by Ted Staunton
“He never went away. Ty killed him and said Danny hadn’t come home, to cover his ass. When Ty’s really flying, he’s a violent guy. He’d beaten on all of them before. That’s why Danny was in foster care—or had you forgotten that part?
“Riiiight,” I said. “So why didn’t you nail him, great detective?”
“Not enough evidence. There was no body, for one. And when the family found out he was a suspect, they backed his story.”
“That’s crazy. Why wouldn’t they turn him in?”
“You don’t know much about families, do you? Maybe they’d rather lose one than two.”
A bead of moisture slid down the water glass. I swallowed. I had to ask, but I kept it sarcastic-sounding. “And so they’re all in on it, this big plot?”
Griffin shook his head. “Not the extended family. The mother knows. Carleen knows for sure.”
“What about Shannon?” I kept my hands flat on the table, like his, but my knees were revving.
“What do you think?”
That one threw me; it was so close to home. The best I could do was, “Well, she better think I’m her brother.”
“I’m not sure which would be worse,” Griffin said, “knowing the lie or finding out later. If you had a conscience, that question would be keeping you up nights.”
“Does it keep you up nights? Or do you just want to send her to jail too?”
“She’s already in jail with that family. I wish she wasn’t.”
There was one last question I needed to ask. I had a sick feeling I already knew the answer. “So if I’m a fake, and they know it, why aren’t they turning me in?”
“If you don’t know, you’re not as smart as I thought. You’re the ultimate alibi. Ty can’t be a killer if Danny’s back home. Why do you think he gave you that chain? To seal the deal, in case you know more than you’re letting on. You’ve got them the way I’ve got you, and they know it.”
For an instant I thought I saw daylight. “Well, if they sealed the deal”—I gave him the Danny smirk— “I guess you’re screwed, aren’t you? You haven’t got anybody. If they say I’m real…”
Griffin’s thumb rubbed at his nicotine stains. “You’re still not listening. You asked what I wanted, I told you. Now, we can deal on this or…” He shifted his bulk forward and pulled out a cell phone. He punched something in, put it flat on the table and turned the screen to me. There were three phone numbers. “The first one,” Griffin said, “is for a guy I know in the States, used to be with the FBI in Buffalo; now he’s with Homeland Security. The second is a friend in our RCMP. The third is a copper I talked to in Tucson. I told you before, but I guess you didn’t get it. You blew it with the eyes. One call from me about someone crossing the border under a false identity and possibly setting up a sleeper cell in southern Ontario, and they’ll be on you like a ton of bricks, no matter what the family says.” He gave me a long look. “Especially with that black hair and those cheekbones. I mean, they’re not supposed to profile…What’s your real family’s background?”
I was too stunned to even make a face.
“Just asking,” Griffin said. “Anyway, from there, well, the DNA test will be the only part that doesn’t hurt. You know about waterboarding? Just between you and me, they still do it, but you won’t die unless you have a weak heart. Your Tucson problem might be worse, if it’s murder. I hope you can prove you’re a juvenile. Otherwise, they have the death penalty there, don’t they?”
I started to shake. I snatched my hands off the table. “This is crazy,” I said. “You’re crazy. You won’t believe me, no matter what.”
“Eyes don’t lie,” said Griffin. I wanted to jam my fingers in his. “Time to deal, no?” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t give in. Griffin spun the phone back around. “Last chance.” I was shaking so hard, I thought I’d fly apart. “Let’s see…” Griffin’s thumb hovered over the touch pad. “Maybe start with Jimmy at the Mounties. Then he can make the other calls. More official that way.”
His thumb started down. “Wait,” I blurted.
His thumb stopped. Griffin looked up from under his eyebrows. I went with the only thing I had left. “Look. You won’t believe me, okay. That’s your hangup. If you’re gonna persecute me like this, I give up. I’ll just go. I’ll clear out, run off again. That what you want?” I tried to zip my backpack. I couldn’t make my fingers work. I clutched the fabric instead. “That what you want? It’ll rip Shan apart again too, but what do you care about that?”
