The Good Boy (27 page)

“Pete, where are you?” Sarah asks when she picks up, concern taking the edge off.

“I’m downtown.”

“I don’t understand. What’s downtown? You think Joel is downtown?”

“No. Listen. I’ll be back soon. Are the police there?”

“You got my message.”

Obviously.

She says, “I’m still waiting for them. After I called they told me to go to the station, like you said. After I filed the report, the officer I spoke to assured me he was sending someone over. But now I can’t get a hold of him, and nobody else with a nightstick seems to know who’s supposed to be here.”

“Do you want me to act surprised?”

“No, thanks.”

“So what’s next?”

“I have no idea. Another casserole? Mrs. Moeller just left—from across the street? She’s the third neighbor to bring food—like what, our son goes missing and we suddenly crave bread?—she’s also the third neighbor to remark about how I’m handling this so well. Do you think I’m handling this well? I’m a fucking mess. All this time I’d been thinking there’s something wrong with Joel and now I can’t picture him doing anything wrong. I just can’t believe he’d leave us. What if he’s—”

“Sarah,” Pete stops her. “Don’t play what-if.”

“What do you expect? It’s part of the waiting game, Pete.”

“Is there anybody on the list you haven’t talked to?”

“There is that girl, Molly Skinner—the one Jo Jo plays with on the other side of Rosehill? She lives with her grandma, and I haven’t been able to get an answer there all morning. I was thinking of leaving McKenna and going over, except that she’s been a fucking mess today.”

“Why?”

“Worried, of course. And hung over, I would guess. She looks it. And get this: she actually turned away a couple of boys who came by today—this weasel Danny Sanchez and another I’ve never met…”

Something about Sarah—her composure, maybe—makes Pete wonder if she’s lost her mind. He remembers her standing in McKenna’s doorway last night with his phone, his coffee. He thought she must’ve heard them talking about the party, or the diet pills, at least. The look on her face was a picture of hurt that would be etched in his brain for years, the way images are when emotions are amplified. How can she be so seemingly normal now?

“… Said he’d just moved from Texas. He seemed nice enough but McKenna’s reaction was weird, weird, weird. I thought maybe
she
was embarrassed—she hadn’t showered—but I also thought she’d have it in her to tack up her hair and tell them about Joel. I never thought she’d duck a social call by her own free will—”

Rima throws open the car door and sits down. She’s unfocused and blinking rapidly and breathing through her mouth and she doesn’t look at him, which is the one thing that worries him.

“Sarah,” he says, “I have to go—”

“Are you kidding? You haven’t told me where you are. I need to know what’s going on. What am I supposed to tell the police?”

“What?” Pete asks Ri, over Sarah.

“Hang up,” she says; in her hand, she clutches what is presumably the list.

“Who’s that?” Sarah asks.

“Let me call you back.”

“Oh no, Pete, you can’t just leave me in the lurch here—”

“We both want him home, Sarah. I’ll call you back.”

He ends the call, turns to Ri, and asks again, “What?”

She turns over the top of three stapled pages and hands them over. “I’m sorry.”

The second page reads, “Consuella B. York Alternative High School Summer Program: June 11–July 27.” Pete skips over the inmate numbers and scans the alphabetically listed names until he finds
Fowler, Zack.

Then he goes back to the top, waiting for a name to stick out at him; the only one is near the end of the list.

It’s
White, Bernard.

“Oh. Rima. White? It’s a common name. You don’t think he’s related—”

She holds a fingertip to her blue lips. “You think Joel’s on the run. Sarah thinks he ran away. Me? I think someone took him.”

The same suspicion must have been lurking somewhere deep in Pete’s brain, maybe because of Sarah, because now that Ri said it out loud, it seems all too possible.

He starts the engine to fire up his Toughbook, fishes ten bucks from his pocket, and hands it to Rima. “Get us some coffee and we’ll sit here and run the names through ICLEAR.”

“Can we do that?”

“Do you mean legally or actually?”

“I mean, won’t it take forever? These guys are all criminals.”

“You have a better idea?”

“I have an idea about Bernard White. It probably isn’t better.” She gets out of the car.

