Blood Sports (28 page)

Tom sat at one of the computers in the back, surfing the Internet for anything he could find on Rusty Letourneau. There were a lot of Letourneaus, and it took him a few tries to find the man he’d killed. Rusty’s real first name was Robert. His face, smooth and unbroken, stared back at him from a mug shot. He had wavy, black hair and a receding forehead that had formed a deep V. His eyes were not as blue in the mug shot as they were in Tom’s dreams. His nose bulged at the tip. He had missed an arraignment hearing. He had a failure to appear charge on top of assault with a weapon and attempted robbery. Crime Stoppers offered two thousand dollars for information leading to an arrest. Letourneau was born in June and would have been twenty-four. He’d beaten a gas attendant with a crowbar when he found out the till only had eight dollars. Stills from the gas-station security cameras showed Letourneau bent over the counter, wailing on a clerk. Tom printed the mug shot.

He found pictures of Robert’s father, Jack Letourneau, on www.gangwars.com. Sunglasses covered Jack’s eyes as he bent his head over a casket, hands clasped in front of him. Tom wrote
down the name of his chapter and then hunted until he found an address. He couldn’t find the name of Robert’s mother.

The condo was quiet when he woke. Tom heard footsteps coming close to the laundry room. He stiffened. The door swung open and light from the hallway made him squint. Jeremy waited.

“It’s getting to the point where I’m afraid to start the dishwasher without checking if you’re sleeping there,” Jeremy said.

Tom swallowed, trying to breathe as quietly as he could.

Jeremy opened the dryer. “I know you’re in here,” Jeremy crossed the room and opened the closet. “I heard you shouting.”

Tom cringed as Jeremy’s feet approached the wheeled laundry hampers. Jer shoved them aside and lifted off the sheets Tom had covered himself in. Tom stood sheepishly.

“There was a guy in my room,” Tom said. “And some girls.”

“You never sleep in your bed. You’re under it, you’re under a table, you’re in a cupboard. And you just keep getting weirder.” Jeremy pulled a crumpled-up piece of paper out of his back pocket. He unfolded it and held it in front of Tom’s face.

Tom had hidden the mug shot under his mattress. He snatched it back.

Jeremy grabbed Tom in a headlock. “What are we going to do with you, hey?” Jeremy noogied him. “You suicidal retard. What were you planning to do? Confess?”

“I wouldn’t say who I was,” Tom said.

“You didn’t bump his fender, Tom. You can’t leave a note on his windshield saying hi, there! Sorry I killed your kid.”

“Let go.” Tom yanked at Jeremy’s arms and Jeremy tightened his grip.

“You’re wasting your God-given talent for guilt on Rusty.”

“Jeremy, let go.” Tom tried pulling out of the headlock and kicking.

“Let’s be logical. Did you go out and hunt Rusty down and plan to kill him?”

“No.”

“What was he doing in your apartment?”

Tom stopped fighting.

“Did he come to sell you Girl Guide cookies? Was he holding a Bible and asking you if you found God?”

“Jeremy. If my kid was missing –”

“You dumb-ass,” Jeremy said. “They don’t think he’s missing. They think he jumped bail.”

“That’s not the point.”

“No, the point is if you tell Daddy Letourneau anything, he is going to kill you. Slowly. Painfully.”

“I want to do something.”

“Saint Tommy, martyr of the freaks,” Jeremy said. He let him go, and Tom tried to walk away. Jeremy shoved him into the wall. He stood in front of Tom with his arms crossed. “I’m serious. Drop this.”

Tom stared at his shoes.

Jer gripped Tom’s arm above the elbow and led him down the hallway to the kitchen. A tall, muscle-bound man with hair shaved down to his scalp poured himself a coffee. He was wearing navy sweats, a navy rain jacket, and so-white-they-must-be-new sneakers.

“Hiding in the fucking laundry room,” Jer said. “It’s embarrassing to be related to you, Tom. What do you think I should do with him, Firebug?”

“You’re wasting your time trying to impress those whiny freeloaders,” Firebug said, turning around. “You could get three houses for what you paid for this.”

“You have no vision,” Jeremy said. “Branch out, my friend. I can cut you in on some sweet deals.”

“Counting is your responsibility. Yours,” Firebug said. “Not some drooling, snot-nosed fuck-for-brains.”

“He means you,” Jer said.

Tom wished Jer would let go of his arm.

“Tommy-boy knows how to keep his mouth shut,” Jer said.

“It’s your funeral,” Firebug said.

