Slashback

8

Niko

Twelve Years Ago

“I’ve got an idea,” Cal announced.

“No. We are not searching that man’s basement for dead bodies. No. Now do your homework.”

“You don’t know I was going to say that.” He carefully folded one page of his English textbook into half of a paper airplane. “But if I was going to say that, it’s totally genius.” He then folded the opposite page the same way for one complete bound and grounded paper aircraft. Where were Orville and Wilbur Wright when you needed them?

There was no doubt he was a genius.

Genius at avoiding homework. Genius at taking a bite of an idea, clamping down his jaws, and never letting go. Genius at making me want to bang my forehead repeatedly against the kitchen table where we sat.

I glared at him. It wasn’t a painless or guilt-free effort, not after checking the bottle-inflicted bruise on his chest fifteen minutes ago, but I did it. “I do know that’s what you were going to say. I know how your ball bounces. I also know that is not how we treat books. Are you trying to be difficult?”

He shook his head, shaggy hair flying, the grin shameless. “Nope. Not trying. Don’t have to. It’s really pretty easy.”

I pushed the sandwich on the plate toward him. Two pieces of bologna, three of cheese, sweet-and-sour pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard, it was his current favorite. Mystery meat and lard, but we’d gone to the grocery to spend some of the money the rich guy had given me for changing his tire. That deserved a celebration, for at least a few days, of whatever we wanted. We’d already had two pizzas instead of the usual one and now Cal was making his way through whatever the janitors swept off the slaughterhouse floor.

It was a good day—when I managed not to see bruises blotting the pages of my own textbooks when my attention wandered. Closing my eyes momentarily, then watching Cal work his way through his first sandwich with the manners of a starving pig tended to make the black-and-purple blotches disappear. Lack of table manners and Cal were linked to reassuring and normal in my brain. That let me say, yes, today was mostly a good day. Sunday, our last day before we had to be back at school, and I would’ve liked it serial killer free. But with Cal and his bulldog teeth firmly embedded in his theory, that wasn’t going to happen.

I did trust Cal’s instincts on the majority of things, but he was eleven. He’d seen monsters, the genuine horror movie article. He’d seen people behave in ways most average adults couldn’t comprehend, knew things most adults saw only on the news or on after-school specials. That was our life. We were a walking, talking PSA filmed by Wes Craven. Through it all, though, he’d stayed a triumph of sanity over endless shit.

Sometimes life did deserve a curse word or two.

But . . . the bottom line remained, he was eleven. Paranoid and cynical and with every right to be, yet still eleven. Once in a while eleven-year-olds jumped to wild conclusions. I’d talked to Junior. I didn’t automatically think he was innocent. It’d been years since I’d made that assumption about anyone from a casual hey-how-are-you? He might be innocent, he might not. He might be innocent of murder, but less innocent of other things. He certainly didn’t seem very bright. Calling the police on him because Cal thought his house smelled bad? It didn’t seem right.

And I did want to do what was right. Right thinking. Right action. Right speaking. Just as many of the sensei and masters of the dojos and gyms taught. It wouldn’t be right to tarnish the reputation of an innocent man and it was hard to do what was right in our world. If I didn’t try, every day, then one day it would become too hard to do right and very easy to do wrong. What kind of role model would I be then to Cal?

With Sophia the lines of wrong had already blurred drastically. I wanted, needed to hang on to keeping all the right I could in my life to balance that out. Even the smallest of good acts helped, each from a pebble to a massive stone that built the wall that kept me clean from the world we lived in now. Our world, Cal’s and mine, was not clean. We both were dealing the best we could. He bounced back, no matter what, and I built walls.

Then there was the police. If our neighbor was guilty of something lesser such as drugs or having three wives who didn’t leave the house, because I couldn’t buy uncatchable serial killer in the muddy dimness of his eyes, the police would come. It wouldn’t matter that the call was anonymous—they’d knock on all the doors, question everyone. I didn’t like to lie, Cal didn’t care either way, but through sheer osmosis from sharing the deceit-heavy air she breathed we’d both learned to do it well from Sophia.

But cops were all different. Some were indifferent, some polite and easy to fool, but some were razor sharp and they’d slice though the paper tower of lies we lived in. There would be a ruin of confetti the color of ashes at our feet before we knew it if we ran into one of those. They were rare, but there were cops who could take one look at the two of us or worse, if Sophia was around, the three of us and know at first glance how dysfunctional our “family” was. They would know we were left alone for weeks at a time no matter how clean we were and well behaved Cal pretended to be. They’d seen it before a thousand times, and maybe, like Cal, they could actually smell it on us. Taste the unbreakable codependency in the air—the kind that happened when it was only the two of you against everything else including your own mother.

There were teachers like that too and four years ago one had a social worker on the way to Cal’s school on his first day in the new town. She’d been moving across the parking lot toward him at the same time I’d showed up to walk him home.

