Hit and Run

by Norah McClintock

  “Hey, Mikey,” said a voice behind me, so sudden that it startled me. Some of the photographs slipped from my hand. “What’re you up to?”

  I turned to look at Dan and held up the toothbrush I had found. Lew was standing behind him.

  “All my stuff is back at Riel’s place,” I said. “Lew said it would be okay if I looked around for a toothbrush.” I turned to Lew for confirmation.

  Dan shrugged. “No problem.” He stooped to get the photos I had dropped.

  “You don’t look too happy in those pictures, Dan,” I said.

  Lew reached over and plucked a couple of them from Dan’s hand.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The no-smile years. Felt like an idiot with all that hardware on your teeth, right, Dan? Looked like one, too.”

  “Hardware?” I looked blankly at him.

  “You know, braces,” Lew said. “You should have seen his teeth before he got them fixed. Most politicians are straighter than Dan’s teeth used to be. He had to get the money together first, though. His parents couldn’t pay for it. So there he was, twenty-one, with a mouth full of hardware. Didn’t smile for, what, two years, right?”

  Dan laughed. “Yeah, well, I’ve been making up for it ever since.”

  Maybe there was a window open somewhere, but I don’t think so. I think that chill came from someplace else, someplace inside.

  A mouthful of hardware. A mouthful of silvery braces. Four or five years ago, when Mom was still alive and Billy was still wild …

  I watched Dan tuck the pictures back into their envelope and slip them into the drawer, his movements casual, his face calm, even smiling a little, like it was all okay, like nothing bad had happened, nothing that involved him, anyway.

  “I’m going to clean up, then I’m going to go back to bed,” I said. Maybe it was just my imagination, but my voice sounded tight and high. Dan didn’t seem to notice, though. Neither did Lew. “I gotta get some sleep,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m really tired.”

  “Stress,” Dan said. “Stress can really do it to you, Mikey.”

  I ducked into the bathroom and washed up as well as I could. When I came out again, the hall was empty and I heard voices in the living room. I slipped back into the spare room and sat down on the bed in the dark. Then I waited.

  It didn’t take long. An hour at the most. I heard a lock turn down the hall. The front door, I thought. Then I heard footsteps in the hallway and someone—Dan—used the bathroom. Lew must have already been asleep on the couch. I waited another thirty minutes. Then another fifteen, just to make sure. The apartment was silent.

  I got up, opened the door to the spare room, and crept down the hall. There was a cordless phone in the kitchen. I grabbed the handset and crept back to Lew’s room with it. I’d decided to call Riel, when, stupid, stupid, stupid, I realized I didn’t know his phone number. Information. Dial information.

  I was about to punch 411 when the door to Lew’s bedroom opened. Dan looked at me, then at the phone in my hand.

  “Hey, Mike, what’re you up to?”

  “Just making a phone call.”

  “Yeah? Who are you calling?”

  “A woman from Children’s Aid. I was supposed to meet her after school today. For all I know, you guys could be in a lot of trouble because they’re supposed to be looking after me and they don’t know where I am.”

  He thought about this for a moment, then said, “You’re calling her at midnight? Don’t you think it could wait until morning?”

  I shrugged. “Better late than never, I guess.”

  Dan grinned and shook his head again. “Come on, Mike, you were going to call that cop, weren’t you?”

  I denied it.

  Dan was still smiling as he took the receiver from my hand.

  “You’re not being straight with me, Mike,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to tell that cop what I said about Billy, aren’t you?”

  I relaxed a little. “No,” I said. “No way, Dan.”

  “If you did that, all of a sudden the cops would want to know how I knew about that and what else I know. And I don’t want the cops sticking their noses into my business. You understand that, right, Mike?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get you in any trouble, anymore than I’d want to get Billy in trouble. That’s why I should call the Children’s Aid lady. They’re going to be looking for me. You know they are.”

  Dan seemed to consider this. I relaxed a little more, feeling almost confident that it was going to be okay, that I was going to be able to leave.

  “It’s late,” he said at last. “You get some sleep, and we’ll call first thing in the morning, okay?”

  I heard a shuffling sound in the hall. Lew? Sure enough, his sleepy head appeared behind Dan.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “The cops are probably looking for me,” I said. That seemed to wake Lew up—fast.

  “Relax,” Dan said. “It’s nothing. Mike’s just worried about Children’s Aid.”

  “I really think I should at least call and tell her where I am,” I said.

  Dan held tight to the phone. “How about I get you something to settle you down and help you sleep, Mike? You really need some rest. Lew, you stay here with Mike, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  He said it all so calmly, and his smile was so friendly, like all he cared about was me and my welfare. He squeezed by Lew, who filled the doorway. I heard him pad down the hall, going in the opposite direction from the front door. Now was my chance. All I had to do was get out and keep going. But how could I get past Lew?

  Marilyn.

  I whirled around, grabbed Marilyn from her little shelf above the dresser, and threw her up in the air.

  “Hey, Lew,” I said.

