Finders Keepers

  Hodge's cell rings. It's Pete. He sounds out of breath.

  "Have you called the police, Mr. Hodges?"

  "No." Although they'll probably have the license plate of Holly's car by now, but he sees no reason to tell Pete that. The boy sounds more upset than ever. Almost crazed.

  "You can't. No matter what. He's got my sister. He says if he doesn't get the notebooks, he'll kill her. I'm going to give them to him."

  "Pete, don't--"

  But he's talking to no one. Pete has broken the connection.

  46

  Morris hustles Tina along the path. At one point a jutting branch rips her filmy blouse and scratches her arm, bringing blood.

  "Don't make me go so fast, mister! I'll fall down!"

  Morris whacks the back of her head above her ponytail. "Save your breath, bitch. Just be grateful I'm not making you run."

  He holds on to her shoulders as they cross the stream, balancing her so she won't fall in, and when they reach the point where the scrub brush and stunted trees give way to the Rec property, he tells her to stop.

  The baseball field is deserted, but a few boys are on the cracked asphalt of the basketball court. They're stripped to the waist, their shoulders gleaming. The day is really too hot for outside games, which is why Morris supposes there are only a few of them.

  He unties Tina's hands. She gives a little whimper of relief and starts rubbing her wrists, which are crisscrossed with deep red grooves.

  "We're going to walk along the edge of the trees," he tells her. "The only time those boys will be able to get a good look at us is when we get near the building and come out of the shade. If they say hello, or if there's someone you know, just wave and smile and keep walking. Do you understand?"

  "Y-Yes."

  "If you scream or yell for help, I'll put a bullet in your head. Do you understand that?"

  "Yes. Did you shoot my mother? You did, didn't you?"

  "Of course not, just fired one into the ceiling to settle her down. She's fine and you will be, too, if you do as you're told. Get moving."

  They walk in the shade, the uncut grass of right field whickering against Morris's trousers and Tina's jeans. The boys are totally absorbed in their game and don't even look around, although if they had, Tina's bright yellow blouse would have stood out against the green trees like a warning flag.

  When they reach the back of the Rec, Morris guides her past his old pal's Subaru, keeping a close eye on the boys as he does so. Once the brick flank of the building hides the two of them from the basketball court, he ties Tina's hands behind her again. No sense taking chances with Birch Street so close. Lots of houses on Birch Street.

  He sees Tina draw in a deep breath and grabs her shoulder. "Don't yell, girlfriend. Open your mouth and I'll beat it off you."

  "Please don't hurt me," Tina whispers. "I'll do whatever you want."

  Morris nods, satisfied. It's a wise-con response if he ever heard one.

  "See that basement window? The one that's open? Lie down, turn over on your belly, and drop through."

  Tina squats and peers into the shadows. Then she turns her bloody swollen face up to him. "It's too far! I'll fall!"

  Exasperated, Morris kicks her in the shoulder. She cries out. He bends over and places the muzzle of the automatic against her temple.

  "You said you'd do whatever I wanted, and that's what I want. Get through that window right now, or I'll put a bullet in your tiny brat brain."

  Morris wonders if he means it. He decides he does. Little girls also don't mean shit.

  Weeping, Tina squirms through the window. She hesitates, half in and half out, looking at Morris with pleading eyes. He draws his foot back to kick her in the face and help her along. She drops, then yells in spite of Morris's explicit instructions not to.

  "My ankle! I think I broke my ankle!"

  Morris doesn't give a fuck about her ankle. He takes a quick look around to make sure he's still unobserved, then slides through the window and into the basement of the Birch Street Rec, landing on the closed carton he used for a step last time. The thief's sister must have landed on it wrong and tumbled to the floor. Her foot is twisted sideways and already beginning to swell. To Morris Bellamy, that doesn't mean shit, either.

  47

  Mr. Hodges has a thousand questions, but Pete has no time to answer any of them. He ends the call and sprints down Sycamore Street to his house. He has decided getting Tina's old wagon will take too long; he'll figure out some other way to transport the notebooks when he gets to the Rec. All he really needs is the key to the building.

