hands and told her I was fine.
“What did you want to tell me, Rebecca?”
She looked puzzled.
“The last time I talked to you on the phone, it sounded like you wanted to tell me something important. What was it?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. She held my hand all the way home, too, and didn’t seem to mind that we had to walk slower than usual.
Riel let me stay home from school on Monday. He told me to keep all the doors locked. He said if I heard anything, anything at all, or if I was scared about anything, anything at all, I should call him right away.
“I mean it, Mike,” he said.
I said okay.
Around two o’clock I heard something.
I tensed up.
I’d been lying on my bed, but now I slid off it. I tiptoed across my room and got my baseball bat out of the closet. I had it in my hand as I crept down the hall toward Riel’s room for the phone. Then someone called out my name.
It was Riel.
He came upstairs. He looked serious, as usual, but I could see that he wanted to tell me something.
“They arrested Daniel Hanson in the airport in Calgary about twenty minutes ago,” he said.
“Calgary?” I said.
“The postmark on that envelope was Calgary. If he was looking for Carole, it was a good bet he’d head out there. The Calgary police have him.”
“Did he confess to killing Sal?”
“No,” Riel said. “But when they did a thorough search of his place, they found traces of blood. If he stabbed Sal, there’s a good chance he got some blood on himself. They didn’t find any clothes with blood on them. But there was some blood between the floor-boards just inside his back door. According to Dave, it looks like a transfer from the bottom of a shoe. He may have washed the floor, but some of the blood got into the cracks. There’s enough to test for DNA. In the meantime, they’re holding him for break and enter both here and at Sal’s parents’ place, for theft, and for aggravated assault on you. They could bump that up to attempted murder.” I started to shake when he said that. “And now that he’s in custody, they’ve put an appeal out to this Carole. They’re asking her to come forward. She may be able to shed some light on this.”
“What about Alex?”
“They let him go.”
Poor Alex. I felt sorry for him. Getting arrested must have been scary enough. But it had to have been much, much worse that both Bailey and his mother thought that Alex had done it. They’d actually thought he’d killed someone.
I had the next weekend off for a change, and I was glad because, finally, it was all over. It turned out the blood they found in Daniel Hanson’s house was Sal’s blood. And Hanson’s ex-girlfriend Carole came forward. She was living in a small town in British Columbia. She didn’t even know Sal had been killed until she saw an article in the newspaper saying that the police were looking for her and wanted to ask her some questions in relation to a murder investigation. She went to her local police station. Then Dave flew out west and talked to her in person. When he got back to town, he came to the house and filled us in. He told us that Carole had been shaking like a leaf the whole time. She said that at first everything had been fine between her and Hanson. He seemed like a nice, considerate guy. She said that he was a little on the jealous side but that she’d been flattered by his attention. Then he started getting possessive. He didn’t want her to go any where without him. He hit her a few times. Once, she called the police, but he told her that even if they arrested him, they couldn’t keep him for long, and when he got out, he would kill her. So when the police came, she told them that the only reason she called was that she was mad at him.
“The officers who took that call should have pressed it,” Dave said. “They’re supposed to with domestic cases.”
After that, things got worse. She was scared of him. She confided in Sal. She said that she’d gotten to know Sal and that he was always nice, even though he was so young. Sal told her that she should go to the police. But she was too afraid. Then one day Hanson came to the McDonald’s where they worked and saw her talking to Sal. He became even more jealous. He started pressuring her to quit her job. He beat her up. She came to work with bruises all over her. This time Sal finally convinced her. He called the police for her, and Hanson was arrested.
“He got six months,” Dave said with disgust. “He was out in two.”
But by then, Carole was gone. She’d packed up everything and moved out of town. Sal had helped her. She said maybe Hanson had gone after Sal because he thought Sal knew where she was. But he didn’t. Carole wrote to him a couple of times, but she never gave a return address, and she always arranged to have the letter mailed from somewhere else.
When the police told Hanson that Carole had come forward, he went berserk, Dave said. Then they told him about the blood they had found at his house. They said they were going to charge him with first-degree murder on Sal and attempted murder on me. They said he was going to be in prison for life.
That’s when his lawyer made a deal.
Hanson would plead guilty to second-degree murder on Sal and aggravated assault on me and, in return, would be eligible for parole in fifteen years.
“Fifteen years?” I said. “Is that all?”
“For second-degree murder, you get life in prison, same as first-degree murder. The only difference is that you’re eligible for parole earlier,” Riel said. “But being eligible for parole in fifteen years doesn’t mean you automatically get out in fifteen years.”
“Hanson’s a dangerous guy,” Dave said. “But if he wants to think he has a shot, he can be my guest.”
Hanson told the cops that when he got out of jail after the assault on Carole and found that she had taken off, he started to look for her. He went to the restaurant and asked around. He talked to Sal. Sal denied that he knew where she was. But Hanson didn’t believe him.
“He says he tried to scare Sal,” Dave said. “He’d hang around the restaurant. One time Sal went up to him and told him if he didn’t get lost, he’d call the police. Hanson seemed to think that was pretty funny. He asked what Sal was going to tell them—that there was a man standing on a public side walk outside of McDonald’s?”
Hanson asked Sal a couple of times where Carole was, and Sal always said the same thing: he didn’t know. Then Hanson started showing up places where Sal was—like the movie theater. And Sal got scared.
“Hanson saw him again the day after the movie theater. Sal told him if he saw him around again, he was going to call the police. And Hanson said the same thing—and tell them what? He told Sal that if he did call the police, even if the police did nothing—which he was pretty sure they would—Sal would be sorry. That
must have been when Sal took your friend’s knife. Right after that, Hanson disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?” I said.
“He got into a fight—a case of road rage. He went to jail on that. He was locked up for three months over the summer. Got out at the end of September.”
It started to make sense.
“Sal probably thought he’d given up,” I said. “He took the knife from Vin at the beginning of the summer because he was scared. Then Hanson dropped out of sight. Maybe that’s why he didn’t say anything. Maybe he thought Hanson wasn’t a threat after all—until he saw him out on the street the day before he died.”
“Hanson says he saw that whole thing on the street with all those kids,” Dave said. “He says that when Sal saw him, he ducked into that alley. Hanson thought that was funny. He said that Sal looked like he was going to—well, he looked scared. So Hanson followed him. The guy is 100 percent bully. He’s probably a psychopath. Sal told him to stay away or else. He pulled out a knife. Hanson said, ‘Or else what?’ He’s a big guy.”
And strong. I knew that from personal experience.
“He said it was easy to turn that knife on Sal.”
Jeez. Sal had been holding the knife, and Hanson had wrapped his hands around Sal’s hands and killed him.
“I wish Sal had said something to me,” I said. “I would have made sure he talked to the police.”
Dave and Riel looked at each other. Then Riel said, gently, “If Hanson didn’t actually threaten Sal, I’m not sure things would have turned out much differently, Mike,” he said. “So don’t blame yourself for what happened.”
I felt terrible. I had to tell somebody. I decided it would be Rebecca. It didn’t seem right that Teddy knew and she didn’t.
I went over to Rebecca’s house. She invited me in, but I said, no, I’d rather go for a walk or something. I didn’t want to be in her house because I was pretty sure she’d ask me to leave as soon as I told her what I had to say.
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