Set You Free (9 page)

“Gastromancy!” Grady says, laughing.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the telling of fortunes by listening to someone’s stomach grumblings.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

He laughs, and his smile is nice.

“But it works,” I tell him. I figure a guy who knows what gastromancy is can’t be that evil.

“So, are you coming?”

I rub the side of my cell phone. I light up the screen and notice that my battery is half dead, which makes no sense. My phone normally lasts all day, and I could swear I had it plugged in for a while at home as well.

“Into this dark, abandoned building with you?” I say.

Grady looks at the building. “Yeah. Seriously, though, no pressure. You can stay here. Even keep the keys. Whatever.”

For some reason, an idea I should have had when this whole thing began strikes me for the first time. “Why were you there?” I ask.

“Why was I where?”

“Maple Grove. What were you doing there?”

Grady looks out the window. “I was following you,” he says. He puts his hand on the key again. “Listen, I’m going to take you home right now. I can come back and—”

“Why were you following me?” I say.

He sighs as though about to tell me some deep secret.

“I’ve been trying to figure out where Tom is. Then that whole thing happened with the kid. Of course, I was certain there was no way Tom had anything to do with it. But I didn’t know anyone else he might have talked to other than you. So I was hanging around your area trying to build up the nerve to knock or, I guess, hoping Tom might just show up.”

“And when Tom didn’t show up, you decided to just follow me?”

“I wasn’t going to let you know I was following you,” Grady says, then shakes his head again. “That sounds even more creepy.”

“Um, yeah,” I say.

“I’m worried about your brother, and I want to know if he’s all right. I probably didn’t go about this the right way, but I’m still figuring it all out as well. So if you want me to
take you home, cool, I’ll do that. If not, let’s go see if he’s inside.” He reaches into the backseat, pulls a flashlight out of the backpack, then opens his door and gets out.

I sit there for a moment. I hold my hand out before me and find it’s no longer shaking. Grady is fiddling with the flashlight. He gives it a quick tap, and it comes to life.

I leave my hand on the door handle for a moment before opening the door, getting out and walking toward him.

“Do you want a pair of shoes or something?” he asks.

“You have extra girls’ shoes in your car?” I say.

“That would be creepy. I have a pair of running shoes in the backseat. They’ll be really big on you, but at least you won’t step on a piece of rusted metal in your bare feet.”

I open up the back door and dig around beneath the seat. My hand finds the shoes, and I bring them out. They’re at least two sizes too big.

Grady says, “Try leaning forward when you walk.”

I take a couple of steps, and the backs flap against the ground.

“You could be starting a new style here,” Grady says. “Who knows.”

THIRTEEN

Grady’s flashlight is insufficient in the wide open space of the warehouse. We can only see a few feet in front of us at any time, leaving the rest of the area a complete mystery. There’d been a piece of duct tape over the lock on one door. Grady had been careful to make certain the tape stayed in place once we were inside.

“Stay close to the walls,” Grady says. The giant shoes bang with each step. I try shuffling for a moment, but this seems to make more noise.

“Where do you and Tom jam?” I whisper.

“In the next room.” He flicks the flashlight beam toward a door at the end of the space. Our footsteps cause riots of noise. There are so many dark spots. I wish Grady would move the flashlight around more, just in case someone is in
the room. It feels like the perfect place for a homeless guy to live. I’ve had enough of those kinds of surprises for a while.

“Is it weird in there?” I ask.

“What do you mean by weird? It’s a room like this one. Pretty big and open.” Even though we are both whispering, it seems like our voices are bouncing off the walls and ceiling, amplifying as they come back at us.

“When were you here last?”

“One week and three days ago,” Grady says with authority. “We worked on ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“A Sam Cooke song. One of his best.”

“Okay, I’ll trust you on that.” Grady opens a door and we enter a new part of the warehouse. The space is strangely arranged. There isn’t any consistency to the size of the rooms.

“I wish he had a cell we could call,” Grady says.

