Wicked Cruel (7 page)

He shrugs and starts walking toward the skateboard park. I walk home. Lots to think about.

What happens when you die? Do you lie there in limbo while your bones decay, not getting free until every molecule in your body has turned to dust and you become part of the atmosphere again? Like a million years from now? Or do you float away from all of that the moment you die, entering some afterlife where everything’s peaceful and light and all of your dead relatives are there to greet you?

And what if you’ve got scores to settle back on Earth? Some revenge to enact on anyone who might have helped hurry you along toward your death?

Our house is dark. Spike is lying on the couch, so I push her aside and turn on Comedy Central. Some woman is doing stand-up and I watch for a few minutes. I’m hungry, so I go out to the kitchen and fish around in the refrigerator, finding that chicken David cooked earlier. I yank off a leg and bite into it. Then I stop cold, hearing a familiar voice from the TV.

“So, I heard your father is working as a plumber’s assistant.”

I set the chicken leg on the counter and rush to the living room. It’s still that woman, joking about sex. I stare at the TV. Was that a commercial I heard? I shut off the set and go back to the kitchen.

I take another bite of chicken. And then I hear Bainer again from the living room. “I need your help right away; I gotta leak in the sink.”

The TV is on when I get there, but the screen is blank and the sound is nothing but fuzz. “Bainer,” I say, really loud. “What are you doing?” I’m scared, but I’m mad. I hustle up to the attic and turn on my computer.

I run through that “Way Back into Love” video three times but don’t see a trace of him. The moonlight is coming directly through my narrow window, making a long, thin patch of brightly glowing light on the floor. And in the light are three tiny silhouettes that look like a samurai and a dwarf and an action figure.

I’m losing it. I’m going crazy. I need to get out of here fast.

The Shamrock is much busier tonight, with crowds of college students standing in the alley smoking and talking on cell phones, and hundreds of others packed into the bar room. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is making the walls vibrate. It feels like my whole brain is vibrating, too, but not from the music—from nerves and confusion.

I lean against a brick building across from the bar and listen. I figure the band will give it a rest at some point and David will come out for a smoke.

They go through “Dream On,” “Midnight Rider,” and “Born to Run,” then some taped crap from Lady Gaga comes on, so I know the band’s on a break. Ten minutes later David squeezes through the crowd with a woman with curly bleached hair.

I walk over.

“Jordan,” David says. “What’s going on?”

“Thought I’d check out the band.”

“We sound good?”

“Yeah, from out here. You gonna be playing all night?”

“Another hour maybe. You okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, though I’m not. “I guess.”

The woman steps past me and lights a cigarette. “Hi, honey,” she says in a raspy voice.

“Hi.”

David gestures at her with an open palm. “This is Lydia. I knew her back in high school.”

Lydia gives a short, high-pitched laugh. “He
ignored
me back in high school,” she says. “What’s your name again? Jordan? Listen, Jordan, this uncle of yours was something special back in the day. Now look at him”—she gives that awful cackling laugh again—“won’t even buy me a drink.”

“You didn’t let me,” he says with a grin. “Said that’d raise too many expectations.”

She takes a long drag on her cigarette and studies him. “Okay,” she says, blowing out the smoke. “You can buy me one. Or two.”

David gives me a sheepish shrug. They start to go back inside. David says, “You’re definitely okay, right?”

Lydia answers for me. “He’s fine.”

Yeah, thanks.

She rubs her cigarette out against the bricks, then tosses it into a puddle. “Right, honey?”

“Right,” I say. No use saying anything else.

My hands are shaking as I reach Main Street. I’m seeing him everywhere now—the Internet, the television. But not outside
my house. We sat in Bainer’s own house for way over an hour and never saw a trace of him. Except maybe that rock that hit the house. And the samurai.

I walk back that way. I don’t know why. Past the industrial area, through the college neighborhood.

There’s Bainer’s house, dark and empty.

My stomach is so tight I feel like I might throw up. The idea of going back to my house is terrifying. Things turn on, and I hear Bainer or see him. But he’s never spoken to me; he just lets me know he’s there. He’s getting back at me in the best way he knows how. By scaring the living crap out of me.

