Sketchy Behavior

by Erynn Mangum

  So far, Detective Masterson had only had to wake me up once since Monday because I was screaming in my sleep again. But other than that, I was getting fairly decent three-hour naps in every day.

  “Are you going to wait until after he’s caught before you come back to school?” Justin asked, apparently staying to chat today.

  I sat down in the recliner, rubbing my cheek. “I don’t know,” I said. I had thought about it, but not very much. What if he never was found? Did that mean I never went to school again? Would Detective Masterson and DJ have to live with us forever?

  “Well, I think you should just come on back to school. What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked.

  I blinked as a hundred different scenarios that would fit the “worst thing that could ever happen” adjective raced through my head. Classmates could get shot, teachers could get hurt, I could put another cop in the hospital.

  Justin apparently noticed the look on my face and winced, rubbing his cheek. “I, uh, I didn’t mean that question, Kate.”

  Maybe it would be better if I didn’t take the police department job. Maybe after all this was over and done with, I could get a full night’s sleep, go to school like a normal sixteen-year-old, and have a nice life of homework and Crispix. I was even starting to miss my beat-up, barely working car.

  I shrugged. “No big deal,” I said. “But that’s why I won’t go back until he’s caught.” I hadn’t elaborated on the why but I had a feeling that Justin got my drift.

  He just nodded. “Okay, then.” He stood, pulling his backpack up off the floor. “All right, I’d better get to school. Have a good day, Kate. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  “Thanks again, Justin.” I walked him to the door.

  “No problem.”

  I locked the door behind him, but not before poking my head outside first. It was a gorgeous day outside. And despite the trampling our front yard had gotten on the day of the pot roast fiasco, it looked like the grass would probably grow back just fine.

  Thank goodness. Dad about died when he saw the yard after the barrage of uniforms left.

  “What in the …” His voice had trailed off and I knew better than asking him to finish his sentence as he stood in the front door, staring at what used to be his lawn of perfection. He’d had complete strangers coming to the door in years past, asking him what kind of fertilizer he used and how he kept his yard so green.

  I closed the door and turned on Happy Days, though by this point I’d already missed the first few minutes of it.

  Detective Masterson came in and settled in the recliner with the newspaper, like he did every morning. DJ was on the phone in the kitchen like he was every morning.

  And Mom and Dad finished breakfast and left with their usual warnings like they did every morning.

  I had just woken up from my nap during I Love Lucy when I saw Detective Masterson close his cell phone and look over at me. “Kate,” he said, “time to pay another visit to the dentist.”

  I nodded, rubbing the lines on my cheek from the corduroy pillows. “Okay.” Suddenly, I was wide awake. Maybe they caught the grocery store parade shooter! Maybe they’d run him down and I could go to school on Monday!

  “And bring something to do,” Detective Masterson said as I jumped off the couch and ran to my room for my shoes. “We’ll probably be there a while.”

  “Okay!” I said.

  I grabbed my shoes, changed into jeans quickly, and slapped a quick coating of mascara on. I closed my sketchpad and picked up my favorite pencil set, tucking both under my arm.

  I could work on my drawings while we were at the station, since apparently we would be waiting there for a little while.

  We left a few minutes later. DJ was driving over the speed limit and Detective Masterson kept looking at his cell phone.

  “Did they catch him?” I asked excitedly.

  “I don’t know,” Detective Masterson said.

  “Did they see him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did they at least identify him?”

  He turned and looked at me. “I don’t know, Kate. All they said was come down to the station right away.”

  “You didn’t ask why?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll find out when we get there.”

  I just shook my head and looked out the window. All men were the same, my mother would have said. Any time Dad got off the phone with his side of the family, Mom would ask him what they said, what was going on with everyone, whether or not the dates for the family reunion would work for everyone this summer. And Dad would have absolutely no answers for her.

  “I guess they were all fine,” Dad would say.

  “You didn’t ask?” Mom would rant.

  “I didn’t think to.”

  We pulled up at the station and hurried inside. Deputy Slalom was sitting at his desk, and we were told to go on into his office.

  I decided that you could always tell what kind of day it had been for the police station by the condition of Deputy Slalom’s wardrobe.

  So it kind of scared me when we walked in and his button-down shirt was completely unbuttoned, showing his white undershirt. His sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, and his tie was in a wad on the desk.

  “Sit,” he barked as soon as we walked in.

  Definitely not good news. I sat immediately, setting my sketchpad and pencils on the floor under my chair. Detective Masterson sat in the chair beside me, and DJ stood behind us, since there wasn’t another chair.

  Deputy Slalom was pacing now, his shirttail flapping behind him. He was seething.

  I watched him, my stomach knotting tighter each time he passed in front of me. I’d already resigned myself that this was not going to be the good news I was hoping for. Now, I was just hoping that there was a light at the end of the house arrest tunnel.

  “Well,” Deputy Slalom growled finally after five minutes of pacing in front of us. He stopped behind his desk chair and gripped the sides of it. “Good news, Kate. They found the parade shooter.”

  He was still seething though, so I didn’t bust into a happy dance just yet.

  He squeezed the chair sides tighter. “And I just got off the phone with the Clayton county office.”

