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  “Nothing really, except you forgot to add that the rest of the crew had been at the retirement home, dropping a wank tag on the sign out front, making it look like amateur bullshit on purpose.”

  Darren’s lips curled dismissively.

  “Yeah, I have to give it to you,” I went on, “it was a brilliant plan. Pulling two jobs at different places across town from each other on the same night, one that you’d intended to claim as your own work, and one that you’d intended to pass off as somebody else’s. That way nobody would ever dream of linking the two, nobody would connect the dots and figure out that the tag on the church was just a decoy, an alibi that seemed to place you guys somewhere else. And although nobody saw your hit on the church, you sure as hell made a point of telling everybody about it.”

  Darren slowly folded his arms across his chest. “Ah-ight, you got my full-on attention, little dude. What else?”

  I could tell he was playing the role of the underworld crime boss like a salty old veteran, and that I had to match him stride for stride without letting it rattle me. “I’ll tell you what else,” I snarled. “How about the reason you guys needed that alibi in the first place?”

  He nodded.

  “Not only the church, but the whole goddamn kaboodle of tags you and the crew have been dropping this summer have all just been a cover to divert attention away from the real crimes you’ve been committing, crimes that’ve been going on at the retirement home for over a month now.”

  “What crimes?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” I’d cleared him back a couple of steps and was pacing in front of the sofa now. “The real crime was swiping cash from old folks at the retirement home, weak and harmless seniors who’d forgotten to lock their windows at night.”

  “Someone’s been jacking the retirement home?” For a second Darren’s concern almost seemed genuine.

  “Don’t act so shocked, okay?” I fired back. “You already know all about it.” I was still hurting and wobbly, but it felt like the cobwebs were clearing from my head and the whole plot was laid out before me now, down to the smallest details. “Once you and your buds had broken in the first time and seen how easy it was, you realized you’d struck the mother lode of free loot and wanted to draw from the well again and again. But you knew you couldn’t get away with it forever, unless you played it smart, and by planting a fake tag on the sign at the scene of the burglaries, you’d made it look like there were some other vandals on the loose in town, to shift suspicion away from yourselves and throw the authorities off your trail.”

  I was picking up steam now; I felt it. “Yeah, you’d thought your plan had worked and steered everybody away from what you were really up to, even the cops who’d come to your house on Sunday morning to hassle you about it. But since you’re better than David Copperfield when it comes to deceiving people, you lied to the fuzz, dodged the heat, and thought you were in the clear. Then I showed up at the arcade on Monday and questioned you about the sign at the retirement home, too, and you started to think again.”

  Darren’s face had stiffened and his eyes were squinting.

  “But that’s when you remembered that you’re the leader of a gang, the kind of arch criminal who has the clout and the connections to hire a couple of toughs like Razor and Tommy to rub someone out of the picture if he wanted to. And that someone was me.”

  “I know, I’m like all fiendish and shit,” Darren jibed, cracking a smile. “But riddle me this, McScruff. If Razor and Tommy are like my hit squad and all, then why did I just totally waste one of them while I was getting your back?”

  “Because you weren’t getting my back. You just jumped at the chance to make it look like you were, to put a wall of distance between you and your henchmen for everyone to see.”

  Darren smiled wider and nodded his head.

  “And with Razor and Tommy out of the picture, nobody would be able to trace any of their deeds back to you. No fucking way. Not the sweet lullaby you’d sent me at football tryouts, or having ordered Razor over to our house to try to root out what Neecey knew about me being on to you, just in case she needed a little roughing-up, too. And when that didn’t work, you’d opted for a more direct route and convinced Neecey to read my journal, to see exactly how close I was getting.”

  I put my hand up, cutting Darren off before he could speak. “Yeah, I know how you got my sister strung out on drugs and alcohol and took complete advantage and were using the shit out of her. That’s why I followed her here tonight—I came to get her away from you and all your bullshit.” I sighed loudly, slowly shaking my head. “Even the stupidest pushers know that nobody ever suspects a hot chick, and that’s exactly what makes hot chicks perfect to cart contraband or payoffs wherever they need to go. Jesus, it was a foul, nasty business, coldly calculated from beginning to end, but that’s all you ever wanted her for.”