Pete waits until she’s out of sight to absorb the shock.

18

Joel wakes up with drool strung from his lip to where it’s pooled on the Rand McNally directory, this afternoon’s pillow. He sits up, wipes his mouth, and feels the imprint the map’s spiral binding left on his cheek.

The sun is in the western sky now, glinting white off the river and finding new angles to shine through the tree cover. The water’s soft ripple softens the racket of traffic bounding over the Diversey Bridge.

He stretches his arms and finds Butchie at his side, tail going.

“Hey, Lieutenant Commander,” he says. “You get some shut-eye?”

Butchie hunkers down, ears back, submissive.

“What’s wrong?” Joel starts to ask, a big yawn interrupting the question.

He checks his watch: it reads 1400, which means he’s been out for two hours. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long.”

Butchie rolls onto his side, top leg limp, exposing his belly.

That’s not submission; that’s guilt.

“What happened?”

Butchie could wag his tail all day, but it’s no answer.

The answer happens to be behind Joel, on the ground, where the contents of his backpack have been pulled out, strewn, picked over. There, among his sweatshirt,
White Fang,
and the walkie-talkie sits the chewed-through cellophane that used to be a bag and used to contain the remaining kaiser roll.

“Butchie,” Joel says, watching him squirm. Joel picks up the slimy, slobbered cellophane, holds it over the dog’s head and asks, “What is this?”

Butchie turns, nose up, trying to shy away from the evidence.

“Did you eat this? Did you eat our dinner?”

“Hurr-erumm,”
he says, a poor excuse.

“Bad dog,” Joel says, his sternest voice.

Butchie can’t take it: he gets on his feet and skulks away, tail tucked.

“Bad dog,” Joel says again, even though he knows it’s his fault, too. He didn’t zip his pack before he fell asleep and that means he let the opportunity present itself. Still, the bread was all they had left. And Butchie knows better.

“Hey,” he says.
“
You’re in charge of dinner.”

Butchie looks back, then curls up against the fence, tail over his nose, and lets his eyes get heavy. Doesn’t inspire much confidence in his hunting skills.

Joel opens Rand McNally to the index and finds the Cook County Circuit Court at 2600 S. California. The court, like every other listing, has a three-part code: one refers to a map, another to something called a CGS, and the third, a grid. He found the map, but he wasn’t able to crack the rest of the code before he fell asleep.

Now, he figures out the grid is an easier version of longitude and latitude—his latest lesson in geography class—and as he narrows his search to a single grid-cube, he finds two red and yellow gavel symbols between the York Alternative School and the House of Corrections. They must mark the court.

From there, he traces east until he finds Oakley, then follows Oakley north until the map runs out and a four-digit number—probably the CGS—points to another map.

That map takes him up Oakley to North Avenue, and the CGS there takes him to a map that pinpoints their location on Diversey. Apparently they are on the other side of the fence from a place called the Lathrop Homes, and apparently it takes only three maps to get from where they are to where they want to be.

He can’t believe it. A whole complicated book and only three maps? Makes the trip seem like an inch inside miles and miles.

“We can make it,” Joel tells Butchie, who lifts his ears, but not his eyelids.

He dog-ears each map, certain whoever came up with the term didn’t have a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois—Butchie’s ears don’t bend that way—and studies 2997, the map that shows their current whereabouts and wheretobes. It looks like the best way is over the Diversey Bridge to Western Avenue, though his dad says Western should have a border patrol since crossing over is like going to another country. To Joel, though, the alternatives look much more dangerous: the first takes them back toward the police station and the second, Damen Avenue, goes right past his dad’s friend Rima’s apartment. Joel has only been there once, but he remembers the street is real busy—lots of outdoor restaurants and shopping—and anyway, it’d be just his luck to run right into her.

Joel decides on Diversey and puts Rand McNally aside.

He gets the walkie-talkie going, presses the code key and transmits
M-O-L-L-Y
in Morse. If she’s got her radio on, she won’t be able to interpret the code—she doesn’t know it—but she’ll definitely hear the tone; that way, Joel won’t give himself away if Grandma Sandee hears, too.

