Ask the Dark
Authors: Henry Turner
Table of Contents
Clarion Books
215 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003
Copyright © 2015 by Henry Turner
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Turner, Henry, 1962–
Ask the dark / Henry Turner.
pages cm
Summary: “A thriller about Billy Zeets, a 14-year-old semi-delinquent
in a deadly tango with a killer.”—Provided by publisher
ISBN 978-0-544-30827-5 (hardback)
[1. Heroes—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. 3. Murder—Fiction. 4. Conduct of life—Fiction. 5. Family problems—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.1.T877Ask 2015
[Fic]—dc23
2014027737
eISBN 978-0-544-31345-3
v1.0415
For my wife, Alma, and our son, Hugo
Part One
Chapter One
I feel better now. I can move my arm some, and walk around a bit. Ache in my belly’s still there, but the doctor says it’ll go too. Says there’s almost nothing that can hurt a fifteen-year-old boy forever, and I’ll grow out of that pain like I grow out of a pair of old shoes.
Loads of people have asked me ’bout what happened. Police and doctors and just about everybody in the neighborhood. I never had so many visitors. Tell the truth, I’m tired of getting asked. I feel like just getting on with what’s happening now, and not thinking of what’s gone by. I want to answer everybody all at once and get it all the hell over with.
But there’s one big thing—where to begin.
Because you don’t know me.
Maybe you seen me on the streets walking around, or riding Old Man Pedersen’s bike if you was ever up at night. I mean that girls’ bike with the tassels on it. Or maybe you just seen me hanging round Shatze’s Pharmacy.
But really knowing me, few people do.
Sam Tate does. He’s a boy my age, and he said something true. He come up here to my room the other day and we talked, not just ’bout what happened, but ’bout other things too, things we did together before all this big mess. He was sitting near my bed, right there on the windowsill, looking out the window at the trees. Then he looked at me and said,
The real thing is, you’d never have done it, never even found out about it, if you hadn’t done all the things people hated you for. It turns out those were the right things to do, Billy. Isn’t that funny? All that stealing and never going to school. It’s what made it so you were outside a lot, seeing things nobody else saw. Hidden and secret things.
He was dead-on right with what he said. I laughed. I saved three boys, so they tell me. Got beat and shot doin’ it. And Sam says I’d never of done it, ’cept I was always stealing and busting things, and creeping around people’s yards at night. That is funny.
But I s’pose it’s true.
I don’t ride that girls’ bike no more. Got a new one. There it is, leaning against the wall over there, bright and shiny. Got twenty-one gears, so I’m told. I’ll have to figure that out. How to use’m. Man that brought it was Jimmy Brest’s father, the Colonel, USMC. He wheeled it in, laughing and smiling. My daddy was with him a minute, then left and it was just the Colonel and me. And you know what he did? He come over to the bed and took my hand, and he called me the bravest boy he’d ever known, for what I done to save his son. He said I was a hero, and he was quiet a minute, and was almost gonna cry.
But that’s like everybody. It seems no matter who gets wind of what I done, from my sister or Sam Tate or one of them news shows on TV, they all start bawling their heads off. So I figure I best tell it myself and get things straight.
’Cause I don’t want to make nobody cry. ’Specially colonels, USMC.
The fact is, I ain’t no hero, and I aim to prove it. What I done, if I done anything, was get my daddy a fruit stand. See, my daddy was feeling bad and needed money and couldn’t do for hisself, so I done it. And to tell this right you gotta know about that, and other things too, like about us losing the house and what my sister done to get herself to be having a baby. You gotta know all that, ’cause if you do, everything else I say will make sense. Sort’f add up, know what I mean?
I ain’t hardly left my bed in four weeks, just hanging around my room. I couldn’t stand lookin’ out the window no more and seeing the days and nights come and go, I was goin’ crazy. So I got one of them video games. Hand-held. Sam Tate brought it. What you do with it is move this little monkey through a maze and traps. Monkey’s gotta jump and roll and bounce, and if he don’t make it he falls through a gap and you gotta start over. You use these little buttons to make him jump. Thing makes beeping noises. Plays a little tune if you do it right.
Can you imagine being that little monkey? Jumping and rolling all day? I kept thinking I was him, and I got so bothered by it, what with whipping my fingers all over it and my eyes jiggling, that I threw the damn thing out the window and heard it bust on the ground.
So now I’m in trouble again ’cause I got no idea what I’m gonna tell Sam Tate.
Since I busted that monkey game I got me a little TV, my daddy brung it up here to me. I started watching that all the time, and just this morning I saw something that explains pretty good why I decided to go ’head and tell all this. There was this talk show on, one with the big fat lady who always got guests on with problems like Welfare and drinking and drugs and whatnot, usually yelling and screaming and hitting each other right there on the show till cops come out and arrest’m, which I can’t say is real or not, or if they just getting paid money to say all them things. But this morning she had on a lady who went through cancer and divorce and all sorts of troubles, only to get rich decoratin’ folks’ houses, famous folks, after she was on her feet again. Anyway, this lady said that even on her darkest day, she always had her dream that kept her going when nothing else did.