I step across the lawn, halfway between the street and the window we climbed through earlier.

I was his only chance for a friend in this town, and I wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t risk the shunning from everybody else. I was the only one who might have stepped up and thrown him a break, back when I could have used a friend, too. Instead, I turned against him. I hurt him and I pushed him away.

All those punches that Scapes and the others threw, all those insults and rejections and shoves. “Mine hurt worst, didn’t they, Bainer?” I whisper as I take the final steps to the house and set my hand on the windowsill.

I taste bile in my throat and swallow hard. I hurt him physically and that helped finish him off. But I also hurt him deeper—right to his soul—and that sort of hurt doesn’t ever go away.

Lorne Bainer was a total jerk.

But maybe I could have manned up and helped him.

I sit on our couch until almost three, wrapped in a blanket and shivering like crazy. David finally comes home, feels my forehead, and makes us hot chocolate.

“We rocked the place tonight,” he says, pumping his shoulders as if he’s still at the Shamrock, jamming on his guitar.

I stare straight ahead.

“You all right?” he asks. “Besides being cold, I mean?” He turns to the thermostat on the wall and amps it up.

“The TV turned on by itself,” I say, wrapping both hands around the mug and breathing in the chocolaty steam.

He raises one eyebrow. “It was windy.”

“The night before that my computer started up by itself, too.”

He leans back in an armchair and smiles. “Old house. I bet there’s a lot of faulty wiring in the walls. You get a storm or a big gust and it can cause power outages.”

“The power didn’t go off.”

“Sometimes it’s a split second that you barely notice. But then there’s a surge when the power comes back, so electronic stuff will reboot by itself. Happens all the time.”

Maybe so. But it’s different when something reboots and you get Bainer’s voice or a video that scares the piss out of you. That’s no coincidence. That’s a haunting.

Or insanity.

I’m not buying this power-surge theory. “I heard Bainer talking when the TV came on,” I say. “Before that, too, but then I shut it off.”

“Oh.” David’s tone sounds like he doesn’t quite believe me but that he’s pretty sure I believe it myself.

“I know that sounds ridiculous,” I say. “It sounds ridiculous to me, too. But things keep happening.”

He takes a deep breath and blows it out, and I can smell cigarettes and beer. “You’re shook up, Jordan, so everything seems magnified. I admit that this is a weird situation, but
everything that’s happened—if you look at them one at a time—has an explanation, right?”

“One at a time, yeah. But this stuff keeps going down. I’m seeing his face or hearing his voice or having that creepy video show up on my computer. That’s too many coincidences for me.”

We sit quietly for a few minutes and I sip the hot chocolate.

“Think you can sleep?” he asks.

“Not up there.”

He nods. “Stay here, then. Leave the kitchen light on. I’m really beat. I’ll sleep in your parents’ bed tonight.”

“Okay.” I set down the mug and shut my eyes. Having him in the house is better. I can probably sleep. A little.

Gary’s phone call wakes me up around ten. “Get bagels?” he asks.

“Yeah. Gimme ten minutes.”

David’s rolling out dough for a pie crust when I get to the kitchen. I was so zonked I hadn’t heard a thing.

“Sleep okay?” he asks.

“I guess so.”

He gives me a little smirk. “No more disturbances?”

“Not lately. Is that apple?”

“Yep.”

“I’m meeting Gary. But I’ll be back for some of that.”

I realize that I’m too hungry for bagels, so I get a small pizza instead. Gary buys two Milky Way bars and we walk toward his house.

“What’d you do last night?” he asks. He says it sort of accusingly, as if he already knows.

“Hung around.”

“At the scene of the crime?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you walking with Scapes.”

“So?”

He shakes his head. “You’re crazy.”

“And what crime anyway? There were a
thousand
crimes committed on Bainer, if you want to look at it that way. And every one of us is guilty.”

“I never hit him.”

We’ve reached his house, so we don’t say anything more until we’re in his room with the door shut. The dog followed us in.