“Do you find that weird?” I ask. Talking is making me feel more comfortable.

“The cell thing? Not really. It doesn’t feel as if Tom is really a part of this era. He’s like a time traveler from the fifties. He seems to operate outside of the modern world.”

“He doesn’t use computers either.”

“Sure he does,” Grady says. “I loaned him a laptop. He does most of the setup and stuff for recording as well.”

“He has a laptop?” I try to picture Tom tapping away at a keyboard and can’t.

“My uncle collects old computers, and we get them working again. I offered one to Tom, but he said he didn’t have a use for it outside of recording.” Grady reaches out and opens the door to the next room. Something scurries away in the darkness, and I grab his arm. “It’s cool,” he says. “There are some mice in here. But they disappear as soon as we show.”

“That’s not cool,” I say. I look behind me. I thought I heard something there, coming in the door. Or moving, slithering across the floor.

“Mice don’t hurt people.”

“They’re gross,” I say.

“That’s one opinion,” he says.

“Don’t tell me you have mice as pets or something weird like that.”

“I do not have mice as pets. But I assume they should be granted the ability to thrive in places humans have deserted. It’s only natural.”

“Natural,” I say.

We step in. Moonlight softens the floorboards in great circles. The ceiling seems miles above us. The wind has picked up outside, creating a low moaning. “Right over here,” Grady says, directing the flashlight beam to a corner of the room where a lone water bottle sits on a table between two chairs.

“I don’t remember leaving this,” Grady says, picking it up. Though the room is large, this little area with the chairs and table seems close and intimate. I can almost imagine
Tom being here, inhabiting this space. Though I still can’t imagine him singing.

“What were you expecting to find?” I ask. The room feels really close, even though it’s huge. The air is dense and flat, still holding a bit of the day’s heat.

“Tom,” he says.

“Like, living here?” I’m about to sit down on one of the chairs when there’s a banging in the other room. Grady puts a finger to his lips and switches off his flashlight.

At first we hear nothing more, but then there’s the unmistakable sound of footsteps. The door between the rooms is open, and a moment later a bright flashlight beam cracks the darkness.

“Do you think it’s him?” I whisper.

Grady grabs my hand, pulling me with him toward the far wall. As he’s passing the second chair, he stops, leans down and picks something up from the floor. Suddenly, his lips brush my ear as he whispers, “If it’s not him, we’re right beside a door.”

“How will we know?” I whisper back. The flashlight beam grows in both size and strength.

“Wait,” Grady says. The beam shifts, and we hear an endless stream of numbers and letters pouring from what sounds like a police radio. It grows louder before falling silent.

“Cops,” I say. Grady opens the door, pulls me through and silently shuts it.

We’re on the other side of the warehouse and have to double back around. As we turn the corner, I spot a police car parked beside the neighboring building.

“There’s a cruiser,” I say, grabbing Grady’s arm. We hug the wall of the warehouse until we can be certain no one is inside the cruiser. I slide back into the shadows, bringing Grady with me. “Don’t they usually work in pairs?” I say.

“There’s likely another one around here somewhere.”

We move around Dumpsters and garbage bags, staying away from the few remaining lights as much as possible. I begin to run toward the car, and one of Grady’s too-big shoes slips off my foot. I trip and go down. It seems as if I’ve barely hit the ground before I feel Grady’s hands beneath my arms, lifting me back up.

“You okay?” he says.

I glance down at my knees, which seem fine. “I’m okay.”

He lets me go, and we cover the rest of the distance to the car. Grady stops on the passenger side and opens the door for me.

“How did anyone know we were there?” I say.

Grady gets in the car, starts the engine and backs out into the lot.

“That couldn’t have been random,” I say. “Why would the police patrol this area?”

“I doubt they would,” Grady says. “This would be rent-a-cop territory, if anything.”

Rocks ping off the tires, and to my ears it sounds like a fireworks display. Instead of retracing our route past the warehouse, he drives around the back to a service entrance that connects to the next set of buildings.

“Have the police questioned you?” Grady asks.

