Passenger (10 page)

It was Conner. He was frustrated.

“You’re really not fucking with me, are you, Con?”

“Maybe you’re just stressed about going back to England or something. Did you just wake up? ’Cause you sound fucked up, Jack.”

“You don’t know anyone named Ben and Griffin?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“I’m coming over.”

“Let’s go grab some food or something.”

Or something.

*   *   *

I slipped into a pair of shorts and threw a T-shirt over my shoulder.

When I sat on the edge of the bed so I could get my socks and shoes, I thought about the glasses on the floor.

Maybe he was just fucking with me.

That was something Conner would do.

But not about this.

Never about this.

I switched my phone back on, flipped through my contacts list.

No Ben Miller.

No Griffin Goodrich.

Fuck you, Jack.

I reached under my bed and picked up the glasses. The third lens was swung out from the bigger eyepiece. There wasn’t anything there; nothing living inside the lenses. I put my fingers on the outer monocle. I wanted to flip it into place, just for a second, just so I could prove to myself that I wasn’t insane—that somehow I’d really fucked everything up. Everywhere.

Welcome to Jack’s universe.

I had to put things back where they belonged.

I slid the glasses into my pocket, and their weight almost dragged my shorts down. Maybe Dr. Nobody was right; that I wasn’t eating enough.

Who cared about that, anyway?

I fucked up.

I went into the hallway and slipped out of the house without Stella even noticing I was ever there at all.

seven

I guess it was Jack’s day for black cars.

*   *   *

When I walked across the lawn toward the blot of shade at the curb where I park my truck, a big Cadillac SUV with blacked-out windows and no license plates pulled up and stopped right in front of me.

At first, I figured, with a car like that it was probably someone coming to talk to Wynn and Stella about insurance policies or their investment portfolio, or the kind of stuff that never meant anything at all to me.

But I was wrong.

The guy who got out of the driver’s side stood in the street and watched me as I took out my keys and hit the remote.

I tried ignoring him.

I was so sick of people I didn’t know watching, staring at me. It was like I could feel his eyes pressing into my skin.

And with just one glance, I thought I had him sized up pretty good. He stood there, sucking in his stomach with his hands on his hips. He was one of those edgy grown-ups who’d played football in high school and bragged to his friends about how he goes to the gym every morning, and he probably did part-time coaching for a youth program just so he could yell at kids and tell them what pieces of shit they were.

You see guys like that everywhere in California.

I kept my head down.

The walk seemed to take forever.

How far away did I park my goddamned truck?

But I knew he was going to say something to me.

“How’s it going?”

I stopped.

Shit.

My hand was just touching the door of my truck. I calculated three seconds—if I had left my room just three goddamned seconds sooner, none of this would be happening and I’d be on my way to Conner’s house.

I pretended like I didn’t know the guy was talking to me.

I opened the door and started to get in.

He turned up his football-coach volume just a notch. Edgy. I could tell he thought I was another piece of shit.

“Hey. John? You’re John Wynn Whitmore, right?”

What could I do?

Nobody ever calls me John.

I was wedged inside my open door, one elbow resting on top of the cab. I looked over at the guy, who’d come around and stood in the street between our cars. His face was blank, but as soon as he saw me look at him, he cracked a smile.

“Yeah. My grandparents are in there.”

I nodded my head toward the house, trying to see if maybe the guy really was there to fill out beneficiary forms or some shit like that.

Nice try, Jack.

“I was hoping I’d catch you.”

Catch me.

He closed the space between us, his eyes fixed directly on mine, unblinking, smiling that fake football-coach smile that made me feel like a piece of shit.

Then he put out his hand.

I thought of Quinn Cahill.

And he said, “My name is Sergeant Scott. Avery Scott. I’m a detective with the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s?”

He said it like a question, like he expected me to say,
Okay, you can play that part in this game.

When I didn’t take his hand, he smoothly reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folding wallet with a gold badge and ID card.

