The obvious answer: We don’t.
F
or some reason I decide to bargain with Struz when he shows up at the house this time. Probably because trying to keep him out of the house didn’t work, and now I don’t have any other options.
“Where’s the laptop, J?” he asks.
“What will you give me for it?”
“I’m serious, the director has been riding my ass about how you managed to hack in,” he says. “I could arrest you.”
I hold out my arms as if I’m ready to be led away. Struz wouldn’t arrest me.
“I can go through this whole house and turn it upside down, is that what you want?”
“Now, see, that’s the right question,” I say, dropping my hands at my sides. “Because what I want is to know details about my dad’s death, and if you can give them to me, I might be able to find my dad’s laptop.”
“This isn’t up for debate—”
“Janelle, who is it?” my mother says, and both Struz and I jump at the sound of her voice. She’s always in the back of my mind, but sometimes I forget that she’s not always at one extreme or the other.
“Elaine, it’s me. It’s Ryan,” he says.
My mother comes into view, wearing a tank top and a pair of my father’s pajama pants. If it’s possible, it looks like she’s lost weight since my dad died.
“Hi, Ryan, are you going to stay for dinner?” she asks, but she doesn’t wait for his answer. Instead she turns to me and says, “I was thinking burgers on the grill, and maybe corn on the cob would be nice. Do we have that?”
“Yeah, I think we still have some from the last time I ran to Wiedners. If not, I can always get more.”
She nods and heads into the kitchen.
We both wait for a second before Struz folds his arms across his chest. “Where were we?”
“You’re welcome to turn the house upside down,” I say. “I can assure you, there’s no laptop here.”
“I can search Alex’s house too. You—”
“Can you? Without a warrant? Have you met Annabeth Trechter?”
From the other room my mom yells, “You don’t have to stand in the doorway, Ryan. Even though James isn’t here, you’re always welcome in our house.”
Struz breaks into a smile and swipes a hand back and forth, ruffling his hair. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you, J-baby?” Then he looks me directly in the eye. I have a split second to be afraid of what he’s going to say, and then he says it. “You’re just like him.”
My whole face tingles, and I clench my jaw to keep it from quivering, but I can’t stop my eyes from watering.
Because actually I haven’t thought of everything. Even if I am just like him. The laptop is in the Jeep, which is currently unlocked in my driveway, but I don’t tell Struz that. “I just want to know the details.”
Sighing, Struz nods to the kitchen, because keeping an eye on my mom is a good idea. I follow him. My mother is rooting through the fridge, and I assume she’ll tell me if she doesn’t have everything she wants.
Struz drops into a kitchen chair and gestures for me to do the same.
I do.
He deliberately takes his time emptying his pockets and laying his car keys, cell phone, and pack of Marlboros on the table. I’m tempted to give him hell about the fact that he’s smoking again, since it took him three tries to quit a couple of years ago, but I figure he deserves a break.
Struz keeps his voice low, but I’m not worried about my mom hearing. She might be lucid right now, but she’s not exactly interested in what we’re doing. “He’d been investigating a couple of leads on his own—you know how he is. He told me he was heading out to Park Village to check something out around lunchtime.”
“I know all this.” I add, “And I know he took one in the arm and two in the chest.”
Struz doesn’t seem surprised. “We haven’t found the exact crime scene—his body was dumped in the canyons. He was either set up and walked into a trap or he misjudged whoever killed him.”
I want to deny it and say my dad wouldn’t have done either of those things. Instead I ask, “Why?”
“There’s nothing to suggest he ever drew his gun,” Struz says, his voice shaking slightly on the last word.
I let that digest for a minute, because that doesn’t seem like my dad at all. True, he wasn’t the kind of guy who rushed into situations guns blazing, but he was smart and he’d been doing this job for years.
Maybe he thought he was meeting a friend? It’s possible, though I don’t know where alias Mike Cooper fits into that.
I stand up and try to clear my head. “Have there been any more bodies?”
