Finders Keepers (40 page)

“Where are you, Peter?” Hodges asks. “Where are you right now?”

There's another pause, and Hodges knows exactly what Pete's doing: checking for landmarks. He may have lived in the city his whole life, but right now he's so freaked he doesn't know east from west.

“Government Square,” he says at last. “Across from this restaurant, the Happy Cup?”

“Do you see the man who shot at you?”

“N-No. I ran, and I don't think he could chase me very far on foot. He's kind of old, and you can't drive a car on Lacemaker Lane.”

“Stay there,” Hodges says. “We'll come and get you.”

“Please don't call the police,” Peter says. “It'll kill my folks, after everything else that's happened to them. I'll give you the notebooks. I never should have kept them, and I never should have tried to sell any of them. I should have stopped with the money.” His voice is blurring now as he breaks down. “My parents . . . they were in such trouble. About
everything
. I only wanted to help!”

“I'm sure that's true, but I
have
to call the police. If you didn't kill Halliday, the evidence will show that. You'll be fine. I'll pick you up and we'll go to your house. Will your parents be there?”

“Dad's on a business thing, but my mom and sister will be.” Pete has to hitch in a breath before going on. “I'll go to jail, won't I? They'll never believe me about the man with the red lips. They'll think I made him up.”

“All you have to do is tell the truth,” Holly says. “Bill won't let anything bad happen to you.” She grabs his hand and squeezes it fiercely. “Will you?”

Hodges repeats, “If you didn't kill him, you'll be fine.”

“I didn't! Swear to God!”

“This other man did. The one with the red lips.”

“Yes. He killed John Rothstein, too. He said Rothstein sold out.”

Hodges has a million questions, but this isn't the time.

“Listen to me, Pete. Very carefully. Stay where you are. We'll be at Government Square in fifteen minutes.”

“If you let me drive,” Jerome says, “we can be there in ten.”

Hodges ignores this. “The four of us will go to your house. You'll tell the whole story to me, my associates, and your mother. She may want to call your father and discuss getting you legal representation.
Then
we're going to call the police. It's the best I can do.”

And better than I
should
do, he thinks, eyeing the mangled corpse and thinking about how close he came to going to jail himself four years ago. For the same kind of thing, too: Lone Ranger shit. But surely another half hour or forty-five minutes can't hurt. And what the boy said about his parents hit home. Hodges was at City Center that day. He saw the aftermath.

“A-All right. Come as fast as you can.”

“Yes.” He breaks the connection.

“What do we do about
our
fingerprints?” Holly asks.

“Leave them,” Hodges says. “Let's go get that kid. I can't wait to hear his story.” He tosses Jerome the Mercedes key.

“Thanks, Massa Hodges!” Tyrone Feelgood screeches. “Dis here black boy is one
safe drivuh
! I is goan get'chall safe to yo destin—”

“Shut up, Jerome.”

Hodges and Holly say it together.

37

Pete takes a deep, trembling breath and closes his cell phone. Everything is going around in his head like some nightmare amusement park ride, and he's sure he sounded like an idiot. Or a murderer scared of getting caught and making up any wild tale. He forgot to tell Mr. Hodges that Red Lips once lived in Pete's
own house, and he should have done that. He thinks about calling Hodges back, but why bother when he and those other two are coming to pick him up?

The guy won't go the house, anyway, Pete tells himself. He can't. He has to stay invisible.

But he might, just the same. If he thinks I was lying about moving the notebooks somewhere else, he really might. Because he's crazy. A total whack-job.

He tries Tina's phone again and gets nothing but her message: “Hey, it's Teens, sorry I missed you, do your thing.”
Beeep
.

All right, then.

Mom.

But before he can call her, he sees a bus coming, and in the destination window, like a gift from heaven, are the words NORTH SIDE. Pete suddenly decides he's not going to sit here and wait for Mr. Hodges. The bus will get him there sooner, and he wants to go home
now
. He'll call Mr. Hodges once he's on board and tell him to meet him at the house, but first he'll call his mother and tell her to lock all the doors.

