Hit and Run (23 page)

And now this.

There I was, standing in Dan's garage, absorbing the look in Dan's eyes and thinking,
This is it.
That moment you never imagined. And now that you're in it, you can't believe it. It doesn't even come close to feeling real. But you know it is, because you're there, you're hearing it and feeling it and it's playing out right in front of you. Oh, and you've got a part in it. You're the guy whose name will show up in the credits at the end of the movie, way down the list somewhere. The bit part in the murder mystery. The disappeared guy. The dead guy. The corpse.

“What are you talking about, Dan?” I said, hoping, praying, ready to trade everything I had that he didn't mean what I thought he meant. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, Mike,” Dan said. “You are.”

I glanced back over my shoulder at Lew, who was standing behind me. He had a tire iron in his hands.

“Hey, come on, Dan. I'm not going to say anything,” I said.

“Yeah?” Dan said. “You're not going to say anything about what, Mike?”

He was a whole different person when he wasn't smiling. When his face was serious like that, when his eyes drilled into you like that, it wasn't hard to imagine
him breaking into Mr. Jhun's place, robbing him, and beating him so hard he died. I bet there had been no smile that night. But there must have been later, the night my mother died. Mrs. Jhun had seen his shiny mouth. It sparkled like the sun, she had said, so he must have smiled at Mom. And then what?

He had robbed Mr. Jhun's place—he and Lew. The coin proved it. And Dan had also talked to Mom the night she died. There was no doubt in my mind about that. But what else had he done? And why?

“I'm not going to say anything about anything,” I said. “I swear. I got problems of my own.”

Man, did I ever.

“Billy told you, didn't he?” Dan said.

“Billy didn't tell me anything.”

Then there it was, that megawatt smile. “It's kinda funny in a way,” Dan said. “I mean, you look at it in the right light, it's even what they call ironic.”

He must have been using a whole other definition of irony than the one I knew from school.

“We only knew about it because
you
told Billy.”

“Me? What did I say?”

“You told him about the keys to the place.”

He meant the keys to Mr. Jhun's restaurant. But what…?

“I didn't know about any keys,” I said. Not until Riel had told me about them. “How could I have told Billy about something I didn't know about?”

Dan shrugged. “Billy told us about it, and he said he
found out from you. You think Nancy would ever tell him something like that?”

I shook my head. “No way. I never—”

I never said, Billy, Mom has keys to Mr. Jhun's restaurant. But there was something else. Little scenes flashing in my head, like the trailer to a movie.

Scene: Mom and Billy, in the kitchen. Mom worrying aloud to Billy about all that money being around Mr. Jhun's place. Billy saying, “How much money are we talking about?”

Cut to: A day, a couple days, maybe a week or two later. Billy at our house babysitting while Mom was out at the community college, taking a course.

Billy: “Hey, Mikey, what do you think about that restaurant, you know, the Chinese one?”

Mike: “Food's good.”

Billy: “What exactly does Nancy do there?”

Mike: “Mostly she talks to Mrs. Jhun. Mr. Jhun, too. And she does paperwork for him.”

Billy: “Yeah? She does it right there in the restaurant?”

Mike: “No. She does it here.”

Billy: “How come I've never seen her then?”

Mike: “You're not here all the time, Billy. And you know Mom, she puts everything away when she's not working on it.”

That was all I said. I never said another word. I never mentioned any keys. I didn't even know about the keys. But, man, I knew Billy. He must have gone looking. Who knew what was going through his mind? Maybe
he thought he'd find cash. Maybe he was looking for more information—“Just how much money are we talking about?” He must have found Mom's box. And in the box, he must have found the keys.

“The thing about Billy, though,” Dan said, “he was gutless. Lift some keys and get duplicates made? No problem. Hand the keys over to me and Lew? Again, no problem. But go with us to do the job? No way. One hundred percent the opposite, in fact, but I bet he didn't tell you that, huh? Gave us the keys, then beat it over to Nancy's place so that he'd have a watertight alibi for when it went down. Nancy could vouch for him.
You
could vouch for him.”

