What did happen to the kid, anyway? She’d been seen in broad daylight, then she was gone. People might have started to forget about her after Christmas vacation (she’d only been at Guadalupe for a few weeks, after all) except that Nick kid flipped out on the field trip. Talking about where she’d gone.
Watching too many movies about people stepping into alternate universes, it’ll do that to you.
Brendan put away the zit cream and shoved his toothbrush back in his mouth. Man, if there was a way to step out of the world, he’d do it in a flash. Walk right across that border, let the world zip up the place where he’d been. Leave people wondering. Become an urban myth himself. He’d do it today, if not for—
The toothbrush stopped moving at the sound of shoes coming down the hallway.
“I’m going now, Brendan.” Sir’s voice, just outside the bathroom door. “You need to leave within four minutes or you’ll be late.”
He hastily spat his mouthful of foam into the sink. “Yes, Sir, I’m just finishing.” You bastard. I haven’t been late once since I got the bike. He mouthed the words at the bathroom mirror—letting not so much as a whisper of sound emerge. That “goddamn” last night had been…not scary, but…(Yeah: scary.) Sir must have a real hair up his ass, to let fly with an actual curse word. The thought of Sir losing it made Brendan want to pump his fist in the air. (And then lock himself in the closet.)
“As I told you, I will not be at your school until 12:40, after lunch.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And you’re certain you want to listen to this physiotherapist instead of coming to hear me?”
Brendan froze. He half expected the door to open so Sir could fix him with that icy, disappointed gaze. “If…you don’t mind,” he managed. “I’m really interested in—”
“Yes, I suppose, that kind of technical training might be for the best.” For you, my chief failure, who can’t be expected to succeed at anything more demanding. “In any event, I may be late coming home. If you don’t hear from me, take a dinner from the freezer.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“No television or video games until you have studied for your math exam. You need a good grade. Even, I imagine, for ‘sports medicine.’”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Brendan, I have a lot going on at the moment. I need you to carry your weight around here. Do try not to disappoint me. And for heaven’s sake, make your bed.”
And his footsteps retreated along the hallway and down the stairs beyond.
Disappoint! Try—not to disappoint? Rage welled up out of some deep reserve, a red-hot tide that made Brendan’s fingertips go white gripping the edge of the sink. Usually he had to break something—or hurt himself—to get it to subside. This time he stood staring into his own eyes, letting the rage come, and come. He could smash his fist into the mirror, slicing his hand to bits again, arrive at school (on time!) covered in blood. Or…
As he watched his dark eyes (Mom’s eyes) glare back in fury, he felt the tide begin to retreat, all on its own. Down it pulled, away from view, into the depths. Only this time, instead of feeling beaten and small, he felt cold. Hard. Like a forged blade. Like the polymer and steel Bodyguard, locked in the gun safe downstairs.
Disappoint? Yes, you fucking tyrannical bastard, I’ll disappoint you, all right.
And with no more warning than that, Brendan Atcheson stepped out of the world and into a decision.
All those months of fantasy and frustration, nobody but Jock to share his plans. The hidden lists and sketches, all those long hours staring up at the pattern of light on his ceiling and wondering if he’d done a good enough job covering his tracks—but all it took (Now!) was a single word (disappoint…) and the planning was over.
The load that lifted from Brendan’s shoulders was so huge that he had to lean on the sink to keep from staggering. Today? My God, it was actually going to happen—today!
The car started up in the drive. (Had it been only seconds?) Sir backed, shifted, accelerated away down the street. (For the last time?)
Brendan looked down, on this, the last (normal) morning of his (old) life, and saw that he was still gripping the toothbrush. He dropped it into the glass unrinsed; foam dribbled down to the porcelain below. He turned on the tap to rinse his mouth, then changed his mind and wiped his face on the towel instead, stretching it out so the smear was displayed. He walked out of the bathroom, leaving the tap running, the light on, the toilet unflushed, lid up. A string of punishable offenses.
One of his four minutes was gone. Brendan grabbed his backpack by the bottom and jerked, watching with joy as the books and papers exploded across the bed and chair and carpet. He then yanked open drawers to replace the books with what he’d actually need today. He opened his laptop, followed the route to his most hidden files, and hit PRINT. While the old machine was creaking into life, he ran downstairs to Sir’s forbidden study, and came back up: two minutes left.
At the desk, he signed his name (his real name) on the long-planned document and folded it into an envelope. When he’d addressed it (Who’d find it first?) he reached up to the row of plastic cases with video games and DVDs: fourth one from the right. Anyone who didn’t know—Sir, if he’d looked—would think this was just a pirated game. (Probably not a very good one.)
Brendan popped open the case to be sure the disc bore the same words as the one he’d put in his pack: nothing more than his name—his real name, not “Atcheson.”
Brendan James Connelly.
He closed the cover, scribbled a sticky note on it, and propped it with the envelope against a glass he should have taken down to the dishwasher (another offense). He swung the heavy pack onto his shoulder, and took a moment for one last look at his childhood: unmade bed, old tired carpet, books and papers vomited across both. At his feet lay a page with his Career Day schedule, the speakers he’d been going to hear.