The bus is almost empty, but he makes his way to the back, just the same. And he doesn't have to call his mother, after all; his phone rings in his hand as he sits down.
MOM
, the screen says. He takes a deep breath and pushes ACCEPT. She's talking before he can even say hello.

“Where are you, Peter?” Peter instead of Pete. Not a good start. “I expected you home an hour ago.”

“I'm coming,” he says. “I'm on the bus.”

“Let's stick to the truth, shall we? The bus has come and gone. I saw it.”

“Not the schoolbus, the North Side bus. I had to . . .” What? Run an errand? That's so ludicrous he could laugh. Except this is
no laughing matter. Far from it. “There was something I had to do. Is Tina there? She didn't go down to Ellen's, or something?”

“She's in the backyard, reading her book.”

The bus is picking its way past some road construction, moving with agonizing slowness.

“Mom, listen to me. You—”

“No, you listen to
me
. Did you send that money?”

He closes his eyes.

“Did you? A simple yes or no will suffice. We can go into the details later.”

Eyes still closed, he says: “Yes. It was me. But—”

“Where did it come from?”

“That's a long story, and right now it doesn't matter. The
money
doesn't matter. There's a guy—”

“What do you
mean
, it doesn't matter? That was over
twenty thousand dollars
!”

He stifles an urge to say
Did you just figure that out?

The bus continues lumbering its laborious way through the construction. Sweat is rolling down Pete's face. He can see the smear of blood on his knee, dark brown instead of red, but still as loud as a shout.
Guilty!
it yells.
Guilty, guilty!

“Mom, please shut up and listen to me.”

Shocked silence on the other end of the line. Not since the days of his toddler tantrums has he told his mother to shut up.

“There's a guy, and he's dangerous.” He could tell her just
how
dangerous, but he wants her on alert, not in hysterics. “I don't think he'll come to the house, but he might. You should get Tina inside and lock the doors. Just for a few minutes, then I'll be there. Some other people, too. People who can help.”

At least I hope so, he thinks.

God, I hope so.

38

Morris Bellamy turns onto Sycamore Street. He's aware that his life is rapidly narrowing to a point. All he has is a few hundred stolen dollars, a stolen car, and the need to get his hands on Rothstein's notebooks. Oh, he has one other thing, too: a short-term hideout where he can go, and read, and find out what happened to Jimmy Gold after the Duzzy-Doo campaign put him at the top of the advertising dungheap with a double fistful of those Golden Bucks. Morris understands this is a crazy goal, so he must be a crazy person, but it's all he has, and it's enough.

There's his old house, which is now the notebook thief's house. With a little red car in the driveway.

“Crazy don't mean shit,” Morris Bellamy says. “Crazy don't mean shit.
Nothing
means shit.”

Words to live by.

39

“Bill,” Jerome says. “I hate to say it, but I think our bird has flown.”

Hodges looks up from his thoughts as Jerome guides the Mercedes through Government Square. There are quite a few people sitting on the benches—reading newspapers, chatting and drinking coffee, feeding the pigeons—but there are no teenagers of either sex.

“I don't see him at any of the tables on the café side, either,” Holly reports. “Maybe he went inside for a cup of coffee?”

“Right now, coffee would be the last thing on his mind,” Hodges says. He pounds a fist on his thigh.

“North Side and South Side buses run through here every fifteen minutes,” Jerome says. “If I were in his shoes, sitting and waiting around for someone to come and pick me up would be torture. I'd want to be doing something.”

That's when Hodges's phone rings.

“A bus came along and I decided not to wait,” Pete says. He sounds calmer now. “I'll be home when you get there. I just got off the phone with my mother. She and Tina are okay.”

Hodges doesn't like the sound of this. “Why wouldn't they be, Peter?”

“Because the guy with the red lips knows where we live. He said
he
used to live there. I forgot to tell you.”

Hodges checks where they are. “How long to Sycamore Street, Jerome?”

“Be there in twenty. Maybe less. If I'd known the kid was going to grab a bus, I would've taken the Crosstown.”

