Blues for Zoey (24 page)

She took her hands away
. “I'm sorry,” she gargled at me. “I'm sorry!”

Her nose was smashed, and her upper lip was split so wide it looked like she had two of them. Her dad must have hit her bad, p
robably with the butt of the gun. There was so
much blood she looked like something in a horror m
ovie—
and I was just staring at her
. I wasn't passing out.

I was cu
r
ed!

I was so shocked by my lack of fainting, I didn't say
or do anything. I just knelt on the blacktop like an idiot, watching dumbly as Zoey's mangled face sped away forever.

Then I discovered my miracle cure was only tempora
ry. Lying a short distance off was one of Zoey's teeth. It stood out amid the wreckage of my phone, still clinging to a pink shred of her gums. A creeping whorl of melted ice c
ream came to mingle with the red.

Seeing that bloody scrap of her mouth b
rought on a familiar feeling. The roaring in my ears
returned and the world went as black as the rivers of soot raging across the sky.

75

Cinnamon and Mold

When the world came back into focus, I was laid out on a slab of vinyl. The lights were dim, every wall was the color of moldy bread, and all I could smell was cinnamon. Tracey's face grinned down at me like a billboard.

“Relax,” she cooed. “You're going to be fine.”

That was hard for me to believe, since her only treatment involv
ed waving the same old metallic cylinder over my face. The smoke puffing out of it
reeked
of cinnamon.

“Are you okay?” Mom
was standing on the opposite side of the massage table. “What happened just now?”

“I screwed up,” I told her.

“Poor Nomi. I think she'
s traumatized. She found you lying in a pool of blood! And she found this.” Mom held up Z
oey's tooth. It looked like a chip of bone, like something that had fallen off the rattler. When I saw it, I felt a bit woozy.

I shut my ey
es. “The tooth's not mine. I just fainted when I saw it
.”

“Thank god. As if we can afford
emergency dental surgery. You want me to throw it out?”

“No, I wanna keep it.”

Mom squinted at me. “Since when do you collect people's teeth?”

“I just want it, that's all.” I reached over and clumsily grabbed it from her.

“I think you'd better tell me what happened.”

So I did. I told Mom everything.

The first thing
she did was call the police. Two officers fr
om the West Olsten PD showed up with a
lot of questions. They only took me seriously after I told them
to call Detective Singh. They said it wouldn'
t be long before they found the dented red conv
ertible. I hoped they were right, but this time, I had a feeling Zoey was gone for good.

While they asked their questions, the sky grew darker and darker. By the time the cops let us head home, it was pouring with rain.
Off in the distance, there were flashes of lightning. We drove in silence nearly the whole way, fat drops of rain splattering the windscreen.
The whole time I kept passing the tooth back and forth from hand to hand. I couldn't stop touching it.

Eventually, Mom said, “You sa
ved all that money just for me?”

I told her how badly I'd let my grades slip. How I had basically given up on a lot of things since her attacks started.
“I don't want anything to happen to you.”

“I know,” she said, “but one day
it will, no matter what we do. That'
s why it's so important you and
Nomi get a good start in life. It's
more important than anything that happens to me.”

“That
's not true.”

“Have you ever thought that maybe I don't want to be cured?”

“O
f course you do,” Nomi said from the back. “You'll get better.”

I nodded. “Nomi
's right. You shouldn't say stuff like that.”

Mom didn't say
anything for a while. “You two have to understand
something. Sometimes life gives you something, and, even
though it's not the most pleasant thing in the
world, it's yours. Of course I want the
attacks to stop, but if they don't, I'll
deal with it. We'll all deal with it.
And there's something else you need to understand. When
I'm asleep for so long, I sometimes have d
reams. Dreams like nothing else. They're so vivid,
so real
. They're the only place I still see your father.”

