There’s a moment of silence. If not for the faint sound of traffic wherever Pete is, Hodges might have thought he’d broken the connection. Then the boy starts talking again, the words spilling out in a waterfall.
“He was there when I got there. The man with the red lips. He told me Mr. Halliday was in the back, so I went into his office, and he followed me and he had a gun and he tried to kill me when I wouldn’t tell him where the notebooks were. I wouldn’t because . . . because he doesn’t deserve to have them and besides he was going to kill me anyway, I could tell just by looking in his eyes. He . . . I . . .”
“You threw the decanters at him, didn’t you?”
“Yes! The bottles! And he shot at me! He missed, but it was so close I heard it go by. I ran and got away, but then he called me and said they’d blame me, the police would, because I threw a hatchet at him, too . . . did you see the hatchet?”
“Yes,” Hodges says. “I’m looking at it right now.”
“And . . . and my fingerprints, see . . . they’re on it because I threw it at him . . . and he has some video discs of me and Mr. Halliday arguing . . . because he was trying to blackmail me! Halliday, I mean, not the man with the red lips, only now he’s trying to blackmail me, too!”
“This red-lips man has the store security video?” Holly asks, bending toward the phone. “Is that what you mean?”
“Yes! He said the police will arrest me and they will because I didn’t go to any of the Sunday meetings at River Bend, and he also has a voicemail and I don’t know what to do!”
“Where are you, Peter?” Hodges asks. “Where are you right now?”
There’s another pause, and Hodges knows exactly what Pete’s doing: checking for landmarks. He may have lived in the city his whole life, but right now he’s so freaked he doesn’t know east from west.
“Government Square,” he says at last. “Across from this restaurant, the Happy Cup?”
“Do you see the man who shot at you?”
“N-No. I ran, and I don’t think he could chase me very far on foot. He’s kind of old, and you can’t drive a car on Lacemaker Lane.”
“Stay there,” Hodges says. “We’ll come and get you.”
“Please don’t call the police,” Peter says. “It’ll kill my folks, after everything else that’s happened to them. I’ll give you the notebooks. I never should have kept them, and I never should have tried to sell any of them. I should have stopped with the money.” His voice is blurring now as he breaks down. “My parents . . . they were in such trouble. About everything. I only wanted to help!”
“I’m sure that’s true, but I have to call the police. If you didn’t kill Halliday, the evidence will show that. You’ll be fine. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go to your house. Will your parents be there?”
“Dad’s on a business thing, but my mom and sister will be.” Pete has to hitch in a breath before going on. “I’ll go to jail, won’t I? They’ll never believe me about the man with the red lips. They’ll think I made him up.”
“All you have to do is tell the truth,” Holly says. “Bill won’t let anything bad happen to you.” She grabs his hand and squeezes it fiercely. “Will you?”
Hodges repeats, “If you didn’t kill him, you’ll be fine.”
“I didn’t! Swear to God!”
“This other man did. The one with the red lips.”
“Yes. He killed John Rothstein, too. He said Rothstein sold out.”
Hodges has a million questions, but this isn’t the time.
“Listen to me, Pete. Very carefully. Stay where you are. We’ll be at Government Square in fifteen minutes.”
“If you let me drive,” Jerome says, “we can be there in ten.”
Hodges ignores this. “The four of us will go to your house. You’ll tell the whole story to me, my associates, and your mother. She may want to call your father and discuss getting you legal representation. Then we’re going to call the police. It’s the best I can do.”
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 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—”