As his eyes adjusted and the first intensity wore away, he propelled his legs onward. He wound deeper into the arcade, all the way to the back where Paulie sat behind a glass case filled with a scattering of cheap toys the kids could exchange for the tickets they won on Skee-Ball or other games.
Paulie leaned back in a wooden chair, tipped on its hind legs in that dangerous way parents loved to scold their kids about. His feet were stacked on the counter’s edge, his legs crossed at the ankles, and he read from a comic book with a dark figure in a mask running from a building with a bloom of red smoke billowing in the distance.
He didn’t look up, and Max wondered if the overwhelming sights and sounds of the arcade had desensitized him. He would likely struggle with deafness as he aged, maybe even go blind.
It was a depressing thought, a very adult thought, and Max frowned only to find his reflection in the mirror above Paulie’s head frowning back at him. He suddenly looked old. Not older, but old, as if the mirror were a funhouse mirror and the trick glass had aged him thirty years.
“Hey, Paulie,” Max said.
To Max’s surprise, the man’s head shot up instantly. With unnatural grace, he pulled his feet in, tipped his chair down, and stood, flopping the comic book on the seat behind him.
“Well, if it isn’t Max Wolfenstein! You and Jake come in to duke it out? You never did best him on Death Race.”
Max laughed and his shoulders relaxed. A bit of his dreariness flitted away.
“Nice shirt,” Max grinned.
Paulie wore a Pac-Man Fever t-shirt in an orange so bright it looked hot.
“Funkadelic, right? Eight hundred tickets and you can have your very own.” He gestured at the wall where several t-shirts hung. “This is my bread and butter right here.” Paulie tapped a finger on his shirt.
“T-shirts?”
Paulie guffawed.
“Hell no! Pac-Man. Kids wait in line all day for that machine. Boggles my brain, man. Meanwhile, my favorite, Zaxxon sits lonely and cold half the day. Kids.” He shrugged.
“Paulie, were you here on yesterday when the woman across the street was murdered?”
Paulie nodded. “Yeah. That was heavy. A kid ran back here screaming. By the time I got to the front, a dozen kids had their faces pressed to the glass up there. A few ran outside, and then the whole pack followed. Damn idgits.”
Max nodded. He didn’t want to hear more about the shooting. He’d seen the video. He knew how it had gone down.
“Kim was the name of the woman who got shot. Did you know her?”
“Kim,” Paulie said triumphantly, as if he’d been searching for her name in his head. “I knew it was something like that. I kept thinking Kelly, but yeah, now I remember, Kim.”
“You met her then?”
“Yesterday. Unreal, right? She came in looking for a kid named Jordan. I pointed her to Donkey Kong. He’s the high scorer. Course he dropped out of school and just plays video games all day,” Paulie whispered from the corner of his mouth.
“Is he here right now?”
Paulie nodded. “Sure is.” Paulie pointed to a skinny kid, young but hard looking.
His messy hair hung over the collar of his cutoff black t-shirt. Thin pale arms reached toward the controls. Max saw ink drawings of barbed wire around the kid’s scrawny biceps.
Jordan barely glanced his way when Max paused beside him.
“Jordan?” Max asked.
The kid said nothing, only continued flicking the controls, eyes laser focused on the digital ape jumping from block to block.
Max wanted to interrupt him, demand the kid talk, but he saw the hard set of his jaw and the way he’d tensed when Max walked closer. He knew kids, and this one was a runner. If he pushed him, Jordan would likely disappear out the door.
Max stepped back, putting space between them. He fished for his wallet and pulled out a five dollar bill, an essential goldmine to a kid like Jordan.
“I’ve got five bucks and five minutes,” Max said. “I’m going to go snag a game of Death Race. You want the money, come find me.”
Max found the game he and Jake used to play for hours. In the years since, the other kids had bested their scores by hundreds of points. Max fed a dollar into the change machine and grabbed the quarters that popped out. He slipped one into the game, glancing behind him as Jordan approached.
“What do you want?” Jordan asked. He thrust his hand out.
Max took the five dollars from his pocket and laid it in Jordan’s, knowing the kid could grab the money and take off.
“Paulie told me you were here yesterday and Kim came in to talk to you.”
Jordan shrugged.
“Do you know who I’m talking about?”
Jordan nodded.
“Sure, the dead lady.”
Max cringed at his words.
“What did she talk to you about?”
Jordan’s eyes flicked toward a kid playing Atari.
“We can go outside if you want,” Max suggested.
Jordan recoiled and stepped back. “I’m not going anywhere with you, man.”
Max gave him an irritated look. “I’m a teacher. Kim was my friend. Believe me, I have no interest in you beyond finding out what happened to my friend.”
Jordan’s hand closed around the money, and he slipped it into his pocket. He stared at the door, seeming to come to a conclusion. “Fine, but I ain’t going to your car or any shit like that.”
Max walked to the door and pushed into the humid day.
Clouds offered a flimsy shield against the sun's intensity, but the brightness after the arcade stung Max’s eyes. He cupped a palm on his forehead and looked down at the sidewalk.
Jordan stopped near the door, as if he wanted to stay within arm’s reach. “She wanted to know about this dude in a van,” Jordan said.
“Okay.” Max spread his hands in a that’s all gesture. “What dude and what van?”
Jordan pulled a pen from his back pocket and started to draw a crisscross of barbed wire lines around his left wrist.
“Kim was livin’ with my mom at Ellie’s House.”
“The women’s shelter?”
“Yeah. My ma told her I almost got nabbed by some freaks last winter. Kim wanted to know what had happened.”
Max blinked toward the tangle of ink lines. “Can you tell me about it, please?”
“Yeah, whatever. I was just walking out by the train tracks. Doin’ nothin’, and this black van pulled up.”
“Black,” Max murmured. It was not a question.
“The door opened, and this guy threw a blanket over my head and dragged me inside.”
Max’s head slowly rolled up to Jordan’s face. The kid was unnaturally pale, but as he told the story, two matching blots of pink appeared on his cheeks as if he were embarrassed.
It stunned Max that it was embarrassment rather than terror on the kid’s face.
“I figured they were a couple of faggots trying to get me to do weird shit. My dad taught me how to fight. I started kicking and punching. I bit the guy who’d grabbed me, and then I pulled the blanket off.
“The driver started swerving all over the place, reaching back. But the guy who’d pulled me in hadn’t latched the door. It was sliding open and closed as we went down the road. I punched the guy who took me as hard as I could right in the nose. That’s how you put a man down. Right here.” The kid tapped a finger on his nose, and Max ached at the tough way he spoke, as if he’d had to defend himself other times, many times.
“I hauled ass out the door of that van. We weren’t going too fast, but I skinned my elbow pretty good and the side of my face. I didn’t stop. I was up and running before they even knew I was out. Lucky for me we were driving by the woods near the pit. I ran like hell into those trees. I knew the woods. I didn’t stop to see if they were coming. I ran a mile before I caught my breath.”