Nothing in this room he would need, ever again.
Brendan left his bedroom light on. Walked out the kitchen door without locking it. Strapped the backpack onto his bike and wheeled it into the drive, not even closing the gate behind him.
Helmet on, Brendan pulled out his phone…and paused.
Could he believe Jock? What if all his talk had been just bullshit? What if, when it came right down to it, Jock had somewhere else to be? Could Brendan do this by himself?
Time to find out if the dude was solid or not.
Brendan had chosen his future. The past was back there in his room for Sir to find—Sir, and the San Felipe Police Department: a letter and a disc, concealed by Brendan’s homemade illustration of a mock game called First Person Shooter.
He opened his cell and typed out a text.
It’s today. Be ready.
Brendan’s thumb hovered over the surface of the phone. Maybe he should…
No. Be a man. Today, or never.
His thumb came down on SEND.
ELEVEN MONTHS AGO
Olivia: her story
“Sergeant Mendez, there’s some nut case on the phone. Can you figure out what he wants?”
Olivia Mendez did not reply, so deep in the maddening details of the Rivas murder file that she didn’t notice the uniformed officer in her doorway.
“Ma’am?”
It was shaping up to be one of those cases, the kind that brought you in on your days off and laid in wait until 3:00 a.m. rolled around on the bedside clock. What have I missed?
Gloria Rivas: Sixteen-year-old babysitter, dead from a bullet in her chest, shot eight days ago on the front walkway of the Escobedo house.
Danny Escobedo: Gloria’s charge, eleven years old, missing since the night of the murder.
Thomas “Taco” Alvarez: twenty-three years old, local punk and gang member, threatened Gloria Rivas the night before she died, after she publicly disrespected him by refusing to go out with him, then further compounded the insult by bad-mouthing Taco’s whole gang. Taco hadn’t been seen since that night, when he’d
filled his car at the Shell station near the freeway and withdrawn $300 from the station ATM.
“Um, Sergeant Mendez? The telephone?”
The first time Olivia had arrested Taco Alvarez was for tagging, back when he was a smart-mouthed fourteen-year-old headed toward a gang initiation. Nine years later, she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d shot others before Gloria. Nor was she surprised that he’d successfully fallen off the map: Taco was not without smarts.
What didn’t fit was Taco saddling himself with eleven-year-old Danny as a hostage. Taco’s brother, Angel, sure. Angel was the true psychopath in that family, and might do anything that caught his fancy, but Taco?
Still, if Taco didn’t have Danny, who the hell did? She’d even wondered if the boy’s mother had whisked him out of sight from Taco’s homies, but if that was so, the woman was a hell of an actress.
“Sergeant?”
“What!”
“You got some whack job on line two. I hung up on him once but he called back. I thought maybe you could figure out what he wants.”
Olivia stared at Marcoletti for a moment, then flicked her eyes to the phone that lay buried under Post-its, notebook pages, unfurled California maps, and scraps of paper. The phone’s light was blinking, which meant that at least the caller was safely on hold and couldn’t have overheard the insult. “Why give it to me?” she asked. Stupid question. She was the only detective obsessed enough to hang around the station on a Saturday morning.
“Because you’re here?” Marcoletti sounded like a teenager—with just enough sense not to add “duh” and a roll of the eyes. Were uniforms this casual in a big-city police department?
“I’m busy. Paul’s the one on call today.” She looked down at the scrap of paper in her hand, where she’d written:
March 4: Mrs. Escobedo hysterical.
March 5: Mrs. Escobedo phoned seven times.
March 7: Mrs. Escobedo did not phone, is not answering calls.
She didn’t want to make another run at the Alvarez family yet. She was pretty sure Taco was still in the area, but if she gave that vicious little brother of his—Angel, what a joke of a name—another day to think he’d got one over on the cops, it might make him cocky enough to slip up. And she wanted another talk with the victim’s sister, Sofia, but the family needed a weekend to themselves. Sofia’s best friend, Yasmina Santos, seemed to know more than she was telling—or it could just be that Mina Santos seemed to know more about everything. Mina was tiny, yes, but it was hard to believe she was only twelve—or, no: thirteen, as of Tuesday.
Marcoletti was still planted in the doorway. “Paul’s at his daughter’s tournament today, and I sort of thought…”
She snatched the receiver and jabbed the 2, knowing she’d regret this. Why on earth had the Department hired this kid who couldn’t speak Spanish and therefore interpreted the language as a lunatic’s ravings?
“Mendez!” Maybe she could intimidate the caller into hanging up.
Instead, the voice came on, deep and melodic and English: England-English. “What am I? An infant crying in the night.”
The voice stopped. Olivia’s eyes narrowed: Marcoletti’s diagnosis might not be far off. “Sir, you’ve reached the San Felipe Police Department. Do you have a crime to report?”
“Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
Her English teacher in high school would have called it a non sequitur—although “whack job” would do. Still, something in the voice, some pressing intelligence, kept her from dropping the phone onto its base and going back to her fruitless search for ideas over who killed Gloria Rivas and who had Danny Escobedo. “Sir, I don’t understand.”