It wasn't a good sign that Dan was telling me this. It could only mean two things. One, that he thought I already knew most of it. And two …

“Then he tried to get what he called his fair share. ‘One-third, one-third, one-third,' he said. ‘I earned mine, Danny.'” Dan snorted. “Yeah, like you can earn a fair share of anything when you're home in bed, letting the other guys take all the risk.”

“Hey, Dan, I would never—”

“It was supposed to be easy,” Dan said. “Wait until the old guy goes to bed. Slip in, grab the cash, slip out. Simple, right? Except the old man comes downstairs and sees us and makes a grab for this baseball bat he keeps behind the cash register. Can you beat that? The guy isn't even from around here, and there he is with a baseball bat, like he grew up playing Little League. And
he's swinging it at my head like there's a baseball sitting on top of my neck and he's Barry Bonds. What was I supposed to do?”

I wished he wasn't telling me this.

“And there's Billy, sitting at home. Mr. Alibi. And he wants money for that? We gave him a finder's fee, that's all, right, Lew?”

Lew. A couple of weeks ago, if you'd asked him, he would have described himself as an honorary uncle. Now he was tapping one end of a tire iron into the palm of his hand. I had to give him credit, though, he didn't look too happy about it.

“We gave him a couple hundred, and what did he do with it?” Dan said.

The Xbox and all the games. The stuff that Mom made him take back.

“Toys,” Dan said. “He spent the money on toys that Nancy wouldn't let you keep. When she made him take them back, what did he do? Trashed them.”

“I don't care,” I said to Dan. A lie. Probably the biggest lie I had ever told. “I don't care.”

Dan peered at me. No megawatt smile. No jolly uncle grin. Just a hard look.

“You don't care?” he said. “If you don't care so much, how come you got everything stirred up? How come you got that cop involved?”

It was on my tongue to say: he isn't a cop anymore. But I didn't think that would make any difference to Dan.

“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Billy's dead.
I got no one. I just don't care anymore.” I looked back at Lew. Maybe he saw things differently.

“Hey, Dan,” he said, his voice quiet.

But Dan kept his focus hard on me.

“You're a good kid, Mike,” he said again. Every time he said it, things got worse for me. “The trouble is, I don't know you. Not really. You're just Billy's nephew, and Billy screwed up good. He talked when he shouldn't have. You want to blame someone for the situation you're in now, blame Billy.” He gestured to Lew.

“He's just a kid,” Lew said, still clutching the tire iron, but looking less menacing, at least compared to Dan.

“He's just a kid who can land us some serious prison time,” Dan said. “What's the matter with you? You heard Billy, blubbering about the damn car. What, you think he didn't tell Mike?”

“He didn't tell me anything,” I said, “except that he had seen the car.”

“But you figured out the rest, didn't you, Mike?” he said. “That's how come you waited until you thought I was asleep before you made that phone call. Calling that cop, right?”

“No, Dan—”

“And that coin, right, Mike?” He shook his head. “Look, I'm sorry it worked out the way it did. But stuff happens.”

“Stuff like my mom, you mean?”

When someone has done something terrible, and when they have you locked in tight and they start talking
about how you're going to disappear and then they start giving you details, you know you're in terminal trouble. I figured I had nothing to lose now. And if there was one thing I had to know—
needed
to know—it was what had happened to Mom, and why.

Dan didn't answer. Instead he said to Lew, “Get some rope.”

I looked Lew straight in the eyes. Lew, who idolized Marilyn Monroe and Bart Simpson. Goofy Lew. Lew with his tire iron, tap-tap-tapping in the palm of his hand.

“Sorry, Mike,” was the best he could come up with.

You see it in movies—a fellow gets himself into a jam with some bad guys. The bad guys decide to deal with the situation, which is never good news for our hero. You feel for him. But you know he's going to be fine—he's smarter than the bad guys or stronger or he has an ace in the hole. Maybe he slipped a knife up his sleeve a scene or two back that the bad guys don't know about. Maybe he has the ability to dislocate his shoulder at will, which he demonstrated in the first scene, so he can slip out of the ropes or the chains or whatever they tie him up with. You just know he's going to be fine. That's the movies.

