Hellhole (2 page)

“What we really need is a trained velociraptor.”

She made the same face she always made at his dinosaur references, then frowned, leaning in on the counter until he could see each and every whisker above her lip. “I hate thieves.” She narrowed her eyes. “I
despise
thieves.”

She knows,
he thought with a rush of terror, cat-shaped spots flying across his vision.
She knows, and she's going to call the police, and I'm going to go to jail, and I'll need to figure out how to use cigarettes as currency or I'll become someone's bitch—Oh, who am I kidding, I'll become someone's bitch no matter what—

Just when Max was sure the sweat accumulating on his forehead was about to cascade down his face in a majestic, disgusting waterfall, Stavroula pounded a fist on the counter. “Restock the meat sticks!”

Max exhaled, taking great pains not to emit a nervous honk as he did so. “The Slim Jims, you mean?”

“Is what I said. Thin Jims.”

Perhaps cheerfulness would mask the foul stench of wrongdoing. “You got it!” he chirped.

As he crouched down to retrieve the last remaining box of Slim Jims from beneath the counter—Audie was going to be so pissed—he pushed the incriminating cat farther into his backpack, and only once it was out of sight did his pulse begin to settle back into a normal rate.
You're fine, you're fine,
he chanted to himself, to the beat of his heart.
You were out of the security camera's line of sight, and she wasn't even in her office watching anyway, and even if she was, she stopped watching those tapes once the Booze Hound retired. You're fine.

Meanwhile, Stavroula took out her iPhone and dialed the police station. “Hello, Rhonda? Yes, we get another one. No, I no break windshield this time—”

She rattled off the numbers of the license plate all the way back to her office and slammed the door shut. Relieved, Max ran a hand over his drenched forehead and into his ridiculous hair, which was black and short except for the front, which stuck out over his forehead like an awning at a Parisian café. Old people liked to say that it was “hair you could set your watch to,” whatever that meant. Max just took it to mean that his head was permanently shaped like a batting helmet and there wasn't anything he could do about it.

Although he was beginning to recover most of his faculties, he still felt on edge. As if he could be struck down at any moment by God, or whichever deity it was that handled knickknack robberies—

His cell phone vibrated.

Max's eyes bulged.
Is it the police? Did they somehow see what I did? Do police make courtesy calls before they arrest people?

He watched it dance across the counter, a beige, bricklike plastic thing designed exclusively for the elderly, with gigantic glowing numbers and a frustrating lack of caller ID. There wasn't really room in his budget for a phone at all, but the situation with his mother required that he be reachable at all times.

His shaking hand knocked against the counter as he picked up the Beige Wonder, wishing yet again that he'd had enough money to afford a communication device that wasn't a glorified coconut radio. “Hello?” he said tentatively.

“You got the stuff?” a gruff voice answered.

It wasn't the police. Or a supreme being. Though maybe Audie did have a little bit of divinity in her—how else could she sense that Max was restocking the Slim Jims at that very moment? “Sorry, Aud, I can't spare any this week,” Max said, ripping the cardboard open. “It's our last box. I'll have to reorder.”

“So reorder, punk!” his best friend replied, punching every word with a blast of pure concentrated glee. If Audie were candy, she'd be a bag of Skittles: bright, shiny, and bursting with real fruit flavor.

Max, on the other hand, would be a bowl of stale licorice, bland and unwanted. “I don't like reordering,” said Max, waving his large hands about. “The customer service guy is named Izzy, and he's really awkward, and every time we lapse into an uncomfortable silence, I end up saying, ‘It isn't easy, is it, Izzy?' and it just devolves from there.”

“Yeah,” Audie said, deadpan. “Izzy sounds like a real freak.”

“I know, right?”

Audie let out a sprightly sigh, no doubt twisting her fingers through her spiky dreads as she always did when her patience was being tested. People said she looked like a cross between Rihanna and a palm tree, but to Max she'd always be the girl next door who made him eat a worm when they were six, then a firefly when they were seven. He swore for weeks that it made his pee glow, until the day she demanded he prove it and the topic was mysteriously dropped.

