One Shot Away (21 page)

“I'd hate for you to do hard time.” Santos taps his finger on the table. “I don't want your first time having sex in a shower to be in a prison.”

Jimmy holds his head. “If my coach knew I was here, he'd be—”

“What?” asks Santos. “What would he do?”

“You're talking about my father!” His voice echoes off the walls. “I can't do that. That's not me. Now please, can I leave?”

“You can go, but leaving would be a mistake. You need to think, to talk this through with me.”

There's a knock on the door. The woman with the ice cream hairdo peeks in. “I have it right here.” She waves a manila envelope.

“Jim, this is Detective Cruz.”

She smiles. “How are you holding up, honey?” She walks inside and puts her hand over Jimmy's. Her fingers are long, and her nails have designs painted on them. “You thinking about doing the right thing?”

“He's thinking about it,” says Santos.

“That's what you have to do.” A tiny gold pair of handcuffs dangles from her necklace. “Don't forget who you are. You don't want to mess that up. All the hard work. You already look like a college boy. You want to be going to Penn State, not the state pen.”

Jimmy's heard this expression as a joke, only she isn't kidding.

She opens the envelope. She hands Jimmy a photo of an old man, cut and beaten, one eye swollen shut. “He needed a few stitches. Forty at his hairline, nine on his cheek, to be precise. He was there that night at the development. You recognize him?”

Jimmy shakes his head.

“Take another look,” says Santos.

“He's going to say he saw you,” says Detective Cruz. “If you don't take Detective Santos's offer, he's going to be there first. Then, it's off the table.”

“Saw me?” asks Jimmy.

“The funny thing about that old man is, he has perfect vision.” She smiles. “So, if you were there, he saw you. And we all know you were there, right?”

Jimmy forces himself to look at the photo. Is the man really the guard?

“I'm handling his assault,” she says. “What do you think? Is it related to the case you're involved in?” She taps her fingernails on the table.

Jimmy steadies his breathing.

“I was taking his information and it was like a lightbulb going off over my head. He works at Horseman's Estates. The midnight shift. Isn't that a coincidence?”

Jimmy continues to study the photo. The old man's thick gray hair looks familiar. He is the guard.

“He's claiming his mugging was a robbery, but I think someone felt some heat and opened a can of whoop-ass on him.” She leans toward Jimmy. He smells her musky perfume. “Still don't recognize him?”

Stop, please stop.

“Someone tuned him up, and I'm going to answer who, what, where, and why,” she says.

Jimmy's phone vibrates. “I'm going to have to go,” he says, almost begging. “You said an hour.”

Santos checks his watch. “It hasn't been an hour.”

Detective Barnes comes in. His long-sleeved T-shirt bulges as if he had just knocked out a set on a bench press. “So, is my man Jimmy on board?”

“He's still playing hard ball, but I think he's starting to see the big picture.” Santos hands Barnes the photo.

Barnes glances at it and tosses it on the table. “Whoever did this is looking at ten years.”

He doesn't have to tell the detectives where he lives. They make the turns as if they drive the route every day. “So Jim, I wouldn't tell your father about our offer,” says Barnes. “Sleep on it.”

“He might not like it,” says Santos.

At his house, Jimmy pulls the rear door handle. It's locked and there's no button to open it. Santos turns around in the seat. “You should definitely think hard. This thing is a slow-moving train, but eventually it's gonna be right on your ass.”

His father's truck is in the driveway. His uncle Johnny's black Ford pickup with the license plate
FREBYRD
is parked across the street. The shed door is open.

“You know your mother can be arrested, if she knows what's going on,” says Barnes, “and I'm sure she does.”

“My mother?”

“It's called conspiracy.”

The door locks snap up.

Jimmy steps into the shed. Inside it's colder than the yard. A single 60-watt bulb hangs from the ceiling. Pops and his uncle are stacking something covered with layers of clear bubble wrap. “Hey,” he says.

They both turn suddenly, their faces frozen with surprise. “You shouldn't sneak up on us like that, partner,” says Pops.

Uncle Johnny laughs. “Talk about giving someone a heart attack.” He gives Jimmy a hug. “Check out the size of this kid,” he says. “What are they feeding you?” Despite everything, Jimmy smiles. “I hear you're ripping them up.”

“Sometimes,” says Jimmy.

Uncle Johnny's muscled arms are tattooed with skulls and dragons, sleeve style, to his wrists. He wears his hair in a mullet, short on the sides, long in the back. He's three years younger than Pops and has crystal-blue eyes. He always makes Jimmy nervous. Everything about him is cocky and big-headed, from his tan to his pre-faded designer jeans. “What are you guys doing?” asks Jimmy.

“Shooting the bull,” says Pops.

“What's in the bubble wrap?”

His father smiles. “How was practice?”

“I didn't go to practice.”

“You sick?”

“No.” He feels the heat of the hanging bulb on his scalp. He grabs a bubble-wrapped package.

“It's moldings,” says Pops, and takes it out of his hands.

“Where did you get it?”

“For your information, some of it was owed to me. The rest was bought and paid for by your uncle Johnny.”

“That's right,” says his uncle. “Yours truly.” He bows. They both laugh.

“What about that and that and that?” Jimmy's words are razor-sharp. He points to stacks of boxes and plastic tubs of 25-pound drywall screws. “You think everyone's stupid! The detectives, they know. They have a woman on the case now. She's calling me honey and showing me photos. They all know!”

“What!” His father raises his hands, palms facing Jimmy.

