How to Disappear (2 page)

I had to get out of there before first light.

As soon as the men disappeared from sight, I lowered Jody’s rope ladder and bolted back into the woods that skirt Lakeshore Road. Sliding between trees in the darkness, listening for footsteps.

By the time I hit the truck stop at Bonnie-Belle Pie, it was almost dawn.

I had nothing to lose.

I climbed onto the flatbed and into the pipe.

Supposedly, Eskimos have fifty words for snow. That’s how many ways I keep saying no to Don. Because at first I don’t believe him. I’ve heard too many variations on the threat before. If I don’t run his errand, this dealer in Reno or that wannabe gangster from LA or the Russians will off him.

But here he is, alive and hunched over a metal picnic table.

Unfortunately, my dad snapping “Curiosity killed the cat” a hundred times immediately before smacking me when I was a kid didn’t have the result he was going for. My curiosity is the peg Don uses to hang me out to dry. Because while I’m saying, “Don’t try to jerk me around, no fucking way,” Don pulls a white envelope out from under his jumpsuit.

I know it’s a mistake before my hand touches the envelope.
I say no but shove it into my jacket in the interest of not getting caught wrestling over something neither one of us should have.

“I knew you’d see reason.” Don smirks. “It’s all there. Everything about her. Good stuff. It’s from somebody’s lawyer.”

Why do they bother having guards at this place? Things slide in and out as if it were a dry cleaner: drugs, sharp objects, dossiers on girls with targets on their backs.

I say, “Whose lawyer?”

“Need-to-know,” he says, as if suddenly he’s CIA and not a lowlife enforcer. That’s what he’s locked up for, whaling the crap out of guys who didn’t pay back the loan shark he was working for. “You’re just the technician.”

I’m Don’s murder
technician
?

“I know you,” Don says. “You’re going to look in the envelope. Then you’re going to have to win the game. You can’t help yourself.”

All right, I’m going to look in the envelope. Who wouldn’t look?

But how can he think I’m going to do this? It’s almost May. AP exams are in a couple of weeks. Then comes Welcome Admitted Students weekend at Mercer College, twenty-five hundred miles east of Nevada, where my future’s supposed to take place. I have a life as an upstanding citizen, honor student, and varsity crew captain that I’ll be right back into as soon as I peel out of the prison parking lot.

“You know where my stuff is, right? In Mom’s garage?”

“I don’t care where your stuff is, Don!” You get good at shouting in a very quiet voice if you visit someone in prison enough. “You order me to do it and I do it? Are you kidding me? Do you even know me?”

Don stares out at the bleak landscape of the high desert. “I know what this Nicolette Holland did to Connie Marino,” he says. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

Of course it bothers me. It makes me sick.

I’ve known Connie since before my folks broke up. She was a nice girl from a nasty family out of Detroit, a little older than we were, liked to shoot hoops with us when her dad still lived in Vegas.

Connie Marino should
not
have had her throat cut. And if this had anything to do with her dad being a hood, it’s flat-out wrong that death should be an occupational hazard that the kids inherit. I grew up with this gnawing at the back of my mind. Someone should do something about it. But it’s hard to see how that’s connected to me hunting down the girl who stuck it to Connie, this monster girl I’m supposed to find.

I don’t say anything. It’s my father’s trick; it reduces grown men to babbling.

“She might know things she shouldn’t know,” Don whispers. “You have to get to her before the cops find her.”

“What
things
could a sixteen-year-old girl know?”

Don looks away. “She might be Esteban Mendes’s bimbo’s kid.”

“Crap, Don! You want me to piss off a Colombian guy?”

Don’s eyes narrow in derision. “He’s not
Colombian
,” he says, as if this were information everyone with half a brain already knew. “He’s
Cuban
. He was Dad’s money guy.”

“We’re connected to her
dad
?” This keeps getting worse. It feels like someone threw a bag over my head and dragged me into
a true crime documentary—the true crime documentary I’ve spent my life trying to avoid.

“He’s not her dad. He’s not anything to her. What he wants doesn’t matter, anyway—he answers to Karl Yeager, and Yeager wants her gone.”

“I’d be doing this for
Karl Yeager
?”

