Blank Confession (10 page)

“Weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Throw him in the cage for a few hours. That'll loosen his tongue.”

“His tongue's plenty loose. He's been talking the whole time. Like listening to
War and Peace
. But I still don't know what he came here to tell us.”

Kramoski said, “Probably just looking for attention.”

Rawls glanced back down the hall toward the interview room.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I don't think so.”

Back in the interview room, Shayne Blank, slumped in his metal chair, clanked the steel ring back and forth. He looked up when Rawls entered.

“About twenty minutes for the pizza,” Rawls said.

The kid nodded.

“So,
Shayne
, you were saying you had a fight—”

“It was more like a stomping,” Shayne said.

“Right.” Rawls looked at his notes. “You got tased and stomped, and you spent a couple days in …which hospital?”

“Saint Stephen's.”

Rawls wrote that down. Kramoski might be right about the kid making it all up. He could check with the hospital later to find out if any of this had ever really happened.

“Then what?”

“I laid low. You know, trying to think what I should do.”

“What did you decide?”

“Like I said before, I pretty much decided to do nothing at all.”

Rawls kept his face carefully neutral.

“I saw Mikey and Marie on Friday. I didn't tell them what happened. I didn't want to get them involved any more than they already were. Anyway, that older guy on the Harley?”

“The one who watched you get beaten,” Rawls said.

“Yeah, him. I ran into him, kind of by accident, a couple days later. You know BG's Chop Shop?”

“Sure.” BG's Chop Shop, a motorcycle supply and customizing business, was notorious. The owners, two
former Hells Angels named Bunk and Griz, had been investigated several times for selling stolen parts, but nobody had ever made a case.

“I needed to replace the broken mirror on my bike, so I went over there and guess who was behind the counter. The Harley guy with the rat on his head. The guy that watched me get stomped.”

Seeing the look Rawls was giving him, Shayne shrugged self-consciously. “I didn't know he worked there. It was completely a coincidence. But it was definitely the same guy. He didn't seem to recognize me. I showed him my busted mirror and he went in back to find a replacement. He came back with the new mirror a minute later. I said thanks, then asked him if he knew Jon Brande.

“‘My little brother,' he said. ‘Why?'

“I said, ‘Because that's who's paying for this mirror.' Then I left.”

“He just let you walk off with the mirror?”

“Actually, he sort of chased me. He wasn't very fast.”

“You stole the mirror.”

“Technically.”

“Is that right,” Rawls said.

“I called the shop later. A guy named Griz answered the phone. I asked him who the guy was with the rat-tail hair. You ever hear of a guy named Wart Hale?”

Rawls felt his face and gut turn to wood.

“I think Wart is his nickname,” Shayne said.

“Stewart Hale.” Rawls forced himself to breathe normally. “His name is Stewart Hale. Wart for short.”

“He seemed like a guy you might have run into.”

“I met him when he was still in high school,” Rawls said.

“Kind of a coincidence,” Shayne said.

Rawls's thoughts went back nearly twenty years. He heard himself say, “I used to teach over at Gancy High….”

“Where's that?”

“I forgot, you're not from around here. Gancy is on the south side.”

“What did you teach?”

Rawls coughed out a bitter laugh. “Creative Writing and Parking Lot,” he said.

“Parking Lot?”

Rawls nodded, wishing he hadn't mentioned it. The memories of his last days as a teacher were still painful. He had an unworthy thought then, which he cast off as quickly as it had arrived. But the ghost of the thought remained, like words scrawled on a steamed mirror.

The kid says he killed somebody. I hope it was Wart.

Shayne didn't call me all weekend, but he was back in school on Monday. To look at him you'd never know he'd been hospitalized just last week. But word spread quickly that Jon Brande and his friends had put the new kid in the hospital. By lunchtime even kids who had never heard of Shayne Blank knew what had happened.

Even though I still felt guilty for not knowing Shayne had been hurt and for assuming he'd somehow abandoned me, I was still mad at him for not telling me about what had happened. I felt left out; that was what it came down to. So when I joined him at lunch, I shifted right into sarcastic mode.

Shayne was prying open a plastic clamshell containing an egg salad sandwich.

“I can't believe you're going to eat that,” I said. “Where'd you get it? The Pump and Munch?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So it's probably been sitting in their cooler for a month.”

He sniffed the sandwich. “Smells okay.” He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Tastes okay.”

“How come you didn't tell me?” I said.

“Tell you what?”

“That you got your ass kicked,” I said.

He took another bite, chewed, and swallowed. “Because it was none of your business,” he said.

“How is it not my business? I thought we were friends.”

“We haven't known each other that long. I don't make friends that fast.”

That
was a kick in the gut.

“What
ever.
” I said it as nastily as I could, but it didn't seem to bother him. He was looking across the lunchroom at Trey and Kyle.

“Jon's not in school,” he said.

“Probably because he's scared to death of
you.
”

“I doubt it.” Taking me completely seriously.

“He wasn't here all last week,” I said. “I think he dropped out. I can't say I'll miss him.”

“Are you going to pay him again this week?”

“If I can find the money. Not that it's any of
your
business.”

“You're absolutely right,” Shayne said. “It's not my business. You
should
pay him. I should never have gotten involved.”

I couldn't argue with that. So I didn't.

He was looking at Kyle and Trey. “There's no reason for me to drag you into my mess.”

“How is it
your
mess?”

“Jon and I are like two freight trains on a collision course.”

I looked at Trey and Kyle. “He has the bigger train,” I said.

