Panic

MONDAY, JULY 11

dodge

“CAN I HAVE SOME WATER, PLEASE?”

Dodge wasn’t really thirsty, but he wanted a second to sit, catch his breath, and look around.

“Sure thing.” The cop who had greeted Dodge and ushered him into a small, windowless office—OFFICER SADOWSKI, read his name tag—hadn’t stopped smiling, like he was a teacher and Dodge was his favorite student. “You just sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Dodge sat very still while he waited, just in case someone was watching. He didn’t have to turn his head to take in nearly everything: the desk, piled high with manila file folders; the shelves stacked with more papers; an ancient telephone, unplugged; photographs of several fat, smiling babies; a desk fan. It was a good thing, he thought, that Sadowski hadn’t brought him into an interrogation room.

Sadowski was back in only a minute, carrying a Styrofoam cup full of water. He was on a mission to seem friendly. “You comfortable? Happy with the water? You don’t want a soda or anything?”

“I’m fine.” Dodge took a sip of the water and nearly choked. It was piss-warm.

Sadowski either didn’t notice, or pretended not to. “Really glad you decided to come down and talk to us. Dan, right?”

“Dodge,” Dodge said. “Dodge Mason.”

Sadowski had taken a seat behind his desk. He made a big show of shuffling around some papers, grinning like an idiot, twirling a pen and leaning back in his chair. All casual. But Dodge noticed that he had Dodge’s name written down on a piece of white paper.

“Right. Right. Dodge. Hard to forget. So what can I do you for, Dodge?”

Dodge wasn’t buying the village idiot act, not for a second. Officer Sadowski’s eyes were narrow and smart. His jaw was like a right triangle. He’d be a mean old bastard when he felt like it.

“I’m here to talk about the fire,” Dodge said. “I figured you’d want to talk to me eventually.”

It had been two days since Dodge had woken up in the hospital. Two days of waiting for the knock on the door, for the cops to show up and start grilling him. The waiting, the ticking feeling of anxiety, was worse than anything.

So earlier that morning he’d woken with a resolution: he wouldn’t wait anymore.

“You’re the young man who left the hospital on Saturday morning, aren’t you?” Right. As though he’d forgotten. “We just missed talking to you. Why’d you run off in such a hurry?”

“My sister . . . needs help.” He realized, belatedly, he shouldn’t have mentioned his sister. It would only lead to bad places.

But Sadowski seized on it. “What kind of help?”

“She’s in a wheelchair,” Dodge said, with some effort. He hated saying the words out loud. It made them seem more real, and final.

Sadowski nodded sympathetically. “That’s right. She was in a car accident a few years ago, wasn’t she?”

Dick. So the village idiot thing was a trick. He’d done his homework. “Yup,” Dodge said.

He thought Sadowski would ask him more about it, but he just shook his head and muttered, “Shame.”

Dodge started to relax. He took a sip of water. He was glad he’d come. It probably made him look confident. He was confident.

Then Sadowski said, abruptly, “You ever heard of a game called Panic, Dodge?”

Dodge was glad he’d already finished swallowing, so he couldn’t choke. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never had too many friends around here.”

“You have a few friends,” Sadowski said. Dodge didn’t know what he was getting at. He consulted his page of notes again. “Heather Nill. Natalie Velez. Someone must have invited you to that party.”

That was the story that had gone around: a party in the Graybill House. A bunch of kids getting together to smoke weed, drink booze, freak one another out. Then: a stray spark. An accident. The blame was spread around that way, couldn’t be pinned to anyone specific.

Of course, Dodge knew it was all bullshit. Someone had lit the place up, deliberately. It was part of the challenge.

“Well, yeah. Them. But they’re not friends friends.” Dodge felt himself blushing. He wasn’t sure whether he’d been caught in a lie.

Sadowski made a noise in the back of his throat Dodge didn’t know how to interpret. “Why don’t you tell me all about it? In your own words, at your own pace.”

Dodge told him, speaking slowly, so he wouldn’t screw it up, but not too slowly, so he wouldn’t seem nervous. He told Sadowski he’d been invited by Heather; there’d been rumors of a keg party, but when he got there he found out it was pretty lame, and there was hardly any booze at all. He definitely hadn’t been drinking. (He congratulated himself on thinking of this—he wouldn’t get busted for anything, period.)

Sadowski interrupted him only once. “So why the closed room?”

Dodge was startled. “What?”

Sadowski only pretended to glance down at the report. “The fire chiefs had to break down the door to get to you and the girl—Heather. Why’d you go off with her if the party was raging somewhere else?”

Dodge kept his hands on his thighs. He didn’t even blink. “I told you, the party was lame. Besides, I was kind of hoping . . .” He trailed off suggestively, raising his eyebrows.

Sadowski got it. “Ah. I see. Go on.”

There wasn’t much else to tell; Dodge told him he must have fallen asleep next to Heather. The next thing he knew, they heard people running and smelled smoke. He didn’t mention Nat. No need to explain how she’d known to direct the firemen to the back of the house, unless he was asked.

For a while after Dodge finished talking, they sat in silence. Sadowski appeared to be doodling, but Dodge knew this, too, was an act. He’d heard everything.

