“Don’t you ever,” I said, my voice shaking, “ever try to . . . use my friend like that, you fuck.” I grasped the baton hard enough to whiten my knuckles, hard enough to hurt, because I was afraid that if I didn’t, if I wasn’t fully paying attention to what I was doing, I might find myself beating Pelham Greer to a bloody pulp in his own apartment. Rage, a deep red vein of it, pulsed in my brain.
“Hey, look,” Greer said. There was a wariness in his face now, a look like I’m dealing with a lunatic here. “I’m not trying to use anyone, okay? I’m just, I just know something. Something about Fritz.”
I stared down at him as I continued to grip the baton. “Bullshit,” I said.
“I’m not lying,” he said.
“Prove it.”
Greer touched his lips with the tip of his tongue. He started to say something and then swallowed the words.
“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to sound dismissive. Instead, my voice was a husky croak. Deliberately I relaxed my grip on the baton and switched it to my left hand so I could reach into my pocket for my phone. It was time to call Briggs.
“Kevin Kelly,” Greer blurted out. “Kevin Kelly knows.”
I looked down at Greer, incredulous, the phone forgotten in my hand. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Kelly knows. He knows where Fritz is.”
I slowly replaced my phone in my pocket. “Kevin Kelly who used to go here?”
Greer nodded. “That’s him.”
The Nazis. That’s what Kevin Kelly had called me and Fritz when we were fourth formers and he was a year behind us. I stared down at Greer, who was looking both desperate and hopeful. “How do you know him?”
A pause. I could practically hear the wheels spinning in Greer’s head. “He gets me the stuff,” he finally said.
“Stuff? He’s your . . . supplier?”
Greer nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. What the hell does that have to do with Fritz?”
“Last fall, we met to—to handle a delivery,” Greer said, awkwardly. “This was after you came by my apartment. Kelly asked about you. He remembered you from when he was here. I told him you had asked about Fritz, and how we had talked about him disappearing. He laughed and said he knew where Fritz was. Saw him last spring. He was keeping that as insurance, he said. He was all pleased with himself about it. Like he got a bang out of knowing something other people didn’t.”
He stopped, looking up at me like a student hoping that his excuse was being bought. For my part, I wanted to sit and catch my breath. Actually I wanted to lie down, to be inert for a while. Kevin Kelly knows where Fritz is kept going through my head. He knows where Fritz is. It was as if my sense of hope had been lost deep in a cave and had just lit a match.
“Where is Kevin Kelly?” I asked. “Where does he live?”
“Outside Charlottesville,” Greer said. “I always meet him at a house outside of town, anyway.”
“You drive?”
Greer nodded. “In my van. I’ve got hand controls. One thing Blackburne did for me, I’ll say that for them. Got me that van.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“Because you’re going to take me to him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Watching Greer drive was a bit like watching a pilot at the helm of a spaceship in a low-budget sci-fi flick. Chunky plastic boxes with red-and-green lights and dials surrounded the steering wheel, turning it into a cockpit area. The driver’s seat had been removed, allowing Greer in his wheelchair to enter the van in the back via a lift and then roll straight forward to the steering wheel. On either side of the wheel, mounted on small posts that rose from the floor, sprouted a trio of vertical handles, each wrapped in black foam, arranged in a triangle with the point facing forward. Now, as we pulled out of the parking lot by the gym, each of Greer’s hands grasped the foremost handle, the other two handles surrounding his wrists. He glanced once at me as we drove down the Hill toward the lions. “Freaks people out, first time they see me drive,” he said conversationally.
“I like being able to see your hands,” I said. “Make sure you don’t have any other batons.”
He turned his head to look at me. “Yeah, ’cause I’d be trying to bash you in the face with one while I’m driving.” He smirked and turned back to the road. “Thought you were supposed to be smart.”
It had taken a bit of doing to convince Greer to take me to Kevin Kelly, but when I pointed out that the police would be very interested in his taped confession of selling drugs to students, he agreed to drive me. The trick was that I needed to tell Briggs, but I didn’t want to call and have a conversation Greer could overhear. So when Greer rolled into his van and was out of sight, I texted Briggs and told him that Greer was taking me to his supplier, who apparently knew something about Fritz. Briggs immediately texted back that I should just go ahead with what we had planned: make a citizen’s arrest on Greer so he and I could take Greer to a state police station. I replied by texting Briggs to follow us and shoved my phone into my pocket before climbing into Greer’s van. The phone had buzzed three times since then, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t want Greer to know Briggs would be following us—I’m not sure why, other than some half-assed idea of keeping an ace up my sleeve.
We rolled past the lions, Greer applying the brakes with a squeeze of a handle to bring the van to a stop at the road. I purposely did not look to our right, where I knew Briggs was in his truck about a hundred yards away.
Greer turned right onto the state road. “So where are we going?” I asked.
“Like I said, a place outside Charlottesville.” He glanced at me. “It’s not far, don’t worry.”
And then we were driving on, past empty fields and stands of trees, a distant yellow square indicating the lit window of a house. We were easily half a mile from the lions, but I saw no sign of Briggs’s truck. I wondered if he had driven off, fed up with me ignoring his calls and deviating from the plan. A knot of anxiety tightened in my chest. This is not a good idea, said a voice inside my head, but I shut it off as best I could. I thought about taking out my phone to text Briggs, but Greer kept glancing at me.
“He’s not going to want to talk to you, you know,” Greer said.
I shifted in my seat. “I’ll worry about that,” I said. “Just drive.”
“Not going to be happy with me bringing you to his house, either.”
“I think he’ll like me coming up there better than the state police.”
Greer snorted. “So, what, you’ll just go up and ask him where Fritz is?”