by Julia Keller
But maybe there were other ways of saving a town.
Chapter Eight
Tyler Topping sat on a curb at the edge of the student parking lot at Acker’s Gap High School. The lot was on a hill next to the low-slung clump of dull pink brick, accessed by a short run of concrete steps.
He passed the time by repeatedly poking his heel in and out of a mound of trash that had wedged itself against the curb. The intrusion created a satisfying little rattle, thanks to the preponderance of empty brown McDonald’s bags, straw wrappers, and assorted other paper-based trash.
Last night’s high was gone, but he wasn’t yet ravaged by the need to get high again, either. That would come, and soon, and it would be brutal; it would claw at his guts and smack his brain around like a tennis ball. Right now, though, he teetered on the thin margin between the savor of one high and the desire for the next one, an interval that never lasted long but that provided his only meaningful opportunity for enterprise and forward motion.
He’d spent most of yesterday in various parking lots—Dollar Tree, the Skin U Alive tattoo parlor, Lymon’s Market—trying to sell pills, because he owed a lot of money to Deke Foley. This was his first stop this morning. He was waiting for the kids to start arriving, at which point the lot would be flooded with students.
Or as he now thought of them: customers.
He felt around in the pouch of his hoodie. Yep, there they were: three baggies filled with white Oxycontin pills. Not as good as heroin, because you had to charge more to make any profit, but at least it was something. He’d bought them with the money he’d gotten from his mom’s billfold. Started out with five and this was what he had left. Selling the two had taken him almost all day yesterday. Way too long. He’d lost the magic touch. His old haunts didn’t work anymore. Not when you only had pills. Everybody wanted heroin now. Heroin, though, was harder to get, especially when he already owed so much money.
“Hey. You.”
Before he looked up to see who had addressed him, Tyler slid his hand—slowly, slowly—out of the pouch. If you moved too fast, you looked like you were way too self-conscious about what was in there.
Be casual. Be cool. That was the best way to play it. Always.
“Yeah,” Tyler said. He squinted up at the large figure looming over him, blocking the sun. He hadn’t noticed the kid’s approach; he’d been too intent on his troubles. He was certain he’d never seen this person before: overfed body, the big pimply face topped off by a tan Peterbilt cap, and the standard county-boy uniform consisting of a brown Carhartt jacket, camo cargo pants, knockoff Red Wing boots. Tyler pegged his age at fourteen, fifteen, although the size could be a fooler; he might be younger. Big ones generally looked older than they actually were. It was only when you started talking to them that the kid part showed through.
“You can’t be doing that shit around here, man,” the kid said. He spoke in a mild, nonthreatening way, with a slight wheedle at the end of the sentence.
Tyler decided to be coy. “What shit?”
“Come on. I seen you yesterday over at Lymon’s. I know why you’re here. All I’m sayin’ is—they won’t stand for it. They’ll chase you right outta here, soon as they see you. Mr. Bricker—he’s the assistant principal—he checks the parking lot every hour. He’s a real SOB.”
Ed Bricker. Big, ugly Ed Bricker with his stupid crew cut and his sneery lip and his lazy eye and his blubbery gut and his fat ass. So he was still here. He’d been here two years ago, the last time Tyler was enrolled as a student. As far as Tyler or anybody else knew, Ed Bricker had been here forever; he was one of those school administrators synonymous with the building, meaning he dated back to the 1950s and had never had a single upgrade.
Tyler kicked again at the slurry of trash. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, bro.”
The kid looked confused now. Tyler could read his mind: The kid was wondering if Tyler was telling the truth. Maybe he’d been mistaken about the drugs.
Could anybody be that dumb?
Yep. This kid could.
Then again, Tyler asked himself, who was the dumb one? Selling this shit in the school parking lot was asking for trouble, just like the kid said. He knew that. But he was desperate. Rock-bottom, end-of-the-line desperate. The other places weren’t working. The few people who came along told him to go away, or to repent and give his life to Jesus. Or they just threatened to call the sheriff.
