Live Wire (29 page)

Everyone fell into an exhausted silence. Myron was wandering the hallways when Mickey came rushing up to him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Suzze T is dead?” Mickey asked.

“You didn’t know?”

“No,” Mickey said. “I just saw it on the news.”

“That’s why I came to see your mom,” Myron said.

“Wait, what does my mom have to do with it?”

“Suzze visited your trailer a few hours before she died.”

That made Mickey take a step back. “You think Mom gave her the drugs?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. She said she didn’t. She said she and Suzze had a big heart-to-heart.”

“What kind of heart-to-heart?”

Myron remembered something else Kitty had said about Suzze’s OD:
“She wouldn’t do that. Not to the baby. I know her. She was killed. They killed her.”
Something clicked in the back of Myron’s brain.

“Your mom seemed sure someone killed Suzze.”

Mickey said nothing.

“And she seemed even more scared after I told her about the OD.”

“So?”

“So is this all connected, Mickey? You guys on the run. Suzze dying. Your father missing.”

He shrugged a tad too elaborately. “I don’t see how.”

“Boys?”

They both turned. Myron’s mother was there. Tears were on her cheeks. A tissue was balled up in her hand. She dabbed at her eyes. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“With what?”

“Don’t start that with me,” she said in a voice only a mother can use on her son. “You and Mickey get into a fight—then suddenly he’s going to live with us. Where are his parents? I want to know what’s going on. All of it. Right now.”

So Myron told her. She listened, shaking, crying. He spared her nothing. He told her about Kitty in rehab and even about Brad vanishing. When he finished, Mom moved closer to them both. She turned first to Mickey, who met her eye. She took his hand.

“It’s not your fault,” she said to him. “Do you hear me?”

Mickey nodded, his eyes closing.

“Your grandfather would never blame you. I don’t blame you. With the amount of blockage he had, you may have inadvertently saved his life. And you”—she turned toward Myron—“stop moping and get out of here. I’ll call you if something changes.”

“I can’t leave here.”

“Of course you can.”

“Suppose Dad wakes up.”

She moved closer to him, craning her neck to look up at him. “Your father told you to find your brother. I don’t care how sick he is. You do what he says.”

S
o now what?

Myron pulled Mickey aside. “I noticed a laptop in your trailer. How long have you owned it?”

“Two years maybe. Why?”

“Is it the only computer you guys had?”

“Yes. And again I’m asking, why?”

“If your father used it, maybe there’s something on it.”

“Dad wasn’t much with technology.”

“I know he had an e-mail address. He used to write your grandparents, right?”

Mickey shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Do you know his password?”

“No.”

“Okay, what else of his do you still have?”

The kid blinked. He bit down on his lower lip. Again Myron reminded himself of where Mickey’s life was right now: father missing, mother in rehab, grandfather suffering a heart attack, and maybe you’re to blame. And you’re all of fifteen years old. Myron started to reach out, but Mickey stiffened.

“We don’t have anything.”

“Okay.”

“We don’t believe in having a lot of possessions,” Mickey said defensively. “We travel a lot. We pack light. What would we have?”

Myron put his hands up. “Okay, I’m just asking.”

“Dad said not to look for him.”

“That was a long time ago, Mickey.”

He shook his head. “You should leave it alone.”

No need or time to explain himself to a fifteen-year-old. “Will you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“I need you to take care of your grandmother for a few hours, okay?”

Mickey didn’t bother with a reply. He headed into the waiting room and sat in the chair across from her. Myron signaled for Win, Esperanza, and Big Cyndi to come out in the hall with him. They needed to reach out to the American embassy in Peru and see whether there were any rumors about his brother. They needed to call any sources at the State Department and get them on the case of Brad Bolitar. They needed to get some computer weenie to break into Brad’s e-mail or figure out his password. Esperanza headed back into New York City. Big Cyndi would stay behind to help with Mom and maybe see whether she could coax some more information from Mickey.

“I can be quite the charmer,” Big Cyndi noted.

When Myron was alone with Win, he called Lex’s phone yet again. Still no answer.

“It’s all connected somehow,” Myron said. “First my brother goes missing. Then Kitty gets scared and goes on the run. She ends up here. She posts that ‘Not His’ with a tattoo that both Suzze and Gabriel Wire shared. She sees Lex. Suzze visits her and then Alista Snow’s father. It has to all relate.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘has to,’ ” Win added, “but things do seem to circle back to Gabriel Wire, don’t they? He was there when Alista Snow died. He clearly had an affair with Suzze T. He still works with Lex Ryder.”

“We need to get to him,” Myron said.

Win steepled his fingers. “You are suggesting then that we go after a reclusive, well-guarded, well-financed rock star on a small island.”

“Seems that’s where the answers are.”

“Bitchin’,” Win said.

“So how do we do it?”

“It will take a wee bit of planning,” Win said. “Give me a few hours.”

Myron checked his watch. “That works. I want to head back to the trailer and check their laptop. Maybe there’s something there.”

Win offered to provide Myron with a car and driver, but Myron hoped the ride would clear his head. He hadn’t slept much in the past few nights, so he drove with the sound system on high. He plugged his iPod into the car jack and started blasting mellow music. The Weepies sang that “the world spins madly on.” Keane wanted to disappear with that special someone to “somewhere only we know.” Snow Patrol, in their search for their lost love, “set the fire to the third bar.”