“Anyway,” she said, “you coming to the game?”

Max cleared his throat and looked down, pretending to count the pennies in the take-a-penny tray, even though Audie couldn't see him. “I can't.”

“Come
on,
man,” she whined, a twinge of hurt in her voice. “You haven't come to a single game this season! What are you so busy doing on Friday nights? And
don't
say you got a hot date—”

“I do have a hot date.”

“With someone who hasn't been dead for seventy million years?”

“Hey, I'll have you know that with recent 3D imaging,
Ichthyosaurus communis
is more
alive
than ever!”

“Talk like the Discovery Channel all you want, but a book of fossils and a tub of plaster does not an orgy make.”

“Gross, Aud.” Max reddened as he glanced at the smutty magazine rack behind the counter, then switched to his reflection in the window. With his big brown eyes and thin, pointy nose, he could easily be mistaken for a barn owl. Audie liked to assure him that there were plenty of girls who would go for that sort of look—Gaunt British Standup Comedian, she called it—but always with the caveat that he wouldn't be encountering such girls until he got to college and joined the Science Society, or “whatever it is that lamewads congregate in.”

“A gaggle of geeks?” Max often suggested.

“A warp of nerds?” Audie would counter.

“A woot of dweebs?”

“A bunch of virgins?”

And so forth.

He returned the Slim Jims to the shelf under the counter. Of course he'd save them for her; he always did.

“I'm just sayin',” Audie was just saying, “if you can't master the art of small talk with a jerky meat salesman, you're never going to be able to manage it with a lady.”

“You make a variety of fine points.”

Audie yelled at someone in the background, then came back to the phone. “Gotta run. Thanks for the laughs. Come to the game.”

“Goodbye. You're welcome. Can't, but good luck.”

Audie muttered a sarcastic “Can't” as she hung up.

“Sorry,” Max said to the dead phone.

And he
was
sorry. But a date was a date.

He dug around in his backpack—ignoring, for the moment, the demonic glassy-eyed cat—until he found his crossword book and a pen. He readied his digital watch, a cheap glob of rubber and plastic emblazoned with the
Jurassic Park
logo. He never took it off, for two reasons: (1) it had been a semi-ironic eleventh birthday gift from his mother and his tweenage self had solemnly sworn to her that he'd never remove it; and (2) he had since repurposed it into his own personal crossword timing device. And okay, there was a third reason: he secretly really loved it.

His current crossword record stood at twelve puzzles in six hours. He triggered the countdown timer, narrowed his eyes, and set his voice to movie trailer voice-over mode.

“Let's DO this.”

 

Six hours and eight crossword puzzles later, the watch alarm beeped. Max threw his pen to the counter and pounded his fist on the rumpled book. “Damn you, Thirty-Two Down! Roast ye in the fiery bowls of HELL!”

After composing himself, he packed everything into his backpack and picked it up gingerly, not wanting to ignite a glitter storm. He was
so
close to pulling off the cat heist.

He tried to keep the waver out of his voice as he yelled to the back room. “I'm heading out, Stavroula!”

The door opened. Stavroula emerged and approached the counter. “Sure you don't want to stay till close? I pay you overtime! You save up for car? Take nice girl out?”

“No thanks.” He made a beeline for the exit lest she spontaneously develop x-ray vision and demand that he empty the contents of his bag. “Any other night I would, you know that.”

“Psff,” he heard her huff as he left. “You and your precious Fridays.”

Once he rounded the corner and unlocked his bike, Max let out a final sigh of relief. He'd gotten away with it. “The purr-fect crime,” he whispered, followed by a strong urge to punch himself.

The town of Eastville was known for four things: its renowned hospital, its renowned high school football team, its renowned granite quarry, and its stupid, stupid name. No one could say with authority what Eastville was supposed to be east
of,
as it was located in a fairly nondescript area far from the highway, in the wilds of western Massachusetts—west of Boston, west of Springfield, west of anything significant. The only thing it was east of was a big, ugly hill (known locally and affectionately as Ugly Hill) that was covered in a variety of shrubs and brambles that looked brown in the summer and browner in the winter. They didn't even glitter prettily in the snow, because snow didn't bother to stick to them. It recoiled from their thistles in disgust.

