The Informant (21 page)

The hypnotic sound of falling water took him back to their childhood, to the only thing he could think of. It was the day he and Curt had vandalized that house by the lake, more than twenty years ago….

Nine-year-old Frank was hiding in the tree fort behind his house. The sun had set hours ago, and he’d been hiding alone in the darkness ever since Curt had limped home on his cut-up leg. Through the big maple leaves he could see the entire yard in the moonlight, all the way to the street. A white Bonneville pulled up and parked in the pea-gravel driveway. The engine cut off but the headlights stayed on. His father got out and stood in the yard.

“Frank!” he yelled, as if calling the dog.

Frank watched in silence as a blue Impala with a white vinyl roof pulled up behind the Bonneville. A skinny blond woman got out and lit up a cigarette. Curt’s mom.

She seemed all excited and nervous. She walked around the car and opened the passenger door. Curt hobbled out. He was on crutches and had a white bandage from his knee to his ankle. Frank knew in an instant that he’d been to Emergency.

Frank caught his breath at the sight of a third car pulling into the driveway. A police car. The county sheriff.

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“Frank, get over here!” his father shouted.

He hurried down the tree trunk and cut across the lawn, then stopped at the end of the driveway. He was staring directly into the blinding headlights, which turned the grown-ups into dark, shadowy figures. Squinting, he could make out their faces. His father was scowling with arms folded. Curt’s mom looked even madder than the time he’d swiped her underwear off the backyard clothesline.

The sheriff was wearing his brown-and-beige uniform with a flat-brimmed hat, but it was the size of the gun in his holster that got Frank’s attention. Curt hid behind his mother, afraid to even look at his friend.

“Did you break into that summerhouse?” his father demanded.

“No.”

He slapped him across the face. “Don’t lie to me!”

“I didn’t do nothin’.”

His father turned toward Curt and looked him in the eye. “Curt, did you break into that summerhouse?”

He hobbled on his crutches and hid farther behind his mother. “Yessir,” he said quietly.

“Why’d you do it?”

Curt paused. “Because—because Frank made me.”

Frank came at him with fists flying. “You’re a rat!

You’re a little beady-eyed rat!”

The sheriff grabbed him and held him back. Frank was kicking and yelling, and he bit his hairy arm. The cop cried out in pain as Frank shook loose. His father grabbed him by the shirt and pinned him to the ground, kneeling on top of him to keep him from squirming away.

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“You’re a ratfink, Curt!” He was flat on his belly with his cheek against the grass. His father buried one knee squarely in his back.

The sheriff patted Curt affectionately on the head. “You did the right thing, young man. It’s always best to tell the truth.”

Frank’s father grabbed him by the hair, nearly picking him up off the ground. The strong odor of bourbon flowed with his words. “You know where you going this time—
don’t you,
you little shit.”

Frank knew. His father had threatened him a month ago, after he got caught in the cemetery. Six months ago, a seventeen-year-old high school senior had been raped and stabbed to death, her naked body found in the woods.

It was the town’s biggest news in a decade, and a local newspaper had seen fit to describe her wounds in gruesome detail. Frank had devoured every bit of it. He kept the photos and newspaper clippings under his bed, including an obituary that said where she’d been buried. Every night, he’d crawl into bed, take off his pajamas and read the old stories. He thought about her, dreamed about her, imagined her telling him what it was like to have someone slit her throat. Her murder was never solved, and when it finally faded from the news Frank felt empty, unfulfilled. After a few weeks he started riding his bike past her house. He stopped a few times and watched from the sidewalk, even snuck up to the porch once and sat on her steps. He started stealing mail out of their box, rummaging through it for belated sympathy cards to her family or magazines she might have subscribed to. One night, he rode past the grocery store where she’d 204

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worked after school as a part-time cashier, and then he peddled to the cemetery to find her grave. The fresh sod hadn’t completely taken root yet, so he could see exactly where she was. He was drawn to it and walked all the way around it. He stood on it, sat on it, even laid down on top of it—until he felt an uncontrollable urge to urinate on it. So he did, right on the headstone. A groundskeeper had caught him and called his parents. Lousy snitch.

