Blues for Zoey (14 page)

41

Something Crazier (an
d Smaller)
Than a Gun

Mr. Rodolfo
was already there. He stood behind the
counter leaning on his arms, a blank expression on his face.
Weird
.

“I thought I was scheduled this morning.”

Mr. Rodolfo didn
't respond. The drawer of the cash register was
open. He was staring into it, apparently zombiefied.
Was it my imagination, or was the float in the register fuller than usual?

“Looks like we had a good night.”

He slammed the register shut. The counter trembled. “What
's that supposed to mean?”

“Doesn't mean anything,” I told him.
“I was just saying—cuz the register looks full.”

“There's mor
e to life than money. Don't they
teach you that in school?”

It was an odd comment, coming f
rom him. It went against his whole good-for-business philosophy of
life. I was about to point this out when I had
another surprise. The rear door swung open and the Brothers
came lumbering in. What were they doing here? It
was too early. They didn't come until the afternoon.

Gon
zo (I think) had a bucket and JJ (I also think) had a pair of mops, one in each hand. The mop-strings trailed dingy water down the back stairs. Silent as
ever, they went over to Ol' B
etty, prying open the broken washer's
mouth and dumping in the contents of the bucket. A cascade of pinky-gray water sploshed into the drum. Why wer
e they mopping up the back alley? I'd never seen them doing that before.

I turned to Mr. Rodolfo. “What's going on?”

“Nothing,” he said. “You can take the morning off.”

“Seriously?”

“I mixed up the schedules. Work tonight instead. I'll pay you double, for the full day, since it was my fault.”

Back out on the street, I watched the Brothers through the front window. JJ meticulously rinsed off the bucket and mops, while Gonzo came up to the counter, firing little bullets of Portuguese at Mr. Rodolfo.

I walked around the block until I was standing under the steps that led up to our kitchen. The pav
ement by the rear entrance to the laundromat was
slick with water. The color was the same pinky-gray I
had just seen dumped into Ol' Betty.

I cr
ouched down and wiped the pavement with a
fingertip. All I got was a smoky sludge of
water and dirt. Then I saw something. A little white cube, just inside the shadow of the bottom step.

It was a die. A single die, with yin and yang symbols for the pips.
When I picked it up, I nearly fainted. Not
because of what it was, but because of what was on it. Little flecks of something. Red.

The moment I saw them, I couldn't
breathe. The only thing that saved me from passing out was closing my hand, hiding the die, clenching my fist to keep my blood flowing.

Blood
.

I took some deep breaths. I stood up. I sh
oved my fist in my pocket. I started walking. I just wanted to get as far away from the Sit 'n' Spin as I possibly could.

42

Jumping
to Conclusions

B-Man always carried A-Man's die.
Always
. Like a talisman, like a r
eligious relic—and A-Man was God. B-Man would never give it up. He certainly wouldn
't just drop it in the alley behind a laundromat.

I walked ten blocks up Steinway. I walked past the Super Center, past the school, until it was just a bunch of office buildings. Then I called Calen.

“Hello?”

“Shit, Cal, something happened. I think something bad happened.”

“Kaz? What the hell?
What
happened?”

“I think—okay, I think … ”

“Dude, just breathe.”

I tried. I took some long, deep breaths.

“Sounds dirty.”

I kept panting anyway.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“I think my boss killed somebody.”

“
What
?! No way.”

“Remember the guy we talked to when we needed beer for Toph's? Not the one who actually bought it, but the other guy, the weird one? In that big bomber jacket? When I went out with Zoey, we saw Mr. Rodolfo come after him with the Arbitrator, and then—”

“The what?”

“A big
fucking
crowbar!” My voice came out like a whistle. Like I was twel
ve. Like my balls hadn't dropped.

“That girl, Zoey? She saw it, too?
With a crowbar?
Dude.
You need to call the cops.”

“We just watched,” I said. I felt sick.

“Wait a sec. When y
ou took her to What the Pho? That was, like,
two nights
ago
. You and her watched your boss
off a guy with a c
rowbar
and you're just telling me now? How come you didn't say anything at the m
ovie?”

