بخش 03 - فصل 50

50

Pete keeps to the shade of the trees, just as Morris and Tina did, although the boys who were playing basketball have gone home to dinner and left the court deserted except for a few crows scavenging spilled potato chips. He sees a small car nestled in the loading dock. Hidden there, actually, and the vanity license plate is enough to cause any doubts Pete might have had to disappear. Red Lips is here, all right, and he can’t have taken Tina in by the front. That door faces the street, which is apt to be fairly busy at this time of day, and besides, he has no key.

Pete passes the car, and at the corner of the building, he drops to his knees and peers around. One of the basement windows is open. The grass and weeds that were growing in front of it have been beaten down. He hears a man’s voice. They’re down there, all right. So are the notebooks. The only question is whether or not Red Lips has found them yet.

Pete withdraws and leans against the sunwarmed brick, wondering what to do next. Think, he tells himself. You got Tina into this and you need to get her out of it, so think, goddam you!

Only he can’t. His mind is full of white noise.

In one of his few interviews, the ever-irritable John Rothstein expressed his disgust with the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. Story ideas came from nowhere, he proclaimed. They arrived without the polluting influence of the author’s intellect. The idea that comes to Pete now also seems to arrive from nowhere. It’s both horrible and horribly attractive. It won’t work if Red Lips has already discovered the notebooks, but if that is the case, nothing will work.

Pete gets up and circles the big brick cube the other way, once more passing the green car with its tattletale license plate. He stops at the front right corner of the abandoned brick box, looking at the going-home traffic on Birch Street. It’s like peering through a window and into a different world, one where things are normal. He takes a quick inventory: cell phone, cigarette lighter, can of lighter fluid. The can was in the bottom desk drawer with his father’s Zippo. The can is only half full, based on the slosh when he shakes it, but half full will be more than enough.

He goes around the corner, now in full view of Birch Street, trying to walk normally and hoping that no one – Mr Evans, his old Little League coach, for instance – will hail him.

No one does. This time he knows which of the two keys to use, and this time it turns easily in the lock. He opens the door slowly, steps into the foyer, and eases the door closed. It’s musty and brutally hot in here. For Tina’s sake, he hopes it’s cooler in the basement. How scared she must be, he thinks.

If she’s still alive to feel anything, an evil voice whispers back. Red Lips could have been standing over her dead body and talking to himself. He’s crazy, and that’s what crazy people do.

On Pete’s left, a flight of stairs leads up to the second floor, which consists of a single large space running the length of the building. The official name was The North Side Community Room, but the kids had a different name for it, one Red Lips probably remembers.

As Pete sits on the stairs to take off his shoes (he can’t be heard clacking and echoing across the floor), he thinks again, I got her into this, it’s my job to get her out. Nobody else’s.

He calls his sister’s cell. From below him, muffled but unmistakable, he hears Tina’s Snow Patrol ringtone.

Red Lips answers immediately. ‘Hello, Peter.’ He sounds calmer now. In control. That could be good or bad for his plan. Pete can’t tell which. ‘Have you got the notebooks?’

‘Yes. Is my sister okay?’

‘She’s fine. Where are you?’

‘That’s pretty funny,’ Pete says … and when you think about it, it actually is. ‘Jimmy Gold would like it, I bet.’

‘I’m in no mood for cryptic humor. Let us do our business and be done with each other, shall we? Where are you?’

‘Do you remember the Saturday Movie Palace?’

‘What are you—’

Red Lips stops. Thinks.

‘Are you talking about the Community Room, where they used to show all those corny …’ He pauses again as the penny drops. ‘You’re here?’

‘Yes. And you’re in the basement. I saw the car out back. You were maybe ninety feet from the notebooks all along.’ Even closer than that, Pete thinks. ‘Come and get them.’

He ends the call before Red Lips can try to set the terms more to his liking. Pete runs for the kitchen on tiptoe, shoes in hand. He has to get out of sight before Red Lips can climb the stairs from the basement. If he does that, all may be well. If he doesn’t, he and his sister will probably die together.

From downstairs, louder than her ringtone – much louder – he hears Tina cry out in pain.

Still alive, Pete thinks, and then, The bastard hurt her. Only that’s not the truth.

I did it. This is all my fault. Mine, mine, mine.