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  After a few seconds, she was back in the kitchen. “Hook up tonight?” she laughed. “Who? You? Cynthia Murdock? Hook up? Ohmigod, you are so full of shit. With who?” I could hear Neecey screaming “eeiew” and “no” and giggling like a Munchkin from the living room. “Aw, c’mon, honey, I’m just busting on you. If you think he’s cute, then you should totally go for it, and I’ll still love you, no matter what. Just remember, guys don’t understand ‘no’ unless you say it like fifteen times and totally shove them around when you do.”

  Gratitude for Gary, undying love for Cynthia—was there anyone outside our family that Neecey didn’t care about more than she cared about us?

  “I was like completely skeeved, Cyn; ohmigod, you don’t even know. Nuh-uh, not the foggiest. But it’s like, who can really say what’s going on in somebody else’s head, right? Especially a helmet head like his. Yeah, he so totally does, but I’m sure he wouldn’t know it, not even if someone took the time to like explain it to him.”

  I wondered if she was talking about Razor, or someone else. Then Neecey said “all kinds of thorny” or “horny” and then “last night” or “the other night,” but I couldn’t be sure about any of it, because she’d walked into the living room again. But that figured. The only part of the conversation I wanted to listen to and I couldn’t hear it.

  Thrash suggested that I get a little closer, so I edged up the wall until my head was just under the window and craned my neck to hear better. It didn’t really help, but at least I wasn’t just sitting on my ass in a puddle of my own sweat doing nothing anymore. Neecey was well into the living room and her voice was low, so I couldn’t catch anything, and then it was quiet, as if she were listening to Cynthia—or something else.

  For a second I thought maybe Neecey had heard me and I was about to slide down the wall again, when she came back into the kitchen. I froze where I was and tried to breathe as little and as quietly as I could.

  “Yeah, I totally wish they’d quit, too, before they go any further and get completely busted. I know. Then what would we do? No, it’s not the worst thing in the world, I guess. But there are like so many other ways to get your kicks.”

  It sounded like she was talking about Darren and the crew, and either the tags they dropped or the weed they smoked.

  “Did I get the stuff? C’mon, Cyn, you know I got the stuff. Darren would have a total seizure if I didn’t. He’d be all, ‘Dude’”—Neecey made her voice gravelly and slow—“‘this is so not a righteous party without the stuff.’ Omigod,” Neecey laughed, “I’d be so cut off.”

  I had to admit it, she did a pretty good impersonation of Darren. But what it seemed to mean sent air-raid sirens off in my head.

  “Not a clue, I don’t think,” she went on. “But I’m still kind of worried. He can be a serious brainiac when he’s not going all Cujo and everything. Ohmigod, don’t say that. You’ve never seen him go off, but I have, so like trust me, okay? Total fucking shitstorm.”

  If I had to guess, I’d say that Neecey could’ve been talking about me.

  “What-ev. Let’s talk about it when I come over. I want to outtie before he gets home.”

  Bingo.

  “Me? No. I totally know how to handle him. It’s just he’s been acting all suspicious and slick lately and I so don’t want to be around him when he’s like that because, sooner or later, it’s like this switch goes off and he totally loses his shit. No, why? Follow me? C’mon, Cyn, get real. Even if he tried to, he’d have to be home before dark.”

  Neecey cackled at her own cheap shot. And suddenly, putting a tail on her didn’t seem like a half-bad idea.

  “Pool? Hello? Have you looked outside? The weather’s totally beat. Oh, I know! Maybe we can go tanning. C’mon, Cyn, whadayasay? Please? Cynnie-Cyn-Cyn? Yea! Cool. Around eight, so we can deliver the stuff and help set up—you know how the guys are. I don’t know. I’ll wear something of yours. All right, love you, too, cutie. Kisses, bye.”

  Neecey hung up the phone, closed the back door, shut and locked the kitchen window, and went upstairs. And I just slid down the wall onto my butt again to let it all sink in.

