Blood Of Angels (20 page)

'When was the last time you saw him?'

'Saturday night,' Karen said. Her voice was cramped and she sounded shocked. 'There was the party here, as I guess you know. Pete was around early, but then he went somewhere else.'

'Do you know where?'

Karen shook her head, looked at Brad.

'No idea,' he said. 'I saw him at the beginning, and then later he just wasn't around. We got some burgers and were looking for him, in case he wanted one, but I guess he'd already split.'

'Peter's mother said he got a lift to your party with someone called Andy.'

'Yes,' said Karen. 'They all got here together, that's right. But Andy was around to the bitter end. He always is.'

'And then he drove home?'

'He doesn't drink much,' Karen said, quickly. 'And actually, I think Monica drove. Yeah, I remember that. Definitely.'

The cop looked at her. 'Right.'

While he made a note on his pad, the other detective spoke for the first time.

'Mr Metzger,' he said. 'Some people we spoke to said you and Pete are good buddies. That correct?'

'Well, yeah,' Brad said. 'I mean, Pete's everybody's friend. But yeah, I guess you could say that. We hang out.'

'You don't know where he went after the party?'

'No.'

'And you didn't hear anything from him since?'

'No. I mean, I figured he slung out to some other party, got wasted, spent yesterday sleeping it through. I'd've called him this evening or something, maybe.'

'Would you characterize him as a person who gets intoxicated on a regular basis?'

'Peter Voss is a nice young man,' Mrs Luchs said. 'He's always extremely civil.'

'What we're trying to establish,' Cascoli said, 'Is whether he might have got himself into some trouble. Got a ride from someone he didn't know too well, ended up in the wrong place, wound up in a bad situation.'

'It's possible,' Brad said. Everyone turned to look at him. 'I mean, I'm just saying, Pete's a friendly guy. He'll talk to anyone. It's what's cool about him. But… you know, he could have spoken to the wrong person, somewhere. I could see that happening.'

'Has this occurred before, that you're aware of?'

'No,' Brad said. His hands felt sweaty against his thighs. He crossed his arms. 'No. I'm just saying, you know, it's possible. But he's probably just hanging someplace, right?'

'Let's hope so,' the cop said. 'Because otherwise I think his mother is likely to go clean out of her mind.'

He closed his pad and put it back in his pocket. Got out his wallet and handed them both a card. 'You hear anything from him, call me,' he said. 'Tell him it doesn't matter if he's in trouble. We just need to let his mom know he's okay.'

Brad and Karen nodded in unison. Mrs Luchs led the policemen back up towards the house. The men looked like they should be carrying something for her.

'Well that's not good,' Karen said. 'God, I hope Pete's all right.'

'He'll be fine,' Brad said. 'You know Sleepy.'

'Maybe I should call around. Check if anyone's seen him. You know?' She grabbed her phone off the table, finger ready to speed dial. 'What do you think?'

'The cops are doing that already.'

'But we could get people out looking for him. Checking places, people's houses, key stores. Places the cops might not think of.'

Brad nodded. 'Yeah, why not, good idea.'

Karen sat cross-legged on the grass and started dialling, safe in the assumption that Pete just needed rooting out — and that she was the girl with the can-do to do it.

Brad waited for an excruciating twenty minutes. When she hung up her sixth call he said he'd remembered he had to run an errand for his dad. He'd call her later, see if she'd found anything out.

She was talking to somebody else before he even reached the house.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'We're fucked.'

'We're not fucked.'

'We are so fucked, Lee. We're
fucked
.'

'Why are we fucked, Brad? Answer me that. Tell me precisely how and why we are fucked.'

They were standing in the kitchen of Lee's house. As always it was eerily tidy, like a kitchen in a show home. Brad had never understood how Lee managed to keep it that way, even given the fact he never cooked. Everyday life messed things up after a while. Chaos encroached. Brad just shook his head. 'We're fucked,' he said, quietly.

Outside, Lee's car sat in the driveway. It too looked like an advertisement for the whole concept of 'clean'.