“Words are like leaves, and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”
She pinched her fingertips into the inner corners of her tired eyes. When did she last have a solid eight hours? Gloria Rivas died on March fourth. It was now the twelfth. Eight days of evidence and interviews, one blank wall after another. Long unproductive conversations with the police of Chiapas, where the Alvarez family came from and where Taco might be headed, and of Oajaca, where the Escobedos had lived before migrating north a few months before Danny was born. Dead ends for the murder, a complete puzzle about the boy. Hang up on this guy, Mendez. You’d do everyone a lot more good if you went home and got some sleep.
But the caller’s voice had none of the slurred consonants of drink or the edginess of drugs. His brief statements, though nonsensical (and now rhyming) did not sound like the ravings of a garden-variety lunatic. He was polite, calm, and somehow determined. Maybe it was the accent—she was a softie for an English accent—but the guy sounded like a professor trying to get across a difficult lesson. Okay, see how he dealt with a bright student.
“Well, sir, you called me. If you want me to pick up the fruit of sense, you’ll have to drop it where I can find it.”
“Truth can never be told so as to be understood.”
“Yeah, ain’t that the pits? If you can’t tell me the truth, sir, why are you calling?”
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.”
This, anyway, was something she recognized. Although what First Corinthians had to do with leaves and fruit, she hadn’t a clue. “Sir, if you want to discuss the Bible, why not go down to St. Patrick’s and have a nice chat with Father—”
“An infant. Crying in the night.”
She paused. “Are you telling me there’s a child in danger?”
“It needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!” the voice boomed in approval.
Fool. Something about that word made the back of her mind twitch, a brief pulse of recognition, or apprehension…then it was gone, leaving her to loop back to where they’d started. “Sir, perhaps you’d like to come in to the Department and tell me all about it.”
“So near, and yet so far.” He sounded wistful.
She looked at the number on the phone’s display: local in both area code and prefix, so he couldn’t be too far away. No car? Disabled? Other than mentally, that is. “You want me to come to you?”
“Come before his presence with song.”
She hoped this wasn’t a sign that her caller thought of himself as God; she really didn’t have time to get involved with the paperwork of a psychiatric hold. Damn it, she wasn’t even on call today. “Where are you located?”
“Absent thee from felicity for a while, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”
Her cop’s mind snagged for a moment on the word pain. Then it moved on to the possibility that tell my story might be where the man’s emphasis lay. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think…” She stopped. The sounds from the earpiece included the crackle of a bad connection—or of a public phone box—and the build and fade of a diesel engine in the background. Also, the voice of a child in long and unintelligible monologue.
When Olivia Mendez was a girl, not much older than the owner of that piping voice in the background, two cousins had been killed by a drunk driver. Her aunt had responded to the agony by joining a church, one of those that lived and breathed the Bible, that regarded Proverbs and Job and the Book of Romans as immediate as the daily news, who referenced any decision, from ethical action to choice of breakfast cereals, by summoning a verse. They could be strikingly apt—the Bible is, after all, a large and diverse book—but often any meaning was stretched past the snapping point, leaving the aunt and her audience staring at each other, dumbfounded. Rather as she felt with this man on the telephone, in fact. “Are you by any chance talking about Felicia? South of San Felipe?”
“My library was dukedom large enough.”
“You’re at the Felicia library?”
“I give you a wise and understanding heart.” The voice’s instant approval made her feel oddly warm. Anyway, it wasn’t like she was getting anything done here.
“Okay, it’ll take me
fifteen, twenty minutes to get there. Will you wait for me?”
The phone went dead, which she supposed meant yes.
She sat for a minute, tapping her middle fingernail on the desk, wondering what the hell she’d just been listening to. There remained the tiny, faraway sense of familiarity in the back of her mind, but for the life of her, she couldn’t tease it forward. Something years back and not here, but an echo…The Bible, snippets of poetry, Shakespeare—she’d caught both Hamlet and The Tempest in his words: an odd conversational form, to be sure. But conversation it appeared to be, albeit of a convoluted and inadequate style. She felt a stir of interest, at this welcome distraction from frustration—and then caught herself.
She had to be careful. This thespian-voiced Englishman could be some honest-to-God nut case setting a trap for a cop. A backwater town like San Felipe might not shelter as many toxic individuals as a big city, but that didn’t rule anything out.
When in doubt, take backup.
And always be in doubt.
Olivia closed the Escobedo file. She opened her computer, hunting for the location of the Englishman’s number. Yes: the little Felicia library’s public telephone, as he’d said. Sort of said.
She shut down the computer. “Marcoletti!”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, Sergeant Mendez, ma’am.” She was muttering as she pulled her shoulder holster from the desk drawer. Muttering wasn’t a good sign.
“What?”
“Nothing. Who’s on patrol down in Felicia?”
“What, you mean now?”
She glared from the doorway. “Yes, I mean now.”
“Um, let me see.” He pawed through the mess before him, came up with the right piece of paper, and read from it. “Torres and Wong.”