The Saint (20 page)

A
T
2:00
A.M
.,
Kieran's telephone rang. He hadn't been sleeping, so he answered it on the first ring. Maybe Claire had changed her mind.

But he must have been sleeping, after all. He'd obviously been dreaming to come up with such a ridiculously optimistic idea.

It was not Claire, of course. It was Ted Mackey, Eddie's father.

Kieran listened a few moments to the poor guy, who was almost inarticulate with worry. Apparently Eddie hadn't come home for his usual 1:00 a.m. curfew. Because he was usually so punctual, Dr. Mackey had begun making calls immediately. On his first try, he had discovered that Eddie wasn't out, as he'd assumed, with his girlfriend Binky Potter. In fact, Dr. Mackey and his wife had been shocked to learn that Binky Potter no longer
was
Eddie's girl. Binky had apparently sounded bored by the whole thing. She had no idea where Eddie might be.

From there they'd called his closest friends, who had all seemed to express the same lazy indifference. After that, they'd called the cops, who had said they'd keep an eye out, but speculated that Eddie would probably be home before long with his tail between his legs.

Then, in desperation, Mrs. Mackey had thought of
calling Kieran. “He seems to think a lot of you,” Dr. Mackey said stiffly. “If something were bothering him, he might not think he could tell Janey and me….”

Kieran could imagine how difficult that had been to admit.

“I'm sure he's okay,” Kieran said, “but I'll make a few calls. I know some of their hangouts. I'll have a look around.”

Dr. Mackey seemed pitifully grateful and asked for Kieran's cell number so that he could stay in constant touch. Kieran gave it to him, even though he agreed privately with the police. Pushing curfew for an hour or so was fairly standard for an eighteen-year-old boy eager to make the most of his waning summer vacation.

Still, there was something odd about the reaction of Eddie's friends. Kieran knew those kids. That's just how they'd act if they were feeling guilty about something.

He decided to make a few calls of his own. When he was finished, he actually was a little unsettled. It sounded as if Eddie Mackey had been more or less ostracized from his entire social set. That would be hurtful for anyone, but it could completely crush an insecure, hormonal teenager.

He called Bill Johnson at the police department and gave him the background. Bill agreed to check it out, and Kieran knew he would be thorough. Bill was turning into a damn fine police officer.

Still, Kieran was wide awake now, and with everything he had on his mind he wasn't going to get back to sleep. He might as well prowl around and see what he could turn up. He pulled on his jeans
and a T-shirt, crammed his shoes into some old sneakers and headed out into the night.

He checked all the usual places—the dead-end road that was an unofficial Lover's Lane, the spot by the river that was perfect for skinny-dipping, the convenience store just outside the city limits that was rumored to be half-blind when it came to spotting fake IDs.

He came up empty. No kids on the loose, no white minivans parked in suspicious places and definitely no Eddie. It was, all in all, a pretty tame Sunday night in Heyday.

In the end, he just got lucky. His cell phone rang, and it was Andy Giff, the security guard who made the nightly circuit of the elementary, middle and high schools for the county. Andy was a Heyday High alum, a football season-ticket holder, and, ever since they won the state championship, one of Kieran's biggest fans.

Apparently Andy just wanted to give Kieran a heads up, because he'd seen a teenage boy horsing around in the middle of the football field, acting weird.

“He's throwing a ball to nobody,” Andy said. “I told him to get along home, but he said he wasn't budging, he wasn't hurting anything, which was true, strictly speaking. I guess I'm gonna have to call Bill Johnson, but I thought I'd tell you first, in case he's one of your boys. If you can get him to head home, maybe we don't have to bring Bill into it, you know?”

Kieran agreed, his car already in a U-turn. He was only about a mile from the school. “Thanks, Andy,” he said. “Tell you what. Ask Bill to call Dr. Mackey
and tell him we think we've found Eddie. But ask him to give me half an hour to see what I can do, okay?”

The electric lights on the football field were out, naturally—it was almost three in the morning. But a clear, starry night shed plenty of light onto the long green rectangle surrounded by rows of empty concrete bleachers.