  “Sounds like you got the angles all figured out.”

  “You can bet your ass I do, and it all starts with the simple fact that somewhere along the line you lost control. You went from being a petty vandal and small-time toker to a full-blown addict with a monkey on your back, so you had to start selling what little weed you didn’t burn to make ends meet. But your habit was too big by then and too expensive and you couldn’t pay off your suppliers and you had to turn to more serious forms of crime to get yourself out of their debt. So you tapped Neecey as your beard and carrier and started stealing from the retirement home and then dropped a shitty-ass tag on the front sign to try to cover it up. Drugs and money and sex—that’s what all of this was about. Then again, that’s what it’s always about.”

  Darren, still smiling, flipped his hair back and sat down on the sofa on the opposite side of the room. “Proof, little dude. You said you had proof.”

  “I do. One of the perpetrators dropped a black rubber bracelet by the sign at the retirement home, and I have it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Where?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s in a safe place. And when I hand it over to the cops tomorrow and they find out that the fingerprints on it belong to you, or one of your boys, you’re gonna be in a dickload of trouble.”

  The room went quiet—cemetery quiet. Now was the time for him to break down and confess, so I stood there stony silent and waited for it.

  Finally, Darren shrugged and said, “Yeah, maybe. Except for when the cops find out that the bracelet doesn’t belong to any of us, little dude, ’cause none of us were there.”

  I’d expected a lowlife like Darren to try to lie his way out of it, but it was the way he’d said it, relaxed, unconcerned, that threw me off. But I wasn’t gonna let that or a blatant fucking falsehood stand in my way.

  “Oh, that’s right, what the hell was I thinking?” I poured it on. “If you say you’re innocent, then you must be. Jesus Christ! What kind of chump do you take me for?”

  “Seriously, little dude.” He spoke calmly, his brown eyes steady on me. “Me and most of the crew hit the church on Saturday night, just like I told you, nothing else. And I said ‘most’ of us because Roni stayed home to babysit his little sis. We been totally raggin’ on him about it since then, too.”

  He still seemed so unfazed that what he’d just said didn’t even sound like a lie. I started to feel unsteady, confused, as if the aftershock of the head blows I’d suffered were kicking in. I knew Roni had a younger sister, two grades below me, and that the crew mocked him all the time for treating her like a princess. I began to think maybe I’d shown my hand too soon, and that it might be better to play along for a second so I could hit him from another direction.

  “All right, let’s just pretend you guys didn’t tag the sign at the retirement home. Fine, we’re pretending. But if you didn’t do it, then who did?”

  “Like I told you the other day, little dude, I don’t know who did it.”

  “Horseshit.”

  “Sincerely,” he insisted. “It’s like I got an idea
who did it, but—”

  “Oh, you have a suspect? Why didn’t you just say so? Who?”

  “Well, the smart money’s on Razor, bro-ski. I totally thought you’d fingered him for the perp yourself, and that’s why you bum-rushed his package like you did.”

  “Razor?” It was so preposterous I almost laughed. But it only went to prove what I already suspected, that Darren was trying to play me for a chump. That was his game, but I wasn’t gonna let on that I knew it just yet. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, still pretending. “He’s never been a tagger before, so why would he try to be one now?”

  “Anybody’s guess,” he prevaricated. “But in the past few weeks he’s been more amped and aggro than ever. Sticky says there’s a rumor going around that he’s been copping cycles with Tommy for when football starts next week, which would totally explain it and shit—”

  “Wait. Cycles? What’s that?” I asked.

  “Juice, little dude.”

  “Juice?”

  “Shee-it.” He sucked his teeth and shook his head. “You need to get out more. Juice is steroids, mini man.”

