Guys, Lies & Alibis

by Kimberly Reid

  I didn’t really have a plan for questioning Eddie when I walked in, so I start filling in a Lotto sheet while I think of what to say.

  “Hey, you trying to get me in trouble or what?”

  “Huh?” Does Eddie read minds or something?

  “You’re still in high school, probably too young to play Lotto. In fact, don’t you go to Langdon Prep Academy?”

  “You busted me,” I say, crumpling the form into a ball and thinking I may not have to come up with questions after all. Eddie just opened the door himself. “It’s School.”

  “What?”

  “You said Academy. It’s Langdon Preparatory School.”

  “Well, whatever you call it, y’all stunk up the place last night.”

  “You follow high school sports?”

  “I did last night, with it being the playoffs and everything.”

  “Did you play in high school? College? Maybe you play in a city league now.” It might explain why he’s Brent’s customer. He might take his city league game very seriously.

  “Nah, it’s strictly a spectator sport for me. In a manner of speaking. I thought I’d run into you, but the crowd was huge.”

  “You were there?”

  “Oh yeah. I told you I’m into it. The playoffs, anyway.”

  “What did you think of the game?”

  “I think your team lost. Baaad,” he says like it’s the funniest thing ever.

  “You don’t have to be so happy about it.”

  “Sorry. I guess you’re still licking your wounds,” Eddie says, not sounding at all sorry. “So what do you need this morning? Milk, I bet. Only reason people come in this early on Saturday morning is for milk. Or eggs. For breakfast.”

  “No eggs, no milk. I gotta go.”

  “You didn’t buy anything,” Eddie says as he pulls the bag out of the trashcan, closing it with a tight knot.

  “No, but I got what I needed.”

  “Whatever. Hey, if you talk to MJ, don’t mention the vacation. I want it to be a surprise.”

  Yeah, I plan to talk to her real soon and found out how she fits into all this, but not until I have a look at what’s in that trash bag. Instead of going home, I go to the side of the building and peek around the corner to watch Eddie throw the bag into the dumpster. I’m not looking forward to dumpster-diving, but a girl gotta do what she gotta do to save her man from whatever it is Marco’s up to. Fortunately, I find the bag on the top of the trash so I don’t have to dig very deep. Using a couple of plastic newspaper bags I found in the dumpster as gloves, I open it carefully since there’s a needle in there somewhere—apparently Eddie doesn’t know about the proper disposal of biohazardous waste. I empty the contents of the bag on the ground and find the syringe and a little glass bottle. Wait—Brent sells insulin? What kind of high can you get from insulin?

  After I cleaned up the evidence of my snooping, I turn the corner of the building heading for home but run smack into Cisco.

  “Just the person I wanted to see,” he says.

  “Why are you always everywhere? I’m starting to get creeped out with you knowing my every move.”

  “It’s what we do. Just ask your mom.”

  Cisco bringing up Lana, and always knowing what I’m doing, makes me think about that car Lana noticed out front. Maybe it didn’t belong to a friend of Ada’s after all.

  “What kind of car are you driving these days, Cisco? Did you trade in the rental for something else?”

  “I don’t want to talk about my car. I want to talk about the list. Got anything for me?”

  “You got anything for me?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You said you have some intel on my father. If I do have information for you about the names on that list—not saying that I do, but if—then it seems like I’m the one with the leverage now and maybe you should share at least a little of that intel first. You know, in good faith.”

  “You’re a smart kid but you don’t quite understand negotiations. I don’t want your information as much as you want mine.”

  He’s right. I can’t imagine anyone wants any information more than I want to know who my father is. But I’m not going to get Marco into any trouble before I know exactly what trouble he’s in. If Cisco really is some kind of cop, no matter how chummy we’ve gotten lately, and if Marco has committed a crime, he’s not going to let off a criminal just because he happens to be my boyfriend.

  “It doesn’t matter because I don’t have any information, anyway,” I lie. I may not be great in negotiating, but I do know how to bluff. “It’s cold. I’m going home.”

  “He’s in town,” Cisco says.

  “Who?”

  “Your father—he’s in Denver.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I say, before turning toward Aurora Avenue and the something I now know for sure. Cisco just confirmed what I spent half the night suspecting. Lana’s not-a-date-but-a-meeting was with my father.

  Chapter 25

  By the time I get home, curiosity has gotten the better of me and I can’t wait for my mother to admit who she was really with last night. Or is still with this morning. When I open Lana’s bedroom door to wake her, I find her bed empty, not even slept in.

  Two things are very wrong with this picture. For one, there is no way any mother of mine got home, slept hard, woke up, showered, got dressed, and made her bed before seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. I check the clock on her nightstand—I was only gone twenty minutes, not long enough for her to do all of that and get out of the house, but I check her bathroom anyway. Shower: dry. Flat iron: cold. I run around the rest of the house looking for clues. Her purse and keys are gone. In my focus to visit Eddie as soon as the bodega opened, I didn’t pay attention to whether her car was parked out front, and now I see it’s gone, too. I go out on the porch and look up and down the street because she can’t always get the spot right in front of our house. There’s no sign of her old blue Hyundai.