“It’s pretty fucking hot today, wouldn’t you say?”

He kept the smile on. He was testing me. He wanted to see if my reaction would show him I thought he was cool for being an old guy who comfortably says words like
fuck
to a sixteen-year-old kid.

“I didn’t watch the Weather Channel today.”

Avery Scott laughed. He reinstalled his nice wallet into his pocket.

“I came out today. Well. I’m looking into a case we’ve got and I was hoping to ask you a couple questions. It has nothing to do with you.”

Sure.

Nothing.

“Am I in some kind of trouble or something?”

“No, no, no!” Scott was a little too exaggerated. “It’s just. Uh. Some background stuff. Do you mind?”

“Shouldn’t my grandparents be around? I mean, if you’re a cop and all, and want to talk to a kid?”

“Seriously, John. You didn’t do anything wrong, son. But if you’d like to go inside, we could talk to your grandparents, too. It’s about this thing you may have heard of. A doctor named Manfred Horvath. People called him Freddie. He was found dead. Not a nice guy.” Scott shook his head. “A fucking sicko. You ever watch the news?”

At that moment, I felt my balls twist their way up, crawling like snails inside my stomach.

Then I was suddenly aware of the sweat dripping down my temples, running from my armpits, playing xylophone on my ribs.

“Sometimes.”

Scott put his hand on the top of my car door. He had curly brown hairs on his fingers and wore a ridiculous class ring with a big green gem in its center.

“This is a sweet truck. You know the thing that’s fucked up about parking under these big oaks? The crow shit.”

Detective Scott pointed a finger at the grapefruit-sized splotch in the center of my truck’s roof, reaching across so he was pinning me in the small triangular space of my open door.

“I guess.”

“So, you want to go inside and we can talk with your folks?”

“Not really.”

“I just want to find a couple things out. Just checking up on stuff. You know, put this thing to rest.” He looked around. He cocked his head. Like a crow. “Hey. I know. Why don’t we sit in my car so I can turn on the air? You look like you’re burning up, John.”

I looked back at the house.

The crows were totally silent.

I felt my knees shaking.

I was so tired.

“Okay,” I said.

*   *   *

Avery Scott wasn’t sweating at all.

He probably bragged about stuff like that to his friends, too.

And I didn’t want to move once I sat down, because I was certain I’d left puddles of wet on his nice black leather seats.

Scott turned the air on high. I didn’t look at him. I watched the little indicator that displayed the outside temperature.

103°

When he pulled his seat belt on, I instantly thought this was it. I was trapped in a car again with some asshole who wants to fuck with me and I didn’t care anymore.

I was tired, and I believed I wanted to die.

“What do you say we get something cold to drink?” Scott laughed a fake football-coach laugh. “I mean, not a cop drink. You don’t drink, do you, John? Well, you don’t look like a kid who’d drink. A Coke or a shake or something. You want that?”

Hell no, I don’t want that. I want to be in my truck, heading to Conner’s house. I want to drive by Ben and Griffin’s so I can see if any of this is real. I want you to leave me the fuck alone. I want none of this to be happening.

I want to go back, but I don’t know where that is anymore.

I sighed.

“Do we have to?”

“Just a drink,” he said. “I’ll have you back in—” He rolled his wrist over. That was stupid. There was a clock the size of a goddamned brick glowing green in the dashboard right in front of his face. “Fifteen minutes. You got somewhere you need to be?”

No, coach. Whatever you say. I’m a piece of shit.

I shook my head and looked at my hands, pressing the legs of my shorts down against my thighs.

“Great! Buckle up, son. I’m buying!”

While we drove through Glenbrook, the cop went on and on and I hardly listened to him at all. He talked about my school—the football team, naturally—and asked if I did any sports. When I told him I ran cross-country, I could tell by the way he inhaled slowly that he was waiting for me to say something else, a different sport—something where boys hurt each other—because guys like Avery Scott don’t consider running to be a “sport.”