His father yanked his hair again, snapping his head back. “I warned you, ya little bastard. Next time you stepped over the line, your skinny ass would land in jail.

And I meant it. Sheriff, do what you gotta do.”

The sheriff scowled as he took a roll of black electrical tape from his pants pocket, then knelt down and taped Frank’s skinny wrists behind his back, like makeshift handcuffs.

“I’m not afraid of jail,” Frank scoffed. “Not afraid of you, either, you stupid pig.”

“You will address me as Sheriff Nettle,” he said sternly.

He grabbed Frank by the arm and lifted him to his feet.

His father gave a wink. “No special treatment, Officer.

Treat him like any other common criminal.”

The sheriff smiled thinly. “We know how to deal with these bad apples.” He nudged him toward the squad car.

“Move along, shorty.”

“Don’t call me shorty, fat-ass. And what about Curt?

Why isn’t he coming?”

The sheriff opened the rear door to the squad car and pushed him inside. “Don’t worry about him. You got enough to worry about.” The door slammed shut.

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Frank glared at Curt through the rear window as the squad car pulled away. Sirens blared and the blue lights swirled in the darkness. They drove fast, like a real emergency. They ran every stop sign all the way to the station. Frank felt important. He imagined he was president—or better yet, someone who’d killed the president and his entire family.

The stockade was in a part of town that Frank had never seen. No trees, no grass. Just boarded-up buildings and garbage in the gutters, and lots of mean-looking dudes on every street corner standing in circles and sharing short little cigarettes. They were frightening to Frank in the shadowy streetlights, but he refused to let it show. The squad car stopped at the busted-up curb. The sheriff got out and led Frank upstairs into the station.

Inside, people were moving in all directions, mostly men. Some wore uniforms and some street clothes. One guy with no clothes was chained to a bench and puking on his feet. Every desk was cluttered with files and newspapers. Three guys in the back were shooting hoops into the wastebasket. The others were jabbering back and forth, making enough noise for a thousand conversations.

It reminded Frank of homeroom and driving the teacher crazy.

“Whatta we got here?” asked the intake officer behind the counter.

“Kiss my ass,” Frank said defiantly.

The cops exchanged smiles. “Tough guy, huh,” said Nettle, as he removed the electrical tape binding Frank’s wrists. “Hands on the palm prints.”

Frank leaned against the wall, but he had to raise 206

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his arms way up over his head to reach the black outlines that marked the spot for prisoners to place their hands, like a vertical game of Twister. As the sheriff patted him down and searched his pockets, Frank noticed how much bigger the outlines were than his own hands.

“Solitary confinement for this one,” Nettle told the intake officer. “Real dangerous character.”

“My own cell? Cool. I can jerk off then.”

The officer did a double take, then checked the register behind the desk. “We can put him in tank eleven. Hornsby ate one of the lightbulbs again, sent him to the hospital this morning.” He glanced at Frank. “Some guys’ll do anything to get outta here for a few days.”

Frank made a face and narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you jokers gonna fingerprint me first?”

Nettle just shook his head. “What for? You ain’t never gettin’ outta here. Alive.”

The intake officer punched the button behind the counter, and the heavy metal door slowly clanked open.

Nettle retaped the prisoner’s wrists behind his back even tighter than before and led him down the chute, past a row of holding cells for the night’s arrests.

It was noisy and crowded inside the cells, worse than Frank had ever seen on television or in magazines. The iron bars seemed thicker, the cement walls felt colder. It smelled bad, like the time he plugged up the toilets in the locker room at school. Looking straight down the corridor to the end of the cellblock, he could see hands and arms sticking out between bars. It was as if the walls had limbs.

He tried not to look at

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any of the prisoners, but one caught his eye. He was crouched on the floor with his shirt off and his hands in his underwear. Frank looked away, but his eyes met the woman in the opposite cell. She was ugly with stringy blond hair, more makeup on her face than the Catwoman, and tight stretch pants that looked two sizes too small.

He winced as she blew him a kiss.

His heart raced faster, but he bit his lip to control it.

“Bunch of losers,” he said with bravado. “I
deserve
my own cell.”