I’d grabbed Cal’s hand, yanked him into motion and we ran. The teacher was sharp, the social worker was sharp, but neither were nearly as experienced as we were at running. Sophia was as eager to go. She had the same amount of desire to spend time in jail for neglect as Cal and I wanted to spend separated in foster homes. None.

I didn’t know what Junior was doing in his house. I doubted anything—he barely had the brainpower to tie his bathrobe, but even if he was up to something, the police were a last resort. Only if our backs were to a metaphorical bloodstained wall. It was too risky. We were good runners and disappearing came as second nature to us now, but it takes only one time. One mistake. One trip over your own feet. If that happened, I might not see Cal again, no matter how long I looked, how hard I tried.

Grendels . . . monsters outside our window, that I could handle. They only watched so far. The police—the state—the government, there was nothing I’d learned in a dojo that would make the fear of them any less.

“Nik, it’s a good idea. It is. We can wait until he’s gone, break in through one of the windows, drag a body out on the front sidewalk and let someone else call the cops on him. Genius.”

I sighed and reached across the table to wipe the mayonnaise/mustard mustache off his upper lip. “Cops . . . policemen, I mean . . . aren’t good.” I backtracked. “They are good, but . . .”

Cal gave me the look again. I’d gotten it so often in the past few days I was going to start assuming anything that came out of my mouth was so utterly ignorant that it made Cal’s very brain cells melt under the vast stupidity of it all. And what I’d been about to say was stupid. He knew as much as I did how badly things could go if the police looked too closely at us.

I held up both hands. “Sorry. I underestimated your enormous brain. You can have an extra cookie for dessert.”

Mollified, Cal started wiping mustard off his plate, licking it off his finger, and rocking back and forth on the back two legs of his chair. Multitalented, that was my brother. “We should move. Now. You have that nut job’s money. Sophia can find us when she comes back.” He shrugged. “Or not.”

I wished “or not,” but she’d already made it clear to us both if I left with Cal she would find us and she would involve social services, do jail time, whatever it took. Cal was an investment. If I wanted him, I was going to have to pay for him. Cal knew, he remembered, but memories were the twilight of lost hopes. In the bright of the day, they could be banished . . . for a while.

“How about this: we’ll go to the library”—because we weren’t going to have a computer of our own unless we stole it—“and research the victims. We’ll see if there’s a pattern to where they’ve been taken.” There. That had to satisfy him. It made it clear I wasn’t dismissing him and it kept him from breaking into our neighbor’s house. This was all Kithser’s fault. If he hadn’t disappeared, Cal would’ve stayed on his live and let live as long as the serial killer’s not killing you personally policy. But Kithser was too close. If he had only run off with his drug dealing loser friends, I’d be tempted to kill him myself for putting me in this situation.

“Boring.” His chair finally tipped too far and began to topple backward. I’d been waiting for it. I hooked an ankle around one wooden leg and caught it. After fifty plus times it was pure instinct now. Cal, who knew I wouldn’t let him fall, had never let him fall, kept talking, unfazed. “Let’s follow him.”

“Research,” I contradicted firmly. I’d disproved a hundred things in papers for school over the years with it. I could disprove a serial killer too.

“Following him would tell us for sure. You said we need to be sure.”

“I know what I said and I know what I’m saying now.” I settled his chair upright. “Research, grasshopper. Absolutely no following.”

“How did this happen?” I hissed out loud as my hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. If I’d kept the question mental, I thought the stress and humiliation of being outthought by an eleven-year-old might trigger some sort of psychotic split. I’d read some advanced psychology books. They hadn’t said that could happen, but it was an imperfect science at best. They didn’t know everything.

“I lied to Mrs. Spoonmaker about your age and you offered to get her oil changed. You were right there, Nik.” Cal was digging in the ancient glove compartment looking for candy bars or cookies in what was a habit so ingrained I didn’t remember when it started. Dogs humped legs. Cal sought sugar. Two universal laws. “How do you get straight As? You can’t remember anything.

“Cool!” He popped up with a petrified package of Ho Hos. “Besides, your research sucked. We didn’t find out anything except people at the public library are doing things in the bathroom they should do at home.”

“I told you to wait for me on the bathroom trips,” I said—a little more loudly than it needed to be said, but that good day I’d been savoring this morning was gone. Cal had driven a stake through its bright and sunny heart.

“You were glued to the computer, like, literally, superglue between your eyeballs and the screen and I had to go. So I went to the women’s just in case. Women can be perverts too. Who knew?”

That was a discussion for . . . not now. My knuckles turned whiter, if possible, under my darker skin as I tried to tail Junior’s beat-up pickup truck with a grimly dark camper, the serial killer–mobile as Cal was calling it, without being made in a giant metallic green Cadillac born long before I was. “And the research did not fail. It showed the people are disappearing from an area approximately fifteen miles in radius and no bodies have been found.”

“Yeah, you showed me the map with all the colors and miles and stuff. It was a big blob. On TV they’re a perfect circle, like a bull’s-eye, and the killer’s house is right in the center.” I heard a distinct crunch as he bit into a Ho Ho, the kind of crunch icing and cake aren’t supposed to make.

