The Long Way Home (16 page)

We kidded Josh a lot, but there was no question he was smart. He understood exactly what I wanted. His camera went down for a moment, and we could see his hands. We saw him take a narrow pad and pen out of his coat pocket, just like a real reporter might use. “Listen, I know you’re a very busy person—everyone talks about how important you are around here—so I’m really grateful you consented to this interview.”

Perfect. You could see the flattery working right away. Hunt shifted his shoulders almost as if Josh had massaged them.

“Yeah,” he said with this sort of haughty frown. “Yeah. Sure. I consent.”

“See, the thing is, when I was researching the case, it was pretty obvious that you were the guy with the most inside knowledge.”

“That’s great, Josh,” I said. “Now ask him if he thinks there was any other reason someone might’ve killed Alex. Besides the piece, I mean.”

Beth leaned over and punched my shoulder. I had to grit my teeth to keep from letting out a yelp into the two-way. She had a pretty good punch for a girl.

Over the two-way speaker, I heard Josh repeating the question, really laying the flattery on thick, making it sound as if Hunt were some expert on criminology or something.

“In your considered opinion, judging Alex Hauser’s psychology and all the other aspects of the crime, do you think it possible the police overlooked some other of his activities that might’ve led to the murder?”

Hunt preened and shifted his shoulders some more, feeling important. Josh had him now. Hunt wanted to show him what an expert he was. He wagged his cigarette at Josh as if giving him a lecture. “Well, you know, I’ll tell you something. Not everybody understood Alex the way I did. He was a very deep guy.”

“Really? Deep, huh.”

As Josh pretended to take notes, the camera went up and down. Watching in the parlor, we could see Hunt’s face and then the pad where Josh was scribbling stuff and then Hunt’s face again.

“Oh yeah,” said Hunt. “A real deep thinker type. You look around here . . .” Hunt gestured at the playing field. “Most of these guys, they wouldn’t know an idea if it jumped out of the ground and bit them. They go around doing stuff until they get arrested or get out of town. But Alex was smart, you know. He wasn’t into gangs or any really heavy drugs or anything like that. He knew where the real action in town was. That’s what he was after.”

“Ask him . . .” I started to say.

But Josh was already there. “What do you mean, ‘the real action’?”

Now Hunt had been totally sucked in. He was really proud of his inside knowledge, really eager to show it off to Josh. He took a quick hit of his cigarette every time he spoke. He seemed to think this made him look smarter. “See, here’s the thing. A person like you, you might look at a town like Spring Hill and think it’s a pretty regular, straight-arrow place. But people like me and Alex, we see past the surface, you understand what I’m saying? We know things aren’t always what they seem.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Hunt. Could you explain that?”

“Mr. Hunt!” Miler laughed. “Go, Josh.”

“Well,” Mr. Hunt explained in a ridiculously lofty tone, “you look around this town, if you don’t have inside knowledge like me, you see guys walking down the street, you might think they’re upstanding citizens. But the truth is: you never really know what business someone is into. I mean, the kids around here, they may do some small-time stuff. But if you want the really dirty business— the stuff where the real money is—you gotta go to the people who look clean and respectable. They’re the ones pulling the strings.”

“Ah,” said Josh. “I see.”

“Alex wasn’t wasting his time doing business around here with high school kids. No way.”

“You mean, he was doing business with adults?”

“Oh yeah. And you can quote me on that.”

“Did you tell the police any of this?” Josh asked.

Hunt shrugged. He took a long, thoughtful drag on his cigarette. The smoke unfolded from his mouth as he talked. “I told the police what they needed to know to put that West kid in the slammer. I’m not exactly what you would call the policemen’s friend, if you know what I mean.”

“Right, right. Of course not.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t quote that.”

“I won’t. Anything you say.”

“Ask him who, Josh,” I said into the two-way. “Who was Alex doing business with? Was he doing business the night he died?”

“Who—,” Josh started.

“No, wait,” I said. “Make it sound like you think he doesn’t know. Say something like . . .”

“I got it,” Josh told me.

“Say what?” said Hunt.

“Oh . . . uh, I got what you’re saying. But these people, these adults, Alex was hanging out with—I mean, that’s not something he would share with you, was it? I mean, he couldn’t trust just anyone with information like that.”

