Wanted (17 page)

“I already invested those winnings. In my credit-card bills. I buy a lot of—” Why do I have to justify my clothes and my credit-card debts and all the crap I spend
my
money on?

“No problem. I’ve got mine—three hundred seventy plus. Okay. Less. Almost three hundred. Um. Two hundred and something.” He clears his throat. “Can, um, we bet more than we have in hand? This Leonard guy—”

“Yes,” I say. “We can.”

“Perfect. Babylonia’s a team. So we pool our money—”

“That we don’t have.”

“We’ll win.”

“We have to.”

“And you give the winnings to your friend.”

“Don’t you even need to know who it’s for? What it’s for?”

“Would you? If I asked the same?”

I think about it. “No. I guess not.”

“Okay. Super Bowl party. My place. I’ll pick you up soon. Call Leo.”

The chips taste stale. The Coke’s gone flat. I watch as everybody analyzes the halftime show, all the guys waiting for a boob-reveal repeat. The last ten seconds of the game flash before my eyes in freeze-frame images. The fumble. The freak seventy-yard sprint to the end zone. The touchdown. The ball being spiked. The dance, gyrating hips, back flip, the same-team tackle. The Chiefs winning.

The Cardinals losing.

Josh and me. Losing.

The room feels closed in, suffocating. Sticky-syrupy Coke pools on the coffee table and has dripped onto what looks like an expensive Persian carpet. Confetti papers flit and float in the air, the pink, yellow, orange, and red dots scattered everywhere, drifting to the floor, sinking in the puddles of carbonated sugar, congealed orange cheese dip, and grease.

Mrs. Mendez’s stooped figure, just a shadow in the shouts, picks up the half-empty plates of greasy food, passing between us almost invisible. But I see her.

Josh sees her.

Where am I going to get four hundred dollars between now and tomorrow?

She pauses; a cup slips through her hands. She falls to her knees. At first it looks like she’s picking up the cup, but she’s frozen in place, pale, face glistening with sweat. She stumbles to stand up, then sits down, leaning against a chair.

My legs feel heavy, like Beelzebub’s gargoyles are pulling me to the center of the earth. I put my hand in front of my mouth to make sure I’m still breathing. “Mrs. Mendez,” I whisper. “Mrs. Mendez?”

Josh pushes past everybody. I make my way to her, lamely putting a damp napkin on her mottled and blotchy face. She smiles at me and puts her hand in mine.

Josh has already called 911. “Moch. Call Moch,” I say, tossing Josh my phone.

Josh blanches.

“Call. Moch. Now.”

An ambulance arrives. Paramedics rush into the house. I hold tight to Mrs. Mendez’s limp hand. The paramedics talk into radios.

“Nonresponsive.”

“Cardiac arrest.”

They move me out of the way. They shove needles into Mrs. Mendez’s arm and an oxygen mask on her face.

“We’re losing her,” one says, and rips open her uniform, rubs together paddles, and sticks them on her chest. “Clear!”

Her body hiccups.

“Clear!”

We stare at the monitor, waiting for the heart line to peak, listening for thumping instead of a steady beep.

They throw questions out into the evening: “Is she allergic to anything?” “What kind of prescription medication does she take?” “Has she been sick?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Yes. Yes. She’s sick.”

“Sick? With what?”

“A stomachache. The flu. The doctor at Urgent Care said she had a flu. That’s all.” My lip quivers. Hot tears spill down my cheeks. Mrs. Mendez’s body arches in response to the shock and goes limp. Josh’s parents arrive—at least I think it’s them. They stand back. Mr. Ellison’s talking on the phone.

Making calls.

Josh’s hands go limp at his sides.

“Let’s move,” the paramedics holler, lifting her on a gurney and out to the ambulence. They shut the doors, leaving me outside.

We caravan to the hospital, the ambulance horn screaming, lights flickering, dodging in and out of light traffic. Halfway there, the sirens go silent. The ambulance slows down to speed limit. I choke back sobs, wiping tears off my cheeks.

Josh takes one hand off the wheel, pulling my head against his shoulder.

We follow the lights in silence.

Take me, God. Bring her back.

Chapter 23

“COME OUTSIDE,”

Josh says when I answer the phone.

