“You should.” Low. Coaxing and reasonable. “Think about it, Peter. With you out of the picture, Andy’s murder looks like an attempted robbery gone wrong. The work of some random crackhead or meth freak. That’s good for both of us. With you in the picture, the existence of the notebooks comes out. Why would I want that?”
You won’t care, Pete thinks. You won’t have to, because you won’t be anywhere near here when Halliday is discovered dead in his office. You said you were in Waynesville, and that makes you an ex-con, and you knew Mr. Halliday. Put those together, and you’d be a suspect, too. Your fingerprints are in there as well as mine, and I don’t think you can wipe them all up. What you can do—if I let you—is take the notebooks and go. And once you’re gone, what’s to keep you from sending the police those security DVDs, just for spite? To get back at me for hitting you with that liquor bottle and then getting away? If I agree to what you’re saying . . .
He finishes the thought aloud. “I’ll only look worse. No matter what you say.”
“I assure you that’s not true.”
He sounds like a lawyer, one of the sleazy ones with fancy hair who advertise on the cable channels late at night. Pete’s outrage returns and straightens him on the bench like an electric shock.
“Fuck you. You’re never getting those notebooks.”
He ends the call. The phone buzzes in his hand almost immediately, same number, Red Lips calling back. Pete hits DECLINE and turns the phone off. Right now he needs to think harder and smarter than ever in his life.
Mom and Tina, they’re the most important thing. He has to talk to Mom, tell her that she and Teens have to get out of the house right away. Go to a motel, or something. They have to—
No, not Mom. It’s his sister he has to talk to, at least to begin with.
He didn’t take that Mr. Hodges’s card, but Tina must know how to get in touch with him. If that doesn’t work, he’ll have to call the police and take his chances. He will not put his family at risk, no matter what.
Pete speed-dials his sister.
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“Hello? Peter? Hello? Hello?”
Nothing. The thieving sonofabitch has hung up. Morris’s first impulse is to rip the desk phone out of the wall and throw it at one of the bookcases, but he restrains himself at the last moment. This is no time to lose himself in a rage.
So what now? What next? Is Saubers going to call the police despite all the evidence stacked against him?
Morris can’t allow himself to believe that, because if he does, the notebooks will be lost to him. And consider this: Would the boy take such an irrevocable step without talking to his parents first? Without asking their advice? Without warning them?
I have to move fast, Morris thinks, and aloud, as he wipes his fingerprints off the phone: “If ’twere to be done, best it be done quickly.”
And ’twere best he wash his face and leave by the back door. He doesn’t believe the gunshots were heard on the street—the inner office must be damned near soundproof, lined with books as it is—but he doesn’t want to take the risk.
He scrubs away the blood goatee in Halliday’s bathroom, careful to leave the red-stained washcloth in the sink where the police will find it when they eventually turn up. With that done, he follows a narrow aisle to a door with an EXIT sign above it and boxes of books stacked in front of it. He moves them, thinking how stupid to block the fire exit that way. Stupid and shortsighted.
That could be my old pal’s epitaph, Morris thinks. Here lies Andrew Halliday, a fat, stupid, shortsighted homo. He will not be missed.
The heat of late afternoon whacks him like a hammer, and he staggers. His head is thumping from being hit with that goddam decanter, but the brains inside are in high gear. He gets in the Subaru, where it’s even hotter, and turns the air-conditioning to max as soon as he starts the engine. He examines himself in the rearview mirror. There’s an ugly purple bruise surrounding a crescent-shaped cut on his chin, but the bleeding has stopped, and on the whole he doesn’t look too bad. He wishes he had some aspirin, but that can wait.
He backs out of Andy’s space and threads his way down the alley leading to Grant Street. Grant is more downmarket than Lacemaker Lane with its fancy shops, but at least cars are allowed there.
As Morris stops at the mouth of the alley, Hodges and his two partners arrive on the other side of the building and stand looking at the CLOSED sign hanging in the door of Andrew Halliday Rare Editions. A break in the Grant Street traffic comes just as Hodges is trying the bookshop door and finding it unlocked. Morris makes a quick left and heads toward the Crosstown Connector. With rush hour only getting started, he can be on the North Side in fifteen minutes. Maybe twelve. He needs to keep Saubers from going to the police, assuming he hasn’t already, and there’s one sure way to do that.
All he has to do is beat the notebook thief to his little sister.
34
Behind the Saubers house, near the fence that separates the family’s backyard from the undeveloped land, there’s a rusty old swing set that Tom Saubers keeps meaning to take down, now that both of his children are too old for it. This afternoon Tina is sitting on the glider, rocking slowly back and forth. Divergent is open in her lap, but she hasn’t turned a page in the last five minutes. Mom has promised to watch the movie with her as soon as she’s finished the book, but today Tina doesn’t want to read about teenagers in the ruins of Chicago. Today that seems awful instead of romantic. Still moving slowly back and forth, she closes both the book and her eyes.
God, she prays, please don’t let Pete be in really bad trouble. And don’t let him hate me. I’ll die if he hates me, so please let him understand why I told. Please.
God gets right back to her. God says Pete won’t blame her because Mom figured it out on her own, but Tina’s not sure she believes Him. She opens the book again but still can’t read. The day seems to hang suspended, waiting for something awful to happen.
The cell phone she got for her eleventh birthday is upstairs in her bedroom. It’s just a cheapie, not the iPhone with all the bells and whistles she desired, but it’s her most prized possession and she’s rarely without it. Only this afternoon she is. She left it in her room and went out to the backyard as soon as she texted Pete. She had to send that text, she couldn’t just let him walk in unprepared, but she can’t bear the thought of an angry, accusatory callback. She’ll have to face him in a little while, that can’t be avoided, but Mom will be with her then. Mom will tell him it wasn’t Tina’s fault, and he’ll believe her.
Probably.
Now the cell begins to vibrate and jiggle on her desk. She’s got a cool Snow Patrol ringtone, but—sick to her stomach and worried about Pete—Tina never thought to switch it from the mandated school setting when she and her mother got home, so Linda Saubers doesn’t hear it downstairs. The screen lights up with her brother’s picture. Eventually, the phone falls silent. After thirty seconds or so, it starts vibrating again. And a third time. Then it quits for good.
Pete’s picture disappears from the screen.
35