“Nice,” I murmured. Josh was good at this.

Hunt reacted just like I thought he would. “Hey, are you kidding me? Alex and I were like this . . .” He held up the two fingers holding his cigarette, squeezing them close together around the filter to show what great friends he and Alex were. “I mean, he couldn’t always tell me things until they were all set up, you know, but I knew a lot, that’s for sure—a lot more than people might think.”

“Well, give me . . . just so my readers can get the gist here. Give me a for-instance.”

“Well, like, for instance—here’s something nobody knows but me practically—well, me and Brownie maybe. That night Alex died, we didn’t go to the mall that night just to meet with the West character. I mean, we knew he would be there, we knew we were gonna give him a hard time. But after that, Alex was supposed to go in and have some kind of secret get-together with the teacher. This was very important, very secret stuff we weren’t supposed to tell anyone. Alex was very clear about that. That’s why we never told the police. We didn’t know if we’d be stepping on important toes, if you see what I mean. You don’t want to start trouble with the kind of people Alex knew.”

“Wait, okay, go back a minute,” said Josh. “The night he was killed, Alex went to the mall to see a teacher? What teacher?”

“The karate guy. What was his name? Mike.”

“Mike?” I whispered. Rick and Miler and Beth all looked at me. I shook my head like a dog throwing off water, trying to clear my thoughts. Why would Alex have been arranging a secret meeting with Sensei Mike? What kind of “business” could they have been up to? And what, if anything, did it have to do with Alex getting killed?

I brought the two-way to my mouth, about to tell Josh to start asking more questions.

But just then, Hunt’s image on the laptop monitor jumped violently.

Josh’s voice came loudly over the two-way: “Ow!”

Now there were other voices. “Hey.”

“Dude.”

“Hunt.”

“Who’s this punk?”

Josh turned—the camera on his jacket turned—and there, in the Ghost Mansion parlor, Beth and Rick and Miler and I saw a nasty-looking face—and then another face just as nasty—and then a third face, even nastier still—staring at us through the monitor.

Josh, suddenly, was surrounded by thugs.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fighting by Remote Control

“Uh-oh,” said Rick. “This isn’t good.”

He was right. It wasn’t. In fact, it was exactly what I’d been afraid of. It was one of the two or three hundred things I’d been afraid of, anyway.

For a few minutes there, I’d been so wrapped up in helping Josh question Hunt that I’d forgotten where he was, his surroundings. All those punks and gangsters on every side of him: they had slipped my mind. Now here they were—up close—and they didn’t look happy.

“What’s going on?” said one of them.

I recognized him as soon as Josh turned to him, as soon as the webcam brought his face onto the monitor. It was Frederick Brown, the other guy who’d been at the Eastfield Mall that long-ago day. He had dark skin and jet-black hair and a sort of slickly handsome face, like a guy in a cheap magazine ad. He was bigger than he was when I’d seen him last, bulked-up as if he’d been lifting weights. He had his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his dark blue track jacket, his shoulders hunched aggressively.

“You doing business here or you standing around blabbering?” he asked Hunt.

The camera swung back to Hunt. Hunt flipped his cigarette into the dirt. He felt guilty—I could see it in his eyes—as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. He was supposed to be dealing drugs and instead Josh had gotten him talking. It was as if the flattery Josh had used on him had hypnotized him, but now the arrival of his friends had awakened him from his trance.

He put his hands in his pockets and gave a guilty shrug. “What? We’re just talking, Brownie.”

“Talking?” This was Brown again. “That what I sent you over here to do? Talk?”

“And who’s this punk?” said one of the other thugs. “What are you talking to him about?” Josh looked at him and we saw on the monitor that he was pushing at Josh’s laptop case, looking it over as if it might be something threatening—a bomb or something. If these guys found out Josh was wired, was broadcasting sound and pictures somewhere, he’d be toast. There wouldn’t even be enough left of him to be toast. He’d be something you could spread on toast.

I guess Rick was thinking the same thing. “This is bad,” he said. “Tell him to get out, Charlie.”

“Josh, get out,” I said into the two-way.

Josh’s answer came back in a kind of singsong under his breath. “No can do that,” the song went.

“You say something?” Brown asked him.

“Who, me?” said Josh.

