Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  I pulled his wheelchair upright and pushed it over to him. “Come on,” I said.

  Greer looked up at me. His eyes narrowed in suspicion, and for some reason this pissed me off. “You practically begged me to help you a few seconds ago,” I said. “So get up. You’ve got something to do for me.”

  Greer hesitated, his hand already outstretched toward his chair. “Help you how?”

  “Clear my name. By telling the cops what you did.”

  Greer sneered. “I don’t need to tell them shit,” he said.

  I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out my iPhone. “That’s true,” I said. I touched the Play button on the sole recording in the Voice Memos app. “Jesus, you scared the hell out of me!” Greer said from my iPhone.

  “Good,” my voice replied.

  Greer’s eyes had widened. I fast forwarded and touched Play again.

  “You were the one who sold to him. And when you got scared that I might figure that out, you planted those drugs in my desk. How’d you get a student to find them? You suggest that they look in there? Ask them to get you a piece of paper or something?”

  There was a pause, and then Greer’s voice, sounding tired, came out of my iPhone. “It was detention. I had a kid helping me clean desks —”

  I paused it. Greer looked like he had forgotten how to breathe. Then his eyes flicked over toward the baton lying on the floor more than ten feet away.

  “Not happening,” I said, stepping between him and the baton. He remained on the floor, watching me tap the screen on my phone. A few moments later, I finished e-mailing a copy of the recording to Briggs and then looked at Greer. “I’m thinking the cops might treat you a little better if you go ahead and confess.”

  Greer looked up at me, loathing and despair warring in his face. Then something closed in his eyes—or maybe opened; I couldn’t tell. Greer raised himself slowly onto one elbow. “What if,” he said, “I could tell you something? Something you’d want to know?”

  “Like what?” I said, putting my phone back into my pocket.

  He lowered his head slightly, as if ashamed to say what he had to say. “Like I know where your friend Fritz is,” he said.

  I froze, my hand in my pocket. Greer was looking up at me with a small, ingratiating smile.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  Greer’s smile fell from his face.

  I walked over to the baton and bent to pick it up, ignoring the sharp jab of pain in my side, and walked back toward Greer. He was looking at the baton, then at my face, then at the baton again. “Hey,” he began.

  “Don’t you ever,” I said, my voice shaking, “ever try to . . . use my friend like that, you fuck.” I grasped the baton hard enough to whiten my knuckles, hard enough to hurt, because I was afraid that if I didn’t, if I wasn’t fully paying attention to what I was doing, I might find myself beating Pelham Greer to a bloody pulp in his own apartment. Rage, a deep red vein of it, pulsed in my brain.

  “Hey, look,” Greer said. There was a wariness in his face now, a look like I’m dealing with a lunatic here. “I’m not trying to use anyone, okay? I’m just, I just know something. Something about Fritz.”

  I stared down at him as I continued to grip the baton. “Bullshit,” I said.

  “I’m not lying,” he said.

  “Prove it.”

  Greer touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. He started to say something and then swallowed the words.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to sound dismissive. Instead, my voice was a husky croak. Deliberately I relaxed my grip on the baton and switched it to my left hand so I could reach into my pocket for my phone. It was time to call Briggs.

  “Kevin Kelly,” Greer blurted out. “Kevin Kelly knows.”

  I looked down at Greer, incredulous, the phone forgotten in my hand. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Kelly knows. He knows where Fritz is.”

  I slowly replaced my phone in my pocket. “Kevin Kelly who used to go here?”

  Greer nodded. “That’s him.”

  The Nazis. That’s what Kevin Kelly had called me and Fritz when we were fourth formers and he was a year behind us. I stared down at Greer, who was looking both desperate and hopeful. “How do you know him?”

  A pause. I could practically hear the wheels spinning in Greer’s head. “He gets me the stuff,” he finally said.

  “Stuff? He’s your . . . supplier?”