  Clayton is another suburb of St. Louis.

  “It seems that our friendly and entirely ridiculous prison system has somehow misplaced a certain inmate!” Deputy Slalom shoved his chair against his desk so hard, the three framed pictures he had sitting on it fell over.

  I jumped. I’d never heard so many stressed words from Deputy Slalom. At first, it didn’t really register what he’d said because I was so shocked by the chair slamming and the yelling.

  He’d seemed like such a docile man.

  Guess not.

  Detective Masterson went pale. “I’m sorry?” he said.

  “Yeah! Yeah, that’s all the guy from Clayton had to say!” Deputy Slalom was back to pacing. “ ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m sorry?! Does that suddenly help things? Are we finally living in a society where all people have to do is halfway apologize, and suddenly everything is all rainbows and butterflies and Hostess snack cakes?!” He banged his fists down on the desk and this time a paperweight fell over.

  I kept scooting farther and farther back in my chair. I’d spent many a time in the principal’s office hearing about how being tardy to class is setting myself up on a road of failure and disappointment, but Principal Murray had never yelled like this at me.

  Somehow I got the feeling that Deputy Slalom wasn’t yelling at us as much as just venting to us.

  He flung himself into his chair with a huff. “John X is missing,” he said in a sullen, deathly quiet voice.

  The room immediately felt like it shrunk six feet in every direction. My chest got tight, my lungs had trouble expanding. I couldn’t feel anything past my waist. Any joy about the parade shooter being captured vanished like the rare package of Nutter Butters in front of my dad.

  “Missing,�
�� Detective Masterson repeated after a few minutes of complete silence in the room.

  “Missing. Gone. Kaput. MIA.” Deputy Slalom waved a wrist around while he spoke, his eyes glassy, his gaze fixed on the window. “He was in his cell for breakfast, and there was no one there by lunch.”

  My hands were shaking violently, and I tried to control them by weaving my fingers together so tight, my knuckles turned white.

  “The clever man from Clayton said he thought it was his ‘responsibility’ to let me know that they’d somehow ‘misplaced’ John X, and if he happened to show up here in South Woodhaven Falls, could we ‘please arrange a transport’ back to the prison.” Deputy Slalom started shaking his head.

  “What did you say?” Detective Masterson said.

  “I said a bunch of words that I’m not going to repeat in front of a minor.” He looked over at me. “And a girl minor at that.” He let his breath out for a long minute and kept looking at me. “Kate. This changes a lot.”

  I managed a nod, but I’m not sure how I did. My muscles felt frozen and stiff, like when it would snow a lot on the hill behind my house and Dad and I would go sledding on Mom’s cookie sheets when she wasn’t home, much to her dismay when she’d return.

  Detective Masterson looked at me as well and reached over, patting my shoulder. “Don’t panic, Kate.”

  He said it in the same tone he’d use if I’d burned myself cooking. If any situation was worthy of a good panicking, I would think that this one would be it.

  DJ had been awfully quiet behind us. I looked over, and he was standing there with his arms crossed over his chest, jaw muscles set, eyes glaring.

  Maybe it was better that he wasn’t talking.

  Deputy Slalom took another deep breath and simply shook his head.

  Right then, his secretary came in and gave him a manila folder. She looked at me and gave me a sad smile before she left.

  He opened the folder and nodded at the contents. “Kate, you’re going into official witness protection.”

  I thought I was in official witness protection. I opened my mouth to ask.

  “And not just at your house with a couple of cops there.” He peered over at Detective Masterson. “You’re going with her.”

  The detective nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “And Kirkpatrick?”

  DJ finally spoke. “Yes, sir?” His voice was hard.

  “You’re staying here. I’ll need all the manpower I can get. Kate, you and your parents are being shipped to an undisclosed location in the next four hours.” He waved at his secretary through the window facing the room filled with cubicles, and she stood from her desk, walked over, and poked her head into the office.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Have a car go pick up Kate’s parents.” He looked at me. “I assume they are both working?”

  I nodded.

  He looked back at his secretary. “The info is all in their folders. I want them back here in thirty minutes.”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir.” She closed the door and walked back to her desk.

  Deputy Slalom looked back at me. “Kate, when your parents get here, you’ll have one hour to pack. Pack lightly and pack the essentials.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  He started shaking his head. “I can’t tell you that.” He squinted at the clock. It was almost one in the afternoon. “You will be headed to your location by three. Is that understood?” Then he looked at Detective Masterson. “I want confirmation that you are there by five tonight.”

  I could see a muscle jumping in Detective Masterson’s cheek. He nodded stiffly. “Yes, sir.”

  “Kate, you are not to take any cell phones, computers, or whatever the latest gadget that starts with i is. No communication devices at all. Anything that could be traced to you, I want left here. Is that understood?”

  I nodded.

  He picked up the phone on his desk and started dialing. I sat there, numb, my fingers still woven together.

  “Daniels? It’s Slalom. I need you to get a forensics team over to Clayton and see if they can’t find how in the blazes a level-four criminal escaped from there without anyone seeing him.” Deputy Slalom listened for a minute. “Thanks.” Then he slammed the phone down.

