The Big Splash (7 page)

He pushed past me into my office. “Matt. What's up?” His face told me that he couldn't care less what was up. He had a definite agenda in mind.

“Nothing,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“What happened today?”

“With what?”

“Cut the crap, Matt,” he snapped. He was more on edge than I thought. He looked crazed.

“Nikki's number got punched,” I said. “If you're surprised by this, you haven't been paying attention.”

“Who did it?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, who do you think did it?”

“How the hell should I know?” I asked. “Everybody. Nobody. Both answers seem just as likely right now.”

“Cut your smart-aleck crap and give me a straight answer!”

I had had a long day, and I was still hungry. This wasn't my idea of relaxing dinner conversation. “Here's your straight answer. Just about everyone in school had a beef with Nikki, including you. So that narrows the list of suspects down to about three hundred. Surprisingly, in the few hours I've been on this case, I haven't had a chance to question all of them. But hey, no time like the present. Where were
you
this afternoon?”

His face turned the color of a boiled lobster. I thought he was going to rip my head off. Instead, he let out a deep breath and fell back into the floral sofa. I tried to look calm, like I wasn't worried about my health.

“I couldn't protect her,” he said.

“The last thing anybody thought Nikki Fingers needed was protection.”

“I knew better. She wasn't like that all the time. Trust me.”

“I'll have to. Any time I talked to her, she was scary as hell.”

“She was scary to me, too, but for a different reason. I liked her, Matt. I mean
liked her
liked her.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And up until the summer, I thought she liked me liked me, too. At least that's what she told me.”

“You guys make out?”

He sighed heavily. “Yeah. On field day. While the boys were running the hundred-yard dash, we snuck off. Kissed for like five minutes …”

“You timed it?”

He ignored me. “I didn't hear from her all summer. I called her every day in June. Then I thought, ‘To hell with her,' and stopped calling.”

“How long did that last?”

“The rest of the summer.”

“I'm impressed,” I said.

“Don't be,” he said. “It was hard to find time to call her when I was riding my bike in front of her house all day.”

“Ouch.” We laughed, and I suddenly felt sad. Despite my best efforts, I really missed hanging out with Kevin. I think he felt it, too, because an awkward silence followed. “What happened?” I asked, getting us back on topic.

“I don't know. I can't help but think that it's because of … you know …”

“Your decision to keep working with Vinny? I know
he looks snappy in a suit, but personally, I would have gone with Nicole.”

“I made the choice I had to make,” he said. “If you knew what I know, you'd have done the same thing.”

“Lucky I'm not as smart as you.”

“Don't get all high and mighty with me, Matt. You took Vinny's money this afternoon. That just about cancels out your moral authority.”

I had nothing to say to that. It was a thought that had been in the back of my mind all afternoon, and now that it was out in the open, it hurt even more.

“What do you want, Kevin?” I asked. The tension between us was back, full force. “If you want to hire me to find the trigger kid, you're about two people too late.”

“Not quite. I don't want to pay you to find him. I want to pay you to give him to me after you do.”

“Why? So you can fill his pants with chocolate?”

“Just hand him over to me.” His eyes looked as dead as an unfed goldfish's.

“He'd have a better shot if I threw him off a bridge.”

“That won't be your problem.”

“All this time we've known each other and you still don't have a clue about me. I have a pretty good idea what
you'd do to that kid, so if I hand him over to you, I might as well do it myself. And I'm not about to cross that line.”

He was off of the sofa and in my face. “And
you
don't know
me
very well. I'll get to him regardless, with or without you. My way, you'll have a little money to show for it.”

“Go home, Kev. Vengeance isn't good for your complexion.”

“Go to hell, Matt.”

He slammed the door on his way out.

I glanced at a photo I kept in a frame on the corner of my desk. My mom had taken it two summers ago. Younger versions of Kevin, Liz, and me smiled and mugged for the camera, each of us holding an oversized ice cream cone. Liz's in particular looked ridiculously huge in her small hand. Kevin and I had teased her that there was no way she was going to finish it before it fell to the ground. She ended up having the last laugh. Both Kevin and I lost ice cream that day, while she polished hers off without a problem. Kevin said later that we had gotten our “just desserts.” All of us had groaned while Kevin smiled proudly, knowing that the only reason we were groaning was because we wished we had thought of that horrible pun first.

The moment that photo had captured was typical of our friendship. On the surface, there was nothing special about it: just three kids smiling and holding ice cream cones. Yet I treasured that day, along with all the other days we had spent together, doing “nothing special.” I had recently come to realize that it was extremely rare to find friendships in which doing “nothing special” was the most fun thing you could ever hope to do. For a moment, I thought about calling Kevin up, telling him I'd help, and confiding in him that I missed being friends. For a moment, I wanted to go back to the way things were between us.

Instead, I sat back down to eat my dinner. No dice … I wasn't hungry anymore. I turned on the radio to see if I could catch the end of the Sox game, but they had already lost to the Twins, 8 to 6. I regarded this as a sign that my day wasn't going to improve, so I went upstairs to bed. I stayed awake until I heard my mom's key in the door, sometime around 2:30. She came into my room.