Two years ago, the FBI dragged Karl Yeager out of the sleaziest strip club in the city that sleaze built. He was free in two weeks. Every time he gets mentioned on the news, it’s “alleged crime boss Karl Yeager” this and “believed Midwestern mob figure Karl Yeager” that. The man’s a crime celebrity: “Karl Yeager, also known as ‘the Butcher.’ ”

He’s everything Don wants to be.

“Yeager doesn’t want cops talking to this girl,” Don says. “Do you get what has to happen?”

What I get is that since NO didn’t work, I’m going to wait him out. Sometimes leading him on gets you a lot less grief than getting into it with him. Cross him directly, you wake up with his knee on your chest, the grill lighter poised so close, you can feel your eyelashes approach ignition temperature, one by one. But let it slide and, eventually, Don loses interest unless there are explosions involved.

I walk out before he can signal a guard to march him back to his cell. I’ve never seen the cell, but I can imagine myself in it.

I climb out of the pipe under a white-hot sun.

My skin is slick with perspiration, the palms of my hands burnt from pushing the chains at the mouth of the pipe out of my way. Shoulders scraped raw from my night slamming against the inside of the pipe. Sun beaming fire to my scalp. Dead muscles coming back to life, not that enthused about walking.

I smell like a football player’s gym bag.

And this upsets me only because I’m afraid it’ll make it hard to hide. That no matter how well hidden I am, someone will smell me.

I’ll be betrayed by my BO.

That, and the sound of my stomach demanding nutrition.

This is how far I’ve come from a life with lavender-scented body wash in it.

Things change so fast.

I tell myself to get a grip.

But my palms are charred and my fingernails broken from
actual
gripping. It seems like God’s laughing at me for thinking I could get a grip on any part of this.

I lower myself off the truck and into a field crisscrossed by derelict railroad tracks. A couple of sheds, tin roofs reflecting the relentless sun, not one person in sight. And all over,
NO TRESPASSING
signs warning of armed patrols and watchdogs.

Oh God, oh God, dogs!

They come from out of nowhere. Small, muscular Dobermans. Clipped ears, clipped tails, and fast.

I run at that fence with a shot of adrenaline so massive, you’d need a horse syringe to hold it. The pain just feels like motivation.

The dogs snarl and jump at my sneakers with what look like werewolf fangs. Do these dogs get to tear trespassers to pieces until someone shows up to view the carcasses and bury what’s left?

There are more pressing questions.

Such as, what if they know where I am, and they’re on their way here?

How much easier for them could I make it? Hanging off a rickety fence like a midnight dare at cheer camp, a slow-moving target as they reach for their guns.

I know guns; people in Cotter’s Mill hunt.

I know that the ones they were waving, silhouetted in the moonlight, are for going after people, not Canada geese.

Steve was always dragging me off into the great outdoors to fish. Or, at least, cook the fish. The worst was hunting season, a buck tied to the hood of the SUV on the way home. But as sexist as he got with me, Steve made sure I knew my way around firearms.

But I don’t see any stray rifles lying around. (As if I’d shoot a dog—I wouldn’t.) What I see is a flat, wide sky, a blue lid with fat clouds stuffed underneath, pressing down, closing me into a tight Texas box.

A box I have no idea how to get out of.

I could make it over this fence so fast, but there’s razor-edged tape up there that could separate your fingers from your hands if you grabbed it.

Watch enough crime shows on TV, and you know this gruesome stuff.

Wake up caked in blood a thousand miles from the scene of the crime, and . . . what? Pray that the pickups driving by aren’t
them
is what.

I poke my sneakers into the fence’s unforgiving little holes and scramble toward the slim opening of the loosely chained gate. Pull it shut. Walk toward the row of trees that shields the lots behind them from the street.

Trying not to be the out-of-place moving speck that draws the hunter’s eye.

Trying to look as inconspicuous as if I were cutting fifth period back home, sneaking under the bleachers and over the fence behind Cotter’s Mill Unified High School with Jody Nimiroff and Olivia so we could get Big Macs for lunch and sneak back into school for sixth period.

That’s what seemed like life-and-death two days before.

Scarfing down fries in time to sprint back to school unnoticed.

Avoiding Saturday detention.

That life is over.

If I don’t stop crying like a helpless baby, so am I.

Over. Done with. Dead.

I have to deal.

I’m dealing.

