Burning Blue (22 page)

The next day, Saturday, I called Nicole’s cell, and she didn’t pick up. I tried the house phone and got the machine. When I got home from work Saturday night, I hadn’t heard back from her. Sunday afternoon, I got her mom on the house phone. “She’s sick with a terrible flu, Jay. She’s been sleeping all weekend.”

I hadn’t slept all weekend. I had been trying to figure out what my father was doing in Marathon. I couldn’t get it out of my head, what he told me that night when I asked him what he’d done with all his attempts at painting. “I burned them,” he’d said.

I met Cherry at Sbarro for a slice. “Here’s the thing about boys,” she said. “You’re all idiots. This isn’t PMS bitchy she’s going through, okay? She lost a sister.”

“Technically, they weren’t sisters.”

“Technically, you’re brainless. This is exactly what I’m talking about. You need to give her space, Jay. Tell me you didn’t text her.”

“A couple of times. Okay, four.”

“You’re worse than a girl. Give her a few days. How are you doing, though? About Emma, I mean. Are you okay?”

“Me? Fine. I mean, yes it sucks, but you know. It’s not like I knew her. Collectively I spent maybe a couple of hours with her. Seriously, I’m cool.”

“You’re so not cool, you poor boy.” She pulled me into a hug. I was exhausted, and I sort of cried into her hair. “Crying can be sexy when it’s done in a rugged albeit sensitive dude way,” she said. “Can I bite your earlobe? Just a nibble? No?”

My suspension ended the next morning, Monday. I was eating by myself, under the B-wing stairs. A bunch of dudes from wrestling rolled up on me. Rick Kerns was suspended for another week, but this other heavyweight was happy to fill in for him as pack leader. He nodded. “Spaceman. Heard you and Dave are cool about Nicole.”

“Nothing’s going on,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said. “Hey, that was ballsy. What you did for her, I mean. Jay, seriously, man, come to practice sometime. We need dudes like you on the team.” He nodded again as he headed off.

“Later, Jay,” somebody else said as they left.

After school I headed down to the Hoboken waterfront to meet my father and his friend from the old days. She was a lawyer. She couldn’t take the case because she wasn’t licensed to practice in New Jersey, but she knew we were broke and was happy to give us free advice. Her name was Camilla, and she chain-smoked. “I think your best bet is to try to get the Lyles woman to drop the burglary charge,” she said. “That might get the judge in the mind-set to reduce the obstruction charge or maybe even throw it out.”

“How do we get her to drop the charge?” my father said.

“Steve, not to tell stories in front of Jay, but do you remember that time you had a couple too many from the frat house keg and ditched me to hang with that pretty little blond thing? What did you do the next day?”

“I apologized.”

“On bended
knee
you apologized. And you were sincere. We worked it out.” She nodded to me. “Offer her compassion, Jay. She just lost a daughter.” Her phone beeped. “Fellas, I have to get a man out of jail. See you around.”

The air was cold, but the sun was warm. “Steakhouse or salad bar?” my dad said.

He didn’t need to be gnawing on rib fat. “Afraid it’ll have to be rabbit food.”

He slapped my knee. “Maybe I ought to go with you to see the Lyles woman.”

“Thanks, but it’ll be better if I go solo. You know, so it doesn’t look like I’m going because my old man forced me to.”

“You ever gonna cut that hair?”

“When I start stepping on it.”

“That’ll be an interesting look.” He sighed as he pushed himself up from the bench. “Salad, huh?
Bleh
.”

“Dad, seriously, it’s cool if you have a girlfriend in Marathon.”

“Jay, seriously, back off. There’s nothing going on down there. Let’s go, we’re getting steaks.”

After school the next day, Tuesday afternoon, I headed for Mrs. Lyles’s house. I bought flowers but realized they would make me look like a kiss-ass, and I gave them away. I wasn’t into my second rap on the door when it opened. Her eyes were puffy slits rimmed with washed-out mascara. She smoked a cigarette. “I’m just on my way out,” she said.

“Ma’am, my name is Jay Nazzaro.”

“What do you want?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, wait, you’re him. You’re the . . .” She slammed the door.

I nodded to nobody but myself. I was at the curb when I heard “Wait.”