What could I say
to that? I remembered Mom's face
when we rode with her in the back of the
ambulance, that day I first saw Zoey. All that orange padding, all mashed around her head like a
vise, pressing her cheeks into doughy lumps. In spite of it all, I remember h
ow nothing could stop her from smiling.

“But still,” she said, “you're right. Let's see if we can plan a trip
to New York. The least I can
do is see what this doctor has to say. Even if we ca
n't afford it, I owe you that much.” She reached over and squeez
ed my hand in hers, pressing Zoey's tooth deep into my palm.

76

Echoes

D
ave Mizra never came back for his CD. One morning, the windows at Fire & Ice wer
e pasted over with newsprint. Dave Mizra was gone. I do
n't know if he went back to his
wife, or if he opened another shop somewhere else. I never saw him again.

The
n, in the middle of August, three cop cars pulled up just below our
apartment. The lights flashed but there was no si
ren. My first thought was that they had found them,
Zoey and her father. I figured they had r
ecovered my money. But when I went do
wn to the street, I saw that the Brothers were locked in the back of one of the
cruisers. They looked pale and tired, but eve
ry bit as stone-faced as ever.

They brought Mr. Rodolfo out in handcuffs. He cursed and kicked and hollered at them, but the moment he saw me, it all stopped.

“What're you looking at?”

I shook my head. “What's going on?”

Mr. Rodolfo looked down at the pavement. “I was just trying to get by. What's so wrong with that?”

I figured Zoey had been right. Mr. Rodolfo really had been running illegal gambling games, operating some sort of money-laundering scheme. But no, that was yet another thing I was wrong about.

It turned out the Brothers had been
dumping dry-cleaning chemicals into the lake rather than paying to dispose of them in the proper way. Some people living nearby had gotten sick, and there was
a good chance all three of them would se
rve time in jail.

By the end of summer, it seemed like the only ones left were A-Man and
B-Man. They still wandered the streets, rolling their die and muttering almost-comprehensible babble about machines and pinions, wheels and echoes.

B-M
an found himself a new dog. It was a
different breed of mutt, less threatening, with a smaller head and a slack mouth that always hung open in a goofy grin. Nevertheless, he gave it the
same name. Razor. When I asked him why,
he told me to look into the dog's eyes.

“See what I mean?”

I didn't.

“The eyes. They're the same.”

“As … ?”

“Razor's!” He
crouched down and yanked the dog's
head to put himself face-to-face with the mutt. “Can't you see it? He's the old girl's
ghost. He's her echo.” He closed his
eyes, rubbing the dog's skull. “You can hear it. Can't you?”

Maybe I could, but the echo I hea
rd was a different one.

I ripped the Shain Cope CD onto our
computer and put it on my phone, too. I listen to it sometimes, just staring at Zoey's tooth, which sits on the shelf above my desk, right where A-M
an's die used to be. Every week,
it turns a little more gray.

“Colt's-
Tooth Blues” is still my favorite song.
Every time I hear it, I notice things in the lyrics. My brain picks out little coincidences behind the words. I know it's impossible, but sometimes it seems like Shain Cope was trying to send me a message. A warning.
Sometimes, I can't help thinking that he wrote his most famous song especially for me.

77

A Person
of Interest

Just after school started
again, a package came in the mail. It was a
brown paper envelope, padded with stuffing and mummified in
clear packing tape. There was no return addr
ess, but the sloppy collage of stamps were from
England. When I tore it open, it was full of money. Soft, wrinkly British pounds. A lot of them.

“It's from her,” Mom said when she saw it, and I knew she was right.

Inside was £810, a lot
of money, but it fell far short of
what I had lost. There was no note, nothing to identify
the sender. The only other thing in the envelope was a clipping from another paper in the
Chronicler
chain:
The Over-the-Rhine Chronicler
. I thought “Over-the-Rhine” sounded like
it might be somewhere in Europe, but when I looked it up, it turned out to be in Cincinnati. The headline was
Grifter Comes to a Violent
End
, and it said:

* * *

Philip Alan Konig, 48, a career criminal with a history of theft and fraud, was found dead last night in a rented apartment on West Liber
ty. Konig had been shot twice in the chest. The weapon, possibly belonging to Konig himself, was recovered at the scene.
Police believe the fraudster may have been murdered by one of his former victims or by someone he was actively engaged in swindling. They are currently seeking the whe
reabouts of his daughter, Zoey Konig, 19, as a person of interest.

