The Boy Who Killed Grant Parker (12 page)

He took another step back as I got out of the car, one hand resting on the butt of his gun as if I posed some kind of potential physical threat. I wasn't sure if I should shut my door or leave it open but finally decided to just shut it gently and stand against it. I started to put my hands in my pockets, but Chief Perry tensed and so I let my hands hang at my sides.

“Have you been drinking?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said, fighting to keep the anger out of my voice. “I went to the football game. I was just giving Penny a ride home.”

“A ride home? You lost? The Olsons don't live anywhere near here.” He shifted his weight on his feet as he settled in to wait for my answer, and the stiff leather of his gun belt creaked.

“We were just … talking. Is there some kind of law against that?” I asked.

“Don't get smart with me, son,” he snapped. “You take Penny on home. I'm going to follow to make sure you get there okay. You sure you haven't had anything to drink?”

“Yes,” I said coldly.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I'm sure I haven't been drinking.”

“Don't think that just because this is a small town that I'm naive or that I haven't dealt with your type before.”

“My type?” I asked, almost impossible to control my temper now. “You don't even know me. You don't know anything about me.”

“I know enough,” he said, and turned on his heel to walk away, dismissing me without another glance.

Penny and I rode in silence on the way to her house, as if Chief Perry, following in the patrol car behind us, could overhear any conversation. At her house Penny flashed me a smile and said good night but didn't try to kiss me.

I waited to make sure she got to her door as I watched the windshield of Chief Perry's car in my rearview mirror. I couldn't see him through the glare of taillights on glass, but I could feel his scowl on the back of my neck.

He followed me for a few blocks after I left Penny, and I was careful to mind the speed limit and use my turn signal. I headed home, defeated once again.

 

17

Saturday afternoon I was perched on a stack of tires that was waiting to be installed, looking at my phone, while Roger clanked around under the hood of a Buick. On Saturday afternoons Tiny took his mother to church for bingo and fried chicken, their weekly ritual, so it was just Roger and me.

“Heard about your run-in with the chief,” Roger said, interrupting my search for new mixes on SoundCloud. “Didn't you and I just have a conversation recently about how you weren't going to be an idiot?”

“How am I an idiot?” I asked.

“Is this how you avoid Grant Parker? By taking his girlfriend out parking by the lake?”

“We weren't
parking,
” I said, my tone emphatically denying the dirty implications of the word “parking.” “And how the hell do you even know about that?”

“It was all the talk at the diner this morning when I stopped in for coffee with the fellas,” Roger said, as if this were a perfectly reasonable explanation. “You can't ride home with a police escort in a town this size and expect people not to notice.”

I shook my head with disbelief, my eyes squeezed shut. “It wasn't like that,” I said. “I was giving her a ride home. She suggested we stop and talk by the lake for a few minutes. Chief Perry totally misread the situation.”

“You really are kind of simple, aren't you?” Roger said, though I took the question as rhetorical. “Every village has to have an idiot. Aren't I the lucky one to have the village idiot working for me?”

He chuckled at his own wit, and I shot him a disgusted look. The look missed its mark, since Roger hadn't even bothered to turn his attention from the blackened engine of the Buick.

“Oh, hell, boy,” he continued, as he must have felt my angry stare burning into his back. “I just look at it as a community service. Somebody's got to give you a job. Keep you out of trouble. Except you keep finding trouble everywhere you look.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “So, let's say some gorgeous girl walked up to you and asked you to take her home. You telling me you would say ‘no'? You'd turn that down?”

This got him to turn his interest away from the car engine, and he settled in with his rear end resting against the hood grill. The ubiquitous red rag materialized, and he idly wiped at his wrench while he considered his response. “Okay. Yeah,” he said. “I get it. You're seventeen. When you're seventeen you have no control over your hormones. I was seventeen once, you know?”

“I know,” I said, my eyes narrowing with the usual skepticism I felt whenever Roger referenced a youthful period in his life. “It's just so … hard to imagine.”

