Deviant (23 page)

He was dressed in a light cream suit with a checked waistcoat and blue tie. He looked cheerful and happy. It was the first time Danny had heard about the Oprah business, but if billionaire casino mogul Steve Glynn was one of the school's trustees, then why not have another billionaire involved, too?

Mr. Lebkuchen sat. “OK, everyone, open your geography books to page fourteen, South America,” he said.

They spent the next forty-five minutes going over the countries, capitals, principal rivers, and mountain ranges of South America.

Occasionally Danny glanced back at his mom. She was wearing a brown Sunday Mass dress and looked really nice with her hair done up in a bun. And of course Walt was there beside her, ten years older if he was a day, and dressed in a gray suit and tie just like a real person or something. All the parents were there. Hector's mom and dad, Charlie's folks, Tom's mother, and there was no mistaking Todd's father—the giant guy in the corner whose head was nearly touching the ceiling.

Danny caught the eye of Tony's father and quickly returned to his book.

The lesson continued.

Danny wondered if anyone would see through all of this Direct Instruction stuff. Mr. Lebkuchen reading out loud, the kids reading out loud, everyone following along with the lesson that had been laid out in the book and repeating it all several times: “
Bogotá is the capital of Colombia, Caracas is the capital of Venezuela, Quito is the capital …
”

To Danny it was a bit like learning lines in a play. You memorized the stuff for the weekly test and it hung around in your short-term memory until the test was over, but then, surely, you quickly forgot it.

I wonder what everyone else is making of this crap? he
asked himself and allowed himself another quick glance around the room.

But of course Danny couldn't know anyone else's thoughts, which was a shame because one mind in particular would have interested him.

A mind that was consumed by images of blood and violence and that was thinking right then that the room had an electric smell.

An electric smell he did not like.

Electricity had robbed the world of darkness, of stars, of constellations.

How much more beautiful the world, lit only by fire. How pleasant it would have been to have lived then. To go there. That world of pilgrims and penitents arrayed with garlands and crowns of violets. How different from this place.

A world of fewer people.

Not everyone jammed together like sardines. So close, so near, all of them breathing my air, breathing my air …

Breathing.

Breathing.

Breathing.

Calm down. It's OK. It's OK. Close your eyes. Close your eyes and when you open them they will be gone. It will be all right.

Soon you will be standing under the moon.

Watching the blood drip from your hands.

If I were the cat and the cat were me, he'd do the same thing.

Look at you, Danny Lopez, look at you trying to trap me.

What are you? You're nothing. You are too naive and too slow and too clumsy.

You're like a cat. Soon to be dying. Soon to be dead.

And yes I know that you have been walking the route.

And yes I know that the net is closing.

How can you hope to compete with me?

All it means is that things will have to be accelerated. Two more cats to complete the pentagram, and then a child.

Sit tight, Danny. Do you feel that breeze on the back of your neck? That's me. Whispering my songs of death. Will you be the first one, Danny boy? You're shivering. Why are you doing that? Are you reading thoughts? Or are you merely cold?

Can you read malice?

Well, read this: Embrace thy father, kiss thy mother, drink thy fill of the cool night air. Thy days on this world have been reduced by the thousand and the ten thousand.

For I am coming.

I am coming.

“How come you don't walk to school with Tony anymore?” Juanita asked Danny at the breakfast table.

He sipped his orange juice and thought about his answer. There were a lot of lies and untold truths to navigate before he could reply. He didn't want to tell his mom that he and Tony had fallen out or that her father still thought he was a pervert or that he thought her father might be the cat killer or that he had to leave early for school because he had morning and evening detention for a few more days.

“I'd just rather skate,” he said.

“That's a pity. You two haven't had a fight or anything, have you?” Juanita asked.

“No. Nothing like that. It's been so cold, she'd rather
have her dad give her a ride and, to tell the truth, I prefer to skate,” Danny said.

“Your mother's going the wrong way, but I can give you a ride in the T if you'd like,” Walt said. “You've barely been in it, and we only get it for another few weeks.”

“Nah, I don't think so,” Danny said.

“Manners, please, Danny,” said Juanita.

“No. Thank. You,” Danny said.

“Bob and I were talking, and he was wondering if you had cracked that disappearing-cat case yet,” Walt said, turning the pages of the
Denver Post
.

Danny sighed heavily. “The cats didn't disappear. We know where the cats are. They're all dead,” he said with withering sarcasm.

“Daniel, watch yourself,” Juanita said.

“Hmm,” Danny muttered.

“The cats are
all
dead?” Walt asked, irritating Danny with his lack of attention.

“Yup.”

“Ooh, sorry to hear that.” Walt grimaced, then finished the last of his cornflakes. Unlike Danny and Juanita he tilted the bowl away from him to get the last of the sugary milk into his spoon. Danny watched him with fascination. Is that how you learned to eat cereal back East? Is that how old-money New England types ate cereal? He suddenly wondered what the hell this guy was doing in their house. Living with them, eating with them. There were back doors
to Walt, back doors and secrets. If the first two cats hadn't been killed long before they'd moved to Colorado, he'd have put Walt close to the top of his list of suspects.

“I like that Bob person,” Juanita said. “It's a real shame he's in prison. What's he in for again?”

“Check fraud. White-collar stuff. He's a model prisoner. I'm pretty sure he's going to make his parole in March. Certainly I'll give him a great report. There but for the grace of God and all that stuff. Although …,” Walt said, but his voice trailed off into silence.