  It’s the second thing about all this that worries me most. My mother never, ever spends the night anywhere but home unless it’s work related, and she always finds a way to let me know. I check my phone again since I have a bad habit of not keeping it charged, but it’s working just fine. I check voicemail on the landline and find no messages. What if she’s been right all this time and whatever she’s been trying to protect me from about my father was true?

  After a couple of hours of no word from Lana and me coming up with the worst possible scenarios, the doorbell rings. Lana would use her key, and no one should be visiting before nine on a Saturday morning, so it can’t be anything but bad news. I go to the door anyway, and don’t even bother to check the peephole first because I already know. I brace myself for what’s about to happen next, but when I open the door it isn’t Lana’s commanding officer.

  “Marco. What are you doing here so early? ”

  “I’m glad I am. You don’t look so hot,” he says, taking my arm and ushering me into the house.

  “Something’s going on. I’m not sure what, but it can’t be good.”

  Marco helps me to the sofa, then goes to the front window and peers through the blinds.

  “No, everything’s okay now.”

  “What ‘everything’ is okay? What did you expect to find out there?”

  “Huh? Oh . . . I just remember your mom was worried about some car in front of the house, so I was checking.”

  “Checking what? It isn’t like you know which car she was talking about. I didn’t describe it to you or anything. Marco, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing’s going on. Not anymore.”

  I get up and take a look out front myself. “Did someone follow you here? Is Brent still after you?”

  “Brent? That’s over and done with, in the past. All I care about is now. And us.”

  “So we’re us again?”

  “We always were. But now I don’t have to be looking over my shoulder and worrying about you.”


  “What changed since yesterday? Did you pay off your debt?”

  “Something like that. But forget Brent and debts. Let’s have fun today.”

  I give him a good, long look because I’m beginning to think I don’t know Marco nearly as well as I thought. Drugs. Mysterious threats on our lives. And now he’s acting like he wasn’t all over the prep sports news section for completely blowing the game last night. I don’t want to kick him when he’s down—except he isn’t down, he’s the happiest I’ve seen him in weeks—but I have to ask.

  “Sure, but I want to talk for a second,” I say, taking his hand and leading him back to the sofa. “What about last night?”

  “Did something happen last night?” he says, looking tense all of a sudden.

  “The game. It was all over the news. They made it sound like a whole different Marco Ruiz showed up last night.” I pause a second before saying this next thing. “It’s okay, we can fix this. You seem pretty straight to me, at least right now, so it’s not like you need to go into rehab or something. You just need to—”

  “Rehab?” Marco says, jumping up from the sofa. “I told you, Chanti, I’m not getting high.”

  His phone chimes a text alert, and when he reads it, he looks like I felt when I went to answer the door a few minutes ago. Now I’m feeling that dread all over again because I remembered I don’t know what’s going on with Lana.

  “No way.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Coach Rickford. Milton Academy had to forfeit their Final Four win and now we’re in the state championship tonight.”

  “Wow, that was fast,” I say.

  “What do you mean? Chanti, what did you do?”

  “The right thing. I figured out Milton cheated last night, that all the starting players are using performance-enhancing drugs.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. So I left an anonymous tip on the coach’s phone late last night. I planned to just tell him, but it was after midnight and he didn’t pick up, so I lucked out and just left a message. I never thought it would move this fast, but I was hoping so.”

  “That means I have to play tonight,” Marco says, still looking a little stunned.

  “Yeah, I’m surprised, too. They probably didn’t have time to do any drug testing. The Milton players must have just rolled over the minute they were questioned.”

  “You should have just stayed out of it. I had taken care of everything, and now it’s all screwed up again.”

  Marco starts pacing, checking the window every other trip to that end of the living room, making me wonder if the symptoms of whatever drug he keeps denying he’s on include nervousness and paranoia.

  “What do you mean? It’s your chance for a do-over. We’ll just pump you full of liquids between now and the game. It works for flushing out a cold, so maybe it works for flushing out . . . you know, whatever you’ve been taking.”

  “Chanti, this is just so very bad.”

  “This is your chance to fix things—for yourself, Langdon Prep, for your team. These last few weeks weren’t you, Marco. Not the real you.”

  He looks at me like he’s just hearing me for the first time since he walked in the door.

  “You’re right. It hasn’t been me for a while.”

  “I don’t know what happened to get you here, but you just tripped up, that’s all. Now you can make it right.”

  “I can make it right. And there’s more than one way to make it right. I’ll find the money to pay off Brent. Then I’ll get some real help. Maybe your mom can help. I just need to come clean about everything, you know?”

  “Okay, sure, we can do all of that,” I agree, even though I don’t quite understand because he’s kinda rambling and still hasn’t told me exactly what is going on. But I do like the sound of him getting clean. I’m not sure how my mother can help with that, especially when I don’t even know where she is, but I’ll agree to anything that keeps him focused on getting back on track.