Just right.

When Myron was young, his father played only AM stations when he drove. He would steer with his wrists and whistle. In the morning, Dad would listen to an all-news station as he shaved.

Myron kept waiting for the phone to ring. Before leaving the hospital, he almost had a change of heart. Suppose, Myron had asked his mother, Dad woke up only one more time. Suppose Myron missed his last chance to talk to his father.

Mom had replied matter-of-factly: “What would you say that he doesn’t already know?”

Good point. In the end, it was a question of his father’s wishes. What would Dad rather Myron do—sit in a waiting room and cry or go out and try to find his brother? The answer was pretty simple when you posed it like that.

Myron arrived at the trailer park. He snapped off the engine. Fatigue weighed down his bones. He half stumbled out of the car, rubbing his eyes. Man, he needed a cup of coffee. Something. The adrenaline had begun to ebb. He reached the door. Locked. Had he really forgotten to get the key from Mickey? He shook his head, reached into his wallet, and pulled out the same credit card.

The door unlocked just as it had several hours ago. The laptop was still in the main room, near Mickey’s pullout couch. He flipped it on and while it booted up, he searched the place. Mickey was right. There were very few possessions. The clothes had been packed already. The TV had probably come with the rental. Myron found a drawer of old papers and photographs. He had just dumped them on the couch when the computer dinged that it was all booted up.

Myron sat next to the pile of assorted papers, pulled the laptop toward him, and brought up the Internet history. Facebook was there. Google searches showed that someone had looked up the Three Downing nightclub in Manhattan and the Garden State Plaza Mall. Another Web site had been used to figure out public transportation routes to both. Nothing here. Brad had gone back to Peru three months ago anyway. The history only went back a few days.

His phone rang. It was Win.

“I have set it up. We leave for Adiona Island in two hours out of Teterboro.”

Teterboro was a private airport in northern New Jersey. “Okay, I’ll be there.”

Myron hung up and looked back at the computer. The Internet history hadn’t given up anything clue worthy. So now what?

Try some other applications, he thought. He started bringing them up one at a time. No one used the Calendar or the Address Book programs—both were empty. PowerPoint had a few school presentations by Mickey, most recently one on the history of the Mayans. The slideshow was in Spanish. Impressive but not relevant. He brought up the Word file. Again there were a bunch of what had to be school projects. Myron was about to give up when he spotted an eight-month-old file called “Resignation Letter.” Myron clicked the icon and read:

Abeona Shelter. Kitty had posted “Not His” using the profile name “Abeona S.” Myron quickly Googled “Abeona Shelter.” Nothing. Hmm. He again Googled Abeona and found that it was the name of a somewhat obscure Roman goddess who protected children the first time they left their parents’ care. Myron was not sure what that all meant, if anything. Supposedly, Brad had always worked for nonprofits. Was the Abeona Shelter one of them?

He called Esperanza next. He gave her Juan’s address and the name of the Abeona Shelter. “Reach out to him. See if he knows anything.”

“Okay. Myron?”

“Yes.”

“I really love your dad.”

He smiled. “Yeah, I know.”

Silence.

Esperanza said, “You know the expression that there’s never a good time to give bad news.”

Uh-oh. “What is it?”

“I’m of two minds on something,” she said. “I could wait until things are good before I tell you this. Or I can just throw it on the pile and with everything else going on, you’ll barely notice.”

“Throw it on the pile.”

“Thomas and I are getting a divorce.”

“Oh, damn.” He thought about the pictures in her office, the happy family shots of Esperanza, Thomas, and little Hector. His heart sank anew. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m hoping it will be peaceful,” Esperanza said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be. Thomas is claiming I’m an unfit mother because of my sordid past and the hours I work. He’s going for sole custody of Hector.”

“He’ll never get it,” Myron said.

“Like you have control over that.” She made a noise, might have been a half laugh. “But I love when you make definitive pronouncements like that.”

Myron flashed back to a recent one with Suzze:

Won’t let her mess up. And now she was dead.

Myron Bolitar: Big man with the big, definitive pronouncements.

Before he could take it back, Esperanza said, “I’ll get on this,” and hung up.

He just stared at the phone for a moment. The lack of sleep was starting to get to him. His head pounded to the point where he wondered if Kitty had any Tylenol in the medicine cabinet. He was about to get up and check when something snagged his attention.

It was in the pile of papers and photographs on the end of the couch. On the bottom on the right. Just a corner stuck out. A royal blue corner. Myron’s eyes narrowed. He reached for it and pulled it into view.

It was a passport.

Yesterday he found Kitty’s and Mickey’s passports in Kitty’s purse. Brad had last been seen traveling to Peru, so that’s where his passport would be, according to Kitty. That begged the obvious question: Whose passport was this?

Myron flipped it open to the identification page. There, staring him in the face, was a photograph of his brother. He felt lost again, his pounding head spinning now.

Myron was just wondering about his next move when he heard the whispers.

There were times it paid to have frayed nerves. This was one of them. Instead of waiting or trying to figure out where the whispers were coming from or who was doing the whispering, Myron merely reacted. He leapt up, knocking the papers and photographs from the couch. Behind him he could hear the trailer door being smashed open. Myron dropped and rolled behind the couch.