Running the Risk (6 page)

Priscilla was happy enough once I cracked the lid on the Styrofoam box and handed her the plastic fork. I thought about Priscilla and her life, and I wondered how she'd ended up like this. Maybe it was one of those things that could have happened to anyone. Maybe I'd end up on the street some day. Luck of the draw, I guess.

Priscilla ate slowly, almost daintily. Neither one of us spoke just then, and a strange calmness came over me. It was like time had stopped.

I didn't exactly know what had drawn me back here today. Boredom maybe. Curiosity about what my father calls “how the other half lives.” Genuine concern for this old demented woman—a woman who I could be kind to, yet who I doubted I could save. And I realized that I was changing. Everything about this past week was different. And now I was different too.

“Looks like rain,” Priscilla said at last.

And it did. It looked like it could rain. I nodded. She smiled.

Monroe and his friend named J.L. came our way. Monroe smiled. J.L. did not.

“Hi, Priscilla,” Monroe said. “Looks like your boyfriend bought you your favorite dessert.”

Priscilla laughed, smiled at him and then smiled at me. “Sean just got a new truck,” she said. It was the first time she'd used my name.

“Really?” Monroe said, looking around the street. “Where's it parked, Sean?”

Priscilla giggled. “Show him.”

I gingerly took the toy truck out of my jacket pocket and placed it on the palm of my hand.

Priscilla laughed out loud just then and so did Monroe. But not J.L. He had remained standing sideways to us, nervously looking down the street as if watching for something. But then he made a sudden turn and was looking right at me, a wary, agitated look in his eyes.

And then it hit me. I recognized those eyes.

As he turned quickly away, I pretended
that nothing had changed. The first drops of rain fell lightly on my forehead.

“See,” Priscilla said, “I told you it would rain.”

“Always does on a picnic,” Monroe said. “It's either that or ants.”

“Time to get you home,” I told Priscilla.

“Guess you know the drill,” Monroe said. “Don't get wet.”

J.L. had already begun to walk away. He'd never said a single word. Monroe followed him.

We didn't move until the pie was all gone. I tossed the Styrofoam container in the nearly full wire garbage can and led Priscilla back to the shelter. I turned back a couple of times to see if anyone was following us. I was getting more nervous by the minute.

The raindrops were sporadic. My hair was wet, but Priscilla didn't seem to have a drop on her. She noticed me looking at her. “My mother taught me how to walk between the raindrops,” she explained. “It takes practice but it can be done. I taught Doyle to do it when he was young.”

The woman at the shelter was happy to see Priscilla returning. I didn't hang around for any polite conversation. I wanted to make sure that Priscilla was safely inside, and when I was back on the now-empty street in the drizzling rain, I began to run. Three blocks away I caught the bus headed back to my neighborhood. I sat alone in my seat, staring out the window as the rain increased. I considered my options. And none of them looked good.

When I got home, I phoned Jeanette. I didn't know who else to call.

“Why are you calling me?” she asked, sounding annoyed.

“I have to talk to you about something.”

“My parents knew I was drinking. I threw up in the bathroom. Why did you let me drink so much?”

“It wasn't my idea.”

“I thought you were so dependable.”

It was a no-win situation, but right then I had something else on my mind. “Jeanette, I saw the guy today.”

“What guy?”

“The guy who held the gun on me that night.”

“What do you mean, you saw him? They had ski masks on.”

“Yeah, but I saw his eyes. I'm almost positive that I know who he is.”

“I don't think so. None of us could have identified either one of those guys who came in.”

“You were in the back. I was in the front. I looked him straight in the eyes. You heard Solway. They think the same guy shot someone in a store. What should I do?”

“Nothing,” she said without losing a beat.

“Nothing?”

“If you identify him, you could get hurt,” she said.

“Don't they have some kind of room you sit in where you can see out but they can't see in?” I asked.

“I guess so, but did you meet this person face-to-face already?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then if he gets arrested, he's gonna want to figure out who snitched.”

“Snitched isn't exactly the word.”

“Sean, don't be stupid,” she said. “Do nothing. Don't get involved.”

And she hung up the phone. I held it for a long time as if waiting for more, but the dial tone came on. And I knew then she was right. What was I thinking? Two things were clear. I could not go back downtown again. And I would not say a word.

I never knew my grandparents on my mother's side. They lived in England and had visited only three times when I was a kid. They were polite and kind, I suppose, just not all that interested in me. He was an investment banker involved in the flow of international money, and she was a woman who spent her time with other women married to investment bankers. I think they gave my parents money for me to go to college. If I decided to go.

On my father's side, my grandmother died when I was very young, but my wonderful crazy grandfather, Hank, hung on until that fateful ultralight accident. What I remember most about him was his energy, his high spirits and his unlimited optimism. Whenever anything went wrong, he'd always say, “It will all work out in the end” or “We're going to turn this around into something positive.”

My father had decided not to follow in his father's footsteps and was now a guy who believed in safety and caution. Two of his favorite words. And my mother, I believe, admired him for those assets. She claimed that she had lived a few reckless years in her early twenties before marrying, but she would never talk about it. Both of my parents had done an excellent job of keeping me safe for over sixteen years.

“We think you should find another job,” my father said at the dinner table that night. “Or concentrate on your studies, maybe. Prepare yourself academically for university.”

“I'm going back to my job,” I told him. “I know it doesn't seem like much of a job, but I like it.” I wondered which, if any, of my former coworkers would be back there when I showed up Saturday night.

“Then we'll get Ernesto to switch your times.”

“I like working nights,” I insisted.

“But we're worried about you,” my mother chimed in.

