Always (47 page)

“Of course.”

I folded the phone and waited for the car valet to come back.

"HELLO, BRI,”
I said.

He straightened from the box of metal scaffolding connectors. “Hi?” He had a spray of pimples on one side of his mouth.

“I can’t find Mackie.” Or Peg, or Joel, or Dornan. “Do you know when he’ll be in?”

“He said he’d be here before lunch?” He twitched, as though he really wanted to get back to his box but knew it wasn’t polite.

It was close to noon now. “What time’s lunch, do you think?”

“About now. Or twelve-thirty?”

I nodded. Turtledove was watching from the door. I held up my wrist, made a half-dial motion, waited until he nodded he understood, then turned back to Bri, who smiled uncertainly. “Do you know who I am?”

His nod was jerky, too.

“Then you know I was one of the people you poisoned.”

He smiled wider and he locked eyes with me. Like a puppy that thumps its tail and cringes at the same time. “I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. You and Mackie.”

“No.”

“Yes. You were at the coffee urn just before I drank. Mackie was laughing. ” I was certain now. Adolescents love to hero-worship.

Something of my certainty must have penetrated his adolescent dimness. Like a lot of teens, he was unpracticed in the subtleties of lying. He couldn’t equivocate. He flipped, suddenly eager to please.

“It was supposed to be a joke! Mackie said it would be funny.”

“Was it?”

He didn’t know whether he was supposed to nod or shake his head.

Mackie could be here any minute. I needed to shortcut this process. “Are you hungry, Bri, or thirsty? No? Because I am. Let’s go sit down out of the way, have a little chat.” He followed me, sneakers squeaking on the concrete floor, to the craft-services table, where dozens of plastic-wrapped bottles of water were lined up with military precision, along with packets of crisps and pretzels. Rusen, or Joel. Kick wouldn’t organize things that way, nor would Dornan. I put them from my mind.

I pulled a bottle from its plastic and sat on the other side of the table, gestured for Bri to join me. He twisted his head to and fro.

“Mackie’s not here. Your father isn’t here. Even if he were, he couldn’t save you. Maybe he wouldn’t want to. You’re sixteen, Bri, not twelve. You know what Mackie’s like.”

“No.” But he did.

“Sit.” He sat. He didn’t know what else to do. “You know that it’s not smart to put drugs in anyone’s food or coffee. What did you think would happen?”

He stared at the floor. It was tempting to force him to respond, but I didn’t know how long we had.

“But it was all Mackie’s idea, right?”

He muttered something.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Tell me what else was his idea.”

“What do you mean?” He looked up at me from behind his flopping hair. I had lost count of the number of adolescent suspects who had given me that look, thinking maybe that now they’d admitted something, maybe they could skate a little.

“Let’s just do this, Brian. Tell me about the film, and the lights, and the lab, and the drugs. Let’s start at the beginning.”

“My dad won’t let you do anything to me. Mackie says I’m too young to be prosecuted.”

“Maybe not.” He was of an age to be legally responsible for his actions, but knowing that would only discourage him from admitting guilt. “But I could tell Mackie you told me everything, because I know a lot of the details, even though I don’t have proof, and he won’t care about the fine print. He’ll just beat you into the dirt.” I flexed my hands:
If he doesn’t, I will.
“And he’ll turn on you in a second. So here’s your chance to tell your story and score some points. Tell me. From the beginning.”

He was sixteen, and not bright. I would give him a minute or so to work out where his best interests lay.

He took forty seconds. “The film stock? He said he’d buy me a beer if I swapped it out for some other film? And, y’know, it wasn’t like it would hurt anyone or anything. I mean, it’s just film. Right?” I nodded. “Right. And it’s not like my dad is broke or anything. So I said okay.”

“How did you do it without anyone seeing?”

“Oh, man, it was so easy. I didn’t have to swap the film, Mackie doesn’t know anything. I just changed the exposures. Like, thirty seconds’ work.”

“Pretty good, wasting thirty thousand dollars in half a minute. What does that work out to an hour?” He was getting uncertain again, which would just waste time. I gave him my best smile. “So you’re pretty smart. Smarter than Mackie, I’ll bet. The drugs were your idea?”