The last part got him. Maybe. At least, he squinted out the window for a moment before answering. He huffed a breath out his nose, then looked back at me with those cement eyes. “You’re not going anywhere now. I gave you a chance to run, and you didn’t. Now I’m running you.”
“Then what do you really want?”
“I told you. You’re going to help me with an investigation.”
TWENTY-NINE
I got back to Shan’s just before supper. I wasn’t hungry. The microwave was humming. The TV was blaring in the living room. She was on the phone. She put her hand over it. “I thought you were going to be late.”
“Didn’t take as long as I thought.”
She turned back to the phone and said something about turkey. I dumped my backpack, watching her. I needed to be alone and I couldn’t stand to be. Did she know or didn’t she? I needed a sign from her. Shan clicked off the phone. “Gram and Grampy won’t be here for Thanksgiving. They’ll have already left for Florida.” She sounded a little pissed. Then she sighed. “I better get a turkey tomorrow while the sale’s on.”
“Thanksgiving?” I said, just to say something. “We’re not even near Halloween yet.”
She gave me a look and walked to the fridge. “You wanna try that again, hon?”
“Huh?”
“Thanksgiving comes before Halloween—unless you’ve turned American.” Her voice was sharp. Was she still pissed from the phone call—or was she was pissed at my mistake? She yanked open the fridge, took out a bottle of ranch dressing and a bag of baby carrots and put them on the counter, not looking at me. She started dumping carrots into a bowl. I couldn’t read her. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but I knew I had to play along. “What…? But…riiight! Oh, God…” I shook my head and slumped into one of the kitchen chairs. “Sorry. It wasn’t like Thanksgiving was a big day for me the last three years, you know?”
“Aw, hon…it’s okay. Sorry, I know. I forgot. I was just…never mind. Anyway, Gram and Grampy will be down to visit before they head south, and if you get confused about stuff like that, don’t be embarrassed to just check the calendar.” She waved to where it hung, above the phone cradle. “Any time.”
I nodded. It sounded as if I was off the hook. “Anyway,” she was saying, “Thanksgiving first, then Halloween. Welcome back to Canada. Got it?”
“Halloween?” said Brooklynne, bouncing into the kitchen. “When?”
“Not for a long time yet,” Shan said, stooping to scoop her up. “Then comes Danny’s birthday.”
“Danny’s birthday? When?”
“November tenth,” I said, probably too fast. “I’ll be sixteen. But Halloween first. What do you want to be?”
“Ooooooh yes,” said Shan, jiggling Brooklynne. “Who do you want to be? Pretending to be somebody is so much fun, isn’t it?”
“I want to be Ariel,” said Brooklynne. “I’m hungry.”
“Well, grab some of those carrots, missy.” Shan leaned her toward the bowl and Brooklynne grabbed some. Shan started into the living room with her. “Supper won’t be long. Soon as Daddy’s home.”
She looked at me as she stepped through the doorway. Did she jerk her head at the calendar or was Brooklynne just tugging at her? I stepped over to the counter. Canadian Thanksgiving was on Columbus Day, October 12. American Thanksgiving was November 26. Danny’s birthday was Monday, November 9.
THIRTY
Harley once told me the scariest thing that had ever happene
d to him was when he and Darla were doing Bill and Bonnie Blessing. “It was a one-stop,” Harley had said, “in and out. Soul’s Light Missionary Church in Milwaukee, way up there in the boonies. I’ll never forget it.”
He and I were playing a round at a mini-putt course in Wichita, waiting for a guy with a cooler full of counterfeit twenties, when he told me about it. It was boiling hot and they had umbrellas up at the start of each hole. I could feel the sun grilling the back of my neck every time I bent over my ball. We were playing for Cokes. Harley always had to play for something. He putted past a Tweety Bird with spinning legs, then went on talking as he waited for me. “It was a bad vibe, you know? The pastor was this no-neck ten-by-ten who’d played defensive tackle or something for the Packers. Got Christian Soldier with a barbed wire halo tattooed on his arm. Biceps the size of your head.” He popped a gum bubble as I putted. “Sorry. Whoo, baby. How’d you end up over there?”