If he didn’t sell the rest and get the money to Deke Foley by tomorrow, if he didn’t make at least some kind of payment on the shitload of cash he owed him, well …
Tyler shivered. Foley was serious business. He didn’t care about anything but his money. Tyler knew a guy who’d tried to cross him once. Nobody ever heard from that guy again.
“I’m talking,” the kid said, “about what you got in your pocket there.” He’d been temporarily emboldened by Tyler’s preoccupation. “You got pills in there, ain’tcha?”
“What?”
“I ain’t stupid.”
“Didn’t say you were.” Tyler hauled himself to his feet. He was tired of sitting on the curb. His butt hurt. “Why’re you up here, anyway? First bell’s not for a while. Used to go here myself.”
The kid’s eyes changed. “Really? How long ago?”
“Not long.”
“Really.” The kid looked intrigued. “You look older’n that. Like you been out a while.”
Now that he was standing up next to the kid, Tyler could smell his breath. It was a sweetly foul combination of Dubble Bubble and smokeless tobacco. There was another scent, too, sweeping off this Big Goober of a kid; to his amusement, Tyler realized it was AXE body spray. The country boy’s go-to aphrodisiac. This kid might as well have taped a hand-lettered VIRGIN sign to his forehead and been done with it.
Before Tyler could brag to the kid about how bad a student he’d been, and how many times Bricker had kicked his nasty ass, his cell rang. With the money he’d swiped from his mom he had picked up a burner phone last night and texted the number to Foley. If he hadn’t, Foley would’ve tracked him down and done some damage. Foley didn’t fool around. He needed to know where you were and what you were doing. He kept tabs on you. Always. You couldn’t call him but he could call you whenever he wanted to.
“Yeah,” Tyler said.
Silence.
“Anybody there?” Nervousness made his voice shake.
“You got the money yet?”
“Working on it.”
The click on the other end of the call was abrupt, unnerving. Like an unspoken threat. That was impossible, Tyler knew; a click was a click. But when the person at the other end of the call was Deke Foley, that’s how it was.
He was afraid of Foley.
Only a friggin’ idiot wouldn’t be afraid of Foley.
And Tyler Topping was no idiot. In fact, he was smart. And so he had a plan. He had a little something up his sleeve. Foley was going to find that out. If everything came together the way Tyler wanted it to—and it would, because the plan was good—then Foley was in for a big surprise. He’d understand real quick that Tyler Topping wasn’t just another one of his dumb-shit employees. You could only push Tyler Topping so far, right?
Sooner or later, a guy like Tyler Topping was going to turn the tables on you. Because he had a brain. Not like those other guys.
“I’m tellin’ you—Bricker’s gonna be coming up here real soon,” the kid said. “You better go. Before he throws your ass out.”
Tyler turned his head. He had forgotten all about the Big Goober.
“Mind your own damned business,” he muttered to the kid. Students had started to arrive, swarming the lot. It was showtime. Tyler only had a few minutes to mingle, make it clear what he had, and strike quick deals. The kid was in his way.
Potential customers swept past him, the guys in Levis and T-shirts despite the fierce cold, the girls in blouses and skirts and leggings and peacoats, a jostling, jumpy, noisy crowd. The sea of teenager
s that engulfed him also brought an unwanted slap of nostalgia: He’d been one of them himself, just a couple of years ago. He, too, had talked shit about homecoming and about what an asshole Bricker was and about how hot Sharon Cullen was—she was the popular girl back then, and he could still remember the dirty jokes about her, God, her tits were spectacular, and when Charlie bought that additive stuff to put in his Dodge Charger, the red plastic bottle with STP on the label, it was Tyler who said, You know what STP stands for, right? It stands for Sharon’s Tough Pussy, and everybody cracked up and he felt like a king, like the friggin’ king of the world, because nothing felt better than making your friends laugh.
Well, there was one thing that felt better: getting high.
Only sometimes at first, and then more often. And then, before he knew it, all the time. He forgot about his sacred ambition of getting into Sharon Cullen’s pants before graduation.