Danny's eye caught the blank TV screen gathering dust on its IKEA TV stand. “Hey, when are we supposed to get cable? It's going to be two weeks on Saturday and we still don't have cable or wireless Internet. And where's our stuff? Have they lost our stuff?”

“I checked up on that,” Juanita said. “Our boxes are in Denver; we should get them in a couple of days. Cable guy's coming on Sunday.”

“When I was growing up, we didn't have TV or computers; we read books, you know?” Walt said.

“Yeah, that was like a hundred years ago. Things are different now,” Danny muttered.

Juanita put down her spoon. She gave Danny a look that meant
This is your final warning, young man
.

“Walt, what do you mean by ‘although'?” she asked to change the subject. “You said Bob's a good guy,
although
…”

Walt sipped his coffee and shook his head.

“What?” Juanita persisted.

Walt frowned. “I was trying not to say anything in front of the boy. He likes Bob, and this was told to me in confidence.”

Juanita realized her mistake, but there was no going back now. Danny would worry away at it until it came out. “What were you told?” she said.

“OK, but this stays at this table,” he said. He looked at Juanita, who nodded, and at Danny, who gave him a “whatever” shrug.

“You know Freddie Sessions?” Walt asked Danny.

“No.”

“The big guy with the handlebar mustache?”

“No.”

“All right, well, anyway, I was talking to Freddie—Bob wasn't with us yesterday because he was working on his parole application—and Freddie's just chewing the fat, you know, and we're talking about Bob's board meeting and Freddie says it's a good thing the juvie record's sealed. And I'm saying what juvie record? And Freddie says oh Bob had this bad juvie record in Alaska. He was up in Fairbanks. That was meth central even back then; anyway he did some pretty bad things.”

“What things?” Danny asked, interested now.

“Well, uh, don't get too angry. He was just a kid …”

“What things?” Danny insisted.

“Well, some boys took a girl's dog … a neighbor of theirs … Bob was part of the group. They tied it to some railway lines … Nasty business. It was big news up there.
Reward money came in from California. They caught the kids. Bob was only fourteen, but he was the oldest, so they reckoned he was the ringleader.”

“Bob tortured and killed a dog?” Danny asked, aghast.

“Well, yeah, I guess,” Walt said.

Juanita was also horrified. “I don't want you to see him anymore, Danny. Walt, I don't want Danny or the other kids going to that prison. I don't know what I was thinking. I made a serious mistake.”

Walt nodded. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“No, I'm glad you told me. I made a mistake,” Juanita insisted.

“But please don't say anything. Freddie told me this in confidence. No one's supposed to know about it, not even the parole board.”

“I won't say anything. Who am I going to talk to anyway around here?” Juanita said.

Neither Danny nor Walt picked up on the loneliness in that remark.

Danny got up from the table, grabbed Sunflower, his heaviest coat, a beanie, and black fleece gloves to go on over his white gloves.

He went out and tested the air. It was so cold that morning that it stung his face but not so cold that it froze his tongue. He could skate. He went back inside and got his iPod and selected his '70s playlist.

He got lucky and the iPod picked Boston, Led Zep, Floyd, and Aerosmith for the ride downhill to school.

He thought about what Walt had said about Bob Randall.

It kind of all made sense.

His mom and Walt couldn't put two and two together, but he could.

Bob tells them the cat killer is a kid to throw them off the scent and he goes out at night through the holes in the prison fence. What didn't make sense was the motive. Why was Bob doing it? Was the compulsion to torture animals so strong that he'd risk his parole for it?

Danny raced down the hill and skidded to a beautiful halt in front of the school gates. He was the first one there of course, before the teachers even, and he took the opportunity to skate across the playground all the way to the school entrance. He put Sunflower in his locker and walked to his detention classroom. Danny felt that he practically lived in the science classroom now. Twenty minutes before school, his classes there all day, twenty minutes after school … and he'd had to come back for parents' night.

It sucked.

“Sit,” Mr. Lebkuchen said without looking up. He was doing paperwork—pink forms and blue forms that were clearly very complicated.

Danny sat.

“Read pages thirteen to seventeen in Scott, quietly. I'll give you a pop quiz at the end.”

Danny opened his geography textbook. It was a chapter on glacial landforms. It was an odd book, and Scott kept saying things like “Drumlins are a common feature of
glacial deposits, though they could also have been formed in a global flood such as has been mentioned in numerous sources including the book of Genesis.”

When he was on page sixteen, which explained that all of Long Island was a glacial deposit or possibly one of the sandbanks that Noah's Ark had rested upon, Mr. Lebkuchen finished his paperwork and sighed heavily. Danny looked up.

“Words, words, words. You know why people quit teaching? So much paperwork. More paperwork than teaching time. I protect my teachers from most of it, but it's hard.”

“Yes, sir,” Danny said.

Mr. Lebkuchen took off his glasses and pinched his nose where they'd been resting. “How are you holding up, Danny?” he asked

“Fine.”

“You're a good kid and you come from good people. Other people would have tried to sue us over that gas tap incident. Although you shouldn't have been in there in the first place.”

“No, sir.”

“How does this compare to your other schools?”

“Uh, fine.”

“What do you like about it?”

“You learn more and, um, I like the uniforms. You don't have to worry about what you're going to wear,” Danny lied.

Mr. Lebkuchen smiled. “Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that. That's been one of my theories. Kids are resistant to the uniforms, but secretly it relieves them of so much stress.”

“Yes, yes, it does,” Danny said.