Struz rubs his temples. “Not since two days ago, when we found one in Ocean Beach, in a phone booth that I swear is straight out of the seventies.”
“The phone booth?”
He shakes his head and reaches for the cigarettes, but I lean forward and bat them out of the way. “Not in this house.”
Struz smiles—that’s what my dad used to say whenever he tried to smoke here. “J, I shit you not, I don’t drive around much in OB, but on every canvass, people swore up and down they’d never seen that phone booth.”
“So where did it come from?”
He gives an exaggerated shrug, which looks a little cartoonish since he’s so tall, and I want to press him more, but he’s jittery and obviously on edge, and I get the sense he’s worried that we’re running out of time.
“I’ll procure you the laptop, as I seem to remember now where it is,” I say.
Struz nods and stands up, thinking he’s won, but as soon as he turns his back, I grab the cigarettes and his cell phone and take them with me. While I retrieve the laptop—and not the files—I scroll through his contacts and find Barclay’s number, then repeat it to myself over and over again while I break each one of Struz’s cigarettes in half and put them back in the pack.
Number memorized and cigarettes broken, I head back into the house. I lay all three on the table, and Struz turns to see me do it. And groans as he notices the cigarettes aren’t in the same place as before.
“Please tell me you left me at least one,” he says.
“Will you stay here for a few hours and watch this while I run out?” I gesture toward the meal my mother seems to be planning.
He nods. “Yeah, sure, I can do that.”
I grab my keys and head for the door. Because I have to put those files somewhere else before Struz realizes exactly what I have.
And maybe because I want an excuse to see him, I’m thinking I can ask Ben to hide them for me.
I
drive aimlessly through Rancho Peñasquitos for about ten minutes before heading to Ben’s. I’ll talk to him about everything that happened when we were freshmen—if there’s anything even left to talk about. And then I’ll confront him about what he hasn’t been telling me about the accident. Coming off the whole “you didn’t tell me the truth before” conversation, I think he’ll confess whatever he’s got going on.
At least, I’m hoping he will.
And it might be nothing. Maybe Elijah is growing weed in his basement or something. I wouldn’t exactly put it past him.
Then I’ll figure out where I can keep the files. If I sort things out with Ben, keeping them at his house makes a lot of sense. Struz doesn’t even know who he is.
But I don’t have Ben’s phone number, and it takes Alex those ten minutes to get me an address up on Black Mountain Road, north of school and no phone number. I’ll just show up unannounced—apparently, I’m like that.
When I do, I knock on the door, wearing the backpack on both shoulders, hoping it will pass to unobservant parents as a school bag. But a little girl who’s about eight answers the door. She’s fair-skinned with bright red hair, and she looks so little like Ben that for a minute I wonder if I have the wrong house.
“Hey, is your brother or your parents here?” I ask in my best dealing-with-little-children voice, which isn’t that good at all.
“I don’t have a brother and my parents are dead,” she says.
My pulse throbs more forcefully throughout my body, and the word “dead” seems to echo between us.
Then I see a woman in her forties, who looks a lot like she could be a mother, coming toward us out of the kitchen.
“Cassie,” she scolds. “How many times have I told you to be respectful?”
“You’re not my mother,” Cassie says, her voice pitched close to a yell, before she turns and runs up the stairs.
The woman—Mrs. Michaels?—looks at me. “I’m sorry about that. Cassie’s new to foster care, and she hasn’t quite adjusted. How can I help you?”
“I was wondering if Ben was here? I have a couple homework questions I was hoping he could help me with,” I manage to spit out, though I want to ask her if Ben is in foster care too. I feel stupid and hurt that I didn’t know that. Not even a week ago, I told myself I wanted to know him better. I’m embarrassed at how self-absorbed I must be to not know something this basic yet important about his life. And I can’t help wishing he’d told me.
“Oh sure,” she says, opening the door wider and pointing me in the right direction. “He and his friends are downstairs.”