I headed back up to the porch and waited at the threshold. “You see me holding the door for you, don’t you?” she said.

The house was more of a wreck than the last time I’d . . . been there. We went to the kitchen. “Sit.” She laid out coffee mugs. “That night at the party a couple years ago. Angela told me you stood up for her.” She poured old coffee. “The detective told me your name, but I couldn’t place it until just now, when I saw your face.” She pulled a faux leather bound album from a stack on the table and flipped to a sketched portrait of me. Angela must have drawn it from memory, because I couldn’t remember posing for a picture like this. She nailed me, my eyes, my trying not to look scared. I hated her a little more for getting inside me like that.

“She told me the whole story,” Mrs. Lyles said. “Or at least the story that was told to her. She herself remembered just tatters of it. I told her she should go out with you, but she said she wasn’t good enough.” Her eyes went to her wristwatch. “I have to visit my daughter now. I’m afraid. I’d like to know if you would come with me.”

The last place I should have been with a tracking bracelet on my ankle was a juvenile detention center, but I had to get Bobbie Lyles to drop the burglary charge. I was stunned when the guard let me in. “Perfectly legal and more common than you would think,” she said. “Parolees visiting prisoners, you know?”

Angela was considered too dangerous to others and herself for a non-secure, face-to-face meeting. A guard escorted her to the chair behind the Plexiglas partition. She was a mess with a black eye and a split lip. Her mother gagged and hurried out for the bathroom. Angela eyed me. “So sweet of you to visit, Jameson.” She was definitely medicated, spacey eyes. All the face jewelry was gone, of course. The pinhole by her lip was infected. She was pale. “The other girls aren’t really feeling me,” she said.

“Especially when you’re around anything liquid, right?” Her jumper was an oddly cheerful color, bright teal. “Why’d you follow us to my apartment house that day?” I said. “What, you just couldn’t resist?”

“I was bombed.”

“Driving drunk. Nice. Lucky you weren’t killed.”

She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Yeah, lucky me.”

The room was freezing, but Angela’s sleeves were rolled up. Her arms were a mess, lots of scars, cigarette burns. One of them was elaborate, a pentangle. She caught me looking at it. “Pretty, right?”

“The test run?” I said, referring to that very first email she sent Mrs. Marks.

She turned her forearm out so we both could see the burn better. “I think it looks righteous. Should have seen when I did it, the tiny little bubbles. I swear, I was salivating. Like it was juicy, you know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t, Angela. So that thing about Nicole giving you her jeans. You made it up.”

“No, it was true.”

“Then how could you burn her after she was so nice to you?”

“Because
she was so nice to me.” She picked at the pentangle scar. “You don’t think it looks cool?”

“Why are you protecting him?”

She rolled down her sleeves. “Have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Angela, did you ever ask yourself, Why me?”

“Are you kidding? Since I’m like three years old.”

“No, I mean why this nutcase picked you to do the job. He must have known you hated Nicole, right? The only dude that comes to mind there is Dave Bendix. I know about you two, okay? I have video.”

“No you don’t, Spaceman. You have Dave Bendix at a wrestling match I happened to be at. You have me cheering him on, like the three hundred other people in that gym. You have shit. Look, my lawyer tells me that in like a week the shrinks will have gotten together and deemed me nuts, and I’ll be whisked to a psych center for four years. I’ll be drawing pictures and watching movies all day and getting all these great meds. After that, three years probation, self check-in parole. I’m not saying anything about anybody else who may or may not have been involved.”

“But Dave can’t touch you now. It’s done. You’re not going to get any more time added to your sentence for turning him in.”

She smiled and shook her head. “You just don’t get it. You don’t get
any
of this. You’re perfectly incapable of understanding.”

“You don’t want to see the dude who put you up to this fry?”

“I would love to see him fry—are you kidding? But it wasn’t Dave. Trust me.”

“Trust you? Are
you
kidding? Then who did it? Who paid you to burn Nicole?”

“I. Don’t.
Know.
Like I told Barrone. I wish I knew. She offered to get the DA to halve my sentence if I could ID the contract issuer. Why are you winking at me?”

“I’m not. My eye twitches when I haven’t slept in three days. How could you not know who made you burn her?”