  “Steroids?” I’d heard the whispers in town about steroids before—how they made you bigger, stronger, faster, hornier than a dump truck full of toads, and prone to fits of uncontrollable rage. And those whispers only got louder and more specific when it came to starters on the high-school football team, especially star players like Chuck and Easy. “Tommy Sharpe does steroids?” I asked.

  Darren pulled his face back a little, staring at me quizzically. “Dude, tell me you didn’t get a look at him while he was thumping your skull? Nobody goes from being the Pillsbury Doughboy to like the One Man Gang in two months without juice. Nobody.”

  I’d gotten a good look at Tommy Sharpe all right, more of him than I’d ever wanted to see in fact, and the kid was pretty much a monster. But I’d gotten several good looks at Razor, too, and he was just as bony as ever. “If Razor’s taking steroids like Tommy, then why the hell is he still so skinny?”

  “No clue. They work faster for some people than for others, and you’re supposed to pump crazy iron to get the max results and shit. Tommy’s been doing weight training with the team all summer, but Razor hasn’t because he’s been too busy talking smack about how he’s gonna quit and all. So maybe that’s it. Or maybe he hasn’t been taking them as long.”

  I wondered what the hell made Darren such an authority on steroids; then again, if there was one thing he knew about, it was drugs. “So you’re telling me that Razor tagged the sign at the retirement home because he’s on steroids?” The question sounded stupid even as it came out of my mouth.

  “Like I said, little dude, I can’t say for sure. But maybe he’s the one boosting cash from the home, too, to front for his juice and shit, and he tagged the sign to make it look like we’d been doing it.”

  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. There was too much new information, too many unforeseen twists to the story. Worse still, some of it was actually starting to make sense. I held my ground, though, and pushed back in the other direction. “Well, that’s it, then. Razor tagged the sign at the retirement home to conceal the fact that he’s been stealing money from there to pay for the steroids he’s taking that have had no visible effect on him whatsoever. While you’re at it, why don’t you try to sell me a bridge in the desert, because I’m not buying that shit either.”

  “You can like buy it or not, I’m just telling you what I heard.” Darren paused, fingering his pukka bead choker. “All’s I know is that ever since he figured out he’d be surfing pine this season, Razor’s been telling everybody he’s gonna quit the team and acting like full-on ass-ness to everyone. That kid’s always been twisted,” he added, “but throw a little juice into that mix and he’d be bringing the chaos for real.”

  “Like I really give two shits about Razor’s behavioral history,” I said.

  “Like who does? I’m just trying to tell you why I think he did it and shit.”

  “It’s called a motive,” I specified, “and if you’re gonna conjure one up for Razor out of thin air, then you damn well better dazzle me with it.”

  “Conjure?” Darren laughed. “Dude, no matter how much Razor says he’s gonna quit football, he totally can’t. He’s roughed up too many younger brothers and sisters of kids in high school, and he’ll be dead meat on his own without his jock buds getting his back. Nobody rocks the mic solo in the big HS and lives to tell about it, little dude,” he declared. “You gotta roll deep twenty-four-seven, or your ass is destined for toast. It’s like a natural law and shit.”

  “So you really expect me to believe that Razor’s become this out-of-control menace because he’s a confused, unlikable kid who doesn’t know where or how to fit in? That is the weakest shit I have ever fucking heard.”

  “Stow that mess, little dude. People’ve told you the same thing like a million times and shit.”

  Okay, maybe they had. But I knew we were talking about Razor, not me, so I wasn’t gonna let him befuddle me into thinking otherwise. From what I knew about the hit at the retirement home, however, I could see that it wouldn’t necessarily take two people to pull it off, if the one person who’d done it happened to have a moped, like Razor did. All he’d have to do is stand on top of the seat, commit the crime, and then crank the engine and be gone. Worse still, a different picture of all the crimes was rapidly forming in my punch-addled head, a picture that had a spoiled and desperate Razor stealing money from the home to pay for steroids to up his chances on the football team, tagging the front sign to try to steer the blame toward Darren and the crew, coercing Stacy into easing his supercharged hormones, and breaking the window at the black church because he was a sleazy, bigoted juice-hound who was losing every single bit of his perverse and feeble mind.