  “How much do you need to pay him off?”

  “Close to a thousand.”

  “I have that much in savings.”

  “No, Chanti, I need to do this on my own. I can’t take your money.”

  “Damn skippy you can’t. That’s part of my college money and Lana will have a fit if she finds out. You’ll get a job and pay me back. But right now, we need to get out from under Brent and the guy with the lisp.”

  “Who?”

  “I know that’s who he works for. Brent really isn’t as scary as all this—there has to be an actual bad guy behind him.”

  “I’d better get going if I have to play today.”

  “What about the money?”

  “We’ll deal with that tomorrow,” he says as he heads out my front door, adding, “Make sure you’re at the game tonight. I plan on winning.”

  That’s one problem down, and another to go.

  Or so I thought. When I check my phone, I find two texts came in while I was playing therapist to Marco. The first is from Lana: I’m okay. Work stuff came up. See you tonight.

  My relief turns quickly to anger that she’s still lying to me. Work stuff. Yeah, right. On the other hand, she had me all stressed out thinking she was hurt or worse, and it turns out the meeting with my father went so well, she didn’t come home last night. When I get past the gross factor, I realize it’s a good sign. She wouldn’t have stayed with him if it turned out he’s the next episode of 48 Hours.

  I didn’t check the next message until hours later because it was from Reginald. With Marco finally in a good place, I didn’t want to ruin the day with some cryptic messages from Reginald suggesting my boyfriend sucked in every way. But now that I’m on the bus to the Coliseum, I figure Reginald can’t mess up my night at this point, so I finally open his text.

  Ur BF wont tell u truth, & u like playing detective, so figure it out 4 urself

  I click on the attached video and what I assume is last night’s game. Reginald must have recorded it from the stands. The audio is just a bunch of crowd noise but the picture is clear enough that it only takes a few minutes of viewing for me to see what Reginald wants me to see, and why Marco didn’t want me at the game. In the short span I watched, he telegraphed every pass, he dribbled so high the ball was stolen from him twice, and even after all our talk about his jump shot, he was still releasing too early.

  It turns out Marco hasn’t been lying to me after all, he just hasn’t been telling the truth. He wasn’t high last night. Marco threw the game.

  Chapter 26

  As soon as I get off the bus in front of the Coliseum, I go looking for Marco. Tip-off isn’t for another ten minutes. I just need to figure out where the locker rooms are and get past any security they might have down there. If they won’t let me through, I’ve come up with a lie that I hope will convince them. I check the building map near the entrance, but the locker rooms aren’t the kind of thing they include.

  “Can I help you miss?”

  I look away from the map to find a security guard standing behind me.

  “I’m looking for the locker rooms.”

  “Why? You a groupie or something?” the guard says, apparently amused by himself.

  “No, I’m not a groupie. I’m—”

  “You look too young to be a reporter.”

  Now there’s a lie I hadn’t thought of, and it’s much better than the one I was going to use. I fish my Langdon Prep ID out of my bag.

  “Because I work for my school paper. See?” I say, showing him the badge. It doesn’t say reporter or anything on it, but he gives me directions.

  Except they must be the worst directions ever, because I know I heard them right and followed them to a T, but I’ve spent the last ten minutes lost in the bowels of the building and haven’t once come close to a locker room. By the time I retrace my steps back out to the main entrance, I can hear the starting buzzer.

  It’s too late to find Annette, Reginald, and the seat they were supposed to sav
e for me, so I find the closest empty seat on our side of the auditorium. I don’t really want to see Reg right now, anyway. It’s always awkward when people remind you they told you so. What isn’t awkward is Marco. He is killing it in the first half, playing his best game all year. The only problem is I’m not sure if he’s redeeming himself or digging the hole deeper. He might be making it too obvious that he threw the game last night.

  The placed is packed, but I scan the crowd anyway, looking for Brent. This time I came prepared with a pair of mini-binoculars I took from Lana’s office. Marco and the rest of the Knights have the crowd on their feet, making it more difficult to search. I manage to spot Annette and Reginald, but no Brent. I’m about to give up looking when I see a familiar face on the Glenn Hills High side of the arena. It’s the stranger from Tastee Treets, the one who saved Marco from a taillight ticket.

  I know Denver is a serious sports town, but it seems everyone is into this playoff. Eddie Ruiz who claims to have no interest in basketball. This guy who saved Marco from a parking fine. I thought he looked out of place at Treets, but he fits right in there compared to here in the arena. He’s probably the only guy in the place wearing a suit. I take a good look at him again, thinking I must be wrong, when the girl next to me nudges me with her elbow. When I look away from the binoculars, the girl from my chem class who had been standing next to me the whole game is no longer there. At some point, she was replaced by Brent.

  He leans down and yells in my ear, “I don’t know how you got Milton Academy disqualified, or what you said to make Marco play like this, but he’s a dead man.”

  “Dramatic much? We’re not afraid of you,” I holler over the crowd noise.