It takes everything I’ve got not to gun the car past the prison gates and fishtail out of there.

Don’s envelope is pressing against my chest like a dead weight, like a rat corpse you pick up by the tail and chuck into the incinerator. It pokes me through my shirt. I’d reach down and scratch, but I won’t risk a move that could make the car jerk and give the Highway Patrol any excuse to stop me. Face it, when those guys see my name on my driver’s license, they’ve been known to come up with a bogus excuse to pat me down.

I don’t know what’s in this envelope, but I know enough not to let a cop find it on me.

I count the minutes, miles, and tenths of a mile to the first turn-off. I pull into a bar and grill that looks least likely to have electronic
surveillance, as if the security cam at the Jack in the Box could see into my car and call me out me for taking step one in Don’s deranged plan.

Tearing open the envelope, I have the feeling I get when I’m crouched in the scull at the starting block, just before the starting pistol fires, waiting to pull back on the oars and launch across the water.

Bang.
There she is, staring out from under the envelope’s flap. A girl with long hair and doe eyes, all narrow shoulders and collarbone and small breasts.

Hello,
Nicolette.

I’ve lost it. I’m seeing thought bubbles over her head that aren’t there: “Don’t.” “You aren’t going to, right?” “Guns don’t kill people; assholes kill people.”

I think,
At least she’s got a sense of humor
. Then I think,
Stop hallucinating
.

Her face is heart-shaped, freckles across the nose, and a wide mouth. She’s not completely confident when the camera catches her eye, but she gives up the suggestion of a grin. There she is in the next picture, prancing around in a cheerleader uniform. She could be junior varsity, that’s how young she looks—young and in-your-face pretty. This girl doesn’t even look as if she’d kill a spider.

The Weedwacker that keeps me in line starts up in my gut.

This is fucked. Heavy-duty guys like Karl Yeager aren’t supposed to hand small-time hoods at Yucca Valley Correctional school portraits of future dead girls, with the girls’ addresses printed on the back. A penciled annotation says it’s Esteban Mendes’s
house—surprise, surprise—with a note to stay away. I’m happy to oblige.

Why go to her house when I’ve got the address of her school, her Tumblr, her Instagram, her Pinterest board of fancy dresses, and her defunct three-year-old blog where her last entry was about
Twilight
? (She was thirteen. She liked it. She was Team Jacob.) I have her log-in and her password for a dozen different sites: BUTTERcup9. Apparently, no one told her it’s smart to change things up.

I unwrap her driver’s license. I don’t mean a scan of it:
it
. Sixty seconds later, I’m in the men’s room at the back of the lounge with my Swiss Army knife, slicing the license into pieces small enough to flush. It’s a liability. She’s a missing-killer-crazy-girl, and I have her driver’s license on me?

Think, Jack.

I pull out the ID my friend Calvin and I trade back and forth for emergencies and buy a beer. I’ve held on to this ID for most of senior year. My mom won’t let me drink, whereas Calvin can take a beer out of the refrigerator in his kitchen. Calvin is the only person I talk to about Don.
His
older brother, Gerhard—the guy with the legitimate claim to the twenty-one-year-old ID—goes to MIT.

I want to call Calvin up, but how would that conversation go? First I’d listen to him moan about how his girlfriend, Monica, might leave him when he takes off for Caltech in August, then he’d listen to me explain how I’m supposed to kill somebody?

Not with a whimper but a bang.

What’s wrong with me? Don’t say genetic predisposition, I already
know that. On one side, we have Art Manx, whose family crest might as well say,
Live by the sword, die by the sword
. On the other side, meet Isabella Rossi Manx, the sweetest insanely strict mother alive, but weak as jelly at the center.

You learn from the Killers-’R’-Us side of the family that weak-as-jelly has its pitfalls. You are never weak as jelly. Then you take the envelope, and you want to bang your head on the bar you shouldn’t legally be sitting at.

Don thinks this is happening.

I sit there eating old peanuts, making myself visualize this Nicolette creeping up behind Connie Marino. I imagine the soft skin of Connie’s neck peeling open, gaping like a thin-lipped mouth, drooling blood. I picture Connie lying on a linoleum floor, bleeding out while this twisted little cheerleader, this tiny evil Nicolette (5' 2'' according to her license) stands over her, laughing.