Finders Keepers (43 page)

Red Lips answers immediately. “Hello, Peter.” He sounds calmer now. In control. That could be good or bad for his plan. Pete can't tell which. “Have you got the notebooks?”

“Yes. Is my sister okay?”

“She's fine. Where are you?”

“That's pretty funny,” Pete says . . . and when you think about it, it actually is. “Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet.”

“I'm in no mood for cryptic humor. Let us do our business and be done with each other, shall we? Where are you?”

“Do you remember the Saturday Movie Palace?”

“What are you—”

Red Lips stops. Thinks.

“Are you talking about the Community Room, where they used to show all those corny . . .” He pauses again as the penny drops. “You're
here
?”

“Yes. And you're in the basement. I saw the car out back. You were maybe ninety feet from the notebooks all along.” Even closer than that, Pete thinks. “Come and get them.”

He ends the call before Red Lips can try to set the terms more to his liking. Pete runs for the kitchen on tiptoe, shoes in hand. He has to get out of sight before Red Lips can climb the stairs from the basement. If he does that, all may be well. If he doesn't, he and his sister will probably die together.

From downstairs, louder than her ringtone—
much
louder—he hears Tina cry out in pain.

Still alive, Pete thinks, and then, The bastard hurt her. Only that's not the truth.

I did it. This is all my fault. Mine, mine, mine.

51

Morris, sitting on a box marked
KITCHEN SUPPLIES
, closes Tina's phone and at first only looks at it. There's but one question on the floor, really; just one that needs to be answered. Is the boy telling the truth, or is he lying?

Morris thinks he's telling the truth. They both grew up on Sycamore Street, after all, and they both attended Saturday movie-shows upstairs, sitting on folding chairs and eating popcorn sold by the local Girl Scout troop. It's logical to think they would both choose this nearby abandoned building as a place to hide, one close to both the house they had shared and the buried trunk. The clincher is the sign Morris saw out front, on his first reconnaissance: CALL THOMAS SAUBERS REAL ESTATE. If Peter's father is the selling agent, the boy could easily have filched a key.

He seizes Tina by the arm and drags her across to the furnace, a huge and dusty relic crouched in the corner. She lets out another of those annoying cries as she tries to put weight on her swollen ankle and it buckles under her. He slaps her again.

“Shut up,” he says. “Stop being such a whiny bitch.”

There isn't enough computer cord to make sure she stays in one place, but there's a cage-light hanging on the wall with several yards of orange electrical cord looped around it. Morris doesn't need the light, but the cord is a gift from God. He didn't think he
could be any angrier with the thief, but he was wrong.
Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet,
the thief had said, and what right did he have to reference John Rothstein's work? Rothstein's work was
his
.

“Turn around.”

Tina doesn't move quickly enough to suit Morris, who is still furious with her brother. He grabs her shoulders and whirls her. Tina doesn't cry out this time, but a groan escapes her tightly compressed lips. Her beloved yellow blouse is now smeared with basement dirt.

He secures the orange electrical cord to the computer cord binding her wrists, then throws the cage-light over one of the furnace pipes. He pulls the cord taut, eliciting another groan from the girl as her bound hands are jerked up almost to her shoulder blades.

Morris ties off the new cord with a double knot, thinking, They were here all along, and he thinks that's
funny
? If he wants funny, I'll give him all the funny he can stand. He can die laughing.

He bends down, hands on knees, so he's eye to eye with the thief's sister. “I'm going upstairs to get my property, girlfriend. Also to kill your pain-in-the-ass brother. Then I'm going to come back down and kill you.” He kisses the tip of her nose. “Your life is over. I want you to think about that while I'm gone.”

He trots toward the stairs.

52

Pete is in the pantry. The door is only open a crack, but that's enough to see Red Lips as he goes hustling by, the little red and black gun in one hand, Tina's phone in the other. Pete listens to the echo of his footfalls as they cross the empty downstairs rooms, and as soon as they become the
thud-thud-thud
of feet climbing the stairs to what was once known as the Saturday Movie Palace, he
pelts for the stairs to the basement. He drops his shoes on the way. He wants his hands free. He also wants Red Lips to know exactly where he went. Maybe it will slow him down.