Shayne nodded slowly. “That doesn't change anything.”
He gave me a frozen-faced look, as if he had suddenly grown an invisible, impermeable shell. “Don't take this personal, Mikey, but maybe we shouldn't hang out anymore.” He got up, walked two tables over, and took an empty seat next to some sophomores.

I was floored. Did he just
unfriend
me? And what was that about
him
dragging
me
into his mess? If anybody had dragged anybody
anywhere,
it was Jon.

I almost got up and went after him, but then I decided, why bother. I finished my lunch alone, trying to act as if I was happy to be there. At one point I looked over at Kyle and Trey. Kyle was smirking at me; Trey stared glumly at Shayne.

During his first year at his first teaching job, twenty-six-year-old George Rawls had despised parking lot duty above all else. Because he was male, slightly larger than average, and the youngest teacher at Gancy High, he got stuck standing in the student parking lot every day after school let out. The kids called him Officer Rawls. He hated that. He had become a teacher so he could make a positive difference, educating and inspiring young people to become happy, productive adults. The last thing he wanted to be was a cop—even a fake parking lot cop.

The idea, according to the principal, was to “establish an adult presence” in the student lot. Keep them from lighting up, fighting, littering, or performing other forbidden acts, at least until they were safely off school property. Mostly the kids behaved because any infraction would lead to loss of parking privileges, at a minimum. Serious offenses—drug use, displaying a weapon, running over another student, et cetera—would result in automatic expulsion.

Day after day, Rawls would stand conspicuously near the parking lot exit, rain or shine, smiling and nodding like a bobblehead to each car full of chattering teens as they
drove out of the lot and into their nonschool lives. So far that year he'd had little reason to invoke his authority—a few cigarette incidents, one shoving match between Allie Franson and Britt Hoades, and a minor fender bender. His presence acted as a deterrent, and that was exactly the point.

He knew, of course, that they were getting away with plenty. Sometimes Rawls would fantasize that he had X-ray vision and could see into every trunk and every glove compartment, and under every seat. Marijuana, alcohol, weapons—if he went through every car from bumper to bumper he'd find it all. But so long as they kept it under his radar, it was okay with him. If every kid got nailed for every violation, the school would be half-empty.

There were a few of them, however, who he would not have minded busting. The ones responsible for the harder drugs, especially. The weed and diet pills didn't bother him so much—after all, less than a year earlier he'd been in college, where such drugs were as ubiquitous as lattes and beer. But crack, meth, even opiates had started showing up recently, and those drugs were really messing with some of the kids. Dara Jensen, for example. Back in September she had been a cheerful, slightly plump junior. By December she had dropped twenty pounds, and she looked like a model. But by February she'd dropped another twenty pounds and looked more like a concentration camp victim. Some of Dara's friends were also losing weight rapidly.

It was hard for him to watch, and he had no idea how
to stop it—drugs were coming at these kids from every direction: from the streets, from older siblings and cousins, from their parents' medicine cabinets …but there were a few Rawls suspected of doing far more than their share in the pharmaceuticals trade.

One was Dev Donato, a classic stoner right out of
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, complete with the red eyes, laid-back delivery, and general incomprehension of where he was and what was expected of him. Rawls had him pegged for selling weed—mostly because how else could the kid afford to stay high all day every day?

As for the harder drugs …there was Stewart Hale, known to his friends as Wart.

Rawls knew—though he could not have said exactly
how
he knew—that Wart was the go-to guy for the Gancy High drug users. Even back then, when he had never imagined himself as a cop, he had already possessed that cop sense. He supposed it was a combination of little things—who hung out with Wart; how the other students acted around him; the bits of expensive flash Wart liked to hang around his neck, wrists, and fingers; and that indefinable
something
about the way Wart carried himself. Like he had a secret, like he had power. But knowing that Wart was selling drugs and being able to stop him were two different things.

Besides, it wasn't his responsibility, so George Rawls, creative writing and parking lot specialist, just did his job and tried not to care too much. That was, until Dara Jensen stabbed Trish Gomez in the face with a scissors. The formerly sweet and shy sixteen-year-old had
exploded during art class, leaving the Gomez girl with a four-inch gash down her left cheek. Dara wouldn't talk about it. That night she hung herself with her nylon fishnet stockings in a holding cell downtown. The autopsy revealed that Dara had been high on methamphetamine.

Thinking back to those events, Rawls tried to understand why he had done what he did. Dara Jensen had been nothing to him. Just another kid. As for Trish Gomez, he didn't even remember her face—or what was left of it.

Still, Rawls had taken it all very personally. He had seen Dara talking to Wart Hale on several occasions, and he was convinced—though he had no proof—that Wart had been supplying her with meth. Still, he might have done nothing, but the day after Dara died, he'd been driving past the McDonald's on South Front Street when he saw Wart hanging in the parking lot with a bunch of his friends. Something inside him snapped.

Rawls pulled into the parking lot, jumped out, and walked up to Wart, who regarded him with a smug, mildly questioning smirk. The smirk disappeared when Rawls grabbed Wart by the front of his shirt, slammed him against the side of his car so hard the window shattered, and screamed in his face. He didn't remember exactly what he had said, but there were words he never expected to hear himself utter to a student. He then threw Wart aside and began rummaging through the car, throwing the contents of the glove compartment onto the lot, emptying the center console, going through the trunk, and pulling up the back seats. He found nothing more incriminating than a half-empty pack of Marlboros and a few empty beer
bottles. He turned away from the car to find the smirk had returned to Wart's face.