“No, I’m talking to myself.”

The other thugs laughed as if this was the funniest thing ever. Obviously Brown was the man in charge around here.

“Talking to yourself,” said Josh with his squeaky-geeky laugh. We could hear on the two-way how scared he was. “Talking to yourself. That’s good. That’s funny. Talking to your—”

“Shut up,” said Brown.

“Right.”

Hunt stepped in in Josh’s defense—in his own defense, really. “No, hey, Brownie. He’s just doing a what-do-you-call-it, a retro . . .”

“Retrospective,” said Josh helpfully.

“Yeah, retrospective. For a newspaper. I consented to an interview.”

“That right?” said Brown. “You consented to an interview? With a newspaper.”

“Yeah. Consented.”

“Without talking to me.”

“Uh . . . well . . . I mean, yeah, hey . . .” I could see Hunt’s mind working, looking for an excuse. I could see him beginning to realize that he’d been had, that Josh had used flattery to rope him into this so-called interview.

“Say thanks a lot and good-bye, Josh,” I said into the two-way.

“Well,” Josh said to the thugs. “This has just been great, really . . .”

Brown ignored him, kept pressing Hunt. “And what’s this interview about?”

“. . . it’s been terrific to talk to you all,” Josh went on. “I hope we can keep in touch. Maybe have lunch.”

The monitor was suddenly filled with Brown’s hand and then the scene shook violently as Brown shoved Josh in the chest.

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”

“Oh, right,” said Josh. “You did. It slipped my mind. Sorry.”

“Charlie,” said Beth. “If they find all his equipment— the webcam and microphone and everything—they’re going to think he’s spying on them for the police. They could really hurt him.”

I nodded. I was already trying to think of a way out, but I could hardly get my thoughts organized. I was too busy cursing myself for being an idiot. Why had I let Josh do this? I had known what might happen . . .

“Josh,” I said again. “You’ve got to get out of there.”

Josh sang under his breath, “I know that, but ho-ow?” Then he pretended to be clearing his throat so the thugs wouldn’t hear him.

“It was like I said,” Hunt was explaining to Brown now. “The retro thing. We were talking about Alex. About how he got killed.”

“Oh yeah?” said Brown. “About Alex, huh?”

Hunt shrugged guiltily again. He looked at Josh. Now that he was beginning to understand how Josh had suckered him, he was getting angry at him, hoping to put the blame off on him. “Hey, he’s just some punk. It’s no big deal.”

“That right?” said Brown to Josh. “You just some punk?” Josh faced him and we saw Brown’s slickly handsome face leaning in toward him. “That why you come around here asking questions?”

“Charlie,” said Beth. “You’ve got to get him out of there now.”

I took a breath and tried to clear my head. I asked myself: What would I do if I was the one standing there instead of Josh? Sometimes, in karate group classes, Sensei Mike would teach us tricks about situations like this, about how to fight when you’re outnumbered. He would have a group of us gang up on one of the other students and then shout instructions about what to do. The main thing, I remembered, was you had to move in ways that forced your opponents to cut one another off, try to get them in an I formation so that only one of them had a good shot at you at any given time. Most of all, you had to avoid getting cornered or surrounded—the way Josh was now.

But even if I could help Josh maneuver himself out of the middle of the pack, what then? He was no fighter. And if he just tried to run for it, they’d take him down like a pack of dogs on a deer.

“Josh,” I said. “Are there any adults there? Any teachers— anyone in charge who might give you a hand if you screamed for help?”

“That’s no good,” said Miler. “If a teacher starts questioning him, they may figure out he’s working for you. Then you’d have the cops on your trail again.”

I knew that—but what could I do? I wasn’t going to let Josh get his arms broken just to save myself.

The scene on the monitor shifted back and forth slightly as Josh tried to steal a glance at the schoolyard, as he tried to seek out someone in charge who could help him. All I saw were glimpses of kids clustered together.

“Hey!” Brown’s voice came sharply over the two-way speaker. “I’m talking to you. Why are you asking questions? Are you just some punk?” His threatening features filled the screen again.

“Am I a punk? That’s your question?” Josh’s voice broke in fear. “Well, I’m not sure how to answer that actually. I suppose you could say I was a punk. On the other hand, you might say . . .”