Hellhole (31 page)

The chief put his hat back on. “You need a ride home?”

“That'd be great, sir.”

They rode without speaking, with Jimi Hendrix generously stepping in to fill the silence. Chief Gregory spoke only once, at the turnoff for Honeybrook Hills. “Little late for a jog, buddy, don't you think?”

Max, who'd been staring at his knees, looked out the window. A bearded figure in a velour tracksuit ran past the car, in the direction of the O'Connell house. He gave Max a smile and a small wave.

Heading to the slammer, Shove?
he piped into Max's head a moment later.

“No,” Max whispered under his breath, covered by the music.

Oh.
Was he disappointed?
Well, good. That means you can bring more snacks tomorrow. Hey, how'd that guy pull through?

The road blurred through the windshield as the cruiser shot around a bend. “He's
dead,
” Max said, barely moving his mouth. “You killed him!”

Oh. Oops.

Max didn't say anything. He just felt cold all over.

Oh, come on, Shove. I didn't mean to. It was an accident!

“You expect me to believe that?”

You believe what you want to believe, kid.

Max's vision swirled. He put his head against the glass of the window and stared outside, trying not to gag at the reeling landscape. “How did you even do it?” he asked, breathless.

He could almost hear Burg smiling.

Just knocked a few screws loose.

 

Outside the stadium, Audie skipped over to the passenger side of the car but stopped once she saw Max's ghostly face within.

“I'll explain later,”
he mouthed to her.

Confused, she continued on to the back seat and hopped in.

“Hey, baby!” Chief Gregory boomed as she put on her seat belt. “How did it go?”

“Amazing!” she bubbled. “Guess what, guess what: The recruiters who are in town for homecoming were there, and one of them wanted to talk to me about their sports journalism program! Like, they were
interested
in me! And it's
exactly
what I'm looking for!” She heaved a contented sigh. “I'm still floating. I can't believe it was real.”

Chief Gregory let out a loud whoop while Max turned around in his seat. “That's great, Aud,” he said, trying to conceal the hoarseness in his voice. “You deserve it.”

Her bubbliness reduced itself to a simmer. “Where did
you
run off to?” she asked with a hint of irritation.

Before Max could answer, Chief Gregory said, “He was up at the old O'Connell place, helping move boxes around.”

Max made a pleading face at her.

“Oh, right,” she said carefully, holding Max's gaze. “You said . . . you were doing . . . that.”

“Not sure you should keep hanging around that guy, Max,” Chief Gregory said. “You don't want to get mixed up in something you can't get out of.”

Max turned around in his seat and stared out the window, gripping the car door handle so tight his hand went numb.

 

Five minutes after he'd kissed his mother good night and three minutes after he threw up, Max heard a knock at the kitchen door.

He opened the door but didn't see anything. He took a few steps out into the yard, and there it was, that spiky, palm-tree hair. “Max?” Audie said, stepping out into the light of the back stoop.

“Hey, Aud.” His voice seemed, to him, strangely cold.

“Why'd you come home with my dad?” she asked.

Her scared brown eyes looked up at him—they'd remained unchanged all those years, looking the same as they did when they were little kids chasing after fireflies.

His, he surmised, were much different now.

“Audie,” he said, taking care not to let his voice tremble, “whatever happens from now on, I need you to not ask any questions. It's better if you don't know.”

“Don't know what? What happened, Max?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he focused on the ground, only the ground. “Don't ask me that, okay? If you don't ask, I can't lie to you. And I'd have to lie. You can't know anything about what happened. It wouldn't be safe for you.”

Resolving not to say another word, he pushed past her and went back into the house. Audie stayed behind, reeling.

“Max!” she called after him, stepping toward the house as he started to shut the door. “What—”

“I said don't ask!”

The door slammed in her face.

OVER THE NEXT TEN HOURS
Max left his bed sixteen times.

The first time, he pulled down every blind in the house and locked all the doors.

The second time, he removed a pile of leftover lasagna from the refrigerator, snuck into his mother's room while she was sleeping, and placed it onto her nightstand.

The other fourteen times, he went to the bathroom to vomit.

 

“You okay, hoss? You look terrible.”

“Terrible” didn't begin to describe the state Max found himself in when he rolled into school around eleven. “Repugnant” was far more accurate, or possibly “subhuman.” Or whatever the word was that described the sort of person who hid another person's body under the tarp of a hot tub.

“I'm fine,” Max said to Wall before he could ask any more questions. Then he crumpled up the yellow principal's office slip sticking out of his locker.
Sorry, Principal Gregory,
he thought.
Not gonna happen.

In English lit, he bent his head low and kept his eyes on his quiz, which was full of words that didn't make any sense, questions that danced before his eyes, and names that burned holes into the page. He didn't know who Horatio was. He didn't give a single distinct fuck who Horatio was.

He turned in the paper, blank except for his name at the top. When Mrs. Rizzo called after him to come back into the classroom, Max ignored her and kept walking past the other students, immersing himself in the crowd until he got to the safe haven of his locker, which he opened and put his head inside. He closed his eyes, savoring the cool, muted darkness.

Only five more periods to get through. He could do this.

 

“I can't do this,” he said to the school nurse. “I need to go home.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Hung over again, are we?”

