For a full minute, no one moved in the dump. The only sound was the dry, snapping sound of the wind flipping a few pages of an open discarded encyclopedia near Elliot.
Jerm’s eyes found Kevin’s. Kevin saw something spark, saw the blackhead-riddled eyebrows rise. Jerm let his jaw fall open and tilted his head, as if awe had overtaken him and he was about to witness something divine. He pushed the barrel firmly into the center of Kevin’s forehead.
Kevin tried to say, “Please,” but it came out as a breath, soundless.
Jerm didn’t so much as move his arm as pivot his entire upper body, sliding the barrel off Kevin’s forehead. His gaze settled on the TV beyond Kevin, and he squeezed the trigger.
The blast ruptured Kevin’s left eardrum. The pain was sudden and excruciating.
The TV screen exploded.
“Fucking that’s right!” Jerm hollered in delight. He turned back to his buddies, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “You see that?”
Kevin slapped his left hand to his ear and was dimly aware of blood pooling around his palm and trickling down his wrist. He might have cried out but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t think he could hear anything. He tripped and fell over Elliot’s bike.
Jerm squeezed off two more shots without warning, blowing the shit out of the TV. He wandered down to the fatally wounded television, surveyed the destruction for a moment, then, as if he hadn’t caused enough damage, kicked the shattered remains of the screen.
Kevin tried not to cry out. He got up and staggered away, clamping his hand to his left ear. The pain blasted through his brain and ricocheted throughout his body, always ending back up in the side of his head. His entire universe had shrunken to the flames of agony burning brightly in his left ear. It was so bad he had forgotten completely about Elliot, about the gun, about Jerm and the assholes. He moved his jaw and almost screamed at the fresh, oozing anguish.
When Jerm had finished kicking out all the glass in the TV set, he looked back at Kevin. “Fuck him, let’s go.” They climbed back up the hill to their bikes. Jerm still carried the Smith & Wesson revolver. He studied the gun for a moment, popped the cylinder out, and made a big deal out of plucking out the spent shells and counting the three live rounds left.
He shouted down at Kevin and Elliot, “See you pussies at school.” It seemed more for Elliot’s benefit, since Kevin was hunched over, holding his head. Elliot’s eyes never left Jerm.
Jerm felt a silly grin climb across his face and couldn’t wipe it off. He stuck the handgun in his shorts and they pedaled off through the heat and cornfields.
The cursor blinked at Sandy. Halfway through her report, right when she’d gotten to the discharge of multiple weapons, her fingers froze over the keys and she glared at the screen as the flat slash of black pixels flashed like an accusatory wink. Sure, it seemed to signal, we all know what happened, and if you don’t want to say anything, it’s okay. I won’t say anything, either.
Sandy pushed back from her desk and went looking for a cup of halfway warm coffee. The police station was quiet. There was a stack of new missing person reports, but they were all outside the town limits, out beyond the Einhorn place, and therefore in Sheriff Hoyt’s jurisdiction. Nobody was in any of the three cells. Hendricks was back out on Highway 67, watching for speeders and drunks. Liz was in the call center, doing her nails.
Sandy gave the coffeepot an exploratory swirl, tentatively touching the glass. Room temperature at best. She poured it in the sink and pulled out the container of ground coffee to start a new pot.
If she wrote down what she had heard, implying that the Manchester County deputies had shot and killed an unarmed man, Sheriff Hoyt and the union would make sure that she never worked again in law enforcement. She’d be lucky to find work as a security guard in some second-rate mall. Instead, if she gave his version of events, essentially saying that the deputies had fired out of self-defense, then she didn’t know if she could live with herself.
As the water hissed and bubbled, Sandy thought of Kevin. What would help him the most? She wanted to go out and ask Liz for advice.
Liz had six kids and fourteen grandchildren. She’d married a cheerful empty-headed bartender who had blown an artery in his head in the middle of mixing a highball and dropped dead, right there behind the bar, six years ago. Liz might have been pushing sixty, with a bald patch on the crown of her head bigger than the mirrors in all the compact cases she kept in her desk, but she had the brightest, most outrageous fingernails in Manchester County. Today Liz was concentrating on gluing tiny little stars across her red, white, and blue nails, getting into the patriotic spirit for the big Fourth of July celebration. Each nail was at least two inches long.
Sandy knew the answer even without asking the question out loud. Liz would say, “Honey, you want to know what I would do for my kids? You try to tell me what I wouldn’t do. Whatever you say, you’d be wrong.”
CHAPTER 12
They both thought it was a good idea to go to Elliot’s house first.
For one thing, Elliot’s parents were both at work and the house was empty. Elliot was supposed to be at the town library. That’s where they were headed next, so they could claim that they’d been there all afternoon.
The second thing, and maybe the most important, was that neither of Elliot’s parents were cops.
Elliot led Kevin to the upstairs master bedroom. Kevin was impressed. He’d never been in that bedroom before. Elliot had made it clear it was off-limits. He was also intrigued with how neat and orderly everything was; the bed was made, no dirty clothes on the floor. It wasn’t like that at his house. Housekeeping wasn’t high on Sandy’s list of priorities.
He followed Elliot into the bathroom. The light passing through the frosted glass window made everything blue and cold. Elliot found a bottle of ibuprofen and took a few minutes to read the label. “Six to eight hours. Okay.” He shook out eight pills, gave two to Kevin, and wrapped the other six in toilet paper. “For later,” he explained.
Kevin winced when he swallowed the two pills, but it didn’t hurt as bad as back at the dump.
Elliot’s eyes went wide and still behind his glasses. “I’ve never seen anybody take drugs before.”
They soaked a washcloth in hot water and wiped the trickle of dried blood away from Kevin’s ear. After that they looked over themselves in the mirror, trying to gauge if anyone else would be able to see the terror. Kevin felt that his mom would sense the screaming panic just behind his eyes, but at least the blood was gone. If he kept his eyes down, and didn’t talk much, he might be able to escape to his room before she suspected anything.
Elliot asked the question that had been chasing them since the dump, like a slow but inevitable freight train. “What are you going to do?”
Kevin stared at himself and tentatively touched his left earlobe. “I don’t know.”
Elliot buried the washcloth in the dirty laundry bin and locked the door behind them. They retrieved their bikes and rode off, making plans to meet tomorrow at the library after school if things didn’t fall apart in the meantime.
Kevin rode home. He had to give Mrs. Kobritz some story, something boring so she wouldn’t mention it to his mom. When he got there though, the house was locked. Mrs. Kobritz usually parked her little Toyota at the curb. The space was empty. The house was silent when he let himself in. Perfect. He wasn’t expecting it, and it had never happened before, but he wasn’t going to complain.
He surprised himself and found that he was starving. He threw a few turkey corn dogs in the microwave and took them up to his room in the attic. After leaving his math homework on the bed, he settled in front of his giant, ancient television. The thing was so old and heavy it had taken both him and his mom to carry it up to his room. He dunked his corndog in ketchup and powered up the used game system he’d gotten for Christmas last year.