  FOURTEEN

  I’d always heard there were moments in life when things you didn’t understand suddenly lined up and came together—all the different pieces gravitated mysteriously into place like the last few Cheerios at the bottom of the cereal bowl—and then, bam, everything that confused you made sense, the lights came on, the fog lifted, you could see things for what they were, and everything was clear and easy to grasp and almost too goddamn simple to believe. After Neecey had left and I’d gone back up to my room, it struck me that what I’d experienced beneath the kitchen-sink window was definitely not one of those moments. If I’d learned anything new from overhearing Neecey’s conversation with Cynthia, it wasn’t all that much, and what little I’d learned didn’t seem very different from the little I’d known before.

  It was different, though; everything was different. And as I began to hash it all out, I realized it was a hell of a lot worse than I’d ever imagined. I’d already known that Neecey had changed—her behavior, her choice of friends, her absence from home, her sniveling stool pigeon complicity with mom. But what I hadn’t known was that she’d changed because of Darren. Not only had she acted as his messenger after he’d stolen my bike, but now she also did what he told her to do, so he wouldn’t “cut her off.” It gave me an empty, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach because I knew Marlowe had already seen the same damn thing in Farewell, My Lovely: in between real and false sightings of the mountainous Moose Malloy and getting sapped in the back of the head like four or five times, Marlowe had found Marriott’s killer by delving into the shadowy realms of juju, tea, American hashish, marijuana—“the stuff.” And, as was almost always the case for some screwed-up head case of a gorgeous chick in Marlowe’s investigations, it was a trail that ended in tears.

  Yeah, I knew the whole damn story like the back of my own hand, and I should’ve seen it coming from the very first play Fucking Darren had lured Neecey away from Gary to draw her into his sordid world of drugs and crime. She was probably hooked by now, close to full-blown addiction, and because Darren had gotten her pinned so tightly under his thumb, he’d started using her as a mule. I was so pissed off at Neecey that I wanted to drag her up and down the stairs by her hair and beat some fucking sense back into her. But she was still my sister, and she must’ve been strung out something awful to let herself get used like that. Shit, she probably spent most of her time wandering around in a drug-induced stupor, drinking beer in the mornings to dull the edge and lighting up again at night, being forced to run packages for a scummy dope lord, and maybe being forced to do other things, too.

  I fought to stay calm. I sat Thrash on my desk chair and noticed how different his face looked now. His eyes were fixed and glistening, his smile was fiendish and determined, and although his tongue just hung there like it always did, it almost looked like he was licking his lips. I felt it, too; I was finally on the right track. I took my key chain out of my pocket, unlocked the side drawer of my desk, took out my journal, and flipped through the pages. There it was: Darren had said that he’d been with most of the crew on Saturday night at the church, meaning that some of the other members had been somewhere else.

  I felt unsteady, so I sat down on the edge of my bed with my journal in my lap. I knew it was only a matter of time before we’d lose Neecey completely to the ruinous clutches of the underworld, and it was up to me to bring her back. My head shook side to side as I heaved a long, heavy sigh. I couldn’t help it. I felt bad for Neecey and really down about where she was headed. I realized she must’ve been reading my journal to find out what I knew about the case so she could keep Darren a step ahead of my investigation and make sure that it never got off the ground. Yeah, that was totally fucking pathetic, but that was just a sign of how far it’d gone, what she’d been reduced to.

  I had to keep reminding myself that that
wasn’t my sister—it was the drugs. And as bad as that was, and it was pretty goddamn bad, the same exact thing could happen to just about anyone who didn’t say no the first time and every time, or who didn’t know when to say when was when. Shit, it’d happened to Sherlock Holmes—he went on long cocaine binges, closed all the curtains at 221B Baker Street, shot himself up with a seven percent solution of the white, and freaked out for days on his violin. No, that wasn’t any kind of way for a man of his substance to live, but in a way, it’d happened to Marlowe, too. Christ, now that I thought about it, Marlowe spent so much time with a bottle that sometimes you’d think he was still teething.