“No, I'm not. I swear.” He pulled his shirt out from his chest, puffing some air into it to fan his skin. “I'm sick. One of those twenty-four-hour bug things.”

She put a hand to his forehead. “You don't have a fever.”

“But I—”
I can't eat,
he wanted to say.
I can't sleep. I can't function.

I'm dying, slowly and arduously, of guilt.

“You're fine,” she said. “Get back to class.”

 

Max now knew how a zombie lived (or unlived). It was as though someone had taken a belt sander to his senses, dulled them down until they were nothing but wisps of their former selves. He saw the world through dead eyes, barely feeling the touch of other students as they brushed past him in the hall, hearing everything around him as a vague, generic noise from which no distinct sounds could surface. In chemistry he stood over a flask of sulfuric acid for a full minute before the teacher shooed him away, astonished that he hadn't passed out from the fumes.

He was sure that every person with whom he came into contact could tell what he'd done, could read it on his face. Their stares would linger a little too long, or they'd pause and glance at his dirty fingernails, beneath which O'Connell's stubborn blood was still caked. But then they'd just smile and move on, and Max would exhale with relief.

At lunch he shoved food into his mouth without tasting it. He sat alone, facing the wall, at a table in the far corner of the cafeteria, where he'd arranged open textbooks around him to make it look as if he was studying too hard to be disturbed.

It worked. No one approached, not Principal Gregory, not Mrs. Rizzo, not even Paul. Max stared at the wall, chewing his cold, unmicrowaved Hot Pocket like cud.

“What happened?”

Max twisted his head. Lore had sat down at the table behind him, her back to his.

“No, don't look at me,” she scolded. “Look straight ahead. Pretend we're not talking.”

“We're
not
talking. I have nothing to say to you.”

She paused. “Don't be like that. Don't blame me because I made a smart move and you didn't have the sense to follow.”

Max gripped the edges of the table. He didn't know what his hands might do if he let them fly of their own accord. “You left me there,” he said through clenched teeth.
“You left.”

“I told you to run!” she hissed. “Why didn't you?”

“Because he was pointing a gun
at my head!
”

“Shh!”

“What was he doing there, anyway? I thought you said he was just going to let the house ‘sit there and rot'!”

“Well, lesson learned: funeral home directors aren't the most reliable sources of information.”

“You think?”

“Max, keep it down,” Lore said, her voice dropping.

“No.” Max swiveled around to look at her. “I am done taking instructions from you. It was a huge mistake to bring you into this. Every time you try to help, things get worse.
You're
the one who insisted we break into a house.
You're
the one who dragged us up to Honeybrook Hills—”

“
I'm
not the one who keeps treating my mother's life as a bargaining chip,” she shot back, turning around to glare at him. “And
I
didn't dig up the bastard in the first place, so maybe you should stop wasting your time on blaming me and start using it to figure out how to save your own ass!”

Max angrily flared his nostrils as he breathed, but she was right. This was his responsibility, even if he'd brought her onboard.
Especially
since he'd brought her onboard.

“Tell me what happened,” Lore said. “After I ran out. Which I
am
sorry about. I hid in the garage and waited until the cop got there. I saw him leave with you. And since you were smiling and not wearing handcuffs, I knew you were okay.”

“Okay?” Max let out a bitter laugh. “Guess you didn't hear the crash.”

“Crash?” For once, she sounded concerned. “What crash?”

Max told her the whole story. He relayed it calmly, in a detached manner, as if reporting the news. As if it had happened to someone else and he'd merely heard about it secondhand or watched it on
CSI.

Lore was quiet as he spoke, her eyes wide, terrified.

“He's . . . dead?” she said. “Burg killed him?”

“He says it was an accident,” Max said. “But who knows if he's telling the truth. Not that it really matters at this point.”

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was a whisper. “Do you believe me now, Max? That you're never going to beat him—that he's going to keep manipulating you and getting you into deeper trouble? Or are you still trying to figure out a way to keep that house, still pushing for that goddamn cure?”

He gave a helpless shrug. “What choice do I have? I've come this far.”

For a moment Lore looked crestfallen. Then her face hardened, back to business. “Where's O'Connell now?”

“Still on the porch, I assume.”

“Okay. I doubt Burg's going to do anything about it himself. So we go there after school. We—”

“I can't. I'm supposed to be back at work today.”

“Then we skip out early again. We go to the house. We clean up the mess. We assess the situation. And we move on from there.”

“Move on?” Max said. “How so?”

“Well, O'Connell left the city to come up here and sell the house, right? So it's not like anyone back home will notice that he went missing.”

“But what are people going to think—that he had a change of heart and decided not to sell it?”

“Uh, yeah. That's exactly what they'll think.”

Max frowned. “But he already listed the house. There have got to be real estate agents involved, people who will be trying to get into contact with him. What if—” A sudden fear rose in his chest. “What if they're showing the house to prospective buyers?”

Lore turned around, her back to his. “Like I said, we go there after school,” she said. “And we clean up the mess.”

 

As he'd ridden home in Chief Gregory's cruiser the night before, Max had sworn to himself that he was never going to set foot on that property again. And here he was, fifteen hours later, doing just that. With two bags of stolen snacks in tow.