“It’s after midnight.”

“Get dressed. Wear dark colors. Come outside. I need your help.”

Josh stumbles into the house when I open the door, almost knocking over a flimsy TV tray with one of Lillian’s houseplants on it. A cactus, of all things. “Watch it!” I grasp the tottering tray and prick my finger on a needle. The soft petals flutter. “What are you doing here?”

“We need to get that money to Mr. Mendez. I need help.”

“To go to the ATM?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Josh says. He chews on his nail. “Listen, Michal. I don’t have access to any accounts. But I know where we can get money. I just need help doing it.”

I push away the little alarm in my head—like an exclamation point in my frontal cortex saying,
“NO! NO! NO!”

Somebody oughta grab my upper-arm flab and pinch. Hard. I do a mental squeeze. I just want to erase Moch’s and Mr. Mendez’s expressions. They got there just after we did. Mr. Mendez saw me, my face, then rushed to the doctors. “I need to see her. Please.”

He came back and sat across from me. “They said she had the flu. The flu.”

I nod.

Then the bill.

Sorry about your loss. Yes. We do take credit cards.

I can’t help but hate Josh’s family now. It’s not like they did anything. But maybe if Mrs. Mendez had had insurance. Maybe if she had gotten those tests. She’d still be here.

We were supposed to win.

Josh stands on the porch looking wilted. Ashamed. He holds out his hand. “I need to do this.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Trust me,” he says, “we won’t get caught. It’s a foolproof plan.”

“And if we do get caught?”

“It’s all me.”

“That hardly seems fair,” I say.

“Who can afford the lawyer?” he says. “My dad’s an asshole. This has been established. I will never, ever spend a single night in prison. Ever.” He says it like a great truth—one of life’s givens: the sun will rise; Cain killed Abel; and Josh Ellison will never spend a night in prison.

We stand together on the porch. He looks at his watch. “This money belongs to her and her family and then some. I
need
to do this.” Absolution and penance—right the wrongs.

I close the door behind me. We walk a block to an old Pontiac. “I borrowed this from a friend,” he explains.

I don’t ask who. We drive past Dayton, where Ellison Industries’ sprawling presence looks like something from Area 51, parking in the back of the buildings. I half expect to see some guys in white lab coats wheeling out sheet-covered body shapes on gurneys. A chain-link fence surrounds the premises. Guards drive around in golf carts patrolling the area.

He tosses me a ski mask and gloves. “Are we really gonna do this?” I ask.

He nods. “We don’t have a choice.”

I can’t work out the probabilities of getting away with this in my head because I don’t have all the information in front of me. The only source for creating odds is Josh’s assurance versus years of criminal investigation TV series in which the bad guy always gets caught.

What are our odds?

Mrs. Mendez had a flu. Now she’s dead.

What are the odds?

Josh grabs my hand and squeezes. “Ready?”

I nod.

I time the guards. There’s approximately seven to nine minutes between passes. Josh points to a door in one of the big warehouses. He holds the keys up. “We need to climb this fence and get there. It’s about a hundred and fifty yards.”

“We need to do it in less than six minutes,” I say. “Just to be safe.”

“Okay.”

We pull on our ski masks. As soon as the guard in the golf cart turns the corner, Josh gives me a boost so I can scramble up the fence. He follows close behind. I climb over and jump down, knives of pain radiating from my feet up my shins. My knee practically gives out on me. Stupid glass. Stupid knee.

“C’mon,” he whispers.

“I can’t see,” I say, trying to pull my fogged up glasses from my mask.

“C’mon, c’mon. Trust me,” he says, and grabs my hand. We sprint to the door. He manages to open it, and we throw ourselves into the small office, closing the door softly behind us just as the golf cart’s lights hit the door’s window.

I move to pull off my ski mask and glasses when Josh grabs my arm. “Lie facedown. Now,” he whispers.

He spray-paints two cameras around the office.

“I think that’s all of them,” he says in a whisper. He taps his finger to his lips.

I nod and pull my glasses out, in a lame attempt at cleaning the lenses. My heart feels tight in my rib cage, like the pounding will shatter my bones. I can hear the blood rushing through my body and tap my ears. It’s probably not a good thing to be able to hear your own blood.