He shot me a warning look but continued. “I'm old. My perspective is different. But you can't be an idiot and expect to live to be my age. If Grant Parker's girlfriend asks you to go parking by the lake, you say no.”

“I couldn't help it,” I said, my voice rising with frustration. “It's not as if my dick gives me any choice in a situation like that.”

Roger chuckled again at that. “That won't change. But if you want to live to see eighteen, you'd better learn to start thinking with your other head. The big one.”

“You're so full of crap,” I said. “You expect me to believe you had sense enough to turn down a girl like Penny when you were my age? Hell, you wouldn't be able to turn it down now that you're a dirty old man.”

He shook his head. “I can be smart now. At least, smarter than I was. I don't have to think about it as much at my age,” he said. “At a certain point you just start to run out of boners.”

“Please stop talking,” I said as Roger's use of the word “boner” sent a shudder down my spine.

“It's true,” he said with a dismissive shrug and turned back to the Buick. “You'll find out.”

“I just want everyone in this town to mind their own business,” I said, in a funk now and feeling sorry for myself. “Why can't everyone just leave me alone?”

 

18

It was late afternoon by the time I got home from work, but I still put in some time working on the Camaro. Delilah wandered into the driveway where I was lying on my back, my head and shoulders under the Camaro as I struggled to attach a radiator hose, cursing fluently to myself. Dusk was approaching, and it was getting too dark to see what I was doing.

It was unclear why she did it, but sometimes Delilah came to sit with me on evenings like this while I worked on the Camaro. Most of the time we didn't say much to each other, but she made herself useful by holding the light when I was working on the undercarriage. Though I wouldn't readily admit it to her, to anyone, I liked having her quiet company while I worked on the car.

As I was tightening the metal clamp over the hose, my hand slipped and I raked a cut along my knuckle. “Ouch! Shit,” I said, and sat up fast enough to crack my head on the undercarriage of the car. “Ah! Goddamn it.”

I scooted out from under the car, rubbing my head as I looked at my knuckle and Delilah shined the light on it. “Blood?” she asked.

“A little,” I said.

“You should wash it,” Delilah said with a rare show of concern for my well-being.

“Yeah,” I said, and was just standing to go to the utility sink in the garage when a red pickup truck pulled up at the curb next to the driveway.

“You expecting someone?” Delilah asked.

“No,” I said, the pain in my finger and my head momentarily forgotten.

Tony Hurst climbed out of the truck and sauntered slowly up the driveway toward us. “Hello, Del,” Tony said, some surprise in his voice at the sight of her there. If he'd been wearing a hat, I felt sure he would have tipped it at her.

“Hi, Tony,” Delilah said, her tone uncharacteristically shy. Her head tipped forward so that her hair fell over half of her face, obscuring her expression. Tony watched her for a long minute, as if waiting for her to say more, and I sensed something between them—tension on Delilah's side and … something else from Tony. Maybe an expectation. He still hadn't even acknowledged my presence.

When his eyes finally did shift to me, they went dead, like the gaze of a wild animal. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

“I'm listening,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.

“You've got a serious problem,” he said in a slow drawl. “You've pissed off Grant Parker, and he doesn't forgive and forget.”

“I didn't do anything to Grant Parker,” I said evenly, though my blood had started to simmer with latent anger.

“He knows you were talking to his girl. Penny told him you gave her a ride home last night after the game.”

I felt Delilah's eyes shift to my face as Tony delivered this news, but I did my best to ignore her.

“Did he send you?” I asked as I reached into my pocket for the rag I kept to wipe my hands—a habit I had picked up from Roger. “Or is this just a friendly visit?”

“Consider this a warning. Maybe you haven't figured out how it works, but nobody fucks with Grant Parker. You keep playing it like you are, you'll end up paying for it.”

“Is that some kind of threat?” I asked, feeling like I was acting out a scene from a movie.