They stopped at the end of the hall in front of one of the internal cells with no window to the outside world.

The sheriff unlocked the door with a key from his belt, then flipped the switch outside the cell. The light by the door went on, but the bulb over the sink was missing.

Just like the other cop had said. Hornsby ate it.

“Get in,” said Nettle.

Frank stumbled inside. There was a rust-stained sink standing in the corner and a hole in the floor that smelled like a sewer. A cot stretched the cell’s entire length. The sheriff sat beside him on the edge of the bed and removed the tape from his wrists that had cuffed his hands. They could hear two men arguing about something at the end of the hall. Then, suddenly, a third voice started up—a man, obviously deranged, making what sounded like animal sounds. Frank’s hands started shaking as the tape came off. The sheriff contained his smile, then spoke in a low, somber tone. “Know what they do in here to nine-year-old tough guys?”

“What?”

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“They turn them into girls.”

He rubbed his wrists, helping the blood flow. “They can’t turn
me
into a girl.”

The sheriff wadded up the tape into a ball and shoved it in his pocket. “That’s what the last boy we had in here said. But he wasn’t talking at all when he left. We put him next to one of those greasy, smelly people you see wandering around the streets downtown. Kind of like those characters right across the hall. And as soon as we turned out the lights, the big guy snuck in the kid’s cell.

Know what he did then?” He paused for effect, making sure Frank was listening. He leaned a little closer and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “Sonofabitch opened his zipper and did it right in the kid’s mouth. Poor bastard couldn’t talk anymore after that.”

Frank swallowed hard, trying to stay tough. “Why couldn’t he talk?”

The sheriff’s expression turned deadly serious. “Because it tasted so bad, the kid cut his own tongue out.”

Frank instinctively touched his tongue, believing every word.

The sheriff smirked with satisfaction, then stepped toward the door. “Sleep tight, Frank.” He closed the cell door and switched off the light.

The cell turned black. Suddenly, Frank didn’t feel so invincible. He rushed to the bars to be closer to the light, but the dim bulbs in the corridor left the rear cells in darkness. It was so dark he couldn’t even see to the other end of the cell. His heart raced, but he fought to control it. No one was going to scare
him

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into being a Goody Two-shoes. No way. In fact, he’d made up his mind. He was going to do anything he wanted, when he wanted. And one thing was damn sure, he’d never again get caught. Because he’d make sure there were no witnesses. If someone did see him and tried to snitch, he’d hurt them bad.

He froze, thinking he heard something. He gasped, thinking he’d heard it again. Maybe it was coming from the cell next to him. His short, panicky breaths were so loud it was hard to hear, so he held his breath and listened harder. There it was again—footsteps drawing closer…

The bathroom light switched on over the shower stall, giving Hannon a start. His head was pounding from the twenty-year-old memory. He turned off the shower and listened.

“Charlie?” a woman called out. “Is that you, babe?”

He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that, for a split second, he nearly forgot that “Charlie” was the alias by which she knew him. He wrapped himself in a bath towel and stepped from the steamy shower. “Hi, Valerie.”

She was a plain but attractive brunette in her late forties, with the figure of a woman who was constantly on a diet.

Her winter suntan was phony but perfectly even, and her legs looked great in her short white tennis dress. Indoor doubles, Hannon figured, since it was forty degrees outside.

“I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” she said with a smile. “How’d the project go?”

“Uh—okay, I think. I got their system up and 210

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running. Those people don’t need an independent computer consultant, though. They need to get over to the library and check out
Computers for Dummies.
”

She moved closer and glided her hand lightly over his well-defined chest. “Well, not everyone appreciates how brilliant you are. But as long as you’ve got your Valerie, it doesn’t matter that they don’t pay you what you’re worth.”

“Did you miss me?”

She smiled seductively with her eyes and planted a light kiss on the corner of his mouth. “Let me show you how much.” She tugged at the towel around his waist and led him to the bedroom, stopping at the foot of the four-poster bed. His leather travel bag was spilled out on the fluffy down comforter. She noticed the book in middle of the pile.
How to Put Power and Passion into Your Relationships
.