  Whatever. Everybody knew there was nothing rougher or harder to stomach than being a detective. Most of the time you just wound up finding out the most goddamn terrible things, things you’d never wanted to think or know about in the first place. But it came with the territory, that was the job, and now that I was a detective, I’d have to start getting used to it, too. My only hope was that it wasn’t too late for Neecey, that there was something left of her to save, that dickless Darren hadn’t already turned her all the way into a junkie slut. The rain finally came in the late afternoon, exploding from the sky like a downward stream. Fat blasts of lightning dazzled the blackened clouds, a low mean thunder rumbled through town like herds of rhinos stampeding across sheet metal, and the raindrops themselves were so big and solid and round that they bounced like marbles off the street. The wind whipped and gusted for hours on end, gutters flooded, trees swayed and groaned, and I was confined to indoors for the rest of the day.

  But that was fine by me because I needed every minute to come up with a plan. Neecey had let it slip that she and Cynthia were going somewhere around eight tonight to deliver the stuff and set up, and that they wanted to look hot when they got there. That meant a party, and since Darren had told me that his parents were out of town this week, the party would most likely be at his place, on the reservoir. So what I had to do wasn’t exactly the same as putting a tail on Neecey, it was more like beating her to the spot and cutting her off at the pass.

  Not like it was going to be some kind of cakewalk either. The fastest way to Darren’s lair was to take the trail at the southeast corner of the mall parking lot, which led uphill to a barbed-wire fence that separated mall property from the big, undeveloped chunk of woods on the western edge of the reservoir. Once I got through the woods, I’d have to hang a right and walk along the banks until I got to Darren’s, then stealth up through the trees and bushes in his backyard until I got close enough to his house, find a good place to conceal myself (maybe in the shrubs near the pool), stake the joint out, wait for the right moment, grab hold of Neecey, and drag her out of there, kicking and screaming if I had to.

  The hard part would be getting her alone at a high-school party, because she’d be mingling, talking, drinking, dancing, or whatever else, and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, because I wasn’t invited, and there’d be at least a couple people there who meant me nothing but harm and might take my crashing their party as an opportunity to give me some. Plus, I’d be out of my territory, out-manned, outnumbered, and if everything hung together the way I thought it would, there was a good chance that I could run up against the kind of high-school football players who were nasty and violent and known for dangling smaller kids by their ankles, just so they could laugh when their faces turned red and then gave them black eyes and bruised ribs by way of thanks for the entertainment.

  No doubt about it, the situation was gonna be fraught with all manner of peril, but I knew I could do it if I had the right plan. And I already knew I’d have a few things working in my favor. The first was the element of surprise. Nobody in the entire world would ever expect me to crash a kegger on a Wednesday night. Not Neecey not Darren, not nobody. Second, I’d had plenty of practice hiding where no one could see me, laying low, keeping quiet, and just watching things unfold, thanks to Manning the Lookout, and I had more than enough guidance on how to run a stakeout from the detective books I’d read. When Marlowe went on a stakeout or cased a joint, he walked you through it, step-by-step, like the layout of the place, where he hid and why, how to get a good view of things, or how to open a door latch or window lock with a penknife, or how to circle back to make sure you weren’t being followed, and all the rest. The pointers I needed from him weren’t all in one place, though, but spread out across his books, so I spent a couple of hours combing through each of Marlowe’s cases, finding what was helpful, taking notes, and studying up to get myself as ready for any and everything as I possibly could.

  And then there was the last thing I had working in my favor. I could go off. The fuse was fast and the package small, but the blast-radius was enormous. All I had to do was guide and control it. No, it probably wasn’t enough to take on two high-school football players and seven graffiti-dropping stoners and tap-dance on all of their noses, but it might just be enough to get Neecey and me out of a tight scrape. That was, if it even came to that. I might not be able to get her alone or creep up close enough to snatch her out of there, and I had no intention of throwing myself into a meat grinder if she and I weren’t guaranteed of coming out clean and whole on the other end.

  No, the most important thing was to keep a watch on her—what she did, how she did it, who she talked to, whether anything changed hands between her and someone else—because if I didn’t get my chance and couldn’t get through to her tonight, then I wanted to have as much detail as possible when I handed the evidence over to mom tomorrow. Yeah, it would suck all ass to have to drop dime on my own older sister, but this was serious, and I guessed there were times when you just had to rat, to serve the greater good.