  But Lew was already diving into the room, scrabbling to catch her before she smashed onto the floor. I was diving the other way, for the door. I was trying to keep from tangling myself up with Lew, which is how I managed to crash into the CD tower. It toppled left. The container of mousse on it flew right. The little basket on top of it cascaded coins all over the floor. The noise brought Dan back on the double, but by then I had forgotten about running because by then I was staring open-mouthed at the coins that lay scattered all over the floor. At one coin in particular, one that glinted like the sun in the middle of all those dull copper pennies. I could almost feel it smooth and cool and heavy in my hand.

  Lew lay on the floor, clutching his precious Marilyn.

  “Jeez,” he said. “Jeez, Mikey.” He started to get up, cradling the figurine. That’s when he saw what I had seen and what Dan was looking at now. Dan’s eyes were hard and cold; his million-dollar smile had vanished.

  “I told you to get rid of that,” he said to Lew. The fact that he said it—said it right in front of me—told me just how much trouble I was in, and probably had been ever since he and Lew had picked me up that afternoon. Then I thought, that was no accident, no chance encounter. They had been looking for me.

  “Come on, Mike,” Dan said. He grabbed my arm. His hand bit into my flesh. When I struggled, he said, “Don’t make me hurt you, Mikey.”

  I don’t know if it was the rumble of his voice, the dead look in his eyes, or the pain I was already feeling from his hand clamped around my arm, but I quit fighting him. Better to stay alert and look for a chance, I thought, than to have him hurt me badly now.

  He dragged me down the hall, through the living room and the kitchen, to the back door that led downstairs. Lew followed closely behind. Between the two of them, I was taken down the narrow stairs and into the garage.

  Dan flicked on a light, and I saw two cars. One of them had big pieces of paper attached to it. It took me a moment to figure out that it was being prepped for a custom paint job. I peered around. There was paint and paint equipment everywhere. There were also a couple of carts of tools, and more tools hanging from hooks or sittin
g on shelves around the place. At the far end were the big double garage doors. To one side was a smaller person-sized door. It was locked.

  Padlocked.

  So were the garage doors.

  “Too bad you took off on the Children’s Aid,” Dan said. “I hear that happens to them a lot. Kids take off. Who knows where they end up? They just disappear.”

  I felt that chill again, only this time I knew it wasn’t a draft from a window. There weren’t any windows down here. There was just me and Dan and Lew.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  One thing I’ve learned is that mostly you should be glad about the everyday annoying boring things that make up maybe nine-tenths of life on a good day. Got a quiz coming up in math? Best friend acting like a jerk? Chicken burgers in the school cafeteria for the twelfth day in a row? Parents giving you a hard time over your so-so grades? Lost another library book so there goes this week’s allowance? Late for your after-school job again and for sure your boss is going to chew you out? Boring, boring, annoying, boring, and you’d do anything if someone would set you free, right?

  And then everything shifts.

  The whole landscape.

  When my mother died, I had to adjust my thinking about almost everything—from what kind of place I would live in and what would appear (or not appear) on the table at mealtime, to what was expected of me and who expected it.

  Now Billy was gone and I had to adjust again. Only this time I was completely alone. Now there was no one—absolutely no one—whose job it was to make sure that I was alive and breathing, forget fed and clothed and educated. All of a sudden, everything was up to me.

  And now this.

  There I was, standing in Dan’s garage, absorbing the look in Dan’s eyes and thinking, This is it. That moment you never imagined. And now that you’re in it, you can’t believe it. It doesn’t even come close to feeling real. But you know it is, because you’re there, you’re hearing it and feeling it and it’s playing out right in front of you. Oh, and you’ve got a part in it. You’re the guy whose name will show up in the credits at the end of the movie, way down the list somewhere. The bit part in the murder mystery. The disappeared guy. The dead guy. The corpse.

  “What are you talking about, Dan?” I said, hoping, praying, ready to trade everything I had that he didn’t mean what I thought he meant. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Yeah, Mike,” Dan said. “You are.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Lew, who was standing behind me. He had a tire iron in his hands.

  “Hey, come on, Dan. I’m not going to say anything,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Dan said. “You’re not going to say anything about what, Mike?”

  He was a whole different person when he wasn’t smiling. When his face was serious like that, when his eyes drilled into you like that, it wasn’t hard to imagine him breaking into Mr. Jhun’s place, robbing him, and beating him so hard he died. I bet there had been no smile that night. But there must have been later, the night my mother died. Mrs. Jhun had seen his shiny mouth. It sparkled like the sun, she had said, so he must have smiled at Mom. And then what?

  He had robbed Mr. Jhun’s place—he and Lew. The coin proved it. And Dan had also talked to Mom the night she died. There was no doubt in my mind about that. But what else had he done? And why?

  “I’m not going to say anything about anything,” I said. “I swear. I got problems of my own.”

  Man, did I ever.

  “Billy told you, didn’t he?” Dan said.

  “Billy didn’t tell me anything.”

  Then there it was, that megawatt smile. “It’s kinda funny in a way,” Dan said. “I mean, you look at it in the right light, it’s even what they call ironic.”

  He must have been using a whole other definition of irony than the one I knew from school.