We hear footsteps outside. Heavy boots. I lie on the floor, face pasted to the cool tiles. We wiggle to the door and sit against it. A flashlight sweeps across the room, pausing on the closet. The guard jiggles the doorknob.

Locked.

His radio beeps. The crackling sound of a voice coming through, asking about Warehouse Number Four.

“On my way.” He rests his hand on the doorknob. We listen to the jingling of keys. The radio beeps again. He walks away, the sound of footsteps echoing in my brain. I can’t tell if he’s still out there or if it’s just my brain on some freak-out repeat track.

Josh squeezes my elbow and motions toward a desk, opens a wooden panel. Behind the panel is a safe. Josh opens it on the third try. “He’s so obvious,” he mutters.

Josh takes out the bag of cash.

Five thousand dollars.

“Five?” I motion with my fingers.

He nods.

“All of it?”

He swallows. “Funerals are expensive.”

A sick feeling sweeps over me. My glasses blur and I rest my head between my knees. Josh squeezes my hand. “I’m sorry.”

The paper that was tightly wrapped around the bills is empty. I wipe my eyes and look around the office for paper. My hands feel clumsy in the heavy black gloves, and I have to keep reminding myself to keep them on.

I find paper and scissors and cut a pile into bill-sized pieces and am about to shove them into the band when I hold up my hand. “Pen?” I ask.

Josh hands me one.

I write on the top piece of paper:
From her beacon-hand glows worldwide welcome . . .

Josh nods. He takes the paint and sprays
Babylonia
on the wall.

Struggling to find meaning in death.

Chapter 24

AFTER JOSH AND I LEAVE

the money for Mr. Mendez, Josh takes me home. I can’t sleep. I can’t think about anything but Moch and his face at the hospital, so I return to his house and stay outside. He doesn’t come home that night.

I look for him on Monday and Tuesday, even drive up to American Flats.

I finally see him outside the place his mom and dad were thinking of renting for their restaurant. I think he’s trying to find a way to keep her close.

I follow him home Tuesday night and go to him. But he’s become the Moch with dead eyes—no poetry. He forgets about the mango sunsets and coconut moons, the flavor of family that oozed from his trailer house and onto his English paper. He forgets his mom—her memory is a pile of ashes, burned down by his anger.

Winners start asking for their payoffs. “Sorry about Mrs. Mendez, Mike, but, um, how about that cash?”

Even Nim’s pretty low-key about things. He only won a couple of hundred dollars, anyway.

Leonard called on Monday. When I told him I couldn’t get up to Reno, he said, “People die, Mike. The game goes on. You’ve got until Wednesday to pay up. This is your only break.”

It’s Wednesday.

At school, everything remains the same—as if Mrs. Mendez never existed. I wonder if I’m the only one who can feel the void she left. How can anybody know she’s the closest I ever had to what could’ve been?

If someone dies, and nobody notices, was she ever alive?

Moch hasn’t come back to school this week. I kind of need him. I just need to feel like I’m not the only one that hurts like this. I’ve already done this trip alone—when my mom died.

Remember that time?

Mom went off on a springtime religious retreat and Lillian stuck me in this horrible day camp where we were corralled around all day long by pot-smoking college students who didn’t have the money to go on spring break, so they spent their week watching us do crafts and play kickball.

Lillian came to pick me up right after camp and drove me to the A&W on the south end of town. I had a frosty mug of root beer, the icy water sweating and beading on the glass. I looked up at her over the foam. Lillian didn’t do grandma stuff like baking cookies and buying sugared cereal. So something was up.

Mid-gulp of my first, and subsequently last, root beer, Lillian said, “Mike, Roe has died.”

“Roe.” I mouthed the word.

“Your mother.”

Mother. Mama. Mami.

Dead.

The root beer congealed in my throat like iced syrup, stopping at the top of my esophagus, cutting off my air supply. I could feel the liquid sliding down into my chest cavity, then settling in the newly opened hole in my stomach like some kind of prehistoric tar pit.

Lillian talked, her burgundy lips surrounded by spires of pucker lines from
tsk-tsk
ing for so many years.