  He runs into his father's office to grab it and stops cold. His mother is on the floor beside the desk, her blue eyes shining from a mask of blood. There's more blood on his dad's open laptop, on the front of her dress, spattered on the desk chair and the window behind her. Music is tinkling from the computer, and even in his distress, he recognizes the tune. She was playing solitaire. Just playing solitaire and waiting for her kid to come home and bothering no one.

  "Mom!" He runs to her, crying.

  "My head," she says. "Look at my head."

  He bends over her, parts bloody clumps of hair, trying to be gentle, and sees a trench running from her temple to the back of her head. At one point, halfway along the trench, he can see bleary gray-white. It's her skull, he thinks. That's bad, but at least it's not her brains, please God no, brains are soft, brains would be leaking. It's just her skull.

  "A man came," she says, speaking with great effort. "He . . . took . . . Tina. I heard her cry out. You have to . . . oh Jesus Christ, how my head rings."

  Pete hesitates for one endless second, wavering between his need to help his mother and his need to protect his sister, to get her back. If only this was a nightmare, he thinks. If only I could wake up.

  Mom first. Mom right now.

  He grabs the phone off his father's desk. "Be quiet, Mom. Don't say anything else, and don't move."

  She closes her eyes wearily. "Did he come for the money? Did that man come for the money you found?"

  "No, for what was with it," Pete says, and punches in three numbers he learned in grade school.

  "Nine-one-one," a woman says. "What is your emergency?"

  "My mom's been shot," Pete says. "Twenty-three Sycamore Street. Send an ambulance, right now. She's bleeding like crazy."

  "What is your name, si--"

  Pete hangs up. "Mom, I have to go. I have to get Tina back."

  "Don't . . . be hurt." She's slurring now. Her eyes are still shut and he sees with horror that there's even blood in her eyelashes. This is his fault, all his fault. "Don't let . . . Tina be . . . hur . . ."

  She falls silent, but she's breathing. Oh God, please let her keep breathing.

  Pete takes the key to the Birch Street Rec's front door from his father's real estate properties board.

  "You'll be okay, Mom. The ambulance will come. Some friends will come, too."

  He starts for the door, then an idea strikes him and he turns back. "Mom?"

  "Whaa . . ."

  "Does Dad still smoke?"

  Without opening her eyes, she says, "He thinks . . . I don't . . . know."

  Quickly--he has to be gone before Hodges gets here and tries to stop him from doing what he has to do--Pete begins to search the drawers of his father's desk.

  Just in case, he thinks.

  Just in case.

  48

  The back gate is ajar. Pete doesn't notice. He pelts down the path. As he nears the stream, he passes a scrap of filmy yellow cloth hanging from a branch jutting out into the path. He reaches the stream and turns to look, almost without realizing it, at the spot where the trunk is buried. The trunk that caused all this horror.

  When he reaches the stepping-stones at the bottom of the bank, Pete suddenly stops. His eyes widen. His legs go rubbery and loose. He sits down hard, staring at the foaming, shallow water that he has crossed so many times, often with his little sister babbling away abou
t whatever interested her at the time. Mrs. Beasley. SpongeBob. Her friend Ellen. Her favorite lunchbox.

  Her favorite clothes.

  The filmy yellow blouse with the billowing sleeves, for instance. Mom tells her she shouldn't wear it so often, because it has to be dry-cleaned. Was Teens wearing it this morning when she left for school? That seems like a century ago, but he thinks . . .

  He thinks she was.

  I'm taking her to a safe place, Red Lips had said. A place where we can meet, once you have the notebooks.

  Can it be?

  Of course it can. If Red Lips grew up in Pete's house, he would have spent time at the Rec. All the kids in the neighborhood spent time there, until it closed. And he must have known about the path, because the trunk was buried less than twenty paces from where it crossed the stream.

  But he doesn't know about the notebooks, Pete thinks. Not yet.

  Unless he found out since the last call, that is. If so, he will have taken them already. He'll be gone. That would be okay if he's left Tina alive. And why wouldn't he? What reason would he have to kill her once he has what he wants?

