I’d talk to him and then I’d leave. I just needed to know one thing, and then Jack could pop out of this Glenbrook and not come back. And I didn’t care where I ended up.
The glasses were wrapped up in my stinking clothes, sitting under the seat in my truck.
And I thought, Maybe I just need to go find a dictionary, so I can see what words have been wiped out of this universe.
I swallowed, gritted my teeth.
SEND
“Avery Scott.”
“It’s Jack Whitmore.”
There was a pause. Maybe five seconds. And I heard him switch the phone in his hands, like he was putting it down so he could write something. Maybe he had to switch off the remote from the football game or the porn he was watching.
“Don’t put me on a speakerphone,” I said.
Another pause.
Things being moved again.
“Okay. You’re not. You want to talk? I can come to you. Where are you?”
“What’s wrong with doing it like this?” I said.
“If that’s what you want.”
“Okay.” I snapped my face to the side. The lights overhead in the park flickered on and a moth nearly flew into my mouth. “I just want to ask you how you know about me.”
“Look, Jack. I really think we should talk. Why don’t I come there, wherever you are?”
And I wondered if maybe he had some way of pinpointing where I was calling from.
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Nobody’s going to know anything about you. Is that what you’re scared of? The newspapers, the TV, they’ll never know your name or see your face. I just want to find out if you’re okay, kid. I need to know more about that guy. For the other kids. You know, their families. That’s all. I promise.”
It was the second promise Avery Scott made to me that day.
“What can you tell me?”
“I can show you what I got, Jack. What I got about you.”
He was lying.
There was nothing.
He couldn’t have anything about me.
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“Where are you?”
I don’t know where this is.
“The park.”
“Five minutes.”
END
* * *
Avery Scott sits beside me and hands a flat yellow envelope to me.
I can tell the envelope has never been opened; the edges are sharp and it smells like an office supply store.
He asks if I’d like to grab some coffee.
Or something.
The closest place is Java and Jazz, and I can hear the music.
Or maybe I only think I do, but I tell him no.
I’m not going to let him take me on any more fifteen-minute rides.
I flip the envelope in my hands, open the shining flap. My fingertip tacks across the adhesive. I can smell the glue, and it seems to say, Put me in your mouth.
Inside, there are papers. Stacked. Some are wrinkled.
“He had this remote file server,” Scott says. “Do you know what that is?”
He thinks I am stupid.
Fuck you.
“It took a while to track it down. He was very organized. Different folders for every one of … you kids. All kinds of information. Medical stuff—weight, blood type, blood pressure, temperature.” The cop watches me. My face.
The top sheet is a color scan of my driver’s license.
Jack is smiling. His hair is down in one eye. A sixteen-year-old kid who nothing ever happened to.
The next two are color photos of me.
Jack is lying on that bed.
The top picture shows the kid from the chest up. No shirt.
The eyes are closed, but you can see glistening slits where they aren’t completely shut. His mouth is open. He looks like a dead kid.
The picture on the next page is taken from the foot of the bed. The kid is lying there on his back, one arm flopped out, dangling over the sides of the mattress, the other hand resting on his belly. And one of Jack’s feet is bent up inside his opposite knee, making a figure 4. Passed out. This was before Freddie put that cable around the kid’s ankle. There is nothing tying Jack down. He just looks dead.
It looks like a cheap amateur porn shot, maybe taken with a cell phone or a twenty-dollar webcam. Jack’s lying there naked.
I look at the cop, wonder if he’s getting some kind of kick watching me.
In that moment, everything is there. I can smell the inside of that room, the cigarettes Freddie smoked. I can feel the precise points on my skin where he pressed the stun gun, the cutting of the wire around my ankle, where his hands touched me, where the needle went into my thigh on that last night. And I remember how the shit he injected me with made my mouth dry and left a taste like nail polish.
It’s funny how you remember stuff sometimes.
The last page has two pictures on it. They are small, cropped, and blurry.
Two more dead-looking kids.
One of them is Ben Miller. The other is Griffin Goodrich.
I turn the page over. I can’t look at it.
This can’t be real.
This isn’t Glenbrook.
It isn’t them.
My mouth is dry; I try to swallow and I slide the papers back inside the envelope.
Bye, Jack.
* * *
“You know those kids?”
“Fuck you. Fuck this shit. It isn’t happening.”
I started hyperventilating. It felt like the entire Cadillac was inside some kind of trash compactor, closing in, pressing down on me. I tried grabbing for the handle of the door. I missed, closed my hand on empty air, like when I felt Griffin’s arm vanish in my grip.
I don’t know how long we sat there. It was so quiet, and I found myself staring at the glint of light reflected on the dashboard. Fake wood. This wasn’t real. That’s all there was to it.
I needed to get out of here, before it sucked me in forever.
I realized he smelled like booze. When I called him, he must have been drinking.
“I think I know those kids.”
“They were from here,” the cop said. “Did he show you pictures of them or something? Films?”
“I don’t know. I know them. Ben and Griffin.”
“Okay.”
“Where are they?”
Scott shrugged, like I shouldn’t have to ask these things. And he delivered his answer like a tired fry cook handing over some change and a greasy sack of fast food.
“They were found inside a barrel in Freddie Horvath’s garage. Their bodies were there for maybe four months.”
That’s a lie.
This can’t be real.
“You want to come with me, to my office?”
“Not tonight.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? You’re a cop and you’re just going to say ‘okay’? Okay, Jack. Everything’s fine with me. Okay, Jack, these kids you know are inside a fucking can. Okay, Jack, see you tomorrow. Fuck you, Jack.”
Jack doesn’t cry.
I could tell he was waiting, listening to my breathing so he’d know when the piece of shit kid was calmed down.
“What am I going to do? Arrest you?”
“Maybe.”
“For what?”
“How many other kids?”
“You were number eight, as far as we can tell. You three from Glenbrook. The others were back in Kansas City.”
“Okay.”
“How’d he get you?”
“I fucked up. My mistake.”
I started to open the door. The interior lights came on. Outside the Cadillac, everything was black.
Scott said, “Two things, Jack.”
I sat there with one foot dangling out the door. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to stand, anyway.
He said, “The date on the files, your pictures, was June twelfth. Not too long ago. They found the guy’s body on Nacimiento Road, I don’t know, three, four days after that.”
I swallowed.