The Odds (18 page)

“I did it before.”

“It’s night and you’re on pain pills. It’ll get better.”

Meg settles herself on the top step, working out how, eventually, in a day or two, Nick can get to the downstairs if they support his leg for him. She practices the moves as if it’s her leg that’s hurt. A person would go nuts staying upstairs all the time.

She listens to the sounds in the bathroom—the movement of the crutches, urine meeting water, sink water running. In the dim light, she spies a blanket that has fallen in the doorway of his room.

Maybe that’s what made him slip. He tried to put it around him and it fell. She has to find him something to wear.

“I’m … I’m ready,” he says in a low voice.

She opens the door and guides him back to bed. Quietly, without speaking, she helps him pivot, get his leg up, and settle back. She covers him with sheet and blanket.

“How long can this go on?” he asks. “Me staying here?”

She shrugs. She puts the small lamp on beside the bed. She looks behind her to the chair in the room. Does he want to talk? She does.

“I’m trying to learn to walk. I’m trying to get out of your hair.”

“That would be foolish. You’re too weak.”

“But … what’s going to happen when somebody finds that body?”

“They did. Find it. It was on the news. We … we couldn’t let him rot up there. I mean, we couldn’t just let it go.”

“You called it in?”

“Yes. Joel did.”

“Oh, my God. I’ll be found.”

“He called from a pay phone. He made sure nobody was watching. We had to do something. Kids use that place. Somebody would have found him eventually.”

“The police are on it, then?”

“It was on the news. We were afraid to tell you before you were going to sleep. It was on TV and radio. We checked.”

“So everyone who watched tonight knows. That’s why I was awake. I sensed it.” His face furrows. He struggles for a bit, hesitating, finally speaking. “There’s someone I’m very afraid of.”

Now she goes for the chair and brings it next to the bed. “I need to know how to help you. You told us you didn’t do it, that it was—”

“I was fighting for my own life.”

“Then,
why
are you running?”

“Because there is nobody in the world who’s going to believe me.”

“I want to. I guess it would help to have some facts.”

“Why didn’t you call the police on me to begin with?”

“We should have. But once we got to … trying, we didn’t. Now here we are and I don’t know what to do.”

“Saved me for the slaughter, huh? You could call them now. Middle of the night. Anytime. Are you going to?”

She shakes her head. It’s the first time he’s seemed really mean. It’s a disappointment and a kind of relief in a way, but she can’t explain that.

“Why should I believe that?”

In the lamplight, his face is changing again. It keeps not being the same face. But one of his expressions is just right. She knows it and trusts it and waits for it. She’s trying to make it happen when the truth comes rolling out. “Because we don’t have anybody here, and once they know that about us, we’ll have to leave.”

He works over what she has said as if he needs to take it apart, put it back together. He grunts. “You have nobody?”

“We had my stepmother, but she’s gone now. She told me to call someone for foster care, but we didn’t want to.”

Slowly he nods, still looking foggy. “Foster care, huh? I had that. I get not wanting to bring that on yourselves.”

“You were in a foster home?”

“They put me with a family from when I was fourteen to eighteen. I hated it.”

“Did you have brothers and sisters?”

“Nope, just me.”

“Why did you have a foster home?”

“My grandma died. It was just her and me, so no choice. Where’s your mother?”

“She died five years ago. She went kind of …” Meg touches her head. “After my little sister was born. She was very … reckless.”

“Reckless. I don’t understand.”

“Violent. My father was worried. He thought she was going to hurt Susannah. Then she left.”

“She on drugs?”

“No. Just …”

For a moment Nick’s expression is right. His eyes soften. He begins to speak several times, seems to think better of it, and finally comes up with, “She never came back?”

“Never. My father blamed himself. Then we heard she committed suicide. In Canada.” Nick listens to each little sentence and does not seem surprised or shocked. This story she can’t tell anyone she’s told to him just like that in the middle of the night and he seems to take it in as if it’s ordinary. Suicide doesn’t disturb him. Some people just
want to sleep
. That’s what her father said.

