All Unquiet Things (32 page)

“Not so fast. I asked Cass if he knew anything about Adam’s supplier, but he doesn’t, only that the guy isn’t in Empire Valley and that he’s a bit of a shadow. Nobody’s ever met him, but Adam complained to Cass last year that Barton was doing a lot of stuff behind his back—having people roughed up, sending Adam’s toadies out on special assignments, bringing stuff over the border without telling Adam, et cetera. He didn’t say so, but I got the impression it might’ve been this Barton guy who cut the cocaine he sold Laura Brandt with Special K.”

“So?”

“So we know that Adam kicked the Bean out of his circle after Cass’s School’s Out for Summer party, but the Laura Brandt stuff didn’t go down until after that—in July and at Lucy’s party in August. Both Adam and this Barton character had a lot to lose if she actually went to the cops. Maybe the Bean agreed to freak her out on the freeway or dispose of her permanently to get on either or both of their good sides.”

“Maybe. You seem to be consulting a lot with Cass lately. Is he part of this investigation now?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually,” she said, ripping open a packet of Sweet’N Low and pouring it into a tall glass of iced tea. “Cass and I are back together.”

“I’ve heard.”

“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say? That I think it’s a big mistake?” I looked her straight in the eyes. “Fine. I think it’s a big mistake.”

“Why?”

“You really want to do this?”

“Do what?”

“You really want to have this conversation about how I disapprove of your boyfriend? We just started becoming friendly and this is how you want all that to end?”

“I know you don’t trust him because he’s friends with Adam, but he told me that they hardly even speak anymore and I really think—”

“Here’s what I think. I think he lied about being with Adam the night of Carly’s murder, and I’m about to prove it. Are you going to stand by him when you find out he impeded a police investigation and he gets arrested for aiding and abetting?”

“If that’s what happened, then yeah, I am going to stick by him.”

“Because he did such a fine job of sticking by you,” I said. “I thought a girl like you would prefer to return the favor.”

“I love him, Neily. If Carly had come to you and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve made a mistake, I want you back,’ what would you have done?”

She had a point. “It’s your life. But for the record, I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You said you were about to prove that Adam wasn’t where he said he was the night of Carly’s murder. How are you going to do that?”

I hesitated. “I don’t think I can trust you with that information.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope. I’m willing to play the understanding, sympathetic friend who supports all your decisions no matter how stupid they are, but you’re compromising the whole investigation by getting back together with Cass.”

“How?”

“There. Right there, that look.”

“What look?”

“That panicked look you had on your face when I talked about proving that Cass is a liar. You’re either on board a hundred percent or you’re not. But if you’re not, I can’t use you.”

“You can’t use
me
? Whose idea was this in the first place?”

“Yours. Which is why I’m surprised that you would give it all up to make out with Cass in the backseat of a car.”

“It’s a really nice car,” she snapped.

“Oh, good one. Right where it hurts.”

“I’m not giving it all up. I still want to find out who killed Carly—I still want to clear my dad.”

“Sure doesn’t look like it. But I guess that you were just doing this to exorcise your daddy issues, and now that you have, the rest is gravy.”

“Excuse me? ‘Daddy issues’?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Enlighten me,” she said, seething.

“This all started because you wanted to win back the love of
a man who abandoned you,” I said, on a roll now. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I also didn’t want to let her off easy for walking away from this. It had been comforting, knowing that somebody was there with me, believing the same things I was, fighting for the same cause, but all she was doing was launching a campaign to get back her ex-boyfriend. What annoyed me most was that I saw this coming, but I thought she would make the right decision. It just showed how little I knew her. “Now you have. It’s a different man, but he’ll do, I’m sure.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“Well, at least some things don’t change.”

“How can you say that to me? After everything we’ve both been through, how can you deny me the one scrap of happiness I’ve had over the past year and a half? You’re so goddamned selfish it makes me want to throw up.” She threw a few dollar bills on the table and left the restaurant. I didn’t watch her leave. It was too sad.

I saw Audrey Monday morning at school, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she dove right for Cass, as if to show me that she knew what she was doing. I wanted to give consideration to Audrey and Cass, but unfortunately I had bigger things to worry about. First of all, I had to figure out how to get into Adam’s gym locker without using the bolt cutter I’d stashed in my own locker in case of emergency.