'The guy's gone missing,' Lee said patiently. 'The cops were always going to talk to his friends. Point two, Karen held the party which was his last known location. So they're going to talk to her too. All of this is predictable. The cops will soon come to figure he's just blown off somewhere and he'll be back, but in the meantime they've got to go through the motions.'

'But he won't be coming back,' Brad said. 'Remember?
He's not going to be coming back,'

'I know that. But so long as he's gone, he's just gone. Nothing more. Pete's a world-class stoner. They'll already know that about him. I tell you now that their assumption will be that he just lit off. Figured he'd go snowboard pro and headed for Colorado. Or he's asleep under some skanky chick nobody knows about and will be back when he has to borrow some cash. They have to look busy but they'll lose interest soon enough. Cops are poor and live in crappy little houses and they hate people like us.'

'She
won't, though,' Brad said. 'Pete's mom won't lose interest. Ever.'

At that moment he got a mental image of her, strong enough to make the real world fade away. Maria Voss was small and slight — Pete's dad had contributed all of his son's height and bulk — and she had long black hair and big brown eyes. The vision held for a second and then suddenly her eyes were full of tears, full in the way the ocean was full. Brad had never seen this happen in real life, but he knew exactly how it would look. Her face started to crumple and he could almost hear the scream that was fighting its way out of her mouth.

'Lee, this is real bad.'

'Nothing has changed. Brad, listen to me. Nothing has altered since the moment the bullet went into his head.'

Brad flinched. 'Christ, man, that's… cold.'

'Listen to me.
You've got to get your mind around what's happened here. All this was going to happen right from that moment. We can't go back before the bullet, so we have to live in the world that comes afterwards. This is not our fault.'

'Of course it's our fault.'

'We didn't kill him.'

'We took him out there. We should have, we should have…'

'What? We should have
what?
What could we have done?'

'We shouldn't just have dumped him.'

Hudek shook his head firmly, a man who either believed he was right or who was simply no longer countenancing alternative views.

'Hernandez nailed it. Once it happened, there was nothing else to do. Pete was already dead. There was no point us going down with him, and that's all that would have happened.'

'Hernandez, right, yeah. Our good buddy. Has he called yet? Have we heard anything out of these so-called friends of ours?'

'No. But we will.'

'You're dreaming, Lee. We're nothing but a problem to them now. We're baggage. We're fucked.'

Hudek reached up and took him by the shoulders. Just looked into his eyes. Brad looked back, and all he saw there was calmness and strength of purpose. Slowly he started breathing more easily.

'Go home,' Lee said. 'Take a nap. Jerk off. Play some Xbox. Do whatever the fuck you have to do, but chill out.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Brad went home. He tried some Xbox, and only then realized that almost every single game he owned involved shooting people. He didn't want to do that. He tried a driving game instead but it just meant going round and round in circles, and his head felt like it was already dizzy. In the end he lay on his bed. From there he could see his photo boards. They were covered in pictures from the last five years, at first laid out neatly and then just all over, on top of each other and four deep in some places. Parties, big school events, snaps of everybody hanging out. Good nights, happy days. Pete was there, of course. There was one of him and Brad in the back of Lee's old car. One of him in Brad's back yard. One of a bunch of them after a big game back at school, arms around each other, mouths wide in victorious bellows.

Eighteen months ago. Was it really only that long?

His phone rang. It was Steve Verkilen, the guy who'd lain in a parking lot next to Pete with duct tape around his mouth. He was breathless.

'Shit, dude. You heard? I just had Pete's mom on the phone. She sounded way strung out.'

'I heard,' Brad said, evenly. 'The cops came by Karen's. You any idea where he is?'

'Not a clue, man. Not a
clue.
Haven't seen him in days. Was supposed to meet up with him at Karen's party but I was wiped and didn't make it.'

'Yeah, well, he was there,' Brad said, thinking: spread the consensus. 'Then he split. Nobody knows anything after that.'

'Weird shit.'

'Yep.'

'Was going to call Lee, see if he heard.'

'I just came from there. You know Pete. He's out there somewhere. Probably just lost his fucking phone.'

'Yeah.' There was a pause. 'We going to be doing a pickup this week, though? If Pete doesn't show up?'

