Luckily I was two blocks down, saw it, and that was the end of Kithser bothering my brother. I could’ve taken him down without hurting him much. Steroid muscle is useless muscle for the most part. But with drug dealers, bullies, perverts, and what else oozed about, you needed to make an impression. A thoroughly broken nose did that and was essentially harmless in the long run. Kithser had never seen a drop of his own blood in his life until then, I could tell. Most bullies haven’t.
And Cal helpfully kicking him in the b— testicles when he was down and rolling around screaming about his nose hadn’t done much for his pride either. Kithser had paid attention to the lesson and he hadn’t come back to our street. So I’d thought.
Or maybe someone had gone over to his street instead.
Expectant eyes slanted up at me in a rainwater gaze. Now I’d see the truth. No way to avoid it. Not even I could ignore this. “You know the killer got him. Right, Nik?” You’re not an oblivious idiot anymore, are you? Because worrying about keeping you alive is getting to be a chore. I could see all those thoughts spinning under the dark hair.
I rested a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. His bones were thin and light under my fingers. Fragile. Breakable. A spun glass version of a brother. I hoped for that growth spurt soon. A knife and some hand-me-down martial art moves from the dojo wouldn’t always be enough.
“Maybe,” I answered, noncommittal. “He leads a bad life. Lots of trouble.” Missing a week now, the poster said. Not crashing at a friend’s place then. “But . . . maybe.”
Cal blew a random strand of hair out of his eyes and rolled up the too-long sleeves of his cast-off sweatshirt one more time. “Can we get pizza after?”
I’d already ripped the stapled poster free. I’d done it completely without thought and stared at it with a combination of dread and curiosity. What was I doing? “After what?” I asked, distracted.
Picking up his skateboard, Cal tucked it under his arm and nodded at the paper. “After you go around the neighborhood asking stupid questions about Kithser.”
“How do you know that’s what I’m going to do?” Bemused at his sudden psychic ability to know what even I hadn’t known, I folded the missing poster in half.
“Because that’s you. Good.” He had an expression of patient resignation on his face that I knew was identical to the one I wore when I was cleaning up his SpaghettiOs and soda handprints in the kitchen. “Just . . . good. You can’t help yourself. You don’t want to get someone in trouble if they don’t deserve it. You know, in case the weirdo next door is a butcher.” There was a heavy load of sarcasm on the word butcher.
“Wouldn’t you want the same benefit of the doubt?” I knocked lightly on top of his head. “Although all the trouble you get in you almost always deserve,” I added with exasperated affection.
Cal was stubborn and getting him off topic wasn’t easy at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times. “You’re right, Nik. He is a butcher. But he butchers people, not cows.” That’s when the glow that hung in the air faded and the sun was only the sun again. The wizard behind the curtain was just a man, possibly one with an inhuman grin and huge, serrated knife dripping blood.
By then Cal was already walking toward our rental, done trying to convince me. There was work ahead and he wanted it over with as soon as possible. “Bible or crutches?”
We’d learned a few techniques from watching Sophia. She could work an entire block in twenty-five minutes lifting valuables to be fenced later and she had a routine that didn’t fail often. It was difficult to get into a house to talk to and scam suspicious neighbors in our crumbling section of town. It helped to have one of two things.
“The Bible or the crutches?” Cal asked again. “And what about the pizza?”
“The crutches,” I decided. The Bible worked less and less for Sophia. It seemed people were as upset by pushy Christians knocking on their door as much as they were the possibility of a home invasion. “Yes, pizza, but vegetarian. You need some vegetables. Otherwise you’ll turn into a can of SpaghettiOs.”
“Okay, but extra cheese.” Which was remarkably agreeable for a kid who loved pepperoni and any other kind of questionable meat more than life itself. It made me wonder uneasily exactly how bad the smell was to him coming from next door. Was there meat in that basement and was it questionable in a very different way?
I planned to find out.
After retrieving the hard-used crutches, we started canvassing the neighborhood. I went from a fifteen-year-old who looked seventeen to a teenager with a hugely swollen foot and ankle, two pair of socks stuffed with more socks, a pathetic limp, and a solemn-eyed little brother holding a box of cookies he could only be selling for school. Granted it was an empty box, another prop and victim of Cal’s appetite, but it would get the job done.