I didn’t look out the window when we drove down Main Street past Steckel Park, the lightpost where Conner and I tagged our initials, Java and Jazz.

I knew he was trying to observe what I paid attention to, so I kept my face forward, watching the swirls in the wood paneling on the dashboard. I wondered if it was wood or plastic.

I just thought about the swirls. Strings. Stella’s Russian nesting dolls. And I reasoned that there were all these strings, layers, stacking and stacking in every unimaginable direction; that they were all going through me—
the center of the universe
—and somehow I kept jumping from thread to thread.

I was a needle on a scratched black record.

The glasses, the broken lens, just skipping from channel to fucked-up channel.

And, what Conner wrote on a wall in that other Glenbrook:

THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.

And this is where I am, sitting in a Cadillac with a cop who wants to ask me things about a man I killed.

This is home.

THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.

“Are you okay, John?”

“Huh?”

“I asked if the DQ was okay with you.”

“Oh. DQ. Yeah. But nobody calls me John.”

Scott cranked the steering wheel and pulled inside the curbs to the Dairy Queen’s drive-thru. A phone began ringing. I instinctively reached for my pocket, felt the glasses there.

It was the cop’s phone.

He flipped it out from his belt and looked at it.

That was the first time I’d noticed he was wearing a gun.

Why didn’t I notice that before?

He looked at his phone screen.

Fake smile. “Don’t do this when you drive.”

He sounded like Dr. Nobody telling me to use condoms.

He pressed the
END
button. “Fuck ’em.”

Yeah, you’re cool, Detective Scott.

“So, what do they call you, then?”

“Jack. My name is Jack.”

*   *   *

We’d already been gone past Scott’s promised fifteen minutes. And I never looked at his face one time. I kept the straw in my mouth and sucked. I couldn’t even taste the milk shake I ordered. It may just as well have been a cup of my own sweat.

I still hadn’t cooled off.

Scott didn’t buy anything to drink for himself. He just kept driving around. I thought he was trying to get me to relax, or he was going to try to spring something on me and shock me into saying whatever it was he was looking for.

I hated cops.

They always knew the answers to everything they were going to ask, anyway.

So out of the corner of my eye, I could see him visibly flinch like he’d been splashed with cold water when I said, “Okay, this is a nice car and everything, but I didn’t think I was going to be driven around Glenbrook all fucking day.”

And I just kept looking at the swirls.

Scott cleared his throat. He probably had to stop himself from calling me a piece of shit.

“Would you feel more comfortable if there was a female detective present, or maybe a doctor?”

I started to crumple the wax cup in my grip, had to stop myself.

Fuck you, Avery Scott.

“Comfortable? Why does how I feel matter?”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Jack. So, do you want to start?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you want from me.”

“Tell me about that guy. Freddie Horvath. When was the first time you saw him?”

I felt myself sinking, getting smaller, needing air.

“You mean did I ever see him on the news? I never watch the news.”

The car turned.

I looked up as we passed beneath the archway sign reading
DOS VIENTOS ESTATES.
The new development where Freddie used to live. I started to panic.

The detective said, “No. That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I thought you said I wasn’t in trouble.”

I felt myself going whiter than the wax inside my empty cup.

“I promise you’re not in any trouble, Jack.”

“How can you promise shit like that?”

Scott didn’t say anything.

And then we were there.

Freddie’s house.

I’d never seen the outside of Freddie Horvath’s house in the daylight, but this was it. Avery Scott pulled his Cadillac right between the brick pillars at the end of the driveway and I looked up at the window where I’d climbed out onto the tile roof before I jumped.

And now it felt like only fifteen minutes had passed since I did that, barefoot, wearing those loose drawstring pants, bleeding, dizzy from the shit Freddie drugged me with.

It was like a dream.

Before the car even stopped rolling, I was out the door, on my hands and knees, puking my guts out, warm, sour vanilla shake, steaming all over the driveway.