Max threw a glance at the hill as he pedaled through town, surprised at his ability to perceive its outline. Normally E'ville was anything but bright, but owing to the lights of the football stadium bouncing off the low clouds in the sky, it was as if a dome had encased the town in a glowing, reddish hue.

The crisp September air bit at his face. A loud cheer mushroomed up out of O'Connell Stadium as he rode past, and there was Audie's voice, booming out of the speakers. In the school's hundred-year history, there had never been a female football announcer at Eastville High—not until the day Audie marched up to the athletic director and flashed that irresistible smile of hers, informing him that she was going to be on ESPN one day, and if he ever hoped to score some tickets to the Super Bowl, he'd give her the job.

He gave her the job.

“And what will
you
be, young man?” Max muttered to himself in a spot-on imitation of Audie's mother.

A convict,
he imagined the cat meowing from inside his bag.
It's death row for you, bub. You'll probably get the chair. I'm a very important cat. Back on my home planet, I was a queen, I tell you! A queen!

Max was not adapting well to the criminal life.

He rounded into the parking lot of the Food Baron, stopped in front of the exit, and looked at his watch. It was 9:03 p.m., the T. rex skeleton informed him. He took exactly $4.81 out of his pocket and waited.

Two seconds later the automatic door swished open. Out poked a sweating bottle of sparkling apple cider. Max exchanged it for the money, then expertly slid it into his bag.

“Hey, Paul,” he said to the person formerly attached to the cider, a short, pimple-faced kid wearing a Food Baron apron.

“Hey yourself” was the standard reply.

Paul had been the only other student to show up for Mr. Donnelly's after-school Paleontology Club last year, an endeavor that had clearly been doomed from the start. (Even Mr. Donnelly hadn't cared enough to show up.) The two of them had chatted and exchanged their favorite geologic periods—Jurassic for Max, Cretaceous for Paul—and from then on had sat at lunch together every day. Slowly, accidentally, Paul became Max's friend, or at least served as a decent pinch-hitter friend once Audie got too popular.

And it was a good thing, too, because Paul looked even more the part of a dweeb than Max did. A curly-haired ginger, he possessed glasses that wouldn't have been out of place at a nursing home, and a bucktoothed overbite fighting an epic battle against a complicated set of braces. But Paul was a nice kid, if a little dull, and his propensity to repeat the same word over and over sometimes got distracting.

“Busy night?” Max asked.

“I'll say. We got a big squash shipment, but the squash was really dirty, so I had to wash each squash.”

“Oh my gosh.”

“Do
you
want to buy a freshly washed squash?”

“No, thanks, I'm good with the cider. Have a good night!”

The errands continued. Max hung a left onto Main Street—the founders of Eastville had apparently expended every drop of their creative juices on the town name—and biked past the dark storefronts, most businesses having closed early because of the football game. Only a couple of them were still open—a quirky gift shop whose owners cared nothing for sports, and a pizzeria, in front of which Max came to a practiced stop.

“Hi, Mario,” he said with a nod as he entered.

Mario the pizza guy smiled through his bushy mustache and opened the oven. Max hadn't even needed to place an order; that large cheese pizza was already waiting for him, just as it was every Friday night at 9:05 p.m.

He paid for the pie and then—because he was still coasting on the high of his successful theft and feeling really crazy—added an order of onion rings.

Mario's eyebrows went up. “Big night?”

Max stuffed the onion rings into his bag. “You have no idea.”

 

The squat ranch-style house that awaited Max was its usual dark and foreboding self, the kind of unkempt pile of shingles and shutters that neighborhood kids sometimes likened to the abode of a witch. Its once-white aluminum siding had long ago turned a sickly shade of brown. The lawn was overgrown and scorched yellow in the late-summer heat; Audie's father often threatened to fine Max for not mowing it, but only in jest, as it made his own lawn look all the more pristine by comparison.