“He didn't beat him with it. He just stuck it in his face.”

Calen didn't get it (not that I was making sense). “But you just said he murdered a guy.
With a crowbar
.”

“No.” I tried again to breathe. “The cr
owbar thing happened a couple nights ago. He didn't
beat him or anything, he just waved it around. But then, just now, I came in to work this morning and I found the die.
Remember?
I rolled a two.”

“Dude, wait a second. This is important. Did you or did you not witness a murder?”

I put my hand in my pocket. I wanted to take out the die and look at it
again, but I couldn't. “There's blood
on it,” I said.

“Blood?”

“
Yes!
I know cuz I nearly passed out.”

“Wait, that's it?”

“That's what?”

“How do you even know it's the same die?”

“I've seen it a bunch of times. It has these little symbols. I know it's his.”

“You found a die with some blood on it—no,
maybe
some blood on it—and you think—”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Dude, you gotta be
sure.” Calen's tone had changed. “The police
'll shut that whole place down. If you're wrong, it'll be this huge deal and your boss
'll shit himself and you'll
definitely
be fired.”

“I know.”

“But you really think this happened?”

“I do.”

“Then you don't have a choice. You gotta call the police.”

“I can't.”

“It's simple. 9-1-1, yo.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

It wasn't until Calen actually said it—
you gotta call the police
—that I realized I wasn't going to.

“Because,” I said, “I don't have enough yet.”

“Enough what?”

“I'm just so close,” I whispered.

“E
nough what?”

“Money.”

“Oh, yeah.” Calen's voice changed again. It got softer. “For your mom.”

“Maybe you're right,” I said. “Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions.”

43

Th
e
Eme
r
so
n
Center

After I
spoke to Calen, I kept wandering the neighborhood. I circled back through M
ontgomery Park, past the big wading pool they have for kids. Crowds of them were there, shouting and splashing each other
.

I passed a skinny guy in a straw hat. He
was selling a bunch of framed photographs laid out on blankets.
I don't know why, but I stopped.

It was all these black-and-white photographs of crumbling buildings. A couple of them I r
ecognized as local landmarks. More than half of the buildings were churches, and in every one,
the focus was on missing bricks and boarded-up windo
ws, or the fact that they were taken through
wire fences thrown up by demolition cr
ews. On the closest corner of the blanket was a pictur
e of the church connected to the rear of the Emerson Center. When I saw it, something clicked.

If anybody knew where B-Man was, it was A-M
an. I took the west exit from the park and headed in that direction.

The Emerson Center was a rooming house, partially funded by
the church, whose steeple towered behind
it. When I got there, I was greeted by
three old men on the saggy porch out front.
They each smoked a thin brown cigarette.

“Who are you?” one of them asked me. “New volunteer?” His voice was nearly as gravelly as something off a Shain Cope album.

“I'm not a volunteer. I'm just looking for somebody.”

“Who?”

For a second, I didn't know what to say. Did the
A
in A-Man really stand for something?

“I'm a friend of A-Man's. Is he here?”

The youngest of the three, a guy in a wheelchair whose legs only went as far as his knees, nodded. “He's here.”

The one with the gravelly voice yelled into the house.
“A-Man! You got a kid here to see you!”

Half a minute later, A-
Man appeared behind the screen door. All I could see was an
impressionistic outline: the thinness of his silhouette, the glossy twinkle
of his eyes, the dim halo of his skull cap.

A-Man squinted at me. “I forget something down at the laundromat?”

“I just need to ask you something.”

“Okay, c'mon in.”

At the back of the house, there was a small room with a bed (more of a cot, really) and a square metal-and-plastic table. His only decorations were a few framed pictures. Most of them featured the same woman. In some, she had a young boy with her, a kid about Nomi's age.

“You look different,” said A-Man. “What changed?”

The question was a surprise, and I didn't know how to answer.

“I met a girl.”

A-Man grinned. “So that's why you look like your whole world flipped. That what you wanna ask me about?”

“Actually
, no. I came about B-Man. Have you seen him?”

A-Man st
uck out his lip. “Not since yesterday.”

I felt a cold heaviness in my gut. “What happened yesterday?”

“Nothing.”

