The Good Boy (39 page)

She lights a cigarette. “I’m my own girl. He’s my dealer.”

She runs a finger along her panty line. Pete would guess that’s valuable currency around here.

“I have to find Elgin.”

“That’s all you want?” She licks her lips and takes a long drag of her smoke.

“That’s all,” Pete says. “I can’t get you high.”

She closes her legs. “Bastian took Elgin to get his respect back. You want to know where, show
me
some.” She takes another drag.

Pete gets out his wallet. Twenty bucks. “Tell me.”

She leans forward, tits hanging, swipes the bill and asks, “You know DeWilliam Carter?”

When Pete gets back into the squad, he U-turns and heads for the Kennedy, the quickest way back to Carter’s place.

“What happened?” Elexus asks.

He looks at her in the rearview. “We just took one hell of a detour.”

26

“Hey, kid, you can’t be here.”

Joel finds himself on the front steps of the courthouse, a black man in a brown uniform standing over him, his attention fixed on the parking garage across the way, or else on some imagined horizon.

“Are you going to arrest me?”

“No,” the man says. “I don’t think there’s room for you in the lockup tonight.”

Joel doesn’t know how he wound up here; for the first time, he feels truly lost. He remembers going back to Agapito’s; he could hear Moco barking, but the curtains were closed, and Marisol didn’t answer. He remembers getting his shoes wet under the train bridges that run across 26th Street where puddles of rain stood swirled with oil; he didn’t care to pick up his feet. He remembers cars bleating their horns as he jaywalked toward the storied, stoic building as soon as he saw it. And he remembers a squad car passing him by, no brake lights.

He remembers that when he pulled open the heavy courthouse door and approached security, a guard sounded off like a drill sergeant about what was allowed inside. Joel put his backpack on a conveyor belt and passed through the metal detector and then a woman with rubber gloves watched the security monitor and she didn’t say anything.

On the ground floor, long hallways led to pod courtrooms where judges set bonds. A guard stationed outside one pod wanted to know where Joel’s parents were. Joel said he wanted to know the same thing.

After that, he rode an elevator. Wandered halls. Took the stairs. Discovered a directory. And then found Judge Crawford’s courtroom.

He went inside. It was empty.

He sat in the gallery and cried.

Butchie.

“Oh, Butch,” Joel says, “what have I done?”

“I don’t know, kid,” the man on the steps says, “but my name’s Mark. And the court is closed now. You have someone inside? You looking for the bond office?”

“I’m looking for Judge Crawford.”

“Bond court’s the only thing running on the weekend. You ought to come back tomorrow morning, during regular hours.”

“What are regular hours?” Joel asks, standing up.

“The courts open at eight thirty
A.M.
You got somewhere to go?”

“Eight thirty
A.M
,” Joel says, “thank you.” He starts down the steps, though he won’t go anywhere, really; not without Butchie.

He cuts north from the courthouse and walks a wide strip of dusty grass that runs between two streets, both called California: one is an avenue cut down to one lane, under construction, and the other is a boulevard, its traffic running light and fast, an artery.

Along the avenue, a fried-chicken place is the only thing open for business; a public parking lot and an attorney’s office look like they might be, too, come tomorrow. The rest of the businesses are closed and look like they have been for a long, long time. In front of what used to be a Mexican restaurant, an excavator sits lifeless atop cracked-up pavement, the deep holes it dug cordoned off by faded yellow tape and traffic cones. There is construction dust everywhere—in the air—and Joel feels it when he breathes.

A siren wails somewhere in the distance though Joel hasn’t seen another squad car since this afternoon; maybe the cops figure nobody is dumb enough to cause trouble this close to the lockup. There must be trouble somewhere, though, because Joel keeps hearing sirens, and he’s seen three ambulances blow by. He isn’t sure where they come from or where they go, but they all seem to be hightailing it out of here.

It’s eerie, the traffic being all that moves. In fact, since Joel left the courts, he hasn’t seen another person on foot anywhere, even though this is the most grass he’s come across since he left Welles Park. Then again, there are no ball fields or benches here, no place to play or to enjoy the sunshine. Everything sits in the shadow of the courthouse and its jail.

