They all laugh, Jerome included.
The leader says, “You think she took off on her own or somebody grabbed her?”
“We don’t know,” Holly says. Her fingers steal to the outside of the pocket of her pants and touch the triangular shape of the earring.
“Come on,” says the boy with the spectacles and the hightop fade. “Be real. She’s good-looking but no teenager. If she just took off, you wouldn’t be looking for her.”
“Her mother is very worried,” Holly says.
That they understand.
“Thanks,” Jerome says.
“Yes,” Holly says. “Thank you.”
They start to turn away, but the redhead with the freckles—Leader Boy—stops them. “You want to know whose mother is worried? Stinky’s. She’s half-crazy and the cops don’t do anything because she’s a juicer.”
Holly turns back. “Who’s Stinky?”
November 27, 2018
It will be a cold winter in this city by the lake, lots of snow, but on this night the temperature is an unseasonable sixty-five degrees. Mist is rising from the seal-slick surface of Red Bank Avenue. The streetlights illuminate a dense cloud cover less than a hundred feet up.
Peter “Stinky” Steinman rides his Alameda deck down the empty sidewalk at quarter to seven, giving it an occasional lazy push to keep it rolling. He’s bound for the Dairy Whip. Ahead is the giant lighted sof’ serve cone, haloed in mist. He’s looking at that and doesn’t notice the van parked on the tarmac of the deserted Exxon station, between the office and the islands where the pumps used to be.
Once upon a time, long long ago (well, three years, which seems like long long ago when you’re eleven), young Steinman was known to his peers as Pete rather than Stinky. He was a boy of average intelligence who had nevertheless been gifted with a vivid imagination. On that long-ago day as he walked toward Neil Armstrong Elementary School (where he was currently enrolled in Mrs. Stark’s third grade class), he was pretending he was Jackie Chan, fighting a host of enemies in an empty warehouse with his excellent kung fu skills. He had already laid a dozen low, but more were coming at him. So absorbed was he (“Hah!” and “Yugh!” and “Hiyah!”) that he did not notice an extremely large pile of sidewalk excrement left by an extremely large Great Dane. He walked through it and entered Neil Armstrong Elementary in an odiferous state. Mrs. Stark insisted he take off his sneakers—one of them shit-stained all the way up to the Converse logo—and leave them in the hall until it was time to go home. His mother made him hose them off and then she threw them in the washing machine. They came out good as new, but by then it was too late. On that day, and forever after, Pete Steinman became Stinky Steinman.
Tonight he’s hoping to find his skateboarding pals doing ollies and kick-flips in the parking lot. Two of them are: Richie Glenman (the boy with a habit of sticking French fries up his nose, and sometimes in his ears) and Tommy Edison (redhaired, freckles, the acknowledged leader of their little gang). Two is better than none, but they are out of money, it’s getting late, and they’re just getting ready to leave.
“Come on, hang out awhile,” Stinky says.
“Can’t,” Richie says. “WWE Smackdown, dude. Can’t miss the awesomeness.”
“Homework,” Tommy says glumly. “Book report.”
The two boys leave, skateboards under their arms. Stinky does a couple of runs, tries a kick-flip and falls off his deck (glad Richie and Tommy aren’t there to see). He looks at his skinned elbow and decides to go home. If his mother is upstairs, he can watch the Smackdown himself, keeping the volume down low so he doesn’t bother her while she does her accounting shit. She works a lot since she cleaned up her act.
The Whip is open and he’d kill for a cheeseburger, but he only has fifty cents. Plus, Wicked Wanda is on duty. If he asks her for credit—or maybe a buck and a half out of the tip jar—she’ll laugh in his face.
He heads back to Red Bank Avenue and once he’s outside the misty circle cast by the light at the front of the parking lot—where Wicked Wanda can’t see him and laugh, that is—he starts dispatching enemies. Tonight, having reached a more mature age, he’s imagining himself as John Wick. It’s harder to bring down his enemies when he has his deck under one arm and only one hand with which to cut and chop, but he has great skills, supernatural skills, and so—
“Young man?”
He’s jerked out of his fantasy and sees an old guy standing just outside the security light at the edge of the parking lot (not to mention the Dairy Whip’s lone video surveillance camera). He’s hunched over a cane and wearing a cool wide-brimmed hat like in an old black-and-white spy movie.
“Did I startle you? I’m sorry, but I need some help. My wife is in a wheelchair, you see, and the battery died. We have a disability van with a ramp, but I can’t push her chair up by myself. If you could help…”
Stinky, currently in full hero mode, is perfectly willing to help. He’s been told repeatedly not to talk to strangers, but this geezer looks like he’d have trouble knocking over a row of dominoes, let alone pushing a wheelchair up a crip ramp. “Where is it?”
The old guy points diagonally across the street. Through the rising mist, Stinky can just make out the shape of a van parked on the tarmac of the old Exxon station. And beside it, a wheelchair with someone sitting in it.
Roddy and Emily take turns being the one stranded in the dead wheelchair, and it’s really Roddy’s turn, but Em’s sciatica is now so bad—mostly thanks to the damned stubborn Craslow girl—that she actually needs the chair.
“I’ll give you ten dollars to help me push her up the ramp and into our van,” the old guy says.
Stinky thinks of the burger he was just wishing for. With a ten-spot he could add fries and a chocolate shake and still have money left over. Plenty. But would Jackie Chan take money for doing a good deed?
“Nah, I’ll do it for free.”
“That is very kind.”
They walk into the misty night together, the geezer leaning on his cane. They cross the avenue. When they reach the sidewalk in front of the gas station, the old lady in the wheelchair gives Stinky a weak wave. He returns it and turns to the geezer, who has one hand in the pocket of his overcoat.
“I was just thinking.”
“Yes?”
“Maybe you could give me three bucks for pushing her up the ramp. Then I could go back to the Whip and get a Burger Royale.”
“Hungry, are you?”
“Always.”
The geezer smiles and pats Stinky’s shoulder. “I understand. Hunger must be assuaged.”
July 23, 2021
“Are you sure about the night this friend of yours disappeared?” Holly asks. Jerome has purchased the boys milkshakes and they’re sprawled on the grass in the picnic area, slurping them up.
“Pretty sure,” the redhead—Tommy Edison—says, “because his mom called my mom to see if he was staying over and he was absent from school the next day.”
“Nah,” says Richie Glenman. This is the resident clown with the disgusting habit of putting French fries up his nose. Holly has all of their names in her notes. “It was later. A week or two. I think.”
“I heard he ran away to live with his uncle in Florida,” says the boy with the hightop fade. This is Andy Vickers. “His mother’s a—” He tips an invisible bottle to his mouth and makes a glug-glug sound. “Got arrested for drunk driving once.”
The boy with the acne shakes his head. He’s Ronnie Swidrowski. He looks solemn. “He didn’t run away and he didn’t go to Florida. He got grabbed.” He lowers his voice. “I heard it was Slender Man.”