Finally Officer Sadowski sighed, set down his pen, and rubbed his eyes. “It’s tough shit, Dodge. Tough shit.”

Dodge said nothing.

Sadowski went on. “Bill Kelly was—is—a friend. He was on the force. Little Kelly went to Iraq. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Not really,” Dodge said.

Sadowski stared at him. “I’m saying we’re going to figure out exactly what happened that night. And if we find out the fire was started on purpose . . .” He shook his head. “That’s homicide, Dodge.”

Dodge’s throat was dry. But he forced himself not to look away. “It was an accident,” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

Sadowski smiled. But there was no humor in it. “I hope so.”

Dodge decided to walk home. He was out of cigarettes and in a bad mood. Now he wasn’t so sure that going to the cops had been a good idea. The way Sadowski looked at him made him feel like the cops thought he’d started the damn fire.

It was the judges—had to be, whoever they were. Any one of the players could squeal about the game, and that would be the end of that.

If Panic ended . . .

Dodge had no plans beyond winning Panic—beating Ray in the final round of Joust, and making sure it was a hard, bloody win. He hadn’t thought of his life beyond that moment at all. Maybe he’d be arrested. Maybe he’d go out in a blaze. He didn’t care either way.

Dayna, his Dayna, had been destroyed, ruined forever, and someone had to pay.

But for the first time he was seized with the fear that the game would actually end, and he would never get his chance. And then he would just have to live with the new Dayna on her plant-stalk legs, live with the knowledge that he’d been unable to save her. Live with knowing Ray and Luke were fine, going through the world, breathing and grinning and shitting and probably crapping on other people’s lives too.

And that was impossible. Unimaginable.

The sun was bright and high. Everything was still, gripped in the hard light. There was a bad taste in Dodge’s mouth; he hadn’t eaten yet today. He checked his phone, hoping Nat might have called: nothing. They’d spoken the day before, a halting conversation, full of pauses. When Nat said her dad needed her downstairs and she had to get off the phone, he was sure she’d been lying.

Dodge circumnavigated Dot’s Diner, checking instinctively to see whether he could spot his mom behind the smudgy glass windows. But the sun was too bright and turned everyone to shadow.

He heard a burst of laughter from inside the house. He paused with his hand on the door. If his mom was home, he wasn’t sure he could deal. She’d been practically hysterical when he came home with a hospital bracelet, and since then she’d been giving him the fish-eye and grilling him every .5 seconds about how he was feeling, like she couldn’t trust him even to pee without risking death. Plus, the news about Little Kelly was all over Dot’s Diner, and when she wasn’t demanding whether Dodge thought he had a fever, she was gossiping about the tragedy.

But then the laughter sounded again, and he realized it wasn’t his mom laughing—it was Dayna.

She was sitting on the couch, a blanket draped over her legs. Ricky was sitting in a folding chair across from her; the chessboard was positioned on the coffee table. When Dodge entered, there were only a few inches between them.

“No, no,” she was saying, between fits of giggling. “The knight moves diagonally.”

“Diag-on-ally,” Ricky repeated, in his heavily accented English, and knocked over one of Dayna’s pawns.

“It’s not your turn!” She snatched her pawn back and let out another burst of laughter.

Dodge cleared his throat. Dayna looked up.

“Dodge!” she cried. Both she and Ricky jerked backward several inches.

“Hey.” He didn’t know why they both looked so guilty. He didn’t know why he felt so awkward, either—like he’d interrupted them in the middle of something far more intense than a game of chess.

“I was just teaching Ricky how to play,” Dayna blurted. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. She looked better, prettier, than she had in a while. Dodge thought she might even be wearing makeup.

He suddenly felt angry. He was out busting his ass for Dayna, almost dying, and she was at home playing chess with Ricky on the old marble board his mom had bought on Dodge’s eleventh birthday, and that Dodge had schlepped everywhere they’d moved since then.

Like she didn’t even care. Like he wasn’t playing Panic just for her.

“Want to play, Dodge?” she asked. But he could tell she didn’t mean it. For the first time Dodge looked, really looked, at Ricky. Could he be serious about marrying Dayna? He was probably twenty-one, twenty-two, tops.

Dayna would never do it. The guy barely spoke any English, for Christ’s sake. And she would have told Dodge if she liked him. She’d always told Dodge everything.

“I just came in to get a drink,” Dodge said. “I’m going out again.”

In the kitchen, he filled a glass with water and kept the sink running while he drank, to drown out the sound of muffled conversation from the next room. What the hell were they talking about? What did they have in common? When he shut off the sink, the voices fell abruptly into silence again. Jesus. Dodge felt like he was trespassing in his own house. He left without saying good-bye. Almost as soon as he shut the door, he heard laughter again.

He checked his phone. He had a response from Heather, finally. He’d texted her earlier: Heard anything?

Her text read simply: Game over.

Dodge felt a surge of nausea riding up from his stomach to his throat. And he knew, then, what he had to do.