Joel unties his jacket from his waist, turns the backpack off his shoulders and stops to add the layer. It’s getting cold, or else it’s been cold and he’s finally noticing. Since he stood and watched Agapito’s car disappear, nothing else has bothered him—the wind, the weight of his pack, the burn of his tears.

Up ahead, the Californias cross. There, a compactor has turned concrete to rubble, rubble to grit; an asphalt paver doesn’t appear to have done anything at all.

A porta-potty stands on the sidewalk behind the heavy equipment, relief for the nonexistent workers. Finally, a place Joel could go, though at this point, why bother?

Past the toilet, a section of sidewalk is blocked off, a sign there featuring a stick figure who looks like he’s trying to lift a heavy black umbrella—or else he’s digging something, depending on how you look at it. The walk is supported by wood forms, concrete still setting: three slabs of fresh sidewalk, completely untouched.

Joel goes to it. Then to his knees. Looks at each of them—one, two, three. And wonders: why resist, now?

And then he doesn’t. He turns a shoulder and falls. And he expects to be enveloped—to lie there and soon be preserved, like Ceemore the Great—except he would be Joel, Joel the
not
great, Joel the boy who lost his best friend. Literally lost him. So he should stay here and dry up with the muck. Turn to bones. Let people walk over him, let—

Joel sits up, rubs the side of his head where he knocked it. Turns out the concrete is much more set than it looks.

It must be funny that he can’t even do this—he can’t seem to make a single dent in the scheme of things. It sure doesn’t feel funny.

He spots a double-headed nail in the grass; it’s bent to a V, probably tossed aside by a workman.

He picks it up, holds it in a backfist, and drives the sharp end into the concrete. The tip catches, and he pulls, and then he repeats the motion. He does this thirty-four more times in different directions and with all his might; each time, the nail bites the surface and he drags it through.

When he is finished his arm burns and there’s sweat on the back of his neck and tears in his eyes and he blinks them away as he stands up and looks down at his mark. It says:
JOEL WAS HERE
.

Because he was here. And he came all this way. Carefully. Diligently. And it doesn’t matter.

He tosses the nail.

He walks along the boulevard as it curves west. He passes a church, the afternoon sunlight glowing orange through panels of stained glass. The homes that follow are dark-windowed and closed-doored, and no one comes in or goes out.

Across the boulevard, another lawn introduces a great building with a face like the Pantheon’s; a sign says it is the Saucedo Scholastic Academy. There, passing by the entrance, is a sole, real-live person. From here, he or she looks the size of an ant, putting distance and dimension in perspective. Joel feels so far away.

On the other end of the academy, the boulevard bends north again, the grass following along, houses on either side for as far as Joel can see. Seated at the curve of the road is a tall, stone-cut statue of an Indian, a priest, and a fur trader. Joel stands beneath the men and watches, as though they could begin to move: the priest’s lifelike gaze falls over the landscape, his cross wielded as proof of what he might say; the trader seems to agree, his shoulder-high shotgun tucked away. The Indian, though, has the spooked eyes of an animal, and he looks up to the sky as though he wonders what God has to say. Joel thinks the Indian knows far more than the others.

He walks around the statue and finds that the trader’s trappings and the priest’s huge cape provide cover for the three—and will for Joel as well.

He sits against the stone facing an empty, fenced-in elementary-school playground; after a thorough visual check, the pull of its bright blue twisty slide is not as strong as his resistance to getting caught. Joel takes off his backpack. The last jungle gym he climbed didn’t have a school camera watching, or a fence, either, and it turned out to be a trap just the same.

When Joel unzips his pack he finds the tortilla, cold and wet. The smell of it makes him sick—or maybe the memories it shakes loose make him feel that way: Agapito and his lying smile; his promise of safety a trick. And Marisol, an accomplice, serving Joel that awful soup.

Still, he will keep the tortilla. He promised it to Butchie.

He works the pen from Molly’s notebook’s spiral and opens to a blank page. When he goes to the courthouse to tell the judge what happened, he wants to have it all on paper. He has to have, on record, a second list—this one for Butchie’s disappearance. He will show the judge, and he will beg her to help him, because the facts are all he’s got left.