  Greer nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. What the hell does that have to do with Fritz?”

  “Last fall, we met to—to handle a delivery,” Greer said, awkwardly. “This was after you came by my apartment. Kelly asked about you. He remembered you from when he was here. I told him you had asked about Fritz, and how we had talked about him disappearing. He laughed and said he knew where Fritz was. Saw him last spring. He was keeping that as insurance, he said. He was all pleased with himself about it. Like he got a bang out of knowing something other people didn’t.”

  He stopped, looking up at me like a student hoping that his excuse was being bought. For my part, I wanted to sit and catch my breath. Actually I wanted to lie down, to be inert for a while. Kevin Kelly knows where Fritz is kept going through my head. He knows where Fritz is. It was as if my sense of hope had been lost deep in a cave and had just lit a match.

  “Where is Kevin Kelly?” I asked. “Where does he live?”

  “Outside Charlottesville,” Greer said. “I always meet him at a house outside of town, anyway.”

  “You drive?”

  Greer nodded. “In my van. I’ve got hand controls. One thing Blackburne did for me, I’ll say that for them. Got me that van.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

  “Because you’re going to take me to him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Watching Greer drive was a bit like watching a pilot at the helm of a spaceship in a low-budget sci-fi flick. Chunky plastic boxes with red-and-green lights and dials surrounded the steering wheel, turning it into a cockpit area. The driver’s seat had been removed, allowing Greer in his wheelchair to enter the van in the back via a lift and then roll straight forward to the steering wheel. On either side of the wheel, mounted on small posts that rose from the floor, sprouted a trio of vertical handles, each wrapped in black foam, arranged in a triangle with the point facing forward. Now, as we pulled out of the parking lot by the gym, each of Greer’s hands grasped the foremost handle, the other two handles surrounding his wrists. He glanced once at me as we drove down the Hill toward the lions. “Freaks people out, first time they see me drive,” he said conversationally.

  “I like being able to see your hands,” I said. “Make sure you don’t have any other batons.”

  He turned his head to look at me. “Yeah, ’cause I’d be trying to bash you in the face with one while I’m driving.” He smirked and turned back to the road. “Thought you were supposed to be smart.”

  It had taken a bit of doing to convince Greer to take me to Kevin Kelly, but when I pointed out that the police would be very interested in his taped confession of selling drugs to students, he agreed to drive me. The trick was that I needed to tell Briggs, but I didn’t want to call and have a conversation Greer could overhear. So when Greer rolled into his van and was out of sight, I texted Briggs and told him that Greer was taking me to his supplier, who apparently knew something about Fritz. Briggs immediately texted back that I should just go ahead with what we had planned: make a citizen’s arrest on Greer so he and I could take Greer to a state police station. I replied by texting Briggs to follow us and shoved my phone into my pocket before climbing into Greer’s van. The phone had buzzed three times since then, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t want Greer to know Briggs would be following us—I’m not sure why, other than some half-assed idea of keeping an ace up my sleeve.

  We rolled past the lions, Greer applying the brakes with a squeeze of a handle to bring the van to a stop at the road. I purposely did not look t
o our right, where I knew Briggs was in his truck about a hundred yards away.

  Greer turned right onto the state road. “So where are we going?” I asked.

  “Like I said, a place outside Charlottesville.” He glanced at me. “It’s not far, don’t worry.”

  And then we were driving on, past empty fields and stands of trees, a distant yellow square indicating the lit window of a house. We were easily half a mile from the lions, but I saw no sign of Briggs’s truck. I wondered if he had driven off, fed up with me ignoring his calls and deviating from the plan. A knot of anxiety tightened in my chest. This is not a good idea, said a voice inside my head, but I shut it off as best I could. I thought about taking out my phone to text Briggs, but Greer kept glancing at me.

  “He’s not going to want to talk to you, you know,” Greer said.

  I shifted in my seat. “I’ll worry about that,” I said. “Just drive.”