“I know. But I'll be all right. I need to do this for me.”

I had a list of things I wanted to change about me. I wanted to be more assertive. I wanted to be more adventurous. I wanted to be more willing to take chances and I wanted to be able to make my own decisions. Including the one about going to the cops about what I thought I knew about the gunman.

I guess I wanted to be more like my grandfather. I had thought about this more than once as I got older. What would old Hank do in this situation? Once, in an unguarded moment, when Hank had been drinking, I think, he took me aside and whispered,
“Sean, you have to really live your life. You have to experience everything you can.” I didn't really get it. But it was the way he said it.

It was odd to think that Jeanette was claiming to be the voice of reason. Here was a screwed-up girl who couldn't get her own life straight, and she was telling me to keep my mouth shut about a criminal. But she was right. If I opened my mouth and went to the cops, somebody back there on the street would be waiting to get me. I would be in over my head. There would be a gun involved or a knife or god knows what. It could be violent. The cops wouldn't be able to protect me.

The next day I went to school and failed a history test I had not studied for. I was a useless lab partner in biology and discovered that trying to read a nineteenth-century English novel was not all it was cracked up to be. Jeanette avoided me as best she could. Whatever spark there was between us before
was gone. I still thought she was really hot, but I knew that nothing was going to happen between us.

I began thinking about other girls I knew and plotting a way to actually get noticed by them. I had always been kind of invisible but I needed to work on getting noticed. I was looking forward to returning to work on Saturday. You never knew who might walk in through those glass doors.

But right then I felt like I was going nowhere. The only woman in my life was Priscilla, and I was not at all sure it was a good idea for me to trek downtown to see her again. After school, I holed up in my room and played a couple of video games I'd been ignoring. They weren't nearly as much fun now as I remembered them to be. I got bored and fell asleep early.

My father was surprised to see me in the kitchen while he was eating breakfast the next morning. “You're up early,” he said, setting down the morning newspaper.

“I was hungry,” I said and popped a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster.

That's when I saw it. The story on the front page of the paper.

There'd been another robbery. At a gas station this time. And someone had been shot and killed.

My father watched me as I read the story. The blood drained from my face. There was a picture of the victim, a university student who had been working part-time at night at the service station. And there was a fuzzy in-store security cam image of the guy holding the gun. You couldn't see his face but it was a guy with a ski mask. I was pretty sure it was J.L. I even recognized the sweatshirt he was wearing.

I prayed that I was wrong, but I knew I had to go talk to Detective Solway, and I didn't want to give my father or anyone a chance to talk me out of it. Once I made that first step into the police station, I knew my life might never be the same again.

But it was a step I had to take.

I knew that my father was looking at me and I tried to act natural. And then I realized something was different. My father was not dressed for work. No suit and no tie. I looked at the clock. It was 8:30.

“Aren't you going to be late for work?” I asked.

“I got fired,” he said.

“What? Not again!”

“Fired. Done. Finished.” He tried to smile. “You could say I'm on vacation.”

This didn't make any sense. “There must have been some mistake, right?”

“No, I guess you wouldn't call it a mistake. I wasn't willing to go along with what my boss wanted. So they fired me.”

“What did they want you to do?”

“It's probably not a big deal. In fact, it's probably done all the time. You know all those twenty-five-cent slot machines in the casino?”

“Sure.”

“You can set the odds of winning on them. It's supposedly regulated by the government, but everyone is pretty sloppy about it.”

“But you don't work on the slot machines. You're an accountant.”

“Right. But somebody along the way reset the odds of winning on those machines. They did it months ago. And as a result, my company was making higher profits. Significantly higher profits. The odds of a customer winning went down. The odds of us making more money went up. I was just curious about why our revenues were so much higher on those machines.”

“And?”

“And they told me to look the other way.”

“Why didn't you?”

“I'm not sure. I guess I didn't think they'd fire me. I just thought I was doing my job by keeping them on track.”

“But they didn't see it that way.”

“I went out on a limb. I said we should come clean and admit the mistake, make an apology, pay a fine or whatever and move on.”

“Only it wasn't a mistake,” I said.

“Right.”

“Can't you fight this?” I asked.

“I probably could but I'm not sure I will. I just know I did the right thing.”

“Balls to the wall,” I said, not exactly sure why.

“What?”

“It's what Hank used to say, remember?” I said.

My father suddenly smiled. “Balls to the wall. I do remember that.”

“So this is your ultralight,” I said, wondering if he'd understand.

He smiled again but said nothing.

I looked down at the newspaper and took a deep breath.

“Dad, I guess I have to tell you something.”

He saw the look on my face. “About the car?” he asked. “Don't worry about that. I keep an eye on the odometer and noticed that it had a higher number on it than where I left it. Don't know why I do that. I just have a kind of photographic thing about numbers. Guess that's why I became an accountant. I was a little disappointed in you at first, but then I talked to your mother. She said she was surprised it took you this long, that it was quite a temptation.”

“You're okay with that?” I asked.

“Now I am. This weekend, let's do it right. We'll go out to the country and you can drive all you want.”

“I don't have a license. You know that.”

“Balls to the wall,” he said. “Want some more toast?”

“Sure.”

As I stared down at the newspaper again, I suddenly realized I didn't know my father, not really. I'd always thought of him as the opposite of Hank, my grandfather. Now this.

As he popped the bread into the toaster and poured himself another cup of coffee, I stared at the photo of the victim in the paper again, a guy not much older than me. And I now understood that I wasn't in this alone after all.

“I think I know who held the gun that night. I think I can identify him.”

My father had his back to me and he seemed to freeze. Then he turned around slowly.