“Go to sleep,” she said, kissing my forehead. She didn't have to tell me twice.

I woke up the next morning, my mom had already left for work. There was a ten-dollar bill and a note on the counter: “Sorry, hon—I had to get to work early this morning. Quarterly reviews—hooray! Also, I have to go right from the office to the restaurant tonight. Mr. Carling needs me to set up for a party. I won't see you until late. Here's some money. Treat yourself to dinner. Be careful and I love you. Mom.”

My jaw clenched and locked. Mr. Carling was Albert Carling, Kevin's father. He was the general manager of

Santini's, the restaurant where my mom worked nights and weekends. His wife, Roberta, owned it, having inherited it from her father, who kicked off before I was born. Kevin always said that if he asked his dad which he loved more, his son or the restaurant, his dad would say his son, but only after giving it a lot of thought.

Mr. Carling was a hard man to get a bead on. When I was friends with Kevin and Liz, I saw him all the time. He was always pretty nice to me, asked me how I was doing in school—all the typical “adult to kid” chitchat. When my mom got a job waitressing at Santini's, he did an abrupt one-eighty, becoming aloof and standoffish. When I was over at his house, he would mumble a halfhearted greeting, then retreat to his office. I thought I had done something wrong. It took me a while to realize it was Mom he didn't like.

Mr. Carling seemed to hold a grudge against her, scheduling her for every holiday, calling her in to work on her days off, giving her the most disgusting and time-consuming cleaning jobs. My mom never gave him the satisfaction of being upset. Whenever he'd get on her, she'd just smile and say, “No problem.” She would take all the holidays and extra shifts, saying, “Great! We could use the
money.” Mr. Carling never saw her come home at two in the morning, dog tired, mentally ticking off the hours before she had to get up to go to her office job, knowing that the sleep she would get wouldn't be enough.

There was definitely something between them, something from their past that I wasn't privy to. Whatever it was, neither of them was talking. I never got a chance to ask Mr. Carling, as my friendship with Kevin was going downhill at the time. I doubt he would have given me a straight answer anyway. I did ask my mom about it a couple of times, but each time she just shrugged her shoulders and changed the subject. I had no leverage on her, no way to make her talk. Plus, she had an annoying ability to see right through all my tricks, the ones that made my peers open up to me even when they didn't want to. I had reached an impasse with her, which as a detective was hard for me to accept. I had no other evidence, no other leads to follow, and I knew that the worst thing you could do on certain cases was to try to force it. So I let it lie. Along with my dad's disappearance, it was the case that was always in the back of my mind.

I picked up the ten-dollar bill Mom had left and brought it into her room. The ugly, ceramic pineapple
where my mom kept the rest of her emergency fund was on top of her dresser. I put the ten back inside, then added ten more from the money that Vinny had paid me. It looked like I was taking the case.

I showered, then got dressed, making sure to grab the little surfer girl from out of the pocket of the jeans that I wore the day before. Then I grabbed a quick breakfast and headed out to school.

The place was abuzz with a weird energy, almost like the day before vacation. People walked around with dazed expressions, wide and wild grins pasted on their faces. Everyone wanted firsthand accounts. The number of witnesses tripled as stories flew back and forth. Speculation as to who pulled the trigger was rampant. The odds were five to one on the betting boards that Nikki would show up to school like nothing had ever happened. Whoever set those odds was a criminal; whoever took those odds was an idiot. Nobody showed up to school the day after they were put in the Outs. Nobody. And nobody would know that better than Nikki.

A few people approached me and asked what happened. I put on my best “don't talk to me” face and made my way to my locker. I put the History book that I had neglected
the night before on top of the Math book that never even made it home. I grabbed my Spanish book and prepared to make myself invisible for class. The less prepared you were, the less it seemed to work. I closed my locker, turned, and almost ran smack into Liz Carling. She was wearing dark maroon tights and a dress as black as her hair.

“He was a mess last night,” she said, as if we were continuing a conversation instead of just starting one.

“Who was?”

She shot me an impatient look. I knew who, and she refused to waste time verbalizing it.

“So? That's not my problem.”

Her eyes narrowed into slits. “He's your friend, Matt.”

“No, he
was
my friend.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Can't you just forget all that and help him?

“Help him do what? Find the kid responsible and rub him out? He's got enough thug buddies to help him do that.”

“That's not what he wants …”

“Don't be so naive, Liz. What the hell do you think he wants? To give the kid a stern lecture?”

“Look, all I know is that he's really hurting.”

“Well, what do you want from me? Tell him to get a hug from his mommy.”

As soon as I said it, I was sorry. Liz winced as if stung.

“Nice guy …,” she mumbled.

My face flushed. Their mother was a tender subject. If their father's attitude toward people was puzzling, their mother's attitude was a neon billboard: She wasn't fond of anybody, and “anybody” included her immediate family. Her affection was reserved for herself and her money, not Kevin, Liz, or, as far as I knew, Mr. Carling. A hug from Mrs. Carling? Kevin might as well ask the principal if he could borrow his car.