We walked down to the balls. “You want gum?” he asked as I lined up my shot. I shook my head, then missed. He sank his putt. We walked to the next umbrella. Harley went on with the story. There was no rush; we were the only people on the course, except for a maintenance guy pretending to rake gravel. “So, I start the usual little tussle with him about what the split’s gonna be on the take from the service. Usually you lie to each other about expenses, pretend to pray on it, then cut the deal. I’m away here.”
“Away” was a golf word Harley liked to use, as if he was a real golfer. It meant he got to go first. He rapped his ball off the side of a miniature windmill, missing the tunnel. He swore. Yess, I thought. I put my ball down on the rubber mat. “Be careful,” Harley said. “It’s trickier than it looks.”
I believed him and missed the tunnel. “See?” he said, before going on. “But that day I was way over the top, burned out. We’d been busy on the road a solid month. I’d been doing pills and a little blow to keep up, vodka to smooth things down. Bad combo, but those services were tough. Took a lot out of you, all that whoop-de-do—you remember. Anyway, Darla had warned me it was showing, and sure enough, the guy’s giving me the hairy eyeball, not budging on the percentages. He knows, you know, and if God tells him to, he can snap me like a matchstick. And I know he knows, so in the middle of this, I just snap myself. I think, Screw it, we’re outta here, and I’m flying so high I’m about to tell Mister Defensive End where he can stick his church”—Harley putted through the wind-mill—“when there’s a knock on the door. Secretary tells him Mrs. Hummel’s here for the laying on of hands.”
He stopped for my shot. I putted through the windmill. My ball stopped maybe an inch before the hole.
“Nice,” Harley said. He moved his own ball away from the backstop, closer to the hole. “Just so’s I can swing the club—or do you want to call this hole a draw?”
“Putt,” I said. He missed. I tapped in. He missed again before he holed the putt. I made sure to watch him mark the score. We walked to the next umbrella. “I can’t remember who’s away,” he said.
“I am,” I said. “But what happened?” I didn’t want to leave the shade yet.
“Right. So as Man Mountain Wisconsin starts to get up, I hear myself say, ‘Brother, let me.’ To this day I have zero idea what I thought I was going to do— strangle Mrs. Hummel, whoever she was, cop a feel, piss on the desk. I don’t know. But I zip out of the room and bammo, Mrs. Hummel is right in front of me, in a wheelchair. She makes the Green Bay Packer look like a little kid. She’s three-fifty if she’s an ounce. Cans like watermelons sagging to her knees. Her husband is the seventh dwarf in a feed cap, can barely push the chair. They tell me she’s got some kind of blockage, growth, I don’t know, in her throat and that the doctors say she has to have an operation. She can’t eat anymore.
“I’m still flying, so I say, ‘Maybe that’s a blessing in disguise, but I am for sure, so let us pray for fatter times instead of lean. Get your cap off there, Sneezy.’ Then I muscle in behind the chair and grab her neck. It’s like a bag of warm chicken fat—my fingers just sink on in. Like to gag me out right there, you know? But I bow my head and spread my legs to brace myself, as if it’s third and one on the forty with a minute left to play, and I bellow out, ‘O LORD…’ and I open my mouth for the usual, but what’s running through my head is this nonsense speed rap, block that kick Green Bay Crapper before I wring this damn neck, Lord, and all the time I’m squeezing the chicken fat and what comes out is, ‘Unpack the block in the neck dam, Lord, in this green pray.’ Then I let go and raise my hands and do my standard ‘His blessings on you through me’—you remember.
“And that’s when I got scared. I looked over at the Green Bay Crapper, and from the look on his face, I figured he was going to tear me apart—except he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at Big Mama in the wheelchair. And that’s when I got really scared, because when I looked, she was turning purple and shaking, and she started to cough and then she spewed out this greenblack slop. Stank like a skunk in a burning tire. Then she’s gasping, ‘I can…I can…I’m saved…’
“I’ve never been so freaked in my life. It was so perfect, I flashed for a second that they’d set me up, but they hadn’t.” Harley shook his head at the memory of it, staring off past the battered Wonderland castle that was the eighteenth hole. “Those cheeseheads flipped out, crying, ‘Praise the Lord,’ hugging me, and all I could do was stare at my hands. I hadn’t even felt anything.”