Tina's eyes widen when she sees him. “Pete!
Get me out of here!
”

He goes to her and looks at the tangle of knots—white cord, orange cord—that binds her hands behind her and also to the furnace. The knots are tight, and he feels a wave of despair as he looks at them. He loosens one of the orange knots, allowing her hands to drop a little and taking some of the pressure off her shoulders. As he starts work on the second, his cell phone vibrates. The wolf has found nothing upstairs and is calling back. Instead of answering, Pete hurries to the box below the window. His printing is on the side:
KITCHEN SUPPLIES
. He can see footprints on top, and knows to whom they belong.

“What are you
doing
?” Tina says. “Untie me!”

But getting her free is only part of the problem. Getting her out is the rest of it, and Pete doesn't think there's enough time to do both before Red Lips comes back. He has seen his sister's ankle, now so swollen it hardly looks like an ankle at all.

Red Lips is no longer bothering with Tina's phone. He yells from upstairs.
Screams
from upstairs. “
Where are you, you fucking son of a whore?
”

Two little piggies in the basement and the big bad wolf upstairs, Pete thinks. And us without a house made of straw, let alone one made of bricks.

He carries the carton Red Lips used as a step to the middle of the room and pulls the folded flaps apart as footfalls race across the kitchen floor above them, pounding hard enough to make the old strips of insulation hanging between the beams sway a little. Tina's face is a mask of horror. Pete upends the carton, pouring out a flood of Moleskine notebooks.

“Pete! What are you doing? He's
coming
!”

Don't I know it, Pete thinks, and opens the second carton. As he adds the rest of the notebooks to the pile on the basement floor, the footfalls above stop. He's seen the shoes. Red Lips opens the door to the basement. Being cautious now. Trying to think it through.

“Peter? Are you visiting with your sister?”

“Yes,” Peter calls back. “I'm visiting her with a gun in my hand.”

“You know what?” the wolf says. “I don't believe that.”

Pete unscrews the cap on the can of lighter fluid and upends it over the notebooks, dousing the jackstraw heap of stories, poems, and angry, half-drunk rants that often end in mid-thought. Also the two novels that complete the story of a fucked-up American named Jimmy Gold, stumbling through the sixties and looking for some kind of redemption. Looking for—in his own words—some kind of shit that means shit. Pete fumbles for the lighter, and at first it slips through his fingers. God, he can see the man's shadow up there now. Also the shadow of the gun.

Tina is saucer-eyed with terror, hogtied with her nose and lips slathered in blood. The bastard beat her, Pete thinks. Why did he do that? She's only a little kid.

But he knows. The sister was a semi-acceptable substitute for the one Red Lips
really
wants to beat.

“You
better
believe it,” Pete says. “It's a forty-five, lots bigger than yours. It was in my father's desk. You better just go away. That would be the smart thing.”

Please, God,
please
.

But Pete's voice wavers on the last words, rising to the uncertain treble of the thirteen-year-old boy who found these notebooks in the first place. Red Lips hears it, laughs, and starts down the stairs. Pete grabs the lighter again—tight, this time—and thumbs up
the top as Red Lips comes fully into view. Pete flicks the spark wheel, realizing that he never checked to see if the lighter had fuel, an oversight that could end his life and that of his sister in the next ten seconds. But the spark produces a robust yellow flame.

Peter holds the lighter a foot above the pile of notebooks. “You're right,” he says. “No gun. But I did find this in his desk.”

53

Hodges and Jerome run across the baseball field. Jerome is pulling ahead, but Hodges isn't too far behind. Jerome stops at the edge of the sorry little basketball court and points to a green Subaru parked near the loading dock. Hodges reads the vanity license plate—BOOKS4U—and nods.

They have just started moving again when they hear a furious yell from inside: “
Where are you, you fucking son of a whore?
”

That's got to be Bellamy. The fucking son of a whore is undoubtedly Peter Saubers. The boy let himself in with his father's key, which means the front door is open. Hodges points to himself, then to the Rec. Jerome nods, but says in a low voice, “You have no gun.”

“True enough, but my thoughts are pure and my strength is that of ten.”

“Huh?”

“Stay here, Jerome. I mean it.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. You don't happen to have a knife, do you? Even a pocketknife?”

“No. Sorry.”

“All right, then look around. Find a bottle. There must be some,
kids probably come back here to drink beer after dark. Break it and then slash you some tires. If this goes sideways, he's not using Halliday's car to get away.”

Jerome's face says he doesn't much care for the possible implications of this order. He grips Hodges's arm. “No kamikaze runs, Bill, you hear me? Because you have nothing to make up for.”