“I got a letter, maybe three months ago, no return address. Letter says, basically, ‘Nicole Castro needs to burn.’ Letter says how it might happen, maybe somebody should throw battery acid into her face. If I do the job, I get a hundred grand, enough to get the hell out of here, maybe go to France, where people are cool and leave you alone, start a new life, go to art school or some shit, you know? Of course I’m like, this is too good to be true. There was a combo code and an address to this storage place off I-95. I go there, small locker, only things in it are a pair of Priority Mail envelopes, again no return address of course, but lots of hundred dollar bills with a note that says half now, half after. And what do you know, all of a sudden I have fifty k in my backpack.”

“Why two Priority envelopes? He couldn’t fit the money in one?”

“You don’t have to go to the post office window if a package is under thirteen ounces, which both were. Fifty k weighs a little over a pound—I checked. Cut the stack in half, you have two roughly nine ounce packages, just drop them into any old mailbox.”

“You believed him, that he would pay you the second half?”

She leaned in. “Dude, are you serious? I would have done it for
five
thousand. And anyway, he paid me the balance.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Unbelievable, right? A psycho with morals. Barrone seized it all anyway, the bitch.” She leaned back. “Not doing the job wasn’t an option. He had my address. Anybody nuts enough to advance me fifty k to burn Nicole is nuts enough to drop a bullet into the back of my skull if I tried to beat him out of the money. I’m the victim here too, Jay. I had no choice.”

“Except maybe to go to the police?”

“You’re funny. I tried to get info on him, in case he tried to get away with not paying the second fifty k, but I couldn’t turn up anything. I hacked the storage place’s files. Dude ordered the locker rental by mail, like sent a hundred-dollar cash down payment with an actual paper form. Who does such things anymore, I ask you. Registered as Joe Smith of Hopper Lane someplace in Florida. That checked out to be an unoccupied HUD-owned foreclosure.”

“You tapped HUD?”

“Please, it was easier than planting Trojans in Canadian discount drug spam. You know, Spaceman, you just might have the chops to run this dude down.” She waved me closer to the glass and whispered. “The money? It was actually a hundred k for the down payment. I left fifty of it where Barrone could find it, but I have the rest tucked away. You track this nut down, get me his name, let me be the one to break the news to Barrone, and I’ll take care of you. I swear.”

“First, you’re lying. You don’t have any money.” Her eyes had ticked right when she mentioned it. “Second, the idea of helping you halve your sentence and getting you back out and at large on the street two years earlier? Not terribly appealing.” I got up to go.

“It was a business transaction, Jay. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would’ve. It was unstoppable. Take comfort in that.”

“But it wasn’t somebody else, Angela. It was you. For the rest of your life, you’ll be the girl who burned Nicole Castro.”

“Dude, you are hilarious. So that’s her problem, then. And you really think people will remember any of this? It’s old news already, now that there isn’t going to be a trial. Then again, Nicole’ll probably remember it, right? But even you, Jay. Year from now, you’ll be moon-eyed over some other fantasy queen, and Nicole Castro will just fade from your heart. I’m saying cheer up, champ. Time heals all wounds, excluding burns. Hey Jay, how much are you hating on me right now, scale of one to ten?”

I turned back to take her in one last time. She showed just the slightest hint of a smile as she waited for my answer. She would be out in four years, maybe less. With therapy, counseling, meds, she’d recover, get a job, marry, have children. Her kids would never know what she had done. And then there was Nicole: How would she get through the next sixty or seventy years with half a face? “Angela, to be perfectly honest, you’re too much of a mess to hate. I feel sorry for you.”

Her half smile turned into a nasty little pout. Her lips quivered. She winced as she wiped her split lip. “Look at me. Look what they did to my
face.
” She glared at me now. “That bitch deserved it.” She pounded her fists into the Plexiglas. “I hate you, Jay. Seriously. You and Nicole.” She slammed her head into the Plexiglas, and then slammed it again. The guards were on her and pulling her away from the glass.

A horrible thought came to me only just then. “The storage place,” I said.

“I hate you, Nazzaro!”

“Was it in Marathon?”

“I
hate
you
.
” She sobbed as they dragged her around the corner and out of sight.