  “Not going to be happy with me bringing you to his house, either.”

  “I think he’ll like me coming up there better than the state police.”

  Greer snorted. “So, what, you’ll just go up and ask him where Fritz is?”

  I had no reply, mostly because this was essentially my plan.

  Sometime in the past half hour the cloud cover had begun to fray and tatter, revealing the silver-white coin of the moon. Beyond the headlights, I could see snowy fields and hillsides glow with a milky translucence. Trees forked up from the ground, black claws tearing at the sky. Suddenly I remembered one February night in college, riding in a car out to a party at a country house, and as a joke the driver had turned off the headlights, plunging us into an eerie darkness. A girl in the backseat beside me had shrieked in my ear, and for a moment I had been terrified we would crash into a tree or another car. But there had also been something ghostly and beautiful about driving down the road with only the moon and stars to guide us, almost as if we were flying through the night sky. I felt an echo of that as Pelham Greer drove through the dark countryside toward Kevin Kelly and whatever he knew about Fritz. It felt strangely reassuring, but also ominous.

  Soon, however, a sodium glow appeared on the horizon ahead, the lights of I-64. Greer took the on-ramp and headed east through the foothills toward Charlottesville.

  I HAD BEEN GLANCING in the side mirrors to see if anyone was following us. I still hadn’t seen Briggs, but he’d been a cop—he was probably good at following people without their knowing it. Or maybe he went home, a voice nagged me in my head. Once I thought I’d seen a pair of headlights behind us before we had gotten on the highway, but no one had followed us onto the on-ramp, and then we were driving through light traffic. I broke down and pulled out my phone to read Briggs’s texts, but as I swiped the screen to unlock it, Greer said, “What the hell you doing?”

  “Checking my messages.”

  “You’re not calling anybody out here,” he said coldly. “This is you and me going up to his house, no one else. You call anyone and I stop the car right here and you don’t ever find out about your friend.”

  I raised a hand, palm out as if warding him off. “Fine, okay,” I said. “Jesus.” But I’d had enough of a chance to see that Briggs had in fact texted me back only once—Where r u—and then the other two times were phone calls, no voice mail messages. I put my phone in my pocket and stared out the window at the passing mile markers. I was alone.

  “How’d you hook up with Kelly?” I asked, more to keep my mind occupied than anything else.

  Greer screwed up his face, as if tasting something unpleasant. “Showed up out of the blue one weekend about two years ago. Looking for me. I thought he just wanted to feel better about himself, have a beer with the cripple. But it wasn’t like that at all. He had a ‘business proposition’ for me. That’s what he called it. We went outside to the Lawn, away from everybody, and he told me he’d heard I was having problems, headaches and all. He said he was in contact with some medical marijuana groups, could help me out. Gave me a bag right there. I figured out pretty quickly he wasn’t just being generous. Turned out he wanted me to sell for him, on campus. Said I could make a lot of money toward that operation I wanted.” Greer’s lip twitched, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Dude had me figured out to the ground. Don’t know how he learned all that about me.”

  I stirred in my seat. “He was like that in school,” I said. “Obnoxious little fucker.”

  “He’s more than that,” Greer said. “He’s smart. Acts like this is some sort of chess game, and he’s five moves ahead of everybody else. Pretty soon it wasn’t just pot but oxy, Vicodin, E, even ADD meds. I don’t think I’m the only guy he has out there selling, either. But he seemed to really want me to sell for him.”

  Or he wanted someone to sell at Blackburne, I thought. Kelly had been kicked out of Blackburne, I’d heard. If Kelly had been expelled, then I could see why selling drugs to Blackburne students would be particularly appealing to him.

  “So, you just . . . pick up drugs from him and then sell them?” I asked.

  Greer shrugged. “Basically.”

  “And you don’t care that you’re selling to teenagers?”