“So you miss her?”

“Kind of. I miss the idea of her. I miss my father more.”

“What, he took off?”

She feels the anger of a blush. “He would never. He loved us. I was very close to him. No.”

“Something happened to him.”

She nods. “Things were fine when he took care of us. It’s just that he thought we needed a mother, and things got complicated.”

“With the stepmother?”

“My father didn’t choose too well.”

Nick smiles, almost laughs. “Join the club. People never like their stepmothers.”

“I know that.”

“So he’s not around?”

“No.”

“When did the stepmother leave?”

“Last week. The day she didn’t give me enough money for a pizza and you let us have it anyway.”

Nick stares hard at her. “You’re the opposite of a person who holds a grudge. You hold a—whatever the opposite is.”

Opposite of a grudge. She can’t think of a word for that. “I guess.”

“That’s not so long ago. She might be back.”

The room is completely bare of any trace of Alison. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”

“Gut feeling?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm. Where’d she go?”

“She told me she didn’t want me to know. I could tell it was to meet a guy.”

“Stepmothers almost never work out.”

“We tried hard for three years. She wasn’t too happy having all of us to worry about. My father was working so many jobs. He was exhausted all the time and could hardly ever be home. She had expensive tastes.”

Nick says, “It happens. It happens.”

Expensive tastes? Exhaustion?

Meg used to sit with her father in the kitchen late at night and they would talk. He would drink and she would keep him company so he didn’t fall when he went to bed. That was up at their other house, the one Alison sold as soon as her father died, to buy luggage and clothes and to pay off her credit card debts.

Her father was sorry he’d brought Alison into it. He said as much to Meg before he died. When they talked alone, he told her he was unhappy. She tried to make him see things weren’t his fault.

“Do you want anything?”

“You have a beer?”

“No.”

“Whiskey?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“I didn’t think so. I sure could use a whiskey.”

“Tea. I could get you tea.”

“Tea. Hmmf. Okay. Tea.”

Meg goes down to the kitchen where she already knows there are exactly three tea bags. She brews his tea down there, saving the bag. If he likes tea not too strong, she can get six cups out of the three bags. Conserving this way makes her feel good, wise, in control. A moment later, she sinks with despair that there is so little in the house. What is she going to do? She must trick one of the old women tomorrow, say she was supposed to clean on Monday. If Joel gets two car washes and if she can manage to clean one place …

She doesn’t put milk or sugar in the tea because there isn’t much of either and he didn’t ask for any.

When she gets upstairs, his eyes are closed again. She tiptoes in, puts the cup down gently, and his eyes open. “Where’s your father?”

She says it simply. “He died in a car wreck.” She thought she could say it without crying, but she starts to cry because of the way Nick is looking at her, pitying her.

“You miss him big-time.”

“He was the nicest, kindest man you could ever meet. To everyone.”

After a while, Nick says, “I’m not kind. Or good. I’m a rotten person. That’s the problem. I didn’t kill that guy. I was trying to save another guy and myself. But look at my record and it’s rotten and that’ll talk louder than anything else. Nobody is going to believe me.”

“I think I do.”

“But you want facts?”

She’s still crying, nodding like an idiot. He takes a sip of tea.

“What are we going to do, little one? Huh? You need food in the house and I have no money. I know you hoped I did. I’m wanted by the law and they are never going to believe the truth. I’m wanted by some people that … let me just say, if I go to jail, they’ll get me out so they can kill me.”

“Why?”

“That’s how they are. I’m stupid. I make big mistakes. You want to believe I’m different, I can tell that much. You’re a little nuts, if you’ll excuse my expression.”

“Maybe you’re kinder than you think.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t even remember your name. Or the others’.”

“Meg, Joel, Laurie, Susannah.”

   IT TOOK A LOT OF THE DAY for Colleen to find Lena Procter at home. “You calling me about my nephew, did you say?”

“If your nephew is Dermott Roux.”

“He been gone for a while. You found him for me?”

“I’m afraid I have bad news,” Colleen began.