'I don't know.'

'Well, keep me in the loop, okay? I need the money.'

Steve went away, leaving Brad to wonder what in fact they
would
do about the week's pickup. Hernandez seemed to have gone to ground. Steve wasn't the only one who needed the money. But could they just do it? Business as usual despite everything?

He lay on his back a little longer, trying to work things out, and then decided he didn't want to be able to see the pictures on his wall. He rolled onto his front, eyes closed, breathing the familiar smell of his sheets. Like Lee said, until they found something, there was no crime. Brad nodded to himself reassuringly, his forehead rustling on the sheets, and gradually started to feel okay. He turned over onto his back again and stared up at the ceiling for a while and eventually sat up and swung his legs off the bed. He felt tired and yet rested when he stood up, and even a little hungry. He decided to head downstairs, see if there were some Fritos in the cupboards. There generally were. Things just appeared. He walked along the upper gallery and down the stairs and realized he seemed to be alone in the house. His mother had been there when he got home, and his sister too, playing Smash Mouth way too loud. He walked into the kitchen and was surprised by how tidy it was. Usually a contained chaos was the Metzger family MO. This afternoon it looked like Lee's place, tidy all over, the Sub Zero gleaming like new, nothing even on the kitchen table, which had long been the eventual resting place of everything in the household that wasn't nailed down somewhere else. He opened the cupboard that usually harboured potato chips and found it empty. Completely, without even any dust. So that's where they'd gone — to the supermarket. Done a spring clean, now time to restock. Figures. He opened the next cupboard. It was empty too. He quickly moved around them all, and found it the same everywhere. A very serious spring clean, evidently. Though it was September, of course. A fall clean, then. He heard a noise and turned to see where it was coming from. It was hard to describe, sort of like a quiet chewing sound. It sounded like it was coming from the back yard. Brad went to the window to look and realized it was night. He must have fallen asleep on the bed upstairs. Though… hadn't it been daylight five minutes before, when he looked out front to check for his mother's car?

Brad walked quickly back to the front of the house. It was clean in here too, he realized. Very, very clean. No magazines, no newspapers, no television remotes, and out the front it was still day. There was something wrong about this arrangement, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. So he turned to deal with the other thing, the chewing/rustling he could still hear from out back. It didn't seem any louder but it didn't seem like it was going to stop either. He headed back into the kitchen and out through the big doors into the yard. It was very dark and cold outside but there was no wind. There were trees, however, ranks of tall trees which came right up to the back of the house. A few even seemed to spike up through the roof from the inside. He thought he could hear a stream too, somewhere not far away. There was an unusual smell. It was cinnamon, and sugar, and something else he couldn't get. He walked between the trees but nothing seemed to get any closer. There was a mole problem, though. Wherever you looked there were pathways running under the surface of the forest floor, like a network of swollen veins. They were moving. This was what was making the chewing sound, and as they shifted it was as if the ground itself seemed to become transparent. There were people under there, too. They were lying flat and their eyes were closed and most were missing something. The smell seemed to get stronger and Brad realized first that there was the scent of apples, and finally that what he could smell was a pie. A slim McDonald's apple pie, specifically, the kind that came with the warning that the contents were very fucking hot. None of the bodies had anything in their hands or in their mouths. There must be a pie somewhere, though. You could smell it.
Anyone
could smell it, Brad realized, his heart going cold. If someone came out here they couldn't help but work out what had gone on.

There was a glassy rapping sound then, and he turned to see his mother and sister had returned from the store and were in the kitchen. His mother was unloading groceries and his sister was tapping on the window, trying to tell him they were back with Fritos and he didn't need to go looking for pies, that it would be better if he did not. He wanted to tell her it was okay and that so long as the pie remained hidden he was safe and everyone was safe. But the more he tried to walk back towards the kitchen, the smaller it seemed to get, and she began tapping on the window harder and harder and the sound was not so much like a tapping as the ringing of some bell, in a rhythm that was familiar and trying to tell him something. The smell of apples became overpowering suddenly, too sickly, nauseously strong and then—