At the top of the page, he writes, “Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry Butch O’Hare,” Butchie due his full title. Below that, he records Agapito’s license plate number—a detail inked in his memory, as permanent as a tattoo. Next, he lists the color of the car, the address, and the names “Agapeeto, Marysoul, and Moco.”

Then he moves on to details that are less concrete: the way Agapito called him
bro,
and Butchie
Bootch.
The gun. The yellow bandana and the Tigers jersey and his marsupial eyes: a rat’s.

Joel should’ve known. He did know.

He keeps hearing his dad say,
Be smarter.

And then he remembers: the walkie-talkie.

The facts aren’t all he’s got left.

He roots around his pack and finds the dog tags he took from Butch’s collar the night they slept under the jacuzzi deck. He takes them out and runs his fingers over the lettering.
Butchie.
This whole trip to protect him. He can’t give up now.

He unpacks his sweatshirt and pulls the drawstring from the hood, laces the tags, and ties the string in a double-knot around his neck.

And then he keeps going.

He heads north for a few blocks and then cuts east; he doesn’t want to stray too far from the courthouse, but he needs to find life outside its shadow.

Circling back to California Avenue, he finds a bright yellow sign that says
LAVENDERIA
, so he goes to see what might be for sale inside. Turns out it’s a Laundromat, and it’s closed. On the opposite corner, a vinyl banner hangs over a door, the sign promoting
especiales de la cerveza;
that last word Joel knows, and it means the place might as well be closed, because he’s not old enough to go inside.

Another block south, Joel finds a redbrick, no-name store on the corner. The sign in its barred window advertises RC Cola for ninety-nine cents; that, he can drink.

He pulls open the door, a
ding-dong
announcing his arrival though nobody is at the register to say hello. The store is bigger than it seems from the outside, and the first two aisles are stocked with every kind of junk food Joel can imagine—most of them labeled in Spanish, though he recognizes many of the brands by their packaging.

He isn’t here for a snack, though.

In the third aisle, plastic cups and paper towels give way to automotive accessories and air fresheners. He keeps looking. The front door goes
ding-dong.

The last aisle has a cooler built into the wall that’s stocked with beer, mostly, and also energy drinks and soda. On the other side of the row, the kind of food a person would actually have to cook doesn’t seem worth the effort, what with everything else so convenient. He picks up a Styrofoam cup of noodles, dust collected on the top; its expiration date is so far off he could buy them now and eat them in high school.

Joel is about to put the noodles back when a too-tall, cranked-tight man comes around the corner. He has long, bone-blond braids, the weave so close to his scalp it looks like his skull is knuckled. He is filthy from his braids to his boots, the street dust a coating—except on his lips: they are deep pink and drawn together, sealed on his face like a scar.

As he looks over the aisles toward the register, his eyes are catlike, indifferent; when he turns back and sees Joel, his lips stretch thin. At that moment, Joel knows the man is bad, because his smile is not real but it is not put on, either; it is called up by something more basic. Like sickness. As though he were rabid.

The man reaches into the beer cooler and takes out a large can and puts it in his long coat and Joel is certain he wasn’t supposed to see, so he turns and heads for the register and there he finds what he intended to buy: behind the counter with the cigarettes, the aspirin, and the lotto tickets is a rack of batteries, the nine-volt variety at the bottom of the row. The sticker says it costs two dollars and nineteen cents.

He knew he wouldn’t have enough money, but he thought he would slip it in his pocket and slip out the door, like the man with the beer, and no one would be the wiser. That was the plan: what else could he do? With the battery, he could get the walkie-talkie going. He could get in touch with Molly. She could get in touch with his dad and tell him Butchie was stolen. Tell him where to look.

“Help you?” asks an Hispanic man who’s about Joel’s height who’d been sitting unseen in a folding chair to the right of the register, attention used up by his phone.

“Ahh,” Joel starts, because he’d only been talking himself into theft, not robbery. He still has the noodles—he forgot—so he puts the packaged cup on the counter and fishes for his wallet as the street-dusted thief passes behind him and exits.