Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (14 page)

“How did you get what you got?” I asked, impressed.

“A friend of a friend I used to work with downtown is a counselor at Garrett’s high school in Cherry Creek. We had coffee this afternoon while you were at the trial. At first, she was very coy about talking specifically about Garrett because she’s not supposed to, you know. But when I told her the situation we’re in”—she nodded toward Angelina in my arms—“she started telling me things. I’m sworn to secrecy, of course. But what she told me about Garrett makes me even more determined to fight them, Jack.”

“Not that you were wavering before,” I said.

“No. But I think we’re dealing with a very sick boy.”

“What did you find out?” I asked, chilled.

“Garrett had a reputation before he even got to high school,” she said, digging the pad she used for grocery lists out of the diaper bag near her feet. “He wasn’t an unknown
quantity. There was an incident in middle school that made the rounds and she heard about it from a fellow counselor. Apparently, the middle-school counselor knew Garrett quite well because he’d talked to the boy after the death of his mother the year before. He said he thought the boy was hollow inside, and he couldn’t get through to him to get him to grieve properly. Anyway, since Garrett knew the counselor, he went to see him one day to complain that his friends wouldn’t have anything to do with him anymore and he wanted the school to punish them. He gave the counselor a list of four boys who should be punished.”

I shook my head.

“The counselor asked why the friends should be punished, and Garrett told him they wouldn’t walk to school with him anymore, that they ditched him whenever they could.”

“Kid stuff,” I said, remembering how casually cruel young teenagers could be.

Melissa said, “Next to each of the boys’ names Garrett had written suggested punishments. He said two of the boys should be branded with a hot iron. He said one of them should be forced to wear girls’ clothes for a month. And the last should be castrated.”

Brian whistled.

“The counselor was alarmed and took the list to the vice principal. Keep in mind this was two years after the Columbine massacre, so school officials were ultrasensitive to anything that resembled a threat. But apparently the vice principal knew Garrett’s father, and they agreed to handle the situation quietly. John Moreland and the vice principal gathered the four boys and Garrett together in a conference room and asked them to talk it out, to work out their problems. What it came down to was the four boys thought Garrett was weird and scary. Garrett was reprimanded for
making the list, but he wasn’t disciplined in any way. The counselor was furious at the outcome, and told his colleague—the woman I had coffee with—about it when Garrett moved on to high school.

“In high school,” Melissa said, “there were disturbing writings. Garrett was—or is—interested in creative writing, and he wrote several fantastically violent plays and short stories. The counselor I had coffee with had read them and agreed with the English teacher that they crossed the line. Torture, beheadings, that kind of thing. He was very interested in criminal behavior. She talked to Garrett about this, but Garrett said he had the right of free speech, especially since he was an artist. He said he would get his father involved if the school tried to stop him from being an artist.”

I said, “I thought these were the kinds of things that got kids bounced out of school these days,” recounting stories I’d heard and read about students who were expelled for things like bringing a plastic butter knife to school in their lunch sacks.

“They do,” Brian said, “but apparently it depends on who you are. And who your father is.”

Melissa said, “The counselor said Garrett brought in books he’d found in the school library filled with violence and violent images, and movies he’d rented at Blockbuster which were just as graphic as what he’d written. He built a case that his work wasn’t any worse than what anybody could get their hands on just about anywhere.”

“A future criminal defense attorney,” I said, thinking of Ludik’s performance that day.

“So nothing was done with Garrett,” Melissa said. “This empowered him, according to the counselor. And so did his money, which he flashed around the school constantly. He
always has the best car, the best clothes, the best computer. He was the first kid at Cherry Creek to have an iPhone— that kind of thing. Other kids resent him for it, but they also want to be around him because he was always willing to pay for lunch, or give them rides, or buy them alcohol.”

“This is where his gang connection comes in,” Brian said.

Melissa nodded. “The counselor said when Garrett was a junior, he started showing up to basketball and football games with gang members from downtown. They were like his posse. Garrett played it up. The gang connections gave him power. So here was a kid who had both money and power in high school and nobody—including the teachers or the counselor—took him on. The school started having some serious drug problems that year as well, and the counselor suspected Garrett’s gang pals of selling crystalmeth and other drugs to students.”

“A criminal-defense attorney and a gang kingpin,” Brian said. “That’s a deadly combination.”

“Can we prove this?” I asked.

Melissa said, “In a court of law? Like in front of a judge if we could get a custody hearing to keep Angelina?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling hopeful for the first time.

“There have to be quite a few students in that high school who would say the same things the counselor told me,” she said.

Brian nodded, excited. “With the right bulldog lawyer and a parade of kids and teachers who know Garrett, I could see a judge ruling that you should keep Angelina for her own well-being and safety.”

I wanted to believe him.

“Think about it, Jack,” Brian said. “You’ve got a man whose parents and first wife died mysteriously and a son who comes across like Little Scarface. What court would
rule they should get a baby girl because of a ridiculous technicality?”

“And maybe it doesn’t even have to go that far,” Melissa said. “Maybe we talk with Judge Moreland and tell him what we know. I’m sure he doesn’t want this all aired in a courtroom. It might be enough to make him go away.”

WE STAYED UP LATE
after Angelina was put to bed and Brian kept us optimistic and hopeful. He was able to get Melissa to laugh at his jokes, and it was a wonderful sound to hear. It was as if days and nights of built-up terrors and fears were being released.

BRIAN WAS PULLING ON
his coat to leave when there was a knock on the door. Melissa and Brian froze and looked at me. I glanced at the clock: 1:20.