“So it was like a miracle?” I said.
“I dunno what the hell it was. There are no miracles. I mean, if there’s a God, he’s gonna deal you your crappy life and answer my bullshit fake prayer? You better hope there’s not a God like that.”
“But something good came out of it.” I put my ball on the mat. This hole had a drawbridge opening and closing.
“Anything good ever come outta your life? I’ll tell you what good came out of it,” Harley said, then: “You sure you got that lined up right?” I tried to ignore him. I was pissed with him talking about my life. “The good was, the Green Bay Crapper puts his arm around my shoulders and whispers, ‘Fifty-fifty.’ But you know what? I said, ‘Forget it, we gotta go.’ Darla was pissed. She said we could have raked it in after that, and she was right too. But I was so spooked I couldn’t do it.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t know what was going on,” said Harley. “Everything was out of control.” I putted. The drawbridge opened. My ball went in the water. “Let me show you how it’s done,” Harley said.
I hadn’t known what he was talking about then. Now I did. In the middle of the night I got up and peered out the bedroom window, between the frame and the shade. A silver Camry was parked outside. Inside it, a red speck flared once and faded. It felt like a searchlight, pointed at me.
THIRTY-ONE
The deal was, if I could find out where Danny’s body was, Griffin would let me run. Pumping Ty was my Get Out of Jail Free card.
I met Griffin the next night in the lot across the park from the library. I’d told Shan I was going to the library and then to Gillian’s. The Camry was parked in the shadow of a maple that was starting to turn color. I got in the back. “Keep your hood up and your head down till I tell you,” Griffin said. He started the car.
I don’t know what route he drove. I hunched low and watched light and shadow glide across the upholstery. It stank of dead cigarettes, like the couch at one of my foster homes. The vibration of the car synced with the fear humming in my gut. There were no streetlights now, just darkness, and the car kept rolling. “I think I might be sick back here,” I told him.
“We’ll be there soon,” was all I got back. The car slowed. I felt it bump off the road. A little farther, then we stopped. “Wait,” Griffin said. He got out of the car. I waited. A moment later he opened my door. “Out and inside.”
We were out of town, parked behind some kind of barn or shed. A chilly breeze rustled the weeds—maybe we were close to the lake. The fresh air felt good. Griffin
swung the barn door, and we went inside.
The place was dim and full of smells and junk: lumber, fence wire, tires, windows, an old Volkswagen. The dirt on the floor looked oily. Griffin pulled a string and light leaked from a bare bulb in the rafters. “Where are we?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He led me behind a pile of boards. He had a plastic grocery bag. He took out white surgical tape and the box that held a battery-pack transmitter and the wire. “Pull up your shirt.” The chill grabbed at me. Griffin put on latex gloves. He was fast and efficient. He taped the transmitter to the small of my back. “Drop your pants.” He ran the wire under my crotch and up the center of my chest. The tape nagged at me every time I moved, glowing even whiter than my skin in the shadows.
“What do I say?”
He shrugged and tore off another piece of tape from the roll. “You’re the crap expert.”
“What if I don’t get him?”
“First, you may not get him tonight—it might take a little time. Second, I got nothing to do for the rest of my life. I’ll come after you even if you run, and so will Homeland, the Mounties, FBI, you name it. You’ll be looking over your shoulder until one of us gets you. And I guarantee you’ll wish it’s me. Lift your chin higher.”
“What if I can’t?”
“Don’t kid me. Bullshit is right up your alley.” He adjusted the wire and pressed the tape to my chest.
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Sometimes I wish I was. But I’m not. Okay, we’re done.” I pulled my jeans up and my shirt down. Griffin reached back into the plastic bag and handed me what looked like a joint in plastic wrap. “Put it in your pocket. Give it to him. It’ll mellow him out and put you in good. He’ll start talking anyway.”
We left the barn and drove again, me hunched in the back. I did what he told me. I couldn’t see any other way. When he finally let me sit up, I had to slouch to keep the transmitter from digging into my back. Griffin lit a cigarette and cracked his window. A rush of road noise and cool air found me. “I’m not going to ask who you are,” he said over it.