  He glanced at me and then turned his eyes back to the road—he seemed to be looking for an exit sign. “How naive are you, man? They don’t buy from me, they’ll buy from someone else. They all smoke, man. I give them really good product, and I get a cut toward my surgery.”

  “So Terence Jarrar was, what, just one of those things that happen?” I asked, unable to stop myself. Part of me marveled at my self-righteousness.

  Greer’s jaw tightened, and he opened his mouth as if to reply, but all he said was, “There she is.” I looked ahead and saw an exit sign for Highway 29, and then we were curving off to the right, off the interstate. Orange light hung in the air ahead, a night glow reflecting off the bellies of the overhanging clouds—Charlottesville proper. But Greer was heading south, away from town, and we passed a new subdivision on the left, its inhabitants slumbering peacefully as we drove past into the dark, the hills rising on either side of us cutting off the glow behind.

  After several minutes—we had passed a few isolated clusters of older homes and a pair of battered churches—Greer slowed and pulled over to the right shoulder. “Are we here?” I asked, surprised.

  “Not yet,” Greer said, leaving the engine idling. He turned to me. “Give me your phone,” he said.

  “What? No.”

  “You want me to take you to Kelly, I want that phone with the voice recording on it. That’s the deal.”

  I hesitated. A car approached from behind us, the headlights shining through the windows on the rear door and washing over Greer’s face so it looked like a skull. The car passed us, and Greer’s face returned to shadow. He held out his hand. “You want to see your friend again?” he said. “Give me the phone.”

  I took the phone out of my pocket, making sure to thumb the power button on the top so it turned off. At least the pass code would keep Greer from swiping open the phone. I handed it to him. He dropped it into a chest pocket on his shirt, nodded once, put the van in drive, and pulled back out onto the road.

  “How much farther?” I asked.

  “He’s off a side road up here somewhere,” Greer said, leaning forward slightly and squinting through the windshield. “Never come up here after dark.” He made a little sighing grunt of recognition and swung the van to the right, onto a narrow road that wound uphill. We passed a field on our left, a few tufts of grass poking up out of the snow, and then we were among trees, the road getting bumpy and the light from the van’s headlights wobbling in and out of the tree trunks.

  “How much farther?” I asked again.

  “Maybe a quarter of a mile.”

  “Stop the van.”

  Greer looked at me but then manipulated the hand controls, pulling the van over to the left and bringing it to a gentle stop, the engine idling.

  “Turn it off.”

  “Why?” />
  “I’m going for a walk. Turn it off.”

  Greer turned the key, leaving it in the ignition, and the idling engine cut off abruptly, the van seeming to settle down as if resting on its haunches.

  I held my hand out. “Give me the keys.”

  “The hell for?”

  “So you don’t leave me alone out here.”

  “I’m not—”

  I leaned forward and jerked the keys out of the ignition. Greer grabbed at my hand, and I leaned back away from him. “Fucking dick,” he sputtered, pawing at me. “Piece of shit.” Fending him off with my left arm, I awkwardly grabbed the door handle with my right hand, still holding the keys, and swung the door open. Then I gracelessly half slid, half fell out of the van to the ground. “Give me my keys, you asshole!” Greer screamed. Instead, I stood up and slammed the door shut. “Fuck you!” Greer shouted, his voice muffled by the door. I held up the keys so he could see them and gave them a jingle. My well-developed sense of guilt kicked in for a moment—you’re taunting a man in a wheelchair—but only for a moment. The guy had sold drugs to students and then tried to frame me for it, after all. So I pocketed the keys, turned my back on Greer, and began to head up the heavily rutted road.

  Leaving Pelham Greer in the van was actually smart, I told myself as I trudged up the dirt road in the dark. Driving up to Kelly’s front door didn’t seem like a good idea—if he was selling drugs, he might not appreciate a car pulling into his driveway in the middle of the night. I figured walking around a bit to scope out the area was a good idea.