“I think I’m guessing it. It’s either jail or dead.”

“We found his body in the place where he was living.”

“How’d it happen?” the woman said evenly. “He get beat up?”

“Drugs.”

“Oh. Not really a surprise.” Lena Proctor didn’t sound as if she was going to cry. “Never did have any control of that kid.”

“Can you come down to Pittsburgh, do an ID for us?”

“I could get my boyfriend to drive me down.”

“If you have a funeral home you’d like to use, you might want to alert them. There are a couple of ways to transport the body.”

“Oh, man. I didn’t even think about a funeral.”

“Does he have other family up there?”

“Older brother in jail.”

“That’s it?”

“That is it. And me.”

“Maybe he had a few school friends who would want to pay their respects.”

“I could put out the notice.”

“I think that might be a good idea.”

“I didn’t think he was going to go bad, then he run away. I put in a report, but the police couldn’t find him. You say Picksburgh?”

People often said it that way, so Colleen just said yes. With urging, she got Lena Proctor to say she would get down to
Picksburgh
on the next day, Wednesday. It felt like progress, but it was only a drop in the bucket she needed to fill. Questions, lots of them still.

She spent some time typing notes to clear her head. She hated to type her reports, but she forced herself to do it. Then she took out a separate list of questions she’d typed up for herself:

1. Who was the dead boy BZ? What was his name? That was solved.
2. Who killed him? Not solved.
3. Who was the dead man up at the house—now Hrznak’s case?
4. Who killed
him
?
5. Who was wounded up at the house? Probably the killer, but they didn’t know
who
he was.
6. Lesser, but puzzling, Where was the kid Carl, who was not on the streets anymore?
7. What was Nick to the drug operation Farber was investigating? That wasn’t solved at all. All they had was Nick’s real name.
8. What had happened to Nick Friday night or thereabouts, since he was no longer working the Dona Ana?
9. What kids were up at the house, and were they connected to BZ?
10. Were drugs a part of the killing of the man up at the house—as Colleen was insisting they were to keep on the case—or were they incidental?

So ten questions and only one of them answered.

The second answer came in during the day. That was the result of the statewide AFIS search. The man up at the house now had a name and history. He was Earl Higgins, his ten digits told them. He’d been in and out of jail most of his life, came from Erie. Colleen read his record. Weapons possession, theft, intent to kill—shot a guy who survived. A lousy piece of work if ever there was one. There was nobody in Erie to claim him. Potocki was working on a place of residence in Pittsburgh. Or Picksburgh, depending. This one might take Roux’s spot in potter’s field.

She ate at her desk, calling the morgue to ask about the powder burns on Earl’s fingers and clothes. She thought about the possible scenarios.

Hrznak was not keeping her in the loop, so she called the lab herself and asked about latent fingerprints at the scene of the crime. The person who got on the phone with her was someone new, young, a woman. “I could work on that for you,” the woman said. “Is this for Hrznak’s case?”

Colleen gave her spiel about the narcotics part of the case and her own involvement.

“This’d be more interesting than what they have me doing.”

“What were the prints on?”

“A door that was up there. They’re pretty good, made with blood.”

“Fantastic. You could get someone to run them?”

“Pittsburgh base?”

“Start with Pittsburgh. They don’t find anything, move to AFIS state.”

“If Hrznak asks me about them—”

“Oh, don’t keep any information from him. But call me. Give me a heads up. I think he’s busy on the street today.”

She sensed the young woman was on her side by the way she said, “Either way, I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

“What’s your name?”

“Ann Cello.”

“Like the instrument?”

“Spelled just like that.”

“Did you ever learn to play it?”

“I learned violin, actually.”

“Must have heard a lot of jokes.”

“Yeah. High school was the pits in every way.”

“It gets better.”

“It already has, some.”

“Good.”

By one thirty, Colleen heard news that depressed her as much as talking to Dermott Roux’s aunt had. The prints came up, all right. They came up like three limes on a slot machine. The prints were in the AFIS state system. They belonged to Nick Kissel.