  Then again, I wasn’t certain about any of it. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was starting to doubt some of the conclusions I’d drawn. “So what if Razor did it?” I shifted ground. “He’s still working for you anyway.”

  “Sorry to disappoint, little dude, but that’s a negative, too. Me and the crew have zero tolerance for buzz assassins like Tommy and Razor. Besides, ever since Razor dropped by your casa the other day to try to press up on your sis, he and I have had beef.”

  Maybe that’s why Neecey had stonewalled me; it was exactly the kind of thing that would’ve set me off. The tables were turning hard and fast. I had to try to swing them back in my favor. “All right, if all that’s true, and you’re not lying to me, then why the hell didn’t you do anything about it? And if you have such beef with him, then what were Razor and Tommy doing at your party tonight?”

  “Dude, I said I thought Razor did it, but that I didn’t know for sure. And since nobody actually saw him do it or can like prove it or anything, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. You can’t just go accusing people because you don’t like them and shit.”

  I realized Darren had aimed that last part at me, but it hit the mark anyway.

  “And I didn’t invite them to the soiree either, little dude,” he went on, “they just bogarted it. But since they did, me and your sis were getting in Razor’s eye, like putting the heat on him and getting some payback for trespassing and trying to take liberties and all. But that’s when you came jetting in and dive-bombed his gonads and shit. By the way, that was fucking awesome,” Darren laughed. “Beyond bitchin’, little dude. Seriously.”

  He leaned forward as far as he could from his seat on the sofa and stretched his hand toward me for a high five. I must’ve had a concussion or something, because I actually found myself starting to lean in that direction when the sound of Neecey’s voice snapped me back.

  “Don’t you even dare, Genie! And what are you like high-fiving him for, Darren?”

  Darren seemed every bit as shocked to discover that Neecey had been eavesdropping on our conversation from the other side of the door as I was. “I told you it was cool, Neece,” he said
, frowning. “You didn’t have to go all dippin’.”

  “Well, he’s my brother, and I’m like so glad I did or I never would’ve heard all the totally wrong and heinous things he just said about us.”

  I was pissed and worried that Neecey had heard everything, but she’d given me an opening, maybe my last, so I jumped on it. “Oh, yeah? If they were so heinous and goddamn wrong, then why don’t you tell me about ‘the stuff’? I heard you talking about it on the phone myself, and how Darren would cut you off if you didn’t bring it. And you haven’t even tried to deny it.”

  “Du-uu-ude,” Darren groaned, “don’t. Trust me.”

  “You cannot be serious,” Neecey hissed. “‘The stuff you think I was supposed to be all smuggling or whatever was party decorations.”

  No, that was not the answer I’d been looking for. I shifted my eyes nervously to Darren.

  He shrugged again, almost apologetically this time. “Yeah, little dude, it’s not a righteous party without the favors. And since you guys live closer to the supermarket, I fronted Neecey some ducats to pick the stuff up and bring it over, while me and the crew were out cashing in some solids to land the beverages.”

  “The stuff was party decorations?” I asked meekly.

  “To like ease your mind and shit,” Darren offered, “I score the cheeba from my cousin in Holmdel, totally free of charge. He grows it under a black light in his closet—”

  “Darren.”

  “Steady, Neece, it’s not like an invitation or anything. I’m just saying, is all.”

  “Well, don’t, not in front of him. He’s only twelve.”

  “Nuh-unh,” I mumbled, “I’m almost thirteen.”

  “Duh!” Neecey sniped. “Almost thirteen is twelve, Genie. And you’re like only twelve years old but you’re already a complete psycho who’s been left back for decking a teacher, and now you’re turning into this way scary stalker who eavesdrops on people and totally follows them, too. And that’s not funny, Genie, that’s serious.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, mostly because I was trying to figure out just how serious this was going to get.