Now that’s just like me. Just like me’n the fruit stand. ’Cause when all this was going on and I was trying to make all that money to save the house, I don’t think a day went by that I didn’t say to myself,
I gotta get that fruit stand! Gotta get my daddy that damn fruit stand.
Scuze my language.
After the lady told ’bout her dream, she said one more thing. I liked it.
She said,
If I did it, you can too!
That’s just how I feel. And that’s why I ain’t no hero. If I did it, you can too. ’Cause I ain’t better’n nobody.
So here goes.
Chapter Two
The first boy got took last September, just a week after school began. I knew him, boy named Tommy Evans, he was fourteen then, same as me. We didn’t get along too good. I ’member once he caught up with me in an alley over behind them shops on Fister Street and he started whaling away on me, mostly chest and back, yelling some shit ’bout how I stole his bookbag and threw it in a dumpster and someone saw me do it. But that someone was lying his ass off, ’cause I never stole it. Stole Evans’s jacket one day, off a bench at a park over near Dayton Avenue. That I done ’cause I heard he was sayin’ nasty things ’bout me, but he never knew ’cause I tossed it down and he found it, so he was hitting me for nothing.
Anyway, after I run I went by his house, running kind of weak ’cause my chest and back was full of bruises, and I hove a brick at his house. Not just brick, cinder block. Damned thing weighed so much it fell out my hands and hit my foot. Didn’t break nothing, ’cept the pain made me so mad I got it up and hove it again. But that didn’t mean much, ’cause that cinder block was heavier than a motherfucker and I only threw it ’bout three/four foot.
Scuze my language.
’Cept for stuff like that I never knew him much. Ain’t like we went to the same school’r nothing, or hung round any the same places. I mean, a couple boys round my way really can’t stand me and spend a lot of time just thinking up fresh ways to kick my ass. But this Tommy Evans, he weren’t that sort, and prob’ly didn’t like me ’cause’f how I’m in trouble all the time, and his parents prob’ly told’m I ain’t the right sort of boy for him to know.
Anyway, he got took they say when he was walking home from school. Different people say they seen him last. There was Mrs. Steinwitz, who runs the grocery. Said she seen him, sold him a candy bar or something. Then a lady named Jenkins, whose son he knew, was out scrubbing her porch rail spars and she said she seen him too, and also seen the car that picked him up. But on her life she couldn’t remember that car, or truck, or van, ’cause each time the cops asked her she seemed to think it was something different.
Anyway, that’s how it began. At the time I was in seventh grade the second time, like I still gonna be, and I spent most of my time downtown at school and didn’t get much news ’bout what happens up our way, ’cause my teachers down there’re just a bunch’f nuns and they ain’t never had much to tell me, ’cept to say I got stains on my soul.
But Evans getting snatched made news all over. So on weekends I was going out with Marvin and hanging posters now instead of the sales flyers from Shatze’s, Shatze’s Pharmacy, where I go sometimes for work. Usually with Marvin I just drive beside him in the delivery van ’cause his leg is bad, I mean his foot with the big shoe on it, and he don’t like getting out of the van. So I do it. When we make deliveries he gives me half the tip and when we dump flyers he pays me a buck’n hour, which ain’t good but I like talking with’m, so it’s fair. He an old black man, Marvin is, and got his bad foot in a war somewhere, and when the time’s right I’ll let you know more ’bout him.
Them weekends, first ones after Tommy Evans got took, we hung posters. I mean posters of Tommy Evans, and I know you seen’m. They the ones with
MISSING
printed under that school picture of Tommy’s face and the date and some details. Just like on milk cartons and them flyers you get in the mail and throw away. But they never found him. Posters didn’t help, and when the snows come with winter they got all mulched and soaked away to bits with just the tape left on phone poles and walls where I used to hang’m.
Next boy got took was Tuckie Brenner, twelve years old. Him I didn’t know. First thing I thought driving around with Marvin was how funny his name was on the posters. I mean, who the hell names their boy Tuckie Brenner? Course, that ain’t the worst I ever heard. Worst was this boy Billy Hill, he was in school with me. When the nun called out his name she done it last name first, so it come out
Hill, Billy
. Can you imagine that? Hillbilly. Shit. We all laughed, it was morning and we was at assembly in the gym, whole school was there, and even though on the next mornings every day the nun said different and called his name
Hill, William,
it didn’t matter and the boys called out,
Hillbilly!
’cause who could ever forget that? So old Billy Hill, he didn’t last long in that school of mine.