M
ost houses in California don’t have basements—or at least most of the ones that I’ve been in—so I find them unnaturally creepy.
I suppress a shudder as I shut the door behind me and begin the descent into a cooler, damper, and darker room than the rest of the house. But I make it only two steps when I recognize Ben’s voice over the alternative music.
“Eli, people are dead,” he says.
That stops my forward movement, and I suck in a breath. I didn’t expect to hear something like that.
People are dead
.
This guy, whose lips fit perfectly against mine, who makes me feel warm and short of breath whenever he smiles at me, he knows
people are dead
.
I crouch where I am, steady my balance, and slow my breathing so they don’t know I’m here before I’m ready for them to know.
“I thought we established that it’s not your fault,” Elijah says. “You didn’t fucking kill them.”
“No, I didn’t mean to kill them. That doesn’t mean it’s not my fault.”
“Ben, we don’t know if you’re responsible,” Reid says.
“What do you mean, ‘we don’t know’?” Elijah says. “We
know
he’s not responsible.”
“I’m just saying that correlation doesn’t mean causation. Unless you actually found some link between them—”
“What the fuck does that even mean? Stop throwing scientific terms at us,” Elijah says. “Ben, none of this was your fault.”
“The whole thing was my fault,” Ben says. “We wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be dealing with any of this if it wasn’t for me.”
“That’s not fucking true—”
“It doesn’t matter. This isn’t a school science experiment. It’s people. Lives,” Ben says, his voice rising. “I told you I’m done until I figure out how to do it without hurting anyone.”
“But we’re still fucking here!” Elijah yells, and there’s a crash of things, possibly heavy things, falling and possibly breaking.
My heart rate spikes. I can feel each pulse in the tips of my fingers, and I’m too warm. Sweat is beading at the back of my neck.
“He’s right, we’ve—”
“You think I want to be here any more than you do?” Ben says. “But did you see the burns on those bodies? They didn’t even look human. I’m not going to do that to more people.”
Bodies. Burns.
They didn’t even look human
.
A
ir leaves my lungs. Blood stops moving in my veins. And for a minute, it feels like life itself just got sucked out of this room. My vision is blurry, like I can’t focus on anything, and the only thing I can hear is white noise.
I look up, my eyes watering, and open my mouth, hoping I won’t suffocate from shock.
And then the earth starts spinning again. Life un-pauses, and the world around me rushes back in.
From the sounds of their voices, when I get to the bottom of the stairs, they’ll be to my left—all three of them. Each of them outweighs me and could easily take me down if it came to hand-to-hand combat. And I still don’t know what kind of freaky shit Ben can do.
But I can’t listen anymore.
Carefully, I slide the backpack off my back and retrieve the Glock 22. And I take a deep breath, hoping I can remember everything my father ever told me about advancing on a potentially hostile target.
I’ll have the element of surprise on my side—and a gun. Assuming there isn’t another person down there and there aren’t a bunch of assault rifles hanging on the wall—or something worse—I should have the upper hand.
Bodies. Burns.
They didn’t even look human
.
It’s too obvious. I know exactly what they’re talking about. And it’s about time, because I know everything else.
I
don’t rush in. Instead I go slowly, each step matching my even breaths and the steady pounding of my heart. I hold the Glock with two hands, arms straight out but slightly bent at the elbows—relaxed but secure.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I point the gun in their direction and say, “Get your hands up!” Then I absorb the details. All three of them are somewhere between five and seven feet away from me, and the unfinished basement offers a few household items as potential weapons, but nothing that will get me from a distance. “Hands up, right now,” I add, trying not to pay attention to how hard my hands want to shake.
“Again? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Elijah says, throwing his arms out wide, though I don’t think for a second he’s serious.
Reid has his arms up, but he’s looking to Elijah for cues. “I told you she heard us.”
Ben is the only one who doesn’t listen right away. And at first glance I think he’s planning to try to talk me out of something, but when I get a closer look at his face, I can see his eyes look pained. He opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out.