“I spent all of yesterday with a detective. Why?”

He glances down at my hands; I’m rubbing the sides of my cell phone again. “Have you had your phone with you all the time?”

I think back through everything that’s happened. “Every second.”

“Did you ever leave it anywhere?”

I think again and remember leaving the phone in Detective Evans’s car when the two of us walked to the school, looking for Ben. I’d set it on the seat while I juggled the food and coffee, and in my hungover haze had forgotten to retrieve it. “I left it in this detective’s car,” I say. “Detective Evans.”

“Let me see it,” Grady says. I hand my phone over to him, and he flicks through it, keeping one eye on the road.

“Maybe you should pull over while you do that,” I say.

He slows almost to a stop and hands the phone back to me.

“Right here,” he says.

On the screen is an app called
trackme
.

“It can be hidden,” he explains as we pull back out onto the street connecting the warehouses with the highway.
“It’s mostly for people who are paranoid about losing their phones and parents wanting to virtually creep their kids.”

“She had this installed on my phone?” I say in disbelief. “Why would she do that?”

“She must believe you know where Tom is and aren’t telling.”

“But that’s illegal, right? The police can’t track anyone they like.”

“Very illegal. But unless you saw her put it on, you can’t prove that she did,” Grady says. “On the other hand, they can’t ever admit to having put it on either.”

There is a gas-station complex just before the highway ramp. Grady pulls in beside the little store, parks beyond the reach of the neon lights and brings the laptop out from the backseat. “Let me see that again,” he says.

I hand him my phone. He looks back and forth between the two screens, typing madly on the laptop while flicking through screens on my phone.

“She didn’t know about the Tom connection until…” I begin, and then I remember how Detective Evans had been texting someone as we walked back to the cruiser. And how she’d been asking me questions about Tom at the same time. There’s every chance that she had the other officer go into her cruiser and install the app on my phone. I never password-protect my phone because I hate having to type something in every time I use it. Of course, with her penetrating stare, she would have noticed me forgetting it in her car.

“There, that’s better,” Grady says, turning the laptop toward me. “You’re now hurtling down the highway away from town. If they are tracking you in real time, we should see the cruiser go past any minute.”

“How’d you do that?”

“These programs are easy. Whoever installed it used a password, so it might take a few minutes to crack that when we want to remove the program.”

“I didn’t see it at first,” I say, staring at him.

“See what?” He looks all innocent and timid.

“That you’re a giant nerd,” I say, laughing.

“I told you, when I get interested in something, I learn all I can about it.”

“And you’re interested in hacking?”

“I’m interested in computers. Hacking is the devil on your shoulder. The apple of knowledge. The—”

“Okay, okay, I get it. With knowledge comes power, and you have to decide how to use that power.”

“There’s the cruiser,” Grady says, pointing at a set of headlights. “See if you recognize the driver.”

I squint at the cruiser as it passes but can’t make out the driver through the tinted windows. “It’s a regular cop car,” I say. “Detective Evans was in an unmarked one.”

“She sent her lackey,” Grady says. He’s typing on the keyboard again. “You want me to remove that app now?”

I think about this for a second, then say, “You can do that whenever, right?”

“Sure.”

“And with the laptop, you can make them think I’m somewhere else?”

“Wherever you want to be.”

“So let’s leave it. This could be fun.”

Grady laughs. “Now who’s the degenerate?” He tosses the laptop into the backseat and pulls a book out of his pocket.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the book your brother was reading last time we were at the warehouse.” He holds it up. It’s called
A Confederacy of Dunces
. “I found it on the floor near the door.”

“That means he was there recently, right?”

“Not necessarily. He might have forgotten it at our last jam session.”

We both look at the book.

“Where the hell are you, Tom?” Grady says under his breath.

FOURTEEN

There’s something strange about the front of my house.

At first I can’t tell what it is, but then a bit of motion catches my eye. The curtain is blowing in the breeze. The problem is that it’s blowing outside, because most of the window is no longer there.