“Mr. Hodges?” Pete.

“I'm here.”

“He'd be stupid to go to my house, anyway. If he does that, I won't be framed anymore.”

He's got a point. “Did you tell them to lock up and stay inside?”

“Yes.”

“And did you give your mom his description?”

“Yes.”

Hodges knows that if he calls the cops, Mr. Red Lips will be gone with the wind, leaving Pete to depend on the forensic ­evidence to get him off the hook. And they can probably beat the cops, anyway.

“Tell him to call the guy,” Holly says. She leans toward Hodges and bellows, “
Call and say you changed your mind and will give him the notebooks!
”

“Pete, did you hear that?”

“Yeah, but I can't. I don't even know if he has a phone. He called me from the one in the bookshop. We didn't, you know, exactly have time to exchange info.”

“How poopy is that?” Holly asks no one in particular.

“All right. Call me the minute you get home and verify that everything's okay. If I don't hear from you, I'll have to call for the police.”

“I'm sure they're f—”

But this is where they came in. Hodges closes his phone and leans forward. “Punch it, Jerome.”

“As soon as I can.” He gestures at the traffic, three lanes going each way, chrome twinkling in the sunshine. “Once we get past the rotary up there, we'll be gone like Enron.”

Twenty minutes, Hodges thinks. Twenty minutes at most. What can happen in twenty minutes?

The answer, he knows from bitter experience, is quite a lot. Life and death. Right now all he can do is hope those twenty minutes don't come back to haunt him.

40

Linda Saubers came into her husband's little home office to wait for Pete, because her husband's laptop is on the desk and she can play computer solitaire. She is far too upset to read.

After talking to Pete, she's more upset than ever. Afraid, too, but not of some sinister villain lurking on Sycamore Street. She's afraid for her son, because it's clear
he
believes in the sinister villain. Things are finally starting to come together. His pallor and weight loss . . . the crazy moustache he tried to grow . . . the return
of his acne and his long silences . . . they all make sense now. If he's not having a nervous breakdown, he's on the verge of one.

She gets up and looks out the window at her daughter. Tina's got her best blouse on, the billowy yellow one, and no way should she be wearing it on a dirty old glider that should have been taken down years ago. She has a book, and it's open, but she doesn't seem to be reading. She looks drawn and sad.

What a nightmare, Linda thinks. First Tom hurt so badly he'll walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and now our son seeing monsters in the shadows. That money wasn't manna from heaven, it was acid rain. Maybe he just has to come clean. Tell us the whole story about where the money came from. Once he does that, the healing process can begin.

In the meantime, she'll do as he asked: call Tina inside and lock the house. It can't hurt.

A board creaks behind her. She turns, expecting to see her son, but it's not Pete. It's a man with pale skin, thinning white hair, and red lips. It's the man her son described, the sinister villain, and her first feeling isn't terror but an absurdly powerful sense of relief. Her son isn't having a nervous breakdown, after all.

Then she sees the gun in the man's hand, and the terror comes, bright and hot.

“You must be Mom,” the intruder says. “Strong family resemblance.”

“Who are you?” Linda Saubers asks. “What are you doing here?”

The intruder—in the doorway of her husband's study instead of in her son's mind—glances out the window, and Linda has to suppress an urge to say
Don't look at her
.

“Is that your daughter?” Morris asks. “Hey, she's pretty. I always liked a girl in yellow.”

“What do you want?” Linda asks.

“What's mine,” Morris says, and shoots her in the head. Blood flies up and spatters red droplets against the glass. It sounds like rain.

41

Tina hears an alarming bang from the house and runs for the kitchen door. It's the pressure cooker, she thinks. Mom forgot the damn pressure cooker again. This has happened once before, while her mother was making preserves. It's an old cooker, the kind that sits on the stove, and Pete spent most of one Saturday afternoon on a stepladder, scraping dried strawberry goo off the ceiling. Mom was vacuuming the living room when it happened, which was lucky. Tina hopes to God she wasn't in the kitchen this time, either.