Even without the proof of the white minivan parked by the front entrance, Kieran could tell that the boy churning down the sidelines, as if the entire Green Bay Packer defense was hot on his heels, was Eddie.

Eddie was a natural runner, and he tucked that football so neatly under his arm it would have been impossible for even the best tackle to strip it. If he decided to try out, he would be a real asset to the team.

And the team just might be a real asset to him—especially if what Kieran had heard from Cullen Overton and Jeff Metzler tonight was true.

But first Kieran had to find out why the kid was out here in the middle of the night, talking trash to the security guard, which was a much dumber move than he'd ever seen Eddie Mackey make.

“Hey,” he called as Eddie dove over the goal line and rolled to a pretend touchdown. “What's the score?”

Eddie looked up, his scowl bordering on hostility. When he recognized Kieran, his expression lightened a little, but it never exactly became friendly.

“It's a friggin' shutout, man,” he said, his voice as sour as his face. He took the football and spiked it into the ground, something he'd never be allowed
to do in a real game. “Eddie Mackey puts a big fat doughnut on the scoreboard. Social life, home life, sex life—
zero.
”

That sounded pretty melodramatic. Kieran scrutinized Eddie as carefully as he could without being obvious. He was looking for the telltale signs of alcohol—slack facial muscles, unfocused or bloodshot eyes, uncoordinated movement, slurring…

Eddie looked stone cold sober. But Kieran had learned the hard way you couldn't take anything like that for granted.

“You haven't been drinking, have you?”

Eddie laughed. In the cool silence of the huge, empty field, the harsh tones echoed eerily. “Hell, no. I'm a loser, man. I've got no fake ID, and I've got no friends. Where would I get booze?”

“You're a smart kid. You might think of something.”

“Maybe I'm not as smart as everybody thinks I am. Maybe, when you get right down to it, I'm pretty damn dumb.”

“That would surprise me.”

“Well, ask around. Ask anybody. Ask Binky Potter.”

“You sure her opinion is the one we're looking for here?” Kieran smiled. “She's still a kid in a lot of ways. You may run a little deep for her.”

“Oh, yeah, I'm deep, all right. Binky Potter was too immature for me, a cool stud like me needed a
real
woman.” Eddie kicked the dirt viciously and banged his head once against the goalpost. “Man, did I feed myself a load of crap or what?”

For the first time, Eddie seemed to have dropped his fierce belligerence. His voice, on that last line,
had sounded deeply wounded, almost plaintive. Kieran's instincts told him they might finally have reached the heart of the matter.

“So…” Kieran tried to sound casual. “Does that mean you did get yourself a real woman?”

Eddie didn't lift his forehead, but he cut his eyes sideways to glance at Kieran. He closed his eyes again immediately, but not before Kieran saw that they were full of misery.

“Yeah. Yeah, I got myself a woman. I think you could say I got myself more woman than I could handle.”

Oh, boy.
Kieran braced himself for whatever sordid story might be coming. He had a feeling that, if he kept a nonjudgmental silence, Eddie would just start spilling his guts. Whatever this kid was holding inside was eating him alive.

Eddie let himself slide down onto the ground. The dirt around the goalposts was damp with dew, just this side of muddy. But he didn't seem to notice.

“The whole thing was such a disaster. She's a lot older than I am. It wouldn't ever have crossed my mind that she might, you know, like me. But she knew about the term papers—I mean, she knew about something I did that could get me into a lot of trouble. And it seemed like she was trying to say that if I'd just come over and if we could just—”

He drew his knees up to his chest and dangled his arms over them limply. He looked at Kieran, his gaze clearly asking for help getting through this part of the story.

Kieran decided to treat it matter-of-factly, at least until he could get the important details laid out. “If
you'd have sex with her, then she wouldn't turn you in?”

Eddie sighed, as if relieved that the word had been spoken.