“Nah, they were his. He was like, We can get them so totally fucked up! and I’m like, Okay, all right, so he goes, I’ll get the stuff and we’ll, like, do it right now. So I said okay.”

“So he had the drugs with him, even before you discussed it.”

He thought about it. “I guess.”

“So when did you do it?”

“You were there. That night. We just dumped the baggie in the pot. You were macking on the craft-services girl, and she was, like, ignoring you so hard she wouldn’t have noticed if I took a dump in the food. So I held up the lid and Mackie shook out the baggie into the coffee, and then stirred it with a wrench.”

“A wrench?”

“We didn’t have a spoon. Anyhow, someone would have noticed if one of us had been carrying a spoon, he said.”

Mackie wasn’t nearly as dumb as Brian. I looked at my watch. “So what do you think I should do with you?”

“Do?”

Perhaps there was no such thing as consequences in the world of almost-Hollywood high school parties. But it wasn’t my job to teach him morals. “I’ll just let your father deal with it.”

Now he panicked. “My father?”

“He’ll decide about the police. But you won’t be working here anymore.”

“But I don’t go back to school for three months.”

“Not my problem.” I waited until I caught Turtledove’s eye, and gestured him over. “Do as you’re told for the next few minutes.”

I stood, and he tried to stand, too, but I pressed him back into the seat without effort. His face went slack; he still didn’t really grasp what was happening. It was tempting to punch him until he understood; I was grateful when Turtledove came up.

“Watch him. I have to talk to Rusen. If Mackie comes in, don’t let him leave.”

I drank my water, threw the bottle in the trash on the way out to the trailer. I knocked and went in. Rusen and Finkel looked up. “Rusen? A word?” and didn’t give him time to consider, but stepped outside again.

He joined me.

“Bri Junior and Mackie are the ones who have been sabotaging things.”

“Bri? Mackie? Are you sure?”

“Yes. The drugs, the film stock, everything. Bri has admitted as much. Mackie, real name Eddard, was the leader, of course. I haven’t talked to him yet.”

“But Bri’s just—”

I needed him to pay attention. “Do you still want me to invest?”

“Well, sure.”

“Then listen. Turtledove is going to babysit Bri. You keep Finkel in the trailer, away from his son, until I’m finished with Mackie. Do you understand? ”

He understood.

I stood by the scaffolding for a while. It was more than thirty feet high. Carpenters were banging busily nearby. I recognized one of them; he’d been talking to Steve Jursen the day I arrived. Perhaps he didn’t like coffee.

Turtledove and Bri were not in the line-of-sight of anyone walking into the warehouse. There were no obvious weapons lying about, no crew whose stance would scream “Take me hostage!” if things went bad. I went out into the lot and sat in my car.

Mackie’s car turned out to be an unremarkable Toyota, old, but not too shabby or too bright. He got out, slung his leather jacket over his left shoulder, and headed for the warehouse.

I shimmed his door open, released the hood, lifted the distributor cap, removed the rotor, closed it up again. Hummed to myself as I followed him in.

He was admiring the scaffolding, nodding at the carpenters, his wide-spaced eyes clear and friendly: matching the appearance of his prey, a small-predator trick. Either he spent more money on tailoring than I did, or he was unarmed.

He was alert. He turned when I was ten feet from him, one foot carefully positioned in front of the other.

“Don’t run, Jim. I’d have to knock you down.” He dropped his shoulders in an appearance of instant relaxation. I smiled. “Or run if you like. Knocking you down might give me an appetite for lunch.”

“Why should I run?” His voice was as whippy as a steel antenna. He probably thought he was a good actor.

“Why do people usually?” I shrugged. “Come and sit and tell me everything. ”

“Make me.”

“All right.”

“Nah, nah, just kidding.” Rueful smile. The it’s-a-fair-cop routine. Casual glance this way and that to see if there were any uniforms at the exit. “What do you want to know?”

“Oh, I already know. I just need verbal confirmation of when Corning hired you and how much she paid.”

That rattled him: I knew. I smiled, allowed myself the indulgence of imagining how I’d take him down if it came to that.

He made a show of swinging his jacket off his shoulder, fiddling with the zip, slinging it back onto his other shoulder. It hung there as easily as it had on the other side. Ambidextrous. That would make it more fun. I wouldn’t want to leave bruises, though: it would shock Finkel and Rusen and, by extension, Kick.