But real life runs differently. You look at these guys, the bad guys, except they're guys you've known forever, guys you've trusted—you look at them and you think, They're not kidding. And the reason they're not kidding is that they're afraid. You can hurt them. You can tear their lives apart. You tell anyone what you know and,
like Dan said, they're looking at serious prison time. You know it and they know it, and the only thing they can think of to make sure that doesn't happen is to make sure you don't talk. You see them with their tire irons and their ropes and you check those padlocks one more time—there's no way out. You're done like Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty soon all that's going to be left are the bones.

“How did she know?” I said. If it was going to come down to that, then at least I had a right to know. At least I could take that with me.

“What?” For a moment, Dan looked confused.

“My mom. You killed her because she knew, right?”

“Down on the floor, Mike,” he said. “Face down.”

I did what he told me, and I asked my question again.

“Put your arms behind your back. Lew, hurry up with that rope.”

I heard a
shwok,
and a coil of rope landed on the ground beside me.

“It was my fault,” Lew said.

I craned my neck around, trying to get a look at him, but he must have been standing somewhere behind Dan because I couldn't locate him.

“It was stupid,” he said. Then he stopped talking. The silence almost drove me crazy.

“Jeez, Lew, you've been at my house a million times. You carry on like you're someone special in my life. You can at least tell me what happened. You think I don't deserve that?”

Dan wrenched my arms back, and I felt the rough rope bind me tightly.

“We were out there that night,” Lew said. “Just taking care of business, you know? And she stopped at a phone booth and was fumbling in her purse and then she saw us.” He came closer. I saw his feet and twisted my neck to look up, way up, at his face. “She asked if I had change for a five,” he said. “She was late, and she wanted to call home and tell you she was on her way.”

“You don't have to,” Dan said. I wasn't sure what he meant.

“I wasn't thinking, I guess. I don't know. I dug into my pocket and brought out all this change.” He stopped and looked at Dan. “The old man had that coin,” he said.

Mr. Jhun's lucky gold coin. The one that had been stolen the night he was murdered. The one I had just seen in Lew's room.

“Dan told me maybe a hundred times, get rid of that thing. But it was real gold, you know. You ever walked around with a real gold coin in your pocket?”

I didn't say anything.

“Nancy saw it. She pretended like she didn't, but she saw it. She said she changed her mind about making a call, she'd just go home, she was worried about you. Mike, we didn't have any choice.”

We didn't have any choice.

Dan stood up and tossed him a key ring.

“Unlock the door,” he said.

Lew's feet stayed where they were for a moment.
Then they walked away. Dan grabbed my hair and pulled my head back. When I opened my mouth to yell, he rammed a balled-up rag into it, almost choking me.

“Okay, Mike, on your feet,” Dan said. He grabbed the rope around my wrists and pulled, yanking my arms almost out of their sockets. I staggered to my feet.

I watched Lew unlock the padlock on the garage door. I know he was working at normal speed—inserting the key into the lock, turning the key, pulling on the lock to disengage it, unhooking the lock from the metal loops in the garage door, engaging the lock again and setting it aside, tossing the keys back to Dan, who caught them easily with the hand that didn't have a firm grip on me. But it all seemed to move in slow, slow motion. Each step seemed to take minutes instead of seconds. And the whole time I was watching, I was thinking,
This can't be happening to me. These guys can't possibly be going to do what I think they're going to do. They can't possibly have done what they just told me they did.
I was on my feet only because Dan had such a firm grip on me. I couldn't feel my legs. If Dan had let go, I'd have crashed to the floor.

I don't know if I heard it first or if Dan did, but he tightened his grip on my arms and
sshhed
Lew. Then he yanked me back to the wall and shut off the lights. In the darkness, I heard thumping. It seemed to be close by. And then I realized: someone was knocking on the front door to Dan's place.