A combination of fear and rage not far under the surface revealed itself. Were the boys back? If so, this time I wouldn’t be humiliated. I ran upstairs and got the .45.

“Jack!” Melissa said, seeing the weapon in my fist.

“They may have paintball guns,” I said, “but I have the real thing.”

“Oooh,” Brian said, shaking his head, “I don’t know …”

But I’d already thrown open the front door, ready and willing to level the Colt at Garrett’s or Luis’s face.

Cody slumped against the threshold, his face flushed, his eyes watery. There was snow on his shoulders and head.

“Go ahead,” he slurred, “shoot me.”

I put the gun aside, and Brian and I helped him in. He could barely walk, and we steered him toward the couch. The smell of bourbon on him was strong. He sat down in a heap.

Melissa said, “Cody, you’re covered in blood. Are you hurt?”

I hadn’t even noticed, but now I saw it: dark floral patterns of blood on his pant legs and down the front of his coat. His knuckles were bloody, the skin peeled back.

“I’m just fucking dandy,” Cody said, “but that kid out there in the Hummer with the paintball gun isn’t doing so hot.”

L
IKE SPRING SNOWSTORMS IN
the Rockies, late-fall snowstorms often had a particular kind of all-encompassing intensity and volume that could make you slip out of your everyday life, look around, and say, “Do we have enough groceries in the house?”

But that night, when Cody showed up at our house drunk and bloody, the snow didn’t divert attention from where we were but steered it back from our brief little respite of hope, and made everything more focused and harder-edged.

BRIAN WAS IN THE PASSENGER SEAT
of my Jeep as we slowly circled the block looking for the kid or vehicle Cody described. The snow was falling in white-capped vertical waves of poker chip-sized flakes. The volume of snow muted outside sound and haloed the streetlights. It wasn’t cold enough yet that the snow wouldn’t melt, but it was falling so hard and so fast that it didn’t get the chance. Cottony balls of it bunched on the hood of the car and rested on the tops of the blades of the wipers.

A few lights were on behind closed curtains in our
neighbors’ homes, and three or four porch lights. Falling snow, like fat summer miller moths, swirled in the glow one second and vanished the next as the neighborhood went black.

“Uh-oh,” Brian said. “What happened?”

“Power’s out,” I said. “Maybe the storm took a line down.”

“Wonderful. The hits just keep on coming.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What did Cody say before he passed out?”

“Something about nearly rear-ending a car that was coming down the street with its lights off,” Brian said. “Then he saw who was inside and followed them.”

“Did he say where?” I asked, my voice pinched with desperation. There weren’t any unfamiliar cars on the curbs or in the driveways of my neighbors. Those that were there had at least six inches of snow on them, making the models hard to pick out in the dark.

“He was hard to understand,” Brian said. “Bombed out of his mind. What I heard was that he pulled the car over and the boys in it tried to run away but he caught one of them. He’s so out of it, though, that I can’t even be sure he wasn’t hallucinating.”

“That blood on him wasn’t a hallucination,” I said.

“But we don’t know if it happened here, is what I’m saying,” Brian said. “I still think we should have called the cops, let
them
look for the boy and the car.”

“And get Cody arrested,” I said.

“Maybe he
needs
to be arrested.”

“You heard Melissa.”

Brian sighed. “By not calling them have we already broken the law?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“But we know we
should,
right?”

“I guess so.”

“But we aren’t going to, are we?”

“No.”

I CRAWLED THE JEEP
down the length of my subdivision street and took a left at the next block, passing under a darkened streetlight. In the dark and in the snow, my own neighborhood seemed unfamiliar. It was the same odd feeling I’d had on Sunday when Judge Moreland showed up at my home and somehow turned it into a place I didn’t know or feel very comfortable in.

“There,” Brian said, pointing through the windshield.

Halfway up the next block, Garrett’s H3 Hummer was parked with a front tire on the sidewalk and the back end angled out toward the street. The headlights of my Jeep washed across the length of the vehicle, revealing no one inside. I slowly drove on.

“I didn’t see anyone inside,” Brian said. “Where did they go?”

“Cody said one took off. But where’s the other one?”

I didn’t want to stop in the street and train my headlights on the Hummer in case any of my neighbors were looking out. In the dark, I wouldn’t be able to see them, and they might recognize me or my Jeep. I wondered if anyone had noticed the H3—it was not exactly a model that would melt into the scenery—or called the police. For sure, I thought, someone had contacted the power company by now.

At the end of the block I flipped a U and cruised back.

“Not too fast,” Brian said, “I’m looking.”

“There he is,” I said, pointing.

“Where?”

“
There
…”

The heap of clothing was about ten feet from the sidewalk
on the lawn of an unfamiliar house. The pile of clothing was dark but substantial and flecked with snow. There was just a glimpse as we passed by, but I thought I saw a bloody face with the wisp of a mustache. A snow-covered
FOR SALE
sign with a local realtor name was planted in the grass. Even though there was no power, the house looked absolutely still, and there was a good likelihood, I thought, that no one was inside.

“Luis,” I said. “Not Garrett. Luis.”

“Oh man, oh man,” Brian said, grabbing my arm. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is he dead? If he isn’t, he’ll freeze soon enough.”

“I know.”

“And where’s Garrett?”

I looked around, shaking my head. “Let me find a place to park. I’ve got to think.”

“Jeez,” Brian said, using an expression I hadn’t heard from him since we’d been in high school. “If the lights come back on… if the cops show up… if Garrett comes back…”

“I
know!
”