  For revenge, Pete thinks coldly. To get back at me. I'm the thief who took the notebooks, I hit him with a bottle and got away at the bookstore, and I deserve to be punished.

  He gets up and staggers as a wave of lightheadedness rushes through him. When it passes, he crosses the creek. On the other side, he begins to run again.

  49

  The front door of 23 Sycamore is standing open. Hodges is out of the Mercedes before Jerome has brought it fully to a stop. He runs inside, one hand in his pocket, gripping the Happy Slapper. He hears tinkly music he knows well from hours spent playing computer solitaire.

  He follows the sound and finds a woman sitting--sprawling--beside a desk in an alcove that has been set up as an office. One side of her face is swollen and drenched in blood. She looks at him, trying to focus.

  "Pete," she says, and then, "He took Tina."

  Hodges kneels and carefully parts the woman's hair. What he sees is bad, but nowhere near as bad as it could be; this woman has won the only lottery that really matters. The bullet put a groove six inches long in her scalp, has actually exposed her skull in one place, but a scalp wound isn't going to kill her. She's lost a lot of blood, though, and is suffering from both shock and concussion. This is no time to question her, but he has to. Morris Bellamy is laying down a trail of violence, and Hodges is still at the wrong end of it.

  "Holly. Call an ambulance."

  "Pete . . . already did," Linda says, and as if her weak voice has conjured it, they hear a siren. It's still distant but approaching fast. "Before . . . he left."

  "Mrs. Saubers, did Pete take Tina? Is that what you're saying?"

  "No. He. The man."

  "Did he have red lips, Mrs. Saubers?" Holly asks. "Did the man who took Tina have red lips?"

  "Irish . . . lips," she says. "But not . . . a redhead. White. He was old. Am I going to die?"

  "No," Hodges says. "Help is on the way. But you have to help us. Do you know where Peter went?"

  "Out . . . back. Through the gate. Saw him."

  Jerome looks out the window and sees the gate standing ajar. "What's back there?"

  "A path," she says wearily. "The kids used it . . . to go to the Rec. Before it closed. He took . . . I think he took the key."

  "Pete did?"

  "Yes . . ." Her eyes move to a board with a great many keys hung on it. One hook is empty. The DymoTape beneath it reads BIRCH ST. REC.

  Hodges comes to a decision. "Jerome, you're with me. Holly, stay with Mrs. Saubers. Get a cold cloth to put on the side of her head." He draws in breath. "But before you do that, call the police. Ask for my old partner. Huntley."

  He expects an argument, but Holly just nods and picks up the phone.

  "He took his father's lighter, too," Linda says. She seems a little more with it now. "I don't know why he would do that. And the can of Ronson's."

  Jerome looks a question at Hodges, who says: "It's lighter fluid."

  50

  Pete keeps to the shade of the trees, just as Morris and Tina did, although the boys who were playing basketball have gone home to dinner and left the court deserted except for a few crows scavenging spilled potato chips. He sees a small car nestled in the loading dock. Hidden there, actually, and the vanity license plate is enough to cause any doubts Pete might have had to disappear. Red Lips is here, all right, and he can't have taken Tina in by the front. That door faces the street, which is apt to be fairly busy at this time of day, and besides, he has no key.

  Pete passes the car, and at the corner of the building, he drops to his knees and peers around. One of the basement windows is open. The grass and weeds that were growing in front of it have been beaten down. He hears a man's voice. They're down there, all right. So are the notebooks. The only question is whether or not Red Lips has found them yet.

  Pete withdraws and leans against the sunwarmed brick, wondering what to do next. Think, he tells himself. You got Tina into this and you need to get her out of it, so think, goddam you!

  Only he can't. His mind is full of white noise.

  In one of his few interviews, the ever-irritable John Rothstein expressed his disgust with the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. Story ideas came from nowhere, he proclaimed. They arrived without the polluting influence of the author's intellect. The idea that comes to Pete now also seems to arrive from nowhere. It's both horrible and horribly attractive. It won't work if Red Lips has already discovered the notebooks, but if that is the case, nothing will work.