“What do mean, you never hit him?” I say. “You hit him. I hit him, too.”

“That was nothing compared to what Scapes does to people. You’re out of your mind hanging around with him, you know.”

“I wasn’t with him long.”

“What’d you do?”

I let out my breath and peel a slice of pizza from the box. I take a bite and chew it slowly. “We snuck into Bainer’s house.”

“You went in there alone? With Scapes? Are you that stupid? Scapes is a murderer, Jordan. He could have left you there dead. They’d find your corpse in twenty years.”

I take another bite. “Can I give Barney this crust?” I ask. The dog’s been drooling on Gary’s floor ever since I opened the box.

Gary looks at it while he chews his Milky Way, shifting his head from side to side. “Nah,” he finally says. “I don’t know what’s in that crust. It might not be good for him.”

Barney lets out a sigh and flops onto the floor.

“He’s not a murderer,” I say softly. “Nobody wanted Bainer dead. We were all just stupid, that’s all. Stupid and gutless, but not murderers.”

*   *   *

My dad called from Paris that afternoon and said they hadn’t sealed any deals yet but they’ll be home on Wednesday. David did most of the talking. I didn’t say a word about my visits from Bainer.

We watched the Patriots game that afternoon and had scallops with rice for dinner, and a lot of pie. David’s gone out “for an hour or so,” but I don’t expect him back anytime soon.

I’m totally exhausted from being up most of last night, and the couch isn’t the most comfortable place I’ve ever slept. So I say the heck with it and climb the stairs to the attic.

Spike is on my bed. I scoot her off and lie down, but she jumps up again and stands on my back. She sleeps up here most nights, but I don’t need the disturbance this time.

“Sorry, buddy,” I say. “I need a solid sleep. School tomorrow.” I lift her gently and set her on the stairs, then close my door to keep her out. It shuts with a
click
and I feel a chill in my gut.

I haven’t slept in this bed the past two nights. I sink in and mold myself into the mattress and the pillow, stretching out and finally beginning to relax. It’s quiet. I sleep.

My dream is of a window, the one into Bainer’s house. I climb through and step to the floor, but there’s nothing but a vast emptiness, and I fall and fall and then hit hard on my back. I press into the surface. It’s my bed. I’m lying flat. I’m suddenly cold, but I’m sweating.

I prop myself up and glance around the attic. All’s clear. I lie back down. I sleep again.

This time there’s a floor when I pass through the window, and I shuffle across the dark, empty living room, up the staircase, and past those first two doors. I put my hand on the third doorknob, hesitate a second, and pull it open.

The attic stairs are lit softly by the moonlight. I hear a buzzing from the attic, steady and mechanical. It gets louder.

It wakes me up.

The buzzing is coming from my laptop, but the monitor is black, except for the screensaver. If I click the space bar, whatever is there will reveal itself. I’m not sure I want to see.

I wait a minute. The buzzing gets softer, then stops. I sit on the edge of the bed and reach for the space bar, holding my finger above it. I gulp, then press. The screen lights up. It’s just my desktop: a handful of icons. There’s an orange
INSTANT MESSAGE
lozenge flashing in the lower right. I hesitate, then click it. It says it’s from
LBAINER
.

L. Bainer? Sure it is. Does Gary think I’m dumb enough to fall for that?

There’s a long pause on the other end. He knows this is just too obvious.

The computer shuts off. I hear Spike yowl outside my door and go scurrying down the stairs. Everything is dark, and then the computer beeps and whines and turns back on.

And I hear the opening notes of “Way Back into Love.”

This is nuts. I scramble across the bed and reach for the doorknob. It’s stuck.

I rattle it and pull it, but it won’t turn at all. The video is playing loudly now; the grungy guy is singing in the shadows. Get me out of here.

I’ve never had this door closed before, never checked to see if it would lock. Why would it? I’ve never seen a key.

I dive across the bed and try to shut off the computer, but it won’t stop. The audience scan is coming up. I start tapping keys and arrows, trying to get it to end.