“If I had to get into somebody’s locker, how would I do it?” Harvey repeated for clarification. “I’m assuming this is not just a hypothetical question.”

“Let’s pretend it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, I guess the best way to compromise a combination lock would be to use a shim.”

“A shim?”

“Yeah. You can buy them on the Internet, I think.”

“Wish I had known that yesterday.”

“Relax, dude.” Harvey walked over to the soda machine and dropped a handful of coins into the slot. A can of root beer tumbled out and he picked it up. “You can make your own out of an aluminum can.”

“Tell me you know how to make a shim.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

I grinned and shook my head. “Unbelievable.”

“What? I get bored a lot and I used to be a Boy Scout.”

“No, it’s brilliant. What else do you need?”

“A knife, some scissors, and a Sharpie.”

“I have a Swiss Army knife in my car and I’m sure we can get a marker from Gert.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s get hacking.”

“You are having way too much fun with this,” I said as I watched Harvey chop up the soda can and draw lines on it with a chunky blue Sharpie we’d borrowed from Gert the librarian. We were in the back of the library at my usual table, where nobody would stumble across us unexpectedly.

“I’m thinking about being an FBI agent when I grow up,” Harvey said. “What’s all this about, anyway?”

“I’m really close to figuring out who killed Carly,” I told him. “To do that, I need something in a certain locker.”

Harvey raised an eyebrow. “You sure you want to do this? It seems like a long way to go for a girl you claim to hate.”

“I don’t hate her,” I said softly, watching his hands work the aluminum instead of looking him in the face.

“Dude, you burned all her pictures.”

“I don’t hate her,” I said. “I was just so angry at her. She broke my heart, she humiliated me, and then she went and got herself killed. How am I supposed to deal with that?”

“So she had some flaws, and she made some big mistakes,” Harvey said. “Everybody does. You can’t be perfect, and you definitely can’t expect other people to be.”

I scoffed.

“Seriously. You know, my grandmother used to say that flaws are God’s greatest gift to humanity, because they give us the opportunity to learn from ourselves and from each other. She said they’re not obstacles to perfection, merely signs and guideposts on the path we take in pursuit of it.”

“But if nobody’s perfect, no matter how hard we try, then what’s the point?”

Harvey didn’t look up; he was concentrating hard on his work. “The universe is infinite; we’ll never map its edges, yet NASA keeps on sending up spacecrafts,” he said, folding the metal precisely. “The
point
is just to get a little closer.”

He smiled and held up the handmade shim. “Now, this may or may not work—the metal is a little too thin to be one hundred percent, but those combination locks are pretty weak. Still, you might need to use some brute force.”

“So I do what? Jam this in where the lock closes and give it a tug?”

“Exactly.”

“What are you doing seventh period, Harv?”

“Well, I was going to go to government class, but seeing as you’ll be otherwise engaged, I guess I can tag along, play lookout.”

“Great.”

“You look a little terrified, Neily. You sure this is a good idea?”

“No. But it’s the only idea I have at the moment.”

“Whose locker are we breaking into, by the way?”

“Adam Murray’s.”

Harvey let out a low whistle. “You might want to keep that knife on you, just in case.”

Shortly after the bell announced the start of seventh period, the men’s locker room emptied out and all the muscleheads started doing rotations in the weight room down the hall. When we were sure that the coast was clear, Harvey and I went into the locker room and jammed the door closed with a wedge.

“Do you know which one’s his locker?” Harvey asked as we walked along the aisles.

I stopped in front of locker 214 and pointed to a large round sticker that had been affixed to the door. “Where else in northern California would you find a Pittsburgh Steelers logo than on the private property of the great-great-great-grandnephew of Andrew Carnegie?”

“And here I thought being a Niners fan was heresy. You know way too much about the people in this town.”

“Yet another sign that it’s time to get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Give me the shim.”

Harvey handed it to me. It took me a couple of tries, but eventually the lock popped open.

“Sweet,” I said in a low voice. I pawed through a pile of dirty laundry, trying not to inhale, and found the BlackBerry in its case near the bottom. “Got it. Let’s get out of here.”

After I stole Adam’s BlackBerry, we booked it to the Mac lab on the second floor of the library to peruse its contents. I hooked it up using a cable from my father’s BlackBerry that I had accidentally taken with my cell-phone charger the last time I stayed with him.