She pressed down.
“Hello?”
Betsy said, “I just saw Adam.”
CARSON’S broken nose was starting to ache. He watched Rosemary McDevitt put down the phone.
Club Jaguar was so quiet now. Rosemary had closed it down, sending everyone home after the near-fight with Baye and his crewcut buddy. They were the only two still here.
She was gorgeous, no question, a total hottie, but right now her usual tough exterior looked like it might crumble. She wrapped her arms around herself.
Carson sat across from her. He tried to sneer, but it made his nose hurt.
“That was Adam’s old man?”
“Yes.”
“We need to get rid of both of them.”
She shook her head.
“What?”
“What you need to do,” she said, “is let me handle it.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
Rosemary said nothing.
“The people we work for-”
“We don’t work for anybody,” she interrupted.
“Fine, put it however you want. Our partners. Our distributors. Whatever.”
She closed her eyes.
“These are bad people.”
“Nobody can prove anything.”
“Like hell they can’t.”
“Just let me handle it, okay?”
“He’s coming here?”
“Yes. I’m going to talk to him. I know what I’m doing. You should just leave.”
“So you can be alone with him?”
Rosemary shook her head. “Not like that.”
“Then like what?”
“I can work this out. I can get him to see reason. Just let me take care of it.”
ALONE on this hill, Adam could still hear Spencer’s voice:
“I’m so sorry…”
Adam closed his eyes. Those voice messages. He had kept them on his phone, had listened to them every day, felt the pain rip through him anew.
“Adam, please pick up…”
“Forgive me, okay? Just say you forgive me…”
They still came to him every night, especially the last one, Spen- cer’s voice already slurred, already hurtling toward death:
“This isn’t on you, Adam. Okay, man. Just try to understand. It’s not on anyone. It’s just too hard. It’s always been too hard…”
Adam waited on the old hill by the middle school for DJ Huff. DJ’s father, a police captain who grew up in this town, said that kids used to get high up here after school. The tough kids hung out here. The others would rather walk the extra half mile to avoid it.
He looked out. In the distance he could see the soccer field. Adam had played there in some league when he was eight, but soccer was never for him. He liked the ice. He liked the cold and the glide of the skate. He liked putting on all those pads and that mask and the focus it took to guard the goal. You were the man then. If you were good enough, if you were perfect, your team could not lose. Most kids hated that pressure. Adam thrived on it.
“Forgive me, okay?…”
No, Adam thought now, youhave to forgive me.
Spencer had always been volatile, with swooping highs and earth-crushing lows. He talked about running away, about starting a business, and mostly about dying and ending the pain. All kids do, to some degree. Adam had even started making a suicide pact with Spencer last year. But for him it was talk.
He should have seen that Spencer would do it.
“Forgive me…”
Would it have made a difference? That night, yeah, it would have. His friend would have lived another day. And then another. And then who knows?
“Adam?”
He turned to the voice. It was DJ Huff.
DJ said, “You okay?”
“No thanks to you.”
“I didn’t know that would happen. I just saw your dad following me and called Carson.”
“And ran.”
“I didn’t know they’d go after him.”
“What did you think would happen, DJ?”
He shrugged, and Adam could see it. The red in his eyes. The thin coat of sweat. The way DJ’s body teetered.
“You’re high,” Adam said.
“So? I don’t get you, man. How could you tell your father?”
“I didn’t.”
Adam had planned it all out for that night. He had even gone to the spy store in the city. He thought that he’d need a wire like you saw on TV, but they gave him what looked like an ordinary pen that would record audio and a belt buckle that worked as a video camera. He would get it all there and then bring it to the police-not the local police because DJ’s dad worked there-and let the pieces fall where they would. He was taking the risk, but he had no choice.
He was drowning.
He was sinking and he could feel it and he knew that if he didn’t rescue himself, he would end up like Spencer. So he planned and was ready for last night.
And then his father insisted that he had to go to that Rangers game.
He knew that he couldn’t do that. Maybe he could postpone his plan a bit, but if he didn’t show up that night, Rosemary and Carson and the rest of them would wonder. They already knew that he was on the fence. They’d already forced him with the blackmail threat. So he had sneaked out and gone to Club Jaguar.
When his father showed up, his plan all went to hell.
The knife wound on his arm stung. It would probably require stitches, might even get infected. He had tried to clean it out. The pain had nearly made him pass out. But it would do for now. Until he could put this right again.
“Carson and the guys think you were setting us up,” DJ said.
“I wasn’t,” Adam lied.
“Your dad showed up at my house too.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. An hour before he got to the Bronx maybe. My dad saw him sitting in a car across the street.”
Adam wanted to think about that, but there was no time.
“We need to put an end to this, DJ.”
“Look, I talked to my old man. He’s working on it for us. He’s a cop. He gets this stuff.”
“Spencer is dead.”
“That’s not on us.”
“Yeah, DJ, it is.”
“Spencer was messed up. He did it himself.”
“We let him die.” Adam looked at his right hand. He made a fist. That had been Spencer’s final touch from another human being. His best friend’s fist. “I hit him.”
“Whatever, man. You want to feel guilty about it, that’s on you. You can’t take the rest of us down for that.”
“It isn’t about guilt. They tried to kill my father. Hell, they tried to kill me.”
DJ shook his head. “You don’t get it.”
“What?”
“We turn ourselves in, we’re done. We’ll probably end up in jail. We can forget college. And who do you think Carson and Rosemary sold those drugs to-the Salvation Army? There are mob people involved in this, don’t you get that? Carson is scared out of his mind.”
Adam said nothing.
“My old man says if we just keep quiet, it will be fine.”
“You really believe that?”
“I introduced you to that place, but that’s all they got on me. It’s your father’s prescription pads. We can just say we want out.”
“And if they don’t let us out?”
“My dad can apply pressure. He said it’ll be okay. Worse come to worst, we just lawyer up and not say a word.”
Adam looked at him, waiting.
“This decision affects us all,” DJ said. “It’s not just your future you’re screwing with. It’s mine. And Clark is involved. Olivia too.”
“I’m not going to listen to that argument again.”
“It’s still true, Adam. Maybe they’re not as directly involved as you and me, but they’ll go down too.”
“No.”
“No what?”
He looked back at his friend. “This is how it’s worked your whole life, DJ.”