“But you have
n't seen him?”

“No big deal. Not like we're married.” A-Man's half-closed ey
es made a move for one of the photographs, but never made it. “B
disappears. It's what he does. He'll be gone for a week, sometimes a whole month, and then—
poof
—he's back. Happens all the time. I'm sure you've noticed: not the most predictable guy.”

“
Okay,” I whispered. “That's cool.” Maybe I
was
jumping to conclusions.

“Ho
w come you came up here to look for him? He in trouble? He do something stupid? ”

“No,” I said.
“Just haven't seen him in a while,
so I wondered where he was.”

“Keep wondering.”

We we
re silent for a while. My eyes went back to the photographs.

“That's my wife and son,” A-Man told me.

“You're married?”

“I was. In my previous life. Those two
there were my pinions.”

“Your what?”

A-Man star
ed at the photograph for a long time. “I'm talking
about the machine,” he said at last. “When y
ou're born, all that screaming and blood, that's you getting shook loose. After that, for a long time, you're a lost cog, rattling a
round. Until you find
your pinion
, that one gear that's been missing you. It's the one place where
you finally fit and the machine runs properly for once. Those two, they were my pinions.”

“Did something happen to them?”

A-Man almost smiled. “Tha
t's the problem with pinion gears. The machine's too big. It'
s too complicated. Sometimes you find your pinion, but
you don't know
y
ou found your pinion. You see what I mean?”

“I think so.”

I was about to suggest B-Man was A-Man's new pinion, but that
was stupid. B-Man was a pretty poor substitute
for a whole family.

A-Man turned away from the photograph. “Guess I'm back to rattling around.”

It was odd how there were no pictures with all three of them together. Just ones of the woman and the boy. It made me happy to know I still had the photograph of Dad and me, on the courts at DeWinter Hills.

“So B-Man wanders off sometimes?” I asked.

“
All
the time.”

I nodded.

“He wasn't always like that.”

A-Man pulled back the door to his
bathroom, revealing a framed photograph of a gr
oup of men standing together on a brown, rocky
slope. They all had guns: large, automatic assault rifles. A-Man was
standing at the edge of the group. His goatee
was the same, but everything else belonged to
a different person. His body was broader,
thick arms bursting out of a tight green T-shirt.

“That's B there beside me.”

I never would have known. B-Man's face was round and healthy. All his teeth were there, polished white. He showed them off with the beaming grin of an actor.

“No way ... ” But once you looked, it was obvious.

“Like I said, a previous life.”
A-Man stood beside me, arms folded and gripping his sides. “You make one bad decision, or in B's case, one
good
decision, and the whole machine'
ll flip.”

“What decision?”

A-Man squinted at me. “I never tell you?”

I shook my head.

“B took a bullet for me. Right here.” He tapped his head, just behind his ear. “
Only grazed him, but he was out cold for three months. When he came to, he wasn'
t the same person, and neither was I.”

B-Man never pulled do
wn the hood of his bomber jacket, even in summer
. I had always assumed it was part of his craziness, and maybe it was. O
r maybe it was his way of disguising the wound.

“He saved your life.”

A-Man nodded. “After that, I lost the stomach for it. He was my best friend till then, and now he's … ”

“
He still is,” I said, cutting in. “He's B-Man.”

A-Man didn't say anything.

I wanted t
o tell him I had found the die in the alley,
but I didn't want him to worry. I wanted to
believe B-Man was just wandering around somewher
e, disappearing for a few days like he
always did. But
there was another reason I left the die in my pocket: for the money. I wanted to keep my job going, just a bit longer
. I was so
close.

“You're right,” I said, as
if A-Man needed reassuring. “He'll be back soon.”

W
alking back from the Center, I felt numb
. What snapped me out of it was my phone, vibrating
against my leg. The display said it was the library where Mom worked, but when I picked up, it wasn't her.

“
Is this … ” There was a pause while whoe
ver it was tried to make sense of my name. “
Ka…zoo…oh
Barrett?”

“Kaz,” I said.

“
Your mother is Aiko Barrett?”

“Yes.”

“I'm afraid your mother's had some sort of an … episode
.”