  “We only knew about it because you told Billy.”

  “Me? What did I say?”

  “You told him about the keys to the place.”

  He meant the keys to Mr. Jhun’s restaurant. But what…?

  “I didn’t know about any keys,” I said. Not until Riel had told me about them. “How could I have told Billy about something I didn’t know about?”

  Dan shrugged. “Billy told us about it, and he said he found out from you. You think Nancy would ever tell him something like that?”

  I shook my head. “No way. I never—”

  I never said, Billy, Mom has keys to Mr. Jhun’s restaurant. But there was something else. Little scenes flashing in my head, like the trailer to a movie.

  Scene: Mom and Billy, in the kitchen. Mom worrying aloud to Billy about all that money being around Mr. Jhun’s place. Billy saying, “How much money are we talking about?”

  Cut to: A day, a couple days, maybe a week or two later. Billy at our house babysitting while Mom was out at the community college, taking a course.

  Billy: “Hey, Mikey, what do you think about that restaurant, you know, the Chinese one?”

  Mike: “Food’s good.”

  Billy: “What exactly does Nancy do there?”

  Mike: “Mostly she talks to Mrs. Jhun. Mr. Jhun, too. And she does paperwork for him.”

  Billy: “Yeah? She does it right there in the restaurant?”

  Mike: “No. She does it here.”

  Billy: “How come I’ve never seen her then?”

  Mike: “You’re not here all the time, Billy. And you know Mom, she puts everything away when she’s not working on it.”

  That was all I said. I never said another word. I never mentioned any keys. I didn’t even know about the keys. But, man, I knew Billy. He must have gone looking. Who knew what was going through his mind? Maybe he thought he’d find cash. Maybe he was looking for more information—“Just how much money are we talking about?” He must have found Mom’s box. And in the box, he must have found the keys.

  “The thing about Billy, though,” Dan said, “he was gutless. Lift some keys and get duplicates made? No problem. Hand the keys over to me and Lew? Again, no problem. But go with us to do the job? No way. One hundred percent the opposite, in fact, but I bet he didn’t tell you that, huh? Gave us the keys, then beat it over to Nancy’s place so that he’d have a watertight alibi for when it went down. Nancy could vouch for him. You could vouch for him.”

  It wasn’t a good sign that Dan was telling me this. It could only mean two things. One, that he thought I already knew most of it. And two …

  “Then he tried to get what he called his fair share. ‘One-third, one-third, one-third,’ he said. ‘I earned mine, Danny.’” Dan snorted. “Yeah, like you can earn a fair share of anything when you’re home in bed, letting the other guys take all the risk.”

  “Hey, Dan, I would never—”

  “It was supposed to be easy,” Dan said. “Wait until the old guy goes to bed. Slip in, grab the cash, slip out. Simple, right? Except the old man comes downstairs and sees us and makes a grab for this baseball bat he keeps behind the cash register. Can you beat that? The guy isn’t even from around here, and there he is with a baseball bat, like he grew up playing Little League. And he’s swinging it at my head like there’s a baseball sitting on top of my neck and he’s Barry Bonds. What was I supposed to do?”

  I wished he wasn’t telling me this.

  “And there’s Billy, sitting at home. Mr. Alibi. And he wants money for that? We gave him a finder’s fee, that’s all, right, Lew?”

  Lew. A couple of weeks ago, if you’d asked him, he would have described himself as an honorary uncle. Now he was tapping one end of a tire iron into the palm of his hand. I had to give him credit, though, he didn’t look too happy about it.

  “We gave him a couple hundred, and what did he do with it?” Dan said.

  The Xbox and all the games. The stuff that Mom made him take back.

  “Toys,” Dan said. “He spent the money on toys that Nancy wouldn’t let you keep. When she made him take them back, what did he do? Trashed them.”
>
  “I don’t care,” I said to Dan. A lie. Probably the biggest lie I had ever told. “I don’t care.”

  Dan peered at me. No megawatt smile. No jolly uncle grin. Just a hard look.

  “You don’t care?” he said. “If you don’t care so much, how come you got everything stirred up? How come you got that cop involved?”

  It was on my tongue to say: he isn’t a cop anymore. But I didn’t think that would make any difference to Dan.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said. “Billy’s dead. I got no one. I just don’t care anymore.” I looked back at Lew. Maybe he saw things differently.

  “Hey, Dan,” he said, his voice quiet.

  But Dan kept his focus hard on me.

  “You’re a good kid, Mike,” he said again. Every time he said it, things got worse for me. “The trouble is, I don’t know you. Not really. You’re just Billy’s nephew, and Billy screwed up good. He talked when he shouldn’t have. You want to blame someone for the situation you’re in now, blame Billy.” He gestured to Lew.

  “He’s just a kid,” Lew said, still clutching the tire iron, but looking less menacing, at least compared to Dan.

  “He’s just a kid who can land us some serious prison time,” Dan said. “What’s the matter with you? You heard Billy, blubbering about the damn car. What, you think he didn’t tell Mike?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” I said, “except that he had seen the car.”