“Now you see why I tell you to stop watching so much TV.” I sighed and wove around a BMW. I’d learned to drive when I was twelve. It was a useful skill for picking up passed-out mothers at bars before the police came sniffing around. “But”—as much as I hated to admit it and I honestly did—“Junior’s house is inside ‘the blob.’ The outer part of it, but it’s there.” But so were a lot of very bad people, cheap and unsafe, how we always lived. “Which is why I let you talk me into following him.” And at night, making this area more risky if possible.

Along the rooftops of the cinder block–style apartment buildings I saw a Grendel racing along, our pale shadow. I wondered if it was curious. I wondered for the thousandth time why they watched. And I thought, with the denial of all that is wrong in the world, that it might be better not knowing.

I looked away and back at the street. “Now finish cracking your teeth on what used to be food and let me concentrate.” Then because I felt bad about letting Cal lie to Mrs. Spoonmaker, I muttered under my breath, “I think I’ll get her car washed too.”

Cal knew the signs of my guilt. In knowing me there wasn’t much Cal didn’t pick up on instantly. “Isn’t lying to borrow her car better than letting a murderer kill somebody?”

He wasn’t wrong. Cal had grasped the gray shades of morality before he grasped potty training. I was different. But I was learning. Too late and too slow, but I’d get there.

“Look! He stopped.” Cal bounced in the seat as if we were two rogue cops about to make a bust. I was throwing out the TV when we got home. In the trash. I rolled, yes, rolled down the window for a better look. The car’s windows were permanently cloudy from age. Cal followed my action because when it came to things not involving work that’s what Cal and most little brothers did. “He’s picking up a whore.”

I reached over and flicked his ear lightly. “Not a good word.” But I was also watching Junior talking out the window to a woman selling it for what looked like a harsh drug habit. Even in the night and where only one out of three streetlights worked, that was easy to see. She had a long black Goth wig, short leather dress with fishnet hose and skin yellow with hepatitis.

“Ow. Hooker?”

I flicked again.

“Prostitute?”

“Better. Not too great for her, but better vocabulary wise.”

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and a gun was in my face as a snarling twist of a mouth and mad dog eyes demanded my money. Beside me Cal sounded as if he were choking on his Ho Ho. “This,” I told him, “is not funny.”

The man, boy, whatever he was—that far into the downward slide into drugs it was hard to tell—shoved the gun closer. He hadn’t even bothered to get a pellet gun and paint the orange tip. He’d gone for painting a water gun. I was embarrassed for him. But not so embarrassed that I didn’t break his wrist and shove the gun in his mouth, grip first. Less room and more of a lesson learned that way.

There was another one coming from the opposite side . . . toward Cal. From the way he moved, belligerent but uncertain, he was unarmed. Good practice then. “Cal, time for school.” He accepted the knife I handed him. It wasn’t his kitchen knife, which I’m sure was on him somewhere. This was a K-BAR combat knife with a happy smile of serrated edges. I’d be passing it down to Cal when he was big enough to carry it and it not be instantly obvious under his clothes.

“Finally. Some fun homework.” Cal already had the knife in the practiced grip I’d taught him, parallel to his body with the edge toward the throat that presented itself.

“You little shit. Tell the bastard driving to hand over his money or I’ll tear you . . .” It took the kid, about sixteen and skinnier than the first, that long to realize he could feel the faint trickle of blood down his throat and metal resting against his skin.

“I’m hungry and Ho Hos aren’t enough,” Cal said cheerfully. “How about you give me all your money so I can get a Big Mac and I won’t cut your throat?”

“Cal,” I said reprovingly, but the kid was already gone, his partner with him and unfortunately Junior’s truck as well as we’d sat at the curb looking like easy prey. “We don’t mug or steal and we don’t hurt people unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“I know.” He bounced again. “But his face.” He laughed and handed the knife back to me, not pretending he didn’t covet it. “People can be so stupid. I betcha when he tells his friends how it happened I’ll be seven feet tall and so full of muscles I almost couldn’t fit in the car.”

“Rambo in the most cunning disguise.” I started back down the street searching for Junior’s truck. I didn’t spot it again until we were at home. There it sat in his driveway. I groaned. “Hookers . . . I mean, prostitutes disappear every day for different reasons. I’ll check the papers for the next few days, but even then, we won’t know.”

“You won’t know.” A hand patted my arm as we crossed the street. “You’re smart, Nik, but sometimes I don’t think you’d know the house was on fire ’cause you were waiting for the oven timer to beep. You think too hard about the little things and not about the big things.”

Cal smiled happily and it wasn’t a good kind of happy, not for me. I’d seen this particular brand before. I tensed myself for what was coming. It would be painful and it would make my brain hurt, but there was no getting around it. Cal’s mouth could not be stopped.

“Hey, you know what? We could burn down his house.”