He’s about to retransmit the tones when—

“Joel!”

“It’s me.”

“Oh my gosh,”
Molly says. “
I was right about to call up your house, even though I’ve been ignoring calls from your house all day—I even turned the ringers off on both phones so my grandma wouldn’t hear. Your mom’s been calling like every twenty minutes. Where are you?
”

She hasn’t once let go of her Talk button, so Joel couldn’t answer even if he wanted to.

“You have to tell me everything,”
she says.
“Do you know I watched the news with my grandma this morning? There was nothing about you or the shooting or anything. But then when she went to church I went on the computer and I found a report about the shooting. Zack Fowler is like, incapacitated. He says he did it. Joel?”

“I’m here.”

“I thought you said some other boy did it. But Murph, they say Zack’s going to be like, charged as an adult, and that he’s going to jail. This must be, like, payback for Felis Catus. Serves him right—you can’t be mean to animals. I mean, kids who do that turn into serial killers. Like the Green Man who escaped from that mental hospital in the suburbs, remember?”

Joel remembers. His dad said the story was really a rumor spun out of control; he said there was no man who painted himself green and hid in the woods and attacked people with an ax; it was just some guy with the last name Greene who left the hospital and, after a news-fueled manhunt, was found hiding in a nearby forest preserve a day later.

“The Green Man tortured animals,”
Molly says.
“Dogs.”

“Was there anything about Butchie?” Joel asks. “Online?”

“Well…”
is all she says because she probably doesn’t want to say.

“I know about Ja’Kobe White.”

“Oh. Well. There was that. But you want to know what I heard about the party last night? From Lisa?”

Joel is surprised she’s talking to Lisa again, though he supposes nothing should surprise him about girls at this point. “What?”

“Her sister was at Zack’s, and she said
your
sister dropped your dad’s name, and got the cops to let her go. And Joel? Everybody is saying McKenna’s two-faced, because she was the one who brought drugs to the party. Which is I guess why those Redbones boys were there—do you know they’re like, a gang?”

“I know,” Joel says, without pressing Talk.

“Anyway, nobody is saying Zack didn’t do it, but they are saying it’s McKenna’s fault.”

“That’s not true.”

“Why not?”

“Because my sister didn’t shoot anybody!”

“Yeah, but
she
went to the party and that’s why
you
went to the party, and you brought Butch, and—”

“But we aren’t the bad guys!” Joel yells even though she’s still talking. “Does everybody know—do they know it was Butch?”

Molly doesn’t answer.

“Molly?”

“Hold on. My grandma is calling—”

Joel holds on, his palms instantly sweating. Mike has to know about the Redbones—she’s the one who told him about Elgin Poole!—. Why would she go anywhere near those boys? Doesn’t she know they’re part of the gang? Or was she tricked?

Did Zack Fowler trick her into this?

“It’s your mom,”
Molly says.
“She’s here—she’s downstairs. She wants to talk to me.”

Panic-struck, Joel turns off the walkie-talkie—if Molly folds, he can’t be there, the other end of the line.

“Butch,” he says and the dog gets up, completely the opposite of panicked, and stretches his legs.

Joel starts to pack up. “Dad told me to take care of you. That’s all I was supposed to do and I didn’t, not at all. You’re in trouble—”

Butchie straightens up as a low growl starts in the back of his throat.

And then someone says, “Who’s in trouble?”

Butchie’s growl swells and Joel gets him by the collar while every hair on his head goes on end.

“Hello?”

“Hello!” says a woman in a long wool coat and a hard hat who comes around the corner of the fence. “Ooh boy. That dog looks hungry.” The hat sits crooked atop her head, the ratchet suspension caught in her haywire curls. “Hungry,” she says again, like maybe she’s talking about herself. Her eyeballs are large—bugged and yellowed—and sizing up the dog.

“He’s okay,” Joel says, tight on the leash as he collects his things.

“Problem is,” the lady says, “you’re not supposed to be down here.” She edges around them toward the riverbank in a careful arc, her rubber-soled work boots a man’s, and filthy.

“We were just going,” Joel says, turning on his knees to keep her in front of him.

“You hiding, are you?”