He forgot about Sharon Cullen.
And graduation? Shit—who cared about that anymore?
He blinked and shivered, shaking off the stupid memories. No time for that crap.
“Hey,” he said, sliding up next to kid after kid, pulling his hand slowly out of the hoodie pouch, thumbing the edge of the baggie. That’s all he ever had to say: “Hey.” Nothing more. He’d known it would be easy, lucrative, like shooting fish in a freakin’ barrel, but he’d tried the other places first because the school parking lot was high-reward, high-risk.
Bricker would be out here any second.
The Big Goober wasn’t right next to him anymore. He’d been pushed back by the crowd as word spread that the guy in the hoodie over by the curb was selling. Tyler finished a transaction and looked up and he somehow saw the Goober’s face again, staring at him mournfully, and he wanted to shout Quit looking at me or Get lost or something—anything—that would make the kid go away.
A soft voice interrupted his irritation.
“Tyler? Is that you?”
His heart gave a little lurch. Jesus Christ—it was Sara Banville. Alex’s little sister. She was a junior this year—how had he forgotten that? When they were kids, he and Alex and Sara had hung out all the time. Played together, rode their bikes, built forts, caught crawdads in the creek in the woods out behind the Banvilles’ house.
“Hey,” he said.
She’d turned out pretty. Not just pretty: friggin’ gorgeous. He’d forgotten that, too. The gawky kid with the sawed-off hair and the braces and the horsey face was, like, a babe now. Lean and tall. Legs for days. He hadn’t seen her in—how long? He couldn’t remember. Before his last rehab, anyway.
“Tyler Topping,” she said, as if she needed to state both halves of his name to make the reality of it being him stick.
And then, just before she was bumped aside by a jagged wave of her classmates, as more car doors popped open and people wheeled past, she gave him a look that infuriated him because it seemed to be made up mostly of pity, with some bafflement thrown in there, too, and a dash of abstract curiosity, and she said, “You used to be the coolest guy.”
You used to be the coolest guy.
He felt a roaring in his ears. His face was hot, even in the cold air. Sara had always had a major crush on him. She’d begged him and Alex to let her hang out with them, back when they were kids. He was a king. But not anymore.
Tyler couldn’t stand to be here another minute, not another friggin’ second, and so he yanked the dirty gray hood up over his head and he drove his balled fists into the pouch and he hunched away.
He wasn’t leaving because of Bricker. To hell with Bricker. Bricker can kiss my ass, he thought. To hell with Sara, too. To hell with everything. He wanted—no, he needed, and he needed it now—to be high. To wipe this shit out of his head.
Correction: to fill his head with another kind of shit.
He’d get out on the highway and hitch a ride. Find somewhere to chill.
He started walking faster. He took a quick look back over his shoulder, scouring the lot. He wondered if Bricker was really going to show up, or if the Big Goober was misinformed—if the kid, that is, was just as full of shit as everybody else in the whole friggin’ world.
No sign of Bricker.
He relaxed. Forward, march. The highway was just ahead.
* * *
But he had missed it.
He didn’t notice the man who had hidden himself behind a rocky outcropping on the ridge above the parking lot, watching him.
It wasn’t Bricker.
Chapter Nine
Ellie Topping stood in front of her kitchen counter, staring pensively at the two chicken breasts she had thawed out to make a late supper for her and Brett. The chicken breasts were still in the package, still positioned on a thin yellow cardboard slab and covered tightly in plastic.
She planned to bake them, not fry them. Brett preferred fried chicken, of course—who didn’t?—but Dr. Salvatore had been clear. Brett needed to get his weight and his blood pressure back under control. The excess pounds were putting pressure on his joints, Dr. Salvatore had explained multiple times, in a voice more neighborly than censorious, and definitely forgiving, being as how the physician himself carried at least thirty extra pounds packed around his middle like ballast in a cargo hold. Fat doctors, Brett had remarked with a wicked grin on their way back from the last appointment, are a real blessing, you know?