“Yeah, that's what it seemed like she meant, only she never came right out and said it, you know? So I was like guessing, but… Anyhow, it wasn't like something I wouldn't want, I mean she's really hot and everything. And Binky never…”

He stopped again. God, Kieran thought, this was like pulling teeth. These kids obsessed about sex 24/7, but they were even terrified of the terminology. They were obviously unprepared for the intricate complications of a love life.

Again Kieran stepped in with the common-sense approach. “Binky is a virgin, so this older woman was pretty tempting.”

Eddie looked up, nodding. “Yeah, exactly. Because she's been married and everything, she's divorced, so she would know all about it, right?”

“Umm…theoretically.”

Even as he gave that calm answer, Kieran almost laughed out loud. As if anyone ever knew
all about it.
Look at Kieran himself. He'd had sex just once since his wedding four weeks ago, and that one encounter had tied his emotions into so many knots he was afraid he might never get them sorted out.

But this wasn't the moment to start worrying about his own problems. He needed to stay focused on Eddie.

It sounded like a twisted mix of seduction and blackmail. Kieran was angry, angry as hell at whoever had taken advantage of this kid's raging hormones and rotten judgment.

With a sudden insight, he knew who it was. Though Eddie hadn't given the woman a name, in Kieran's mind she already had a face. He could see Linda Tremel at the Senior Send-off, smiling like the Cheshire cat and observing that Eddie Mackey had “bedroom eyes.”

But he needed to stay calm. If he let his fury toward Linda take over his thoughts, Eddie might sense them and read them as anger toward Eddie himself.

“Okay,” Kieran said as neutrally as he could, “so what happened?”

Eddie was picking at the cuff of his khakis, which were black with mud. He didn't look at Kieran at all.

“Nothing. Not a damn thing. I'm like this pathetic, terrified kid. She's looking all gorgeous and ready to go and I'm—” He groaned and leaned his head back against the goalpost. The light wasn't quite strong enough to be sure, but Kieran thought he saw a glistening in the corners of Eddie's eyes. “I'm nothing, man, nothing. I can't do a thing.”

The relief that washed through Kieran was so intense it surprised him. He hadn't realized just how creepy he had found the idea of Linda Tremel blackmailing this kid into being her unwilling replacement for Austin. Kieran liked Eddie Mackey. He thought the kid had guts and brains—and kindness, too, which was something you didn't see all that often in teenage boys anymore.

He damn sure didn't want Eddie's first experience with sex to be as Linda Tremel's coldly manipulated boy toy.

But he knew that, at least right now, Eddie didn't share his relief. So he hid it as best he could.

“Nothing, huh? Actually, that's not terribly surprising,” Kieran said. “Given the circumstances.”

Eddie opened his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“Well, you probably didn't feel completely right about going there in the first place. I mean, it was a little like blackmail, wasn't it? And she's older than you, so probably it wasn't a relationship that meant anything special to you.”

“It wasn't a relationship at all,” Eddie said. “I just work for her. It was just supposed to be, you know, just sex. Except I couldn't even manage that.”

Here's where it got tricky. Kieran was hardly a child psychologist, but he figured that the two of them needed to be at the same level for this part of the discussion.

He took a seat next to Eddie on the mud and joined him in staring at the green-black field that stretched away before them. A mist had rolled in, giving the whole place an unreal quality. That helped, a little. It took the edge off.

“Look, your body's not some kind of machine, with an on button and an off button,” Kieran said lightly. “Believe it or not, it's connected to your brain. If your brain doesn't feel good about a situation, it's very possible your body won't feel good about it, either. It's quite likely to go on strike, to say heck no, forget this, pal, I'm not interested.”

Kieran was glad to hear a small chuckle from Eddie's side of the goalpost. He looked over, and saw that Eddie was actually smiling. “Kind of like when protesters stage a sit-down,” Eddie suggested.

“Yeah.” Kieran grinned back. “Kind of like that.”'

For a long minute, Eddie was silent. Then Kieran
heard him take in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

“So I guess I'm going to have to tell you about the other thing, too.”

Kieran hesitated. “The blackmail thing?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugged. “You don't have to tell me. But you do have to tell somebody. That's the only way to make stuff like this come right. You have to tell the people who can help you fix it.”