  So that was my plan. And it was a pretty good one—simple, straightforward, and not as risky as it could’ve been. All I really had to do was get where I was going and control myself. Not because grandma had made me promise to, but because the case itself had left me no choice.

  What I needed now was something to wear. I couldn’t go with the white shorts and light blue T-shirt I had on, because I wouldn’t be able to sneak up on a blind kid if I looked like the Boo-Berry Ghost flitting hauntingly through the night. But I had something else in mind. For Halloween last year I’d gone as a ninja assassin, and I still had the black drawstring pants and matching long-sleeved shirt hanging in the back of my closet. I got some scissors and cut the pants just under the knees to long shorts (it was summer after all), but I cut the sleeves to one-quarter length for a different reason. With all the push-ups and pull-ups I’d been doing, my arms had gotten knotty and hard, and it wasn’t a bad idea to dangle them for whoever I might bump into, and maybe flex them a little for them to see, so they’d realize that I was not only crazy enough, which everybody already knew, but now also strong enough to do some serious fucking damage. I needed every edge I could get, and brandishing the guns during a standoff might be one of them.

  All right, so the guns were .22’s and not .45’s, but there was nothing I could do about that, and I’d need to sport them anyway, because tonight I’d be all on my own. I’d be running, climbing, slinking, scurrying—maybe even rappelling, shit, who knew—and with all that constant movement, I couldn’t afford to weigh myself down with any excess bulk, or allow the rustle of a backpack to broadcast my every change of direction. I had to go in clean, slick, unencumbered, and that meant Thrash had to stay home. I didn’t know how to break it to him, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. He lived for shit like this.

  Thrash wouldn’t be the only one taking the night off. If I could get to Neecey and pull her out of there, the Cruiser would really come in handy in helping us make swift tracks. Only thing was, there was nowhere to park it while I’d be trying to fetch her. There was no way in hell I could leave the Cruiser in the mall parking lot unattended at night, not even for a few minutes, let alone a couple of hours, and the fence around the reservoir was like the Bermuda Triangle of bikes—sure, you could take one in there and l
ock it up to the post, but that’s the last you’d ever see of it. No, whatever happened, I couldn’t take a chance on losing the Cruiser, so tonight it would be the shoe leather express or nothing. That way, if I ever made it back to this place, there’d be at least one thing worth coming back to.

  Downstairs in the toolbox there was a tiny screwdriver, the kind used for fixing eyeglasses, which I rummaged for and pulled out. It was just long and thin enough to jimmy a window latch between the panes or to depress the catch of a locked doorknob, and I might have to do one or the other or both, so it was coming with me. We also had a pocket flashlight, really more of a penlight, and I got fresh AA batteries from the refrigerator, put them in, and made sure the pen-light worked, because you never knew when you’d need to see something in the dark.

  I went upstairs to the hall closet, where we kept the towels and some of the outdoor stuff, and got the travel-sized bug spray. I’d be by the water, near the woods, not too long after dusk; it had rained a lot today, and it was still August, so that meant mosquitoes, probably swarms of them. I put everything in my pockets—the tiny screwdriver, the penlight, the bug spray—and found that the ten-dollar bill mom had left on the kitchen counter for pizza had somehow gotten in there.

  I didn’t remember taking it, but I put it in the top drawer of my desk with the other one. Yeah, I’d doubled my loot, but I’d also doubled my duty—the safety of grandma and Neecey depended on me earning every single cent in that drawer, all on my own, without any aid or help. But that’s what being a detective was all about. I turned and searched the back of my closet for the sneakers mom had bought me a few months ago, the ones I’d hidden away and hoped we’d both forget about. They were the worst knock-off indoor soccer shoes you’d ever seen, so cheap and crappy that they looked like they’d come from a sale of irregular goods at the ninety-nine-cent store. I’d had no intention of ever wearing them, because you had to draw the line somewhere. But they were black, and with black sneakers, black shorts, and a black shirt I’d be so perfectly camouflaged for a night by the woods that I wouldn’t even be able to see myself. So I laced them up.