  Pete gets up and circles the big brick cube the other way, once more passing the green car with its tattletale license plate. He stops at the front right corner of the abandoned brick box, looking at the going-home traffic on Birch Street. It's like peering through a window and into a different world, one where things are normal. He takes a quick inventory: cell phone, cigarette lighter, can of lighter fluid. The can was in the bottom desk drawer with his father's Zippo. The can is only half full, based on the slosh when he shakes it, but half full will be more than enough.

  He goes around the corner, now in full view of Birch Street, trying to walk normally and hoping that no one--Mr. Evans, his old Little League coach, for instance--will hail him.

  No one does. This time he knows which of the two keys to use, and this time it turns easily in the lock. He opens the door slowly, steps into the foyer, and eases the door closed. It's musty and brutally hot in here. For Tina's sake, he hopes it's cooler in the basement. How scared she must be, he thinks.

  If she's still alive to feel anything, an evil voice whispers back. Red Lips could have been standing over her dead body and talking to himself. He's crazy, and that's what crazy people do.

  On Pete's left, a flight of stairs leads up to the second floor, which consists of a single large space running the length of the building. The official name was The North Side Community Room, but the kids had a different name for it, one Red Lips probably remembers.

  As Pete sits on the stairs to take off his shoes (he can't be heard clacking and echoing across the floor), he thinks again, I got her into this, it's my job to get her out. Nobody else's.

  He calls his sister's cell. From below him, muffled but unmistakable, he hears Tina's Snow Patrol ringtone.

  Red Lips answers immediately. "Hello, Peter." He sounds calmer now. In control. That could be good or bad for his plan. Pete can't tell which. "Have you got the notebooks?"

  "Yes. Is my sister okay?"

  "She's fine. Where are you?"

  "That's pretty funny," Pete says . . . and when you think about it, it actually is. "Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet."

  "I'm in no mood for cryptic humor. Let us do our business and be done with each other, shall we? Where are you?"

  "Do you remember the Saturday Movie Palace?"

  "What are you--"

  Red Lips stops. Thinks.

  "Are you talking ab
out the Community Room, where they used to show all those corny . . ." He pauses again as the penny drops. "You're here?"

  "Yes. And you're in the basement. I saw the car out back. You were maybe ninety feet from the notebooks all along." Even closer than that, Pete thinks. "Come and get them."

  He ends the call before Red Lips can try to set the terms more to his liking. Pete runs for the kitchen on tiptoe, shoes in hand. He has to get out of sight before Red Lips can climb the stairs from the basement. If he does that, all may be well. If he doesn't, he and his sister will probably die together.

  From downstairs, louder than her ringtone--much louder--he hears Tina cry out in pain.

  Still alive, Pete thinks, and then, The bastard hurt her. Only that's not the truth.

  I did it. This is all my fault. Mine, mine, mine.

  51

  Morris, sitting on a box marked KITCHEN SUPPLIES, closes Tina's phone and at first only looks at it. There's but one question on the floor, really; just one that needs to be answered. Is the boy telling the truth, or is he lying?

  Morris thinks he's telling the truth. They both grew up on Sycamore Street, after all, and they both attended Saturday movie-shows upstairs, sitting on folding chairs and eating popcorn sold by the local Girl Scout troop. It's logical to think they would both choose this nearby abandoned building as a place to hide, one close to both the house they had shared and the buried trunk. The clincher is the sign Morris saw out front, on his first reconnaissance: CALL THOMAS SAUBERS REAL ESTATE. If Peter's father is the selling agent, the boy could easily have filched a key.

  He seizes Tina by the arm and drags her across to the furnace, a huge and dusty relic crouched in the corner. She lets out another of those annoying cries as she tries to put weight on her swollen ankle and it buckles under her. He slaps her again.

  "Shut up," he says. "Stop being such a whiny bitch."

  There isn't enough computer cord to make sure she stays in one place, but there's a cage-light hanging on the wall with several yards of orange electrical cord looped around it. Morris doesn't need the light, but the cord is a gift from God. He didn't think he could be any angrier with the thief, but he was wrong. Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet, the thief had said, and what right did he have to reference John Rothstein's work? Rothstein's work was his.