Dodge had been to the Hanrahans’ house only once before, two years earlier, when Dayna was still in the hospital—when, briefly, it had seemed like she might not wake up. Dodge hadn’t budged from the chair next to her bed except to pee and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot and get coffee from the cafeteria. Finally Dodge’s mom had convinced him to go home and get some rest.

He had gone home, but not to rest. He had stopped in only long enough to remove the butcher’s knife from the kitchen and the baseball bat from the closet, along with a pair of old ski gloves that had never, as far as he knew, been used by anyone in his family.

It took him a while to find Ray and Luke’s house on his bike, in the dark, half-delirious from the heat and no sleep and the rage that was strangling him, coiled like a snake around his gut and throat. But he did, finally: a two-story structure, all dark, that might have been nice one hundred years ago.

Now it looked like a person whose soul had been sucked out through his asshole: collapsed and desperate, wild and wide-eyed, sagging in the middle. Dodge felt a flash of pity. He thought of the tiny apartment behind Dot’s, how his mom put daffodils in old pickle jars on the windowsills and scrubbed the walls with bleach every Sunday.

Then he remembered what he had come to do. He left his bike on the side of the road, slipped on his gloves, removed the baseball bat and knife from his duffel bag.

He stood there, willing his feet to move. A swift kick to the door, the sound of screaming. The knife flashing in the dark, the whistle of the bat cutting through the air. He was after Luke, and Luke alone.

It would be easy. Quick.

But he hadn’t managed it. He’d stood there with his legs numb, heavy, useless, for what felt like hours, until he began to fear that he’d never move again—he’d be frozen in this position, in the darkness, forever.

At some point the porch light had clicked on, and Dodge had seen a heavy woman, with a face like a pulpy fruit, wearing a tentlike nightgown and no shoes, maneuver her bulk out onto the porch and light up a cigarette. Luke’s mother.

All at once, Dodge could move again. He had stumbled toward his bike. It wasn’t until he was four blocks away that he realized he was still holding the knife and he had dropped the baseball bat, probably on the lawn.

It had been two whole years, almost to the day. Ray’s house looked even more run-down in the daylight. The paint was shedding like gray dandruff. On the porch were two tires, a few smelly armchairs, and an old porch swing hanging on rusty chains, which looked like it would collapse under the slightest pressure.

There was a doorbell, but it was disconnected. Instead Dodge banged loudly on the frame of the screen door. In response, the TV inside was abruptly muted. For the first time, it occurred to Dodge that it might not be Ray who answered the door, but that pulpy woman from two years ago—or a father, or someone else entirely.

But it was Ray. He was wearing only basketball shorts. For a split second, he hesitated, obviously startled, just behind the screen.

Before Dodge could say anything, Ray kicked open the screen door. Dodge had to jump back to avoid it. He lost his footing.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

The sudden motion had screwed Dodge up. He was already off balance when Ray grabbed him by the shirt and then shoved him. Dodge stumbled down the porch stairs and landed in the dirt on his elbows. He bit down on his tongue.

And Ray was above him, in a rage, ready to pounce. “You must be out of your mind,” he spat out.

Dodge rolled away from him and scrambled to his feet. “I’m not here to fight.”

Ray let out a bark of laughter. “You don’t have a choice.”

He took a step forward, swinging; but Dodge had regained his balance and sidestepped him.

“Look.” Dodge held up a hand. “Just listen to me, okay? I came to talk.”

“Why the hell would I want to talk to you?” Ray said. His hands were still balled into fists, but he didn’t try and swing again.

“We both want the same thing,” Dodge said.

For a second, Ray said nothing. His hands uncurled. “What’s that?”

“Panic.” Dodge wet his lips. His throat was dry. “Both of us need it.”

There was an electric tension in the air, hot and dangerous. Ray took another quick step forward.

“Luke told me about your little threats,” Ray said. “What kind of game do you think you’re playing?”

Ray was so close, Dodge could smell cornflakes and sour milk on his breath. But he didn’t step back. “There’s only one game that matters,” he said. “You know it. Luke knew it too. That’s why he did what he did, isn’t it?”

For the first time, Ray looked afraid. “It was an accident,” he said. “He never meant—”

“Don’t.”

Ray shook his head. “I didn’t know,” he said. Dodge knew he was lying.

“Are you going to help me, or not?” Dodge asked.

Ray laughed again: an explosive, humorless sound. “Why should I help you?” he asked. “You want me dead.”

Dodge smiled. “Not like this,” he said. And he meant it, 100 percent. “Not yet.”

Sometime around midnight, when Carp was quiet, dazzling in a light sheen of rain, Zev Keller woke in the dark to rough hands grabbing him. Before he could scream, he was gagging on the taste of cotton in his mouth. A sock. And then he was lifted, carried out of bed and into the night.

His first, confused, thought was that the cops had come to take him away. If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have realized that his assailants were wearing ski masks. He would have noticed that the trunk they forced him into belonged to a navy-blue Taurus, like the kind his brother drove. That it was his brother’s car, parked in its usual spot.

But he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was panicked.

Kicking out, watching the sky narrow to a sliver as the trunk closed over him, Zev felt something wet and realized that, for the first time since he was five years old, he’d peed himself.

At last he realized too that despite everything, the game was ongoing. And that he had just lost.