“Take it however you want to,” Tony said. “I'm just telling you that if you mess with us again, you're going to pay for it.”

Delilah had watched this whole exchange in silence. She spoke up now with a toss of her hair over her shoulder. “Tony, you know Luke didn't do anything but stick up for himself when Grant was acting like a bully. And Penny's a big girl. It wouldn't be the first time she used some other guy to make Grant get in a sweat over her.”

Tony turned his cool gaze to her, and his expression immediately softened. I was getting the vibe, definitely now, that they had some kind of history, some connection. The way Delilah spoke to him told me that was the case, even if the way Tony looked at her hadn't already. And I found myself feeling strangely pissed off about there being something between Delilah and Tony, though I was unsure why.

“Stay out of it, Del,” Tony said. “I'm not interested in seeing you get hurt. Does your daddy even know where you are?”

“That's my business and none of yours, Anthony,” she said.

“You delivered your message,” I said to break their focus on each other. “You can go.”

Tony hesitated, like he might say more, but just turned to leave. “You want a ride home?” he asked Delilah as he stopped at the door of his truck, one arm leaning on the open window.

“Not likely,” Delilah said as she crossed her arms over her chest.

Tony just smiled and shook his head, then climbed into his truck and drove away.

I went into the garage to wash the cut on my knuckle. A streak of blood had dried along the side of my finger. A coagulated drop at the tip washed away as I rubbed it. The gritty Lava soap made the cut hurt worse, but I ground my teeth and enjoyed the pain as it somehow made my anger abate.

“Tony can be a real jerk,” Delilah said as she leaned against the counter and watched as I washed my hands, then carefully dried the skin around the torn knuckle. “If he ever thought for himself he might not be such a dumbass.”

“I don't need you sticking up for me, getting in my business,” I said, the words sounding colder than I had meant.

Her eyes flashed with anger, and she pushed off the counter with a gusted breath. “What's the matter?” she asked. “Did you get a bruised ego? Having a girl fight your battles?”

“Who is that guy to you?” I asked. “Did you used to date him or something?” Suddenly I wished I had kept my mouth shut. I wasn't angry because Delilah had taken up my fight against Tony. I was just angry in general, but Delilah was going to take the brunt of it.

“So what if I did? What do you care?” she asked, delivering it like a challenge.

“I guess I don't,” I said, and not nicely.

She barely hesitated before she turned to walk out, leaving me standing there by the sink, holding a paper towel against my knuckle.

“Hey,” I said and hurried to catch her as she left the driveway and turned up the sidewalk. “Hey, wait up. It's dark. I'll walk with you.”

She snorted and tossed her hair at me with impatience but didn't argue when I fell in step beside her.

We walked in silence until I said, “I'm sorry. Okay? I was mad, and I took it out on you.”

“You should listen to Tony. Just lay low and leave Grant Parker alone. He's…” She paused for so long I thought she wasn't going to finish but then said, “He doesn't fight fair.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Grant Parker doesn't scare me.”

“Right. I forgot you're a macho gearhead.” Then, after a beat, “And you listen to Morrissey.”

“I listen to The Smiths. There's a big difference.”

“No,” she said. “There isn't.”

“So, what's that guy Tony's story?” I asked, ignoring her invitation for a fight. “You guys used to date or something?”

She cast a sidelong look at me that I couldn't read. Guilt. Secrecy. “Or something.”

I waited, but she wasn't going to give me anything else. It occurred to me to ask her if she liked Tony, but I thought it would sound too desperate if I did. I was unsure if I really liked Delilah or if she just exasperated me. Still, she had her moments, and she was the only person I knew in Ashland who seemed to get me as a person.

The porch light at Delilah's house burned a couple of hundred watts, and there were floodlights strategically placed to up-light the few trees and shrubs that dotted the manicured lawn. There was no place where a person could secret himself in the yard. She lived in a protected fortress with her heavily armed father, like a princess in a tower.