"And what do I get?”

“What would you suggest?”

“Immunity.”

“No.”

“Then I’ve got nothing to say.”

“Your choice.” I got out my phone, let him watch me dial 411, press TALK. His shoulders relaxed a little more, but the weight moved to his back foot. Clearly he wouldn’t be expecting a foot sweep. “Yes,” I said to the operator, “Seattle police, nonemergency. Yes, please. Thank—” He bolted.

He got to his car before I did, but that was because I wasn’t trying. He leapt into the driver’s seat. He gave me the finger and slid the key home without slamming the door. He turned the ignition. Nothing happened.

I hummed to myself as I pulled him out and kneed him on the sciatic nerve hard enough to collapse the leg.

“Get up.”

“You’ve broken it!”

“No. But I could if you like. Get up. Sit.” He dragged himself into the driver’s seat and rubbed at his leg.

“I can’t feel it.”

“There won’t even be a bruise.” I was really tired of people whining today. “Now, tell me about Corning.”

He wasn’t scared, and if he was angry he didn’t show it, but he knew a no-win situation when he saw it. He talked.

Corning, he said, had given him five thousand dollars, with a promise of double that when he was done. “But if I’d known it’d take so long, I’d have asked for more.”

The five thousand was a lie. She’d given him three installments of two thousand dollars. “What did she ask you to do?”

“If you don’t know, then why are we having this talk?”

“I know what you did. I want to know what she asked you to do.”

“Wasn’t specific. Make them leave, she said. Make them go broke.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Another young man who liked breaking things for no particular reason. Maybe a horrible childhood was to blame, or some genetic glitch. It really didn’t matter; he was twenty-two, and he saw no reason to change a life with which he was perfectly satisfied.

“Did she give you the drugs?”

“Karenna?” He laughed, and it struck me that Corning had a penchant for young men: Gary and Mackie and probably Johnson Bingley. Big Mac.

“When and how did you meet her?”

He shrugged. But it didn’t really matter. I had the date of the first payment.

“Come with me,” I said, and motioned for him to stand.

“My leg.”

“You’ll just have to limp.”

Inside the warehouse, people glanced at each other as he limped in ahead of me. “You got any duct tape?” I asked an electrician. He passed a roll to the carpenter, who passed it to me without a word.

I walked Mackie to the food-services table, where it looked as though Bri had been crying. Turtledove seemed interested in his nails. “Yo,” Mackie said to Bri. “Fucking pussy.”

I made him kneel and put his hands behind his back. I put his jacket on the table, and taped his hands and feet together, then lifted him onto a chair. I taped him to that. No more hammering. The crew stared openly.

“One more question. When were you going to claim the rest of the money from Corning?”

He shrugged, though not as elegantly now that he was bound. “When the job was done.”

“How were you going to get in touch?”

“Her cell phone.”

I went through his jacket, found his cell phone, slipped it into my pocket.

“Hey!”

He seemed genuinely outraged that I was taking his fifty-dollar phone. I could have taken his sight, or his life. I just looked at him. Something deep in his eyes squirmed like a sea mollusk under pressure. I went through his wallet, but there was nothing interesting. I dropped the jacket on the table.

I said to the listening crew, “This man that you know as Mackie is really Jim Eddard. He and Bri spoiled the footage and drugged the coffee. If that pisses you off, feel free to let them know.” To Turtledove: “Don’t let either of them move.”

NO POLICE,
Finkel and Rusen decided.

“That’s not wise,” I said.

“It would be too hard on the boy,” Rusen said. “His brother has just died.”

This wasn’t about how Bri felt. But I hesitated. What did I feel? What did I want? One called the police to ensure protection, punishment, or revenge. I didn’t need protection from a sixteen-year-old boy. Punishment was only useful when it triggered remorse, or acted as a deterrent. Revenge, as George Orwell pointed out, is the product of helplessness. I wasn’t helpless, though I had been for a few days, thanks to Bri and his friend. Perhaps if I’d understood a few months ago how it felt to be helpless, I could have explained to my students that having power meant not needing vengeance. Perhaps things would have turned out differently.