“Come on,” Jer said, leading him up the stairs to his bedroom. He picked up a duffle from the floor and zipped it open. “Every once in a while, some moron pays us with party packs.” He dumped the contents onto the bed. A riot of five, ten, and twenty-dollar bills swirled and fluttered as Jer shook them loose. Change spilled on the sheets, on the carpet, over their shoes. “I think they had a bake sale to pay this guy’s debt.”

Tom stared at the money pile. Jer’s watch beeped.

“Make yourself useful. Separate and stack the bills into their denominations. I don’t want to deal with the coins. Keep that. We’ll call it your count fee.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Tom said.

“Want to know where it came from?” Jer said.

“No,” Tom said.

“Smart boy.”

“Don’t try tackling the whole quadratic equation at once, Tom,” Dude said, his tone the aggressively patient one people used when they were talking to morons. “Work in sections. All you’re
working with are binomials. You can handle binomials, can’t you?”

Tom fingered the edges of his red-marked practice mid-term. Dude was a volunteer tutor in his mid-twenties with a shoulder-length shaggy haircut and some kind of facial smudge in the shape of a teardrop under his lip and a line of hair framing his jaw.

“Tom?” Dude said.

“I’m listening,” Tom said.

The tutor didn’t sigh, but he wore a stoic expression, as if he was a friend who was going to give you a ride home after a party even though he was really tired. Dude repeated the lesson slowly. Dude had a funny name, something vegetable-y, rutabaga or radicchio-sounding. Tom had taken to calling him Dude at first because he could never remember Dude’s name, and then because it pushed Dude’s buttons. Dude was supposed to be helping him prep, but Tom loathed the practice exercises.

“Maybe this would work better if you could tell me what part you’re having trouble with?” Dude said.

Busted. Dude had been talking, but all it sounded like was wacka, wacka, wacka, carry the two, wacka, wacka. “Maybe it would.”

Dude went squinty as a no-name cowboy in a dusty, lawless town at high noon.

“Try,” Dude said, “to focus. All righty?”

“Did you just say ‘all righty’?”

Dude lost his patient smile. “Maybe we should call it a day.”

When Dude walked away, Tom rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palm. He felt heavy, sluggish, and unsure of what to do with the rest of the day. The clouds were low and dull, the rain steady as a pulse.

Tom was wearing his headphones, the Walkman turned up loud and all the lights in his room turned on. He rummaged through the opened books on his bed, sending paper drifting down to the floor. He caught movement and froze as Jeremy opened the door. Tom put his headphones around his neck.

“I said knock, knock,” Jeremy said. He hesitated.

Behind him stood a tall, slender woman in a blue dress that looked like the hem had been caught in a blender and shredded. She put one hand on her hip as she strolled in behind Jeremy, and Tom half-expected her to do a catwalk swivel. Typical of Jer’s women, she was flawlessly lovely. But they usually had less attitude and were much younger. Sometimes they lasted a week, the longest had lasted a month.

“This is Lilia,” Jeremy said.

“Hi,” Tom said, not getting up.

Lilia didn’t bother to look over. She picked up a snow globe his mother had given him for Christmas, examined it, and put it down, wiping her fingers on her thigh.

Charming, Tom thought.

“Does he live here?” Lilia said.

“Yes,” Tom said. “I do.”

“Lilia’s going to help me cheer you up.”

“This room is hideous,” Lilia said.

“Then be glad it’s not yours,” Tom said. “And get out.”

“I refuse to work in here,” Lilia said.

“We’ll go into the living room,” Jeremy said, yanking Tom up. “Come on, upsy-daisy. Let’s get you laid.”

When her face came close, Lilia went slightly cross-eyed, not a woman who closed her eyes when she kissed. Her mouth tasted
like cinnamon gum. Tom couldn’t stop glancing at Jer, at the big-screen
TV
that showed him and Lilia together on the couch.

“Don’t look at the camera,” Jer said.

Lilia had a Hitler moustache over her clitoris; a black rectangular thatch, red goosebumps on the curve of her pubis, the skin swollen and angry. She had four scars running across her stomach, long and shiny smooth. She grabbed his wrist when he tried to touch them.

“Don’t,” she said.

Tom saw his hand on the screen, saw the camera focus in tight on Lilia’s scars. Jer leaned forward, his face obscured by the camera’s light.

“Let him touch you,” Jer said.

Lilia paused for a coke break and Jer said nothing, waiting. The camera never left her scars, traced them lovingly as she breathed.