Crazy Dangerous (20 page)

“Yeah, but I never . . .”

“And it had your fingerprints on it.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know . . .”

“Now you and this Mr. Macintyre—they tell me the two of you are known to have had a fight recently, yes?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

Detective Sims held up the finger again. “And as I understand it, Mr. Macintyre and his friends beat you up pretty severely.”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing . . .”

“You know what the word
motive
means, don’t you, Sam?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“Let me use it in a sentence for you so I’m sure you understand,” said the snowman detective, still smiling away. “Sam Hopkins got beaten up by Harry Macintyre, so Sam’s motive for murdering Harry was revenge.”

There was an explosion of horror inside me. “I didn’t murder Harry Mac!” I nearly shouted the words, the idea was so scary. “I wouldn’t murder anybody.”

“So what exactly were you doing at the barn with a dead body and a gun?” asked the detective.

“I already explained that to the officers who brought me here.”

“Well—now explain it to me.”

So I did. I told him how Jennifer had had a hallucination about demons and then I had had a dream and then the Bible had mentioned dreams and I’d remembered how I’d seen the tree and the lake and I went there because Jennifer said something terrible was going to happen and Harry Mac was in a box there and got killed.

When I finished talking, there was a long, long silence. Detective Sims tapped his fingertips together. He went on smiling. His bushy eyebrows bounced up and down on his round, bald snowman head.

“That’s your story?” he asked me finally.

“That’s what happened!” I insisted.

“A crazy girl had a hallucination about demons and whatnot. Then you had a dream. And it all came true.”

“Well . . . Yeah! Basically. Yeah,” I said. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. Was it really possible the police could think I’d killed Harry Mac?

Detective Sims nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s your story then.” He reached for the black folder and drew it closer to him. He opened it and scanned the top page inside. “Now let me tell you another story,” he went on. “We’ll see which one sounds more plausible. In my story, Jeff Winger and Harry Macintyre and Ed Polanski are a gang of thieves. They steal cars and burgle houses, then deliver the swag to a crew in Albany, who sell it off and give them a piece of the profits. Jeff brings you in and starts giving you lessons on how to be a thief too. But somehow you and Harry Mac have a falling-out, and Harry convinces the others to cut you out of the action. They give you a beating and send you on your way. So you decide to get your revenge on Harry, hoping the others will let you come back into the crew. So this morning at approximately eleven o’clock, you abducted Harry Mac. You took him to the barn. And you shot him dead.”

I opened my mouth to try to answer him, but I couldn’t. It felt like there was something blocking my throat. All I could think about was getting taken off to jail. Charged with murder! Locked up for life! I just sat there with my mouth hanging open.

Finally, my dad spoke for me in his usual quiet, serious, and thoughtful way.

“Detective Sims,” he said, “you can see my son was struck very hard on the back of his head, can’t you?”

“Yes, of course I can, but . . .”

My father did to the detective what the detective had done to me: he held up a silencing finger. “You must know he couldn’t possibly have done that to himself.”

“Well, no, but . . .”

“So that means you know someone else was in the barn with him.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“Someone who must’ve abducted Harry Mac because at the time he was abducted, my son was in church, reading in front of the entire congregation.”

Detective Sims shrugged. “Okay. So maybe he had an accomplice who did the actual kidnapping, but . . .”

My father’s serious face creased with a small, quiet smile of his own. “Only you know that’s not true, don’t you, Detective?”

This time the detective didn’t answer at all. He went on smiling as before, but I could tell that, behind his smile, he was annoyed.

I watched almost without breathing. What was Dad talking about? Why was he making the detective mad?

“You knew my son was hanging out with Jeff Winger,” my father went on in the same quiet tone. “You knew Winger and his thugs beat my son up. That’s the sort of thing you might have heard around town. But you also knew Winger gave my son lessons in breaking locks and stealing cars. That’s inside information. I’m guessing you had an informant in Winger’s gang, someone who was talking to you about the whole thieving operation.”

“Reverend Hopkins . . . ,” Detective Sims began.

“I’m guessing that informant was Harry Mac,” my father said.

For the first time, Detective Sims stopped smiling. His cheeks turned red—just slightly, but I could see it. And his eyes got dark too. He still looked like a snowman, but now he looked like a really, really angry snowman.

And I was thinking:
What? Harry Mac? An informant? How did my dad figure that out?

“You know what the word
motive
means, don’t you, Detective?” my dad said then. “Let me use it in a sentence so I’m sure you understand: Harry Mac was informing on Jeff Winger and Ed Polanski, so Winger wanted to shut him up and that was his motive for killing him.”

My dad and Detective Sims sat looking at each other through another long silence.

And now the horror inside me was almost instantly transformed into hope. I realized what had happened, what my dad had done. And I thought,
Whoa! Dad! Bring it on!
My dad was a better detective than the detective.

Finally, Detective Sims cleared his throat. “I’m not saying your son acted alone. But his fingerprints were on the gun and . . .”

“My son was knocked unconscious, Detective,” my father said. “Anyone could have wrapped his hand around that pistol. In fact, why knock him out in the first place unless you wanted to do exactly that?”