“I guess you know the night watchman from Horseman's Estates got beat up?” says Jimmy.

Pops looks like someone slapped him. “Who told you that?”

“The detectives brought me to the police station and showed me his photo.”

“When?”

“Today. They just dropped me off.”

“Son of a bitch!” Uncle Johnny cocks his jaw to one side, then the other. “You tell them anything?”

“No.”

“Didn't you hear what Frankie Scales said?” yells Pops.

“They came to the school,” says Jimmy. “They called me out in front of Roxanne. In front of everyone.”

“You didn't tell Roxanne, did you?” asks Pops.

“Pops, no, I didn't tell anyone.” Tears well up in his eyes. “Did you hurt that guard?”

“That had nothing to do with your father,” says his uncle.

“How did you know about it?” asks Jimmy.

“Knock off the interrogation and drop it,” says Pops, already annoyed. “You worry about winning your next match. We'll worry about everything else.”

Jimmy looks at his father's hands. His knuckles are clean and smooth. He could have worn gloves or used a baseball bat. Jimmy shivers. The O'Shea brothers are nothing more than thugs. Pops doesn't care enough about his family to stop stealing. “Pops, you know who did it, don't you?”

“No one knows nothing.”

“You're lying!”

“Jimmy, I don't know, and I don't want to know, and I have company right now.” Pops looks at his brother.

“And you don't need to know,” warns Uncle Johnny.

Jimmy studies his father's face. He doesn't have a tell. His face is like stone. “They want to cut a deal and give me immunity,” says Jimmy.

“Against me? Your own father? I don't think that's legal.”

Uncle Johnny laughs into his hand. “Stupid dicks.”

“Pops, I'd never do that, I'd never hurt you.”

“Good boy.” His father reaches to stroke his head.

Jimmy pulls back. From the open shed, he spots his mother sorting laundry in the pantry. She lifts a pair of jeans and cuts them in half with a chop, then folds them onto a pile of wash. Barnes's words swim in Jimmy's head: “It's called conspiracy.”

In the yard, white vapor blows out the dryer vent under the window, making the air smell like a drawer full of clean T-shirts. Jimmy bursts through the back door. His mother jumps. “What do you think they're doing in the shed?” he shouts.

“Don't worry, I'm going to talk to your father.”

“Talk to him? Ma, it's way beyond talking to him. He's filling the shed again.”

“He told me all that stuff is—”

“Are you kidding me? You can't be that stupid. He's ripping that stuff off.”

“Your uncle Johnny is taking that stuff home with him.”

“You're as bad as him! I'm going to jail! You could be going to jail! Mom, this is for real!”

T
REVOR CHECKS THE ROOM'S THERMOSTAT.
S
EVENTY, BUT HE'S
still cold. The curtains flutter in front of the drafty windows. He kicks the wooden trunk at the foot of his bed. He should use a screwdriver and open the trunk, but the lion-faced lock could be worth something. London has had a locksmith at the motel, but Trevor didn't remember to ask about the lock.

He checks his phone for any missed calls. It rang after midnight last night, but again no one was there. “Private number” came up on the phone.

He pulls his door open to the courtyard parking lot and leans in his doorway. Frost covers the car windshields. In a few hours, the motel will be filling up for the night.

Trevor doesn't want to stop searching for Whizzer. Bones, with his big mouth, said the dog's “dead in a ditch on the side of the highway. You might as well get over it.” Trevor looks toward the road and thinks about the puppy dying, terrified and alone.

Across the courtyard, the blonde hooker darts from room 4A, in the same red dress she usually wears at night. When Trevor told the guys about her, they laughed and Diggy asked, “Are you choking the chicken while she's doing it in the next room?” Trevor must have blushed, because Diggy was exactly right.

The girl walks between parked cars with her high heels in her hand, barefoot in the cold, then fixes her eyes on Trevor. “You didn't see a cab, did you?”

“No,” he says, trying to think of something clever. It would be cool to talk to her. “You need one?”

“Aw, duh.” She smiles. She doesn't have a coat and it must be freezing with just stockings on her legs. She puts the strap of her pocketbook between her teeth and places her high heels on the hood of a car. Reaching with both arms, she twists a rubber band around her hair, so that it's close to her head in a ponytail. She looks like a college girl, maybe a bit older. “I'm having the worst night,” she says. “What I could use is some coffee.”

“There's Gus's Diner a half-mile west on this road,” he says. “It's open all night.” He thinks of what she must have just done and feels like a gawky kid.

“You don't have a car, do you?”

“Just a license.”

“I either lost my cell phone, or some jerk stole it.” She folds her arms across her chest. “Didn't I see you here last week?” The girl squints at him. “Do you live here or something?”

“It's temporary,” he says.

She hugs herself across her breasts and appears to think this over.

“Do you want to come in? It's warm and you could use my cell phone.”

“You look like someone I once knew,” she says. “What are you in, Molly Pitcher High?” She follows him into his room. She sidesteps around the room, looking at his wrestling posters, then stops at his two third-place medals that hang from their blue and gold ribbons. “You're a wrestler? The wrestlers in my school were always hunks.” She turns and smiles at him. “You look strong.”

In the room's overhead light, he sees that she's a bit round-shouldered, with large breasts. Patches of acne across her cheeks are covered with makeup. She places her hands on Trevor's shoulders as if they are about to dance, then runs them along his sides. “You're all muscle. I like that.” Her breasts are almost touching his chest. He can't speak, doesn't dare to move. “Let me ask you something,” she says near his ear. “How much money do you have?”