And better than I should do, he thinks, eyeing the mangled corpse and thinking about how close he came to going to jail himself four years ago. For the same kind of thing, too: Lone Ranger shit. But surely another half hour or forty-five minutes can’t hurt. And what the boy said about his parents hit home. Hodges was at City Center that day. He saw the aftermath.
‘A-All right. Come as fast as you can.’
‘Yes.’ He breaks the connection.
‘What do we do about our fingerprints?’ Holly asks.
‘Leave them,’ Hodges says. ‘Let’s go get that kid. I can’t wait to hear his story.’ He tosses Jerome the Mercedes key.
‘Thanks, Massa Hodges!’ Tyrone Feelgood screeches. ‘Dis here black boy is one safe drivuh! I is goan get chall safe to yo destin—’
‘Shut up, Jerome.’
Hodges and Holly say it together.
37
Pete takes a deep, trembling breath and closes his cell phone. Everything is going around in his head like some nightmare amusement park ride, and he’s sure he sounded like an idiot. Or a murderer scared of getting caught and making up any wild tale. He forgot to tell Mr Hodges that Red Lips once lived in Pete’s own house, and he should have done that. He thinks about calling Hodges back, but why bother when he and those other two are coming to pick him up?
The guy won’t go to the house, anyway, Pete tells himself. He can’t. He has to stay invisible.
But he might, just the same. If he thinks I was lying about moving the notebooks somewhere else, he really might. Because he’s crazy. A total whack-job.
He tries Tina’s phone again and gets nothing but her message: ‘Hey, it’s Teens, sorry I missed you, do your thing.’ Beeep.
All right, then.
Mom.
But before he can call her, he sees a bus coming, and in the destination window, like a gift from heaven, are the words NORTH SIDE. Pete suddenly decides he’s not going to sit here and wait for Mr Hodges. The bus will get him there sooner, and he wants to go home now. He’ll call Mr Hodges once he’s on board and tell him to meet him at the house, but first he’ll call his mother and tell her to lock all the doors.
The bus is almost empty, but he makes his way to the back, just the same. And he doesn’t have to call his mother, after all; his phone rings in his hand as he sits down. MOM, the screen says. He takes a deep breath and pushes ACCEPT. She’s talking before he can even say hello.
‘Where are you, Peter?’ Peter instead of Pete. Not a good start. ‘I expected you home an hour ago.’
‘I’m coming,’ he says. ‘I’m on the bus.’
‘Let’s stick to the truth, shall we? The bus has come and gone. I saw it.’
‘Not the schoolbus, the North Side bus. I had to …’ What? Run an errand? That’s so ludicrous he could laugh. Except this is no laughing matter. Far from it. ‘There was something I had to do. Is Tina there? She didn’t go down to Ellen’s, or something?’
‘She’s in the backyard, reading her book.’
The bus is picking its way past some road construction, moving with agonizing slowness.
‘Mom, listen to me. You—’
‘No, you listen to me. Did you send that money?’
He closes his eyes.
‘Did you? A simple yes or no will suffice. We can go into the details later.’
Eyes still closed, he says: ‘Yes. It was me. But—’
‘Where did it come from?’
‘That’s a long story, and right now it doesn’t matter. The money doesn’t matter. There’s a guy—’
‘What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? That was over twenty thousand dollars!’
He stifles an urge to say Did you just figure that out?
The bus continues lumbering its laborious way through the construction. Sweat is rolling down Pete’s face. He can see the smear of blood on his knee, dark brown instead of red, but still as loud as a shout. Guilty! it yells. Guilty, guilty!
‘Mom, please shut up and listen to me.’
Shocked silence on the other end of the line. Not since the days of his toddler tantrums has he told his mother to shut up.
‘There’s a guy, and he’s dangerous.’ He could tell her just how dangerous, but he wants her on alert, not in hysterics. ‘I don’t think he’ll come to the house, but he might. You should get Tina inside and lock the doors. Just for a few minutes, then I’ll be there. Some other people, too. People who can help.’
At least I hope so, he thinks.
God, I hope so.
38
Morris Bellamy turns onto Sycamore Street. He’s aware that his life is rapidly narrowing to a point. All he has is a few hundred stolen dollars, a stolen car, and the need to get his hands on Rothstein’s notebooks. Oh, he has one other thing, too: a short-term hideout where he can go, and read, and find out what happened to Jimmy Gold after the Duzzy-Doo campaign put him at the top of the advertising dungheap with a double fistful of those Golden Bucks. Morris understands this is a crazy goal, so he must be a crazy person, but it’s all he has, and it’s enough.
There’s his old house, which is now the notebook thief’s house. With a little red car in the driveway.
‘Crazy don’t mean shit,’ Morris Bellamy says. ‘Crazy don’t mean shit. Nothing means shit.’
Words to live by.
39