She wasn’t sure what time Brett would be home. He’d told her that he was addressing a regional civic improvement association meeting over in Swanville.
Did she believe him? No, she didn’t. But her skepticism didn’t matter to her, and she pushed it aside. She didn’t care about where he was. Maybe he was having an affair. She doubted that, but maybe it was true. She didn’t care enough to speculate.
Only the fact of her resolve to kill her son mattered to her anymore.
She unwrapped the chicken breasts and arranged them in a shallow baking dish. Her plan was to let them marinate in Italian dressing for an hour or so in the refrigerator, and then bake them in a 350-degree oven for forty-five minutes. It was her go-to recipe, the first dinner she’d ever cooked for Brett, just after they met.
She had been working at the Walgreen’s photo counter. He came over and introduced himself. Before she knew it, Ellie had invited the big, handsome, older man with the nice smile to come to her house for dinner. And—wonder of wonders—he showed up, driving his fancy car to the log home at the end of Briney Hollow, shaking hands with her sisters and brothers and her father, charming them all.
A year later, she had married him.
She turned the temperature dial on the front of the oven to preheat it.
Still no word from Tyler. He could be anywhere, doing anything. Which was nothing new. Which was why she’d decided to do what she had to do.
Her thoughts took a wild swing.
Here I am, sprinkling a bottle of Kraft Italian over chicken breasts—and the next time I see my son, I’m going to kill him.
Here I am, pressing Saran wrap around the edges of the baking dish—and the next time I see my son, I’m going to kill him.
Here I am, putting the baking dish in the fridge—and the next time I see my son, I’m going to kill him.
The juxtapositions had been popping up in her mind ever since she had made her decision. Ordinary life rubbed up against the profound thing that loomed over her, the thing that dominated the horizon the way a mountain range does, throwing a shadow over everything.
The two-part chime of the doorbell crashed into her thoughts. Startled, she lurched away from the oven and almost blundered into the butcher-block island, catching herself before her hip smashed against it.
Her mind clicked through the possibilities. Brett wouldn’t ring the front doorbell, would he? No, of course not. He always came in through the garage door.
Tyler. Could it be Tyler?
Her gun was up in the doll room. Two stories away.
This is all wrong.
She felt like a fo
ol. Like the universe was playing a joke on her. Because when she had the gun—it wasn’t Tyler.
And when it really might be Tyler, she didn’t have the gun.
Ellie waited another few seconds, letting her breathing go back to a semblance of a normal rhythm. And then she walked to the front door. She felt light, almost hollow, as if she were watching her own actions from a high and distant perch, and she was curious to see what she might do next.
But it wasn’t Tyler.
It wasn’t Brett, either.
Standing on the wide front porch, each palm cupping its opposite elbow, dressed in a pretty lavender sweater and pressed khaki slacks, was Sandy Banville. Her short blond curls looked coppery in the brightness of the porch light. At the moment Ellie opened the door Sandy’s head was turned; she appeared to be scanning the darkening neighborhood, her head whipping around in quick, birdlike jerks.
“Sandy?” Ellie said.
The head zipped back around to face forward. Sandy smiled at her and laughed. It wasn’t a real laugh, though; Ellie knew what it was, because she did that herself. It was a nervous, embarrassed reaction to stress. Almost every woman of Ellie’s acquaintance was a nervous laugher. None of the men were.
“Oh—hi,” Sandy said. Another short laugh, as she winced in the porch light. “Sorry to just come by like this.”
“It’s fine. Is everything—”
“Everything’s great. Really great.”
Ellie waited. In years past she would have automatically said, “Get in here, you,” and she and Sandy would’ve sat around the kitchen and talked, maybe having a glass of wine, maybe not, but the talk was always animated and fun. Sandy’s a riot, Ellie would tell Brett, because it was true. An absolute riot. They went back and forth all the time in those days, she and Sandy; they were in and out of each other’s houses, chatting about children, husbands, current events.
But they hadn’t been that close for … what was it now? A year and a half? At least. At least that. Ellie had lost track. What had divided them was Tyler. And his problems.