  “I’m going to get any and every picture of John X that we have out there circulating. If he so much as even peeks out of his little gopher hole, I want someone there to slam him over the head with a mallet and some handcuffs. And no way in …” He looked at me briefly. “No way in heck am I letting him go back to Clayton. Fool me once, shame on you. They aren’t fooling me twice.”

  I was assuming that Deputy Slalom had been referring to the old arcade game where you had to whack the little groundhogs on their heads when they popped out of the holes before they went back in.

  I was never very good at that game.

  Thirty minutes later, almost to the second, both of my parents ran in, looking panicked.

  “Kate!” my dad shouted when he saw me. “What happened? Are you okay? Did they catch the parade shooter?”

  Apparently, no one had informed my parents why a policeman had demanded that they go with him in a squad car in the middle of the day.

  Detective Masterson stood and offered my mom his chair. Deputy Slalom had spent the last few minutes before they got here trying to get the media relations guy to send out bulletins about John X to all the news stations in and around Missouri.

  “I want his picture as far as he can drive in one day, you got that? And at every airport, bus station, and train depot around.” Then he’d slammed down his phone so hard it probably left a resounding ring in the media guy’s ear.

  I was starting to worry about the structural integrity of his desk with the beating it was taking today.

  Mom sat down in Detective Masterson’s vacated chair and reached over for me. “Are you okay?” she asked, smoothing my hair away from my face.

  “What is going on here?” Dad demanded.

  Deputy Slalom was back to shaking his head. “They caught the parade shooter.”

  “Oh yay!” Mom said.

  “Yeah. Yay. And then the idiots down at the Clayton prison seemed to have somehow ‘misplaced’ our friend John X.”

  I immediately jumped up out of my chair so Dad could drop into it, since he didn’t look like he’d be able to stand for much longer.

  Both he and my mom just stared at the deputy.

  “They what?” Dad finally said.

  Another slam on the desk, which made both Mom and Dad jump. “Look, I don’t have the strength to tell it again,” Deputy Slalom said, almost growling as he looked around the room. “Kent, tell them what’s going on.”

  In short, precise sentences, Detective Masterson quietly informed Mom and Dad of the situation. “So, the four of us are going to be leaving in the next two hours for an undisclosed location,” he finished.

  Mom sat there, mouth open.

  Dad jumped up from the chair and started pacing back and forth behind it, in front of DJ.

  I stood quietly against the window.

  “Obviously, our primary concern is for Kate’s safety,” Detective Masterson said to Dad. “So, we need you guys to go home and pack only the essentials. No cell phones, computers, or any other communication device that could trace someone back to Kate.”

  “What about our family?” Mom started fretting. “Our son, Mike. He’s in school. What am I supposed to tell him? What about my work?”

  “What about our dog?” I asked.

  “How often do you talk to your son?” Deputy Slalom asked Mom.

  We all just looked at Mom, wondering if she’d actually admit how little she talked to him. She sighed and shrugged. “It varies.”

  It did vary. It varied on how often Mike needed something.

  “Don’t tell him anything then,” Deputy Slalom said. “Here’s the thing, Mrs. Carter. I don’t want another person outside of these four walls to know where Kate is, whether that
means lying your tail off to your work or your son.”

  Mom nodded and I saw the tears building.

  Dad must’ve seen them too, because he reached down and put both hands on her shoulders. “We’ll tell work that we got offered the use of a vacation house and we decided to take it. Considering everything that has happened, I don’t think anyone’s going to doubt our need of a good vacation.”

  Mom nodded again and sniffed. “And Mike?” she asked quietly.

  Dad sighed. “We’ll tell him we won’t be able to answer our phones for a while and if he needs to get ahold of us to have him call …” Dad’s voice trailed off and he looked at Deputy Slalom. “I guess giving him Kent’s number wouldn’t be the wisest, would it?”

  “Tell him to call your friend Gene,” Deputy Slalom said. He tapped a nameplate I hadn’t noticed before on his desk. It was gold and engraved.

  Deputy Gene Slalom.

  Dad nodded. Mom nodded. Detective Masterson nodded.

  I was too busy feeling sorry that the deputy had to go through life with a name like Gene Slalom to nod. No wonder he went into law enforcement.

  “Make your calls,” Deputy Slalom said. “And then you’ve got an hour to pack. I want every one of you gone by three.”

  “And Lolly?” I asked.

  Deputy Slalom sighed. “What kind of dog is she?”

  “Lab, sir.”

  He sighed harder. “My wife and I will take her for a few days.”

  Mom immediately pulled out her cell phone and pushed the speed dial. She waited for a while, her expression growing bleaker and bleaker with each passing second. “Hi, honey,” she said, finally, and I could hear her holding back the tears as she talked. “It’s Mom. We’re going on something of a last-minute vacation and our cell phones won’t work there, so if you need something, call our friend Gene at 555–8711.” She paused. “Love you, Mike.”

  Dad was on the phone with his work. “We got offered a fabulous vacation rental for a little while, and we think that we of all people deserve a vacation,” he said. “My cell won’t work, so just hold all my calls and I’ll return them when I get back.”