“I know.”

The truth is he knows nothing of the kind. Four years ago, a woman he loved died in an explosion that was meant for him. There's not a day that goes by when he doesn't think of Janey, not a night when he doesn't lie in bed thinking, If only I had been a little quicker. A little smarter.

He hasn't been quick enough or smart enough this time, either, and telling himself that the situation developed too quickly isn't going to get those kids out of the potentially lethal jam they're in. All he knows for sure is that neither Tina nor her brother can die on his watch today. He'll do whatever he needs to in order to prevent that from happening.

He pats the side of Jerome's face. “Trust me, kiddo. I'll do my part. You just take care of those tires. You might yank some plug wires while you're at it.”

Hodges starts away, looking back just once when he reaches the corner of the building. Jerome is watching him unhappily, but this time he's staying put. Which is good. The only thing worse than Bellamy killing Peter and Tina would be if he killed Jerome.

He goes around the corner and runs to the front of the building.

This door, like the one at 23 Sycamore Street, is standing open.

54

Red Lips is staring at the heap of Moleskine notebooks as if hypnotized. At last he raises his eyes to Pete. He also raises the gun.

“Go ahead,” Pete says. “Do it and see what happens to the notebooks when I drop the lighter. I only got a chance to really douse the ones on top, but by now it'll be trickling down. And they're old. They'll go up fast. Then maybe the rest of the shit down here.”

“So it's a Mexican standoff,” Red Lips says. “The only problem with that, Peter—I'm speaking from your perspective now—is that my gun will last longer than your lighter. What are you going to do when it burns out?” He's trying to sound calm and in charge, but his eyes keep ping-ponging between the Zippo and the notebooks. The covers of the ones on top gleam wetly, like sealskin.

“I'll know when that's going to happen,” Pete says. “The second the flame starts to go lower, and turns blue instead of yellow, I'll drop it. Then,
poof
.”

“You won't.” The wolf's upper lip rises, exposing those yellow teeth. Those fangs.

“Why not? They're just words. Compared to my sister, they don't mean shit.”

“Really?” Red Lips turns the gun on Tina. “Then douse the lighter or I'll kill her right in front of you.”

Painful hands squeeze Pete's heart at the sight of the gun pointing at his sister's midsection, but he doesn't close the Zippo's cap. He bends over, very slowly lowering it toward the pile of notebooks. “There are two more Jimmy Gold novels in here. Did you know that?”

“You're lying.” Red Lips is still pointing the gun at Tina, but
his eyes have been drawn—helplessly, it seems—back toward the Moleskines again. “There's one. It's about him going west.”

“Two,” Pete says again. “
The Runner Goes West
is good, but
The Runner Raises the Flag
is the best thing he ever wrote. It's long, too. An epic. What a shame if you never get to read it.”

A flush is climbing up the man's pale cheeks. “How dare you? How dare you
bait
me? I gave my
life
for those books! I
killed
for those books!”

“I know,” Pete says. “And since you're such a fan, here's a little treat for you. In the last book, Jimmy meets Andrea Stone again. How about that?”

The wolf's eyes widen. “Andrea? He does? How? What happens?”

Under such circumstances the question is beyond bizarre, but it's also sincere. Honest. Pete realizes that the fictional Andrea, Jimmy's first love, is real to this man in a way Pete's sister is not.
No
human being is as real to Red Lips as Jimmy Gold, Andrea Stone, Mr. Meeker, Pierre Retonne (also known as The Car Salesman of Doom), and all the rest. This is surely a marker of true, deep insanity, but that must make Pete crazy, too, because he knows how this lunatic feels. Exactly how. He lit up with the same excitement, the same
amazement
, when Jimmy glimpsed Andrea in Grant Park, during the Chicago riots of 1968. Tears actually came to his eyes. Such tears, Pete realizes—yes, even now,
especially
now, because their lives hang upon it—mark the core power of make-believe. It's what caused thousands to weep when they learned that Charles Dickens had died of a stroke. It's why, for years, a stranger put a rose on Edgar Allan Poe's grave every January 19th, Poe's birthday. It's also what would make Pete hate this man even if he wasn't pointing a gun at his sister's trembling, vulnerable midsection. Red Lips took the life of a great writer, and why? Because Roth
stein dared to follow a character who went in a direction Red Lips didn't like? Yes, that was it. He did it out of his own core belief: that the writing was somehow more important than the writer.