I had no reply, mostly because this was essentially my plan.
Sometime in the past half hour the cloud cover had begun to fray and tatter, revealing the silver-white coin of the moon. Beyond the headlights, I could see snowy fields and hillsides glow with a milky translucence. Trees forked up from the ground, black claws tearing at the sky. Suddenly I remembered one February night in college, riding in a car out to a party at a country house, and as a joke the driver had turned off the headlights, plunging us into an eerie darkness. A girl in the backseat beside me had shrieked in my ear, and for a moment I had been terrified we would crash into a tree or another car. But there had also been something ghostly and beautiful about driving down the road with only the moon and stars to guide us, almost as if we were flying through the night sky. I felt an echo of that as Pelham Greer drove through the dark countryside toward Kevin Kelly and whatever he knew about Fritz. It felt strangely reassuring, but also ominous.
Soon, however, a sodium glow appeared on the horizon ahead, the lights of I-64. Greer took the on-ramp and headed east through the foothills toward Charlottesville.
I HAD BEEN GLANCING in the side mirrors to see if anyone was following us. I still hadn’t seen Briggs, but he’d been a cop—he was probably good at following people without their knowing it. Or maybe he went home, a voice nagged me in my head. Once I thought I’d seen a pair of headlights behind us before we had gotten on the highway, but no one had followed us onto the on-ramp, and then we were driving through light traffic. I broke down and pulled out my phone to read Briggs’s texts, but as I swiped the screen to unlock it, Greer said, “What the hell you doing?”
“Checking my messages.”
“You’re not calling anybody out here,” he said coldly. “This is you and me going up to his house, no one else. You call anyone and I stop the car right here and you don’t ever find out about your friend.”
I raised a hand, palm out as if warding him off. “Fine, okay,” I said. “Jesus.” But I’d had enough of a chance to see that Briggs had in fact texted me back only once—Where r u—and then the other two times were phone calls, no voice mail messages. I put my phone in my pocket and stared out the window at the passing mile markers. I was alone.
“How’d you hook up with Kelly?” I asked, more to keep my mind occupied than anything else.
Greer screwed up his face, as if tasting something unpleasant. “Showed up out of the blue one weekend about two years ago. Looking for me. I thought he just wanted to feel better about himself, have a beer with the cripple. But it wasn’t like that at all. He had a ‘business proposition’ for me. That’s what he called it. We went outside to the Lawn, away from everybody, and he told me he’d heard I was having problems, headaches and all. He said he was in contact with some medical marijuana groups, could help me out. Gave me a bag right there. I figured out pretty quickly he wasn’t just being generous. Turned out he wanted me to sell for him, on campus. Said I could make a lot of money toward that operation I wanted.” Greer’s lip twitched, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Dude had me figured out to the ground. Don’t know how he learned all that about me.”
I stirred in my seat. “He was like that in school,” I said. “Obnoxious little fucker.”
“He’s more than that,” Greer said. “He’s smart. Acts like this is some sort of chess game, and he’s five moves ahead of everybody else. Pretty soon it wasn’t just pot but oxy, Vicodin, E, even ADD meds. I don’t think I’m the only guy he has out there selling, either. But he seemed to really want me to sell for him.”
Or he wanted someone to sell at Blackburne, I thought. Kelly had been kicked out of Blackburne, I’d heard. If Kelly had been expelled, then I could see why selling drugs to Blackburne students would be particularly appealing to him.
“So, you just . . . pick up drugs from him and then sell them?” I asked.
Greer shrugged. “Basically.”
“And you don’t care that you’re selling to teenagers?”
He glanced at me and then turned his eyes back to the road—he seemed to be looking for an exit sign. “How naive are you, man? They don’t buy from me, they’ll buy from someone else. They all smoke, man. I give them really good product, and I get a cut toward my surgery.”
“So Terence Jarrar was, what, just one of those things that happen?” I asked, unable to stop myself. Part of me marveled at my self-righteousness.
Greer’s jaw tightened, and he opened his mouth as if to reply, but all he said was, “There she is.” I looked ahead and saw an exit sign for Highway 29, and then we were curving off to the right, off the interstate. Orange light hung in the air ahead, a night glow reflecting off the bellies of the overhanging clouds—Charlottesville proper. But Greer was heading south, away from town, and we passed a new subdivision on the left, its inhabitants slumbering peacefully as we drove past into the dark, the hills rising on either side of us cutting off the glow behind.
After several minutes—we had passed a few isolated clusters of older homes and a pair of battered churches—Greer slowed and pulled over to the right shoulder. “Are we here?” I asked, surprised.
“Not yet,” Greer said, leaving the engine idling. He turned to me. “Give me your phone,” he said.
“What? No.”
“You want me to take you to Kelly, I want that phone with the voice recording on it. That’s the deal.”
I hesitated. A car approached from behind us, the headlights shining through the windows on the rear door and washing over Greer’s face so it looked like a skull. The car passed us, and Greer’s face returned to shadow. He held out his hand. “You want to see your friend again?” he said. “Give me the phone.”
I took the phone out of my pocket, making sure to thumb the power button on the top so it turned off. At least the pass code would keep Greer from swiping open the phone. I handed it to him. He dropped it into a chest pocket on his shirt, nodded once, put the van in drive, and pulled back out onto the road.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“He’s off a side road up here somewhere,” Greer said, leaning forward slightly and squinting through the windshield. “Never come up here after dark.” He made a little sighing grunt of recognition and swung the van to the right, onto a narrow road that wound uphill. We passed a field on our left, a few tufts of grass poking up out of the snow, and then we were among trees, the road getting bumpy and the light from the van’s headlights wobbling in and out of the tree trunks.
“How much farther?” I asked again.
“Maybe a quarter of a mile.”
“Stop the van.”
Greer looked at me but then manipulated the hand controls, pulling the van over to the left and bringing it to a gentle stop, the engine idling.
“Turn it off.”
“Why?”