“Wanted to do exactly what?” said Detective Sims.

“Frame my son for murder,” said Dad. “I mean, if my son had fired that gun, wouldn’t there be powder residue on his hands? Blood-spatter stains on his shirt? Did you find anything like that?”

Again, Detective Sims didn’t answer. And again, I thought:
Whoa, Dad!
Powder residue? Blood-spatter stains? Where’d he learn about that stuff? My dad never even watched cop shows on TV.

And Dad said, “My son couldn’t have been there to abduct Harry Mac—he was in church at the time. And he obviously didn’t fire the gun that killed him. That pretty much leaves my son’s version of events as the only plausible version there is.”

Detective Sims looked at my father across the table and said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

Now my dad turned to me. “Sam, do you have anything else you want to tell the detective?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said. “I told him everything I can think of.”

My father’s chair scraped against the floor as he pushed back from the table and stood up. He was so tall, he looked to me like his head was going to brush the ceiling. He looked down—way down—at Detective Sims.

“Are you going to arrest my son?” he asked.

I held my breath as I waited for Detective Sims to answer. After what seemed to me the longest silence of all, the detective finally said, “No. No, not today. But if he gets in any more trouble—if he even gets in my way—we’re going to take up this issue again. I may not have him on murder—not yet. But I’ve got enough to charge him with being part of Winger’s gang.”

“Except you know he wasn’t,” my father said. “Because Harry Mac was your informant, and he told you what happened.”

Detective Sims didn’t answer.

“Well, in that case, I’m taking him home,” said my father. Then to me he said, “Let’s go, Sam.”

Believe me, he didn’t have to tell me twice.

18
Prophets and Madmen

I followed my father out of the interrogation room into the detective room—and there was Jeff Winger.

The detective room was a windowless office with lots of flyers and papers pinned to bulletin boards along the wall. There were three gray desks crowding the floor. There was a detective sitting behind one of the desks, talking on the phone. At another desk, there was a detective tapping at a computer. Jeff was sitting next to him.

Jeff was in handcuffs. He looked totally miserable. His head was hanging down and his weaselly eyes weren’t darting around every which way like they usually did. They were just staring at the floor.

Until I came in, that is. When Jeff heard the interrogation room door open, he looked up. He saw me at the same time I saw him. He stared at me—and his eyes looked so dark and so unhappy, I actually felt sorry for him even though he’d beaten me up. He didn’t have a dad to get him out of trouble—and he was in a lot of it.

I paused for a minute and just stood there looking at Jeff as he looked at me. Then my father stopped walking. He turned back and took hold of my arm.

“Come on, son,” he said.

And I left the detective room with my dad as Jeff Winger sat there in handcuffs, watching me go.

I kept my mouth shut until Dad and I were in the Passat, driving out of the police station parking lot.

“Dad!” I said then. “That was so awesome! That was so cool! You turned that detective guy inside out! He never knew what hit him!”

“Well,” said my father quietly. “Then that makes two of us.”

I was about to say something else, but my mouth fell shut with a snap. I hadn’t really had time to think about how all this had seemed to my father. Me running off without telling anyone. Getting in more trouble over Jeff Winger without saying anything to him. And it was real trouble this time too. This wasn’t just some fistfight out by the side of the road. Harry Mac was dead! Murdered. And for a minute there, before my dad unleashed his death-ray intellect on Sims, I was feeling like I was the prime suspect.

“Listen, Dad, I’m really sorry. I’m, like, the worst son ever. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, no, no,” said my father, holding up his hand as he drove. “I can see what happened. I’m not sure you did exactly the right thing, but I can see you didn’t do anything actually wrong—not as far as I can tell anyway.”

I was quiet then, thinking about everything that had gone on. The Passat cruised down a tree-shaded lane of houses. It was Sunday quiet out there, the lawns and sidewalks empty, no one in sight. The afternoon sun shone through the late-winter branches, sending patches of light and shadow over the windshield.

“How could it happen?” I said after a while. “How could Jennifer’s hallucination come true?”

My father shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think . . . ?”

I couldn’t find a way to put it into words, so after a minute my dad glanced at me. “Do I think what?”

“Well, do you think Jennifer might be some kind of, like, prophet or something?”

“A
prophet
?” He repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. “What do you mean?”

“Well, there are prophets in the Bible, right? People who had visions about what was going to happen . . .”

My dad gave an unhappy sort of laugh. “Well . . . I think the prophets in the Bible were just very wise people who knew how to listen to God in their hearts and who understood that actions have consequences.”

“But the prophets did have visions, didn’t they?”

“Yes, some of them.”

“So, I mean, isn’t it possible that Jennifer could be somebody like that? I mean, maybe her mom is taking her to the doctor and giving her medicine and whatever, and really she’s fine—she’s just seeing visions of things that haven’t happened yet.”

I watched my father as he thought this over. The corner of his mouth turned up in a smile as he drove, but it was a very sad smile, I thought.

“Listen, Sam,” he said finally. “Jennifer is a sick girl. She has a mental disorder and she’s having hallucinations. How those hallucinations managed to get you to that barn just as Harry Mac was being murdered—well, that I don’t know, but . . .”