* * *

I don't know why, but something about the package made me want to star
t again, to do things in a completely new way. Not that I ever had a system of doing anything at all. I hadn't. I didn't. That was
my whole problem. I could have sat ar
ound, watching the mail slot, hoping and praying for another bundle of money to come tumbling thr
ough, but somehow that seemed wrong. I had to do something.

So I got on the bus.

Mr. Dearborn lived in the suburbs. It took an hour to get out there. He answered the door in cargo shorts and a faded apron that said,
Sometimes I'
m off in my own little world, but that's okay
, they know me there.
His beard was thicker than I remembered.

He was a short guy
, a couple inches shorter than me, and his face was creased all over, but not from age—more from smiling so much.
He was in pretty good shape, too, apart
from a pot belly. He looked like a jolly, domesticated elf, but one who worked out.

“Nice apron,” I said.

“Kaz? What are you doing here?”

He looked worried. I wondered if other students had visited, too, come to tell him how they'd been traumatized by the alt-porn he had shown us in health class.

“I need your help,” I told him.

Alana had told me Dearborn wasn't teaching anymore. He was doing private tutoring instead, which was exactly what I needed.

“I'm not sure what I can do for you.”

“I heard you were tutoring.”

He laughed. “At an ESL school in a shopping mall. I'd say
your command of the language is a bit more advanced.”

“Oh, I heard that … ” I didn't know what to say.

“Did you come all the way from—”

“Evandale. Yeah.”

“My wife and
I were just about to eat. Why don'
t you join us.” He rubbed his paunch. “As you can see, I have this tendency of making too much.”

Mr.
Dearborn's house looked the way I thought Zoey's apartment should have looked. Every wall was lined with bookshelv
es. There were novels, dictionaries, photography books, books about art, books about ar
chitecture, old magazines, even comic books and manga. We follo
wed the smell of bacon into the kitchen.

Mr. Dearborn's wife was taller than
him, with insanely long limbs, at least in my opinion. T
wo black pugs were curled around the legs of her chair. They started yapping at me.

“Who's this?”

I thought Dearborn's wife might be wary of me, but if she was, she hid it well.

“This is Kaz,” Dearborn told he
r. “A former student. He's gonna join us for brunch. Kaz, this is Mrs. Dearborn.”

“Call me Valerie.” She reached out from what seemed like miles away and shook my hand.

“Tha
t's Sal and Dean on the floor.
Would'ja please shut up, guys?” He bent to
pat them, and the dogs licked his forearm like he was sweating
gravy.

As we ate, I explained why I was
there. With my money troubles, my only chance for college was to bring up my grades and shoot for a scholarship.
I couldn't do that alone. Of course, when I told D
earborn how far my grades had slipped, he wasn't optimistic.

“Sounds like an uphill battle,” he said.

“My mom really wants
me to get into a decent school, and I want to
make her proud.” It was true.
I was being honest, for once.

“You think you can
do all this in one year?” Mrs. Dearborn asked me.

Mr.
Dearborn shook his head. “Val's right. One
year's not a lot of time.”

“I can do it.”

“Maybe. But why me? Last I checked, I hadn't r
eally made it as a teacher.”

“Are you kidding? You're the best one I ever had. Trust me, I learned
loads
from you.”

“I'll bet you did!”

Dearborn grinned wickedly, first at me, then at his wife. That set us off. All three of us lost it, cracking up a
round the tiny breakfast table. Even Sal and Dean
joined in, hopping and yapping around my feet. We just couldn't stop.