IQ

Joe Ide IQ

© 2016

For Mom, Dad, Bea, and Henry

Saving you is the only thing that will bring me peace for all the wrong I have done.

That is my truth.

– Jillian Peery, TigerLily

Prologue

Boyd parked his truck across the street from the school and waited for the bell to ring. It was ninety-plus degrees outside, the air in the cab as still and stifling as a closed tomb. Boyd’s fishing cap was dark with sweat; streams of it trickling down his face, getting in his eyes, and making his sunburn sting. To get some relief, he flapped the collar of his T-shirt and got a cloud of armpit steam so foul it made him laugh.

Boyd had spent hours in the bathtub, half submerged in the gray, lukewarm water, seeing himself do it one way and then another. Jesus Christ, that’s so STUPID, think of something else, Boyd, come on, come ONNN, Jesus Christ, don’t be so STUPID.

When he broke a front tooth he almost called the whole thing off. It happened in the kitchen while he was trying to make chloroform. You couldn’t buy the stuff unless you were a doctor or a laboratory but he’d found a recipe online: acetone and swimming pool chemicals. Putting it together was easy enough but he inhaled too much vapor and passed out, smashing his tooth on the sink as he slid to the floor.

Later, when he stopped being dizzy, he ate some Chunky Monkey to soothe his bloody gums and wondered what he’d do if the girl wasn’t scared or laughed at him or thought it was a joke. He thought about going to the dentist but the need was a giant tapeworm twisting in his gut, frustrated, hungry, and blind. He was halfway through his second pint of Chunky when he started to get angry. So what if he was missing a tooth? He was already weird-looking. His mouth was a wavy line on his big round face, his other teeth jagged and coffee-stained, his black button eyes set too far apart. The rest of him was shaped like an egg.

When he was eleven years old a wild girl named Yolanda called him Humpty Fucking Dumpty while she and her friends from the soccer team kicked him with their cleats until his legs were covered with green and purple bruises. Yolanda had warned him not to say hellooo, Yolanda but he did it anyway. It was sort of a trademark, something he did even though he knew it annoyed people. Hellooo, Ernesto. Hellooo, Laquisha. Hellooo, Mr. Bleakerman.

Boyd still annoyed people. On league night he’d stand at the line staring at the pins like he was trying to remember what they were while the whole team groaned and said Boyd, Nick telling him to hurry up, asshole. When he finally rolled the ball, he held on to it too long so it flew up in the air and bounced down the lane, dropping into the gutter or taking out the six pin. Then he’d yell FUUUCK and stomp back to his seat with his fists clenched at his side, muttering Come on, Boyd, COME ONNN like all he had to do was bear down, Nick saying What were you aiming at, numb nuts, the fucking sky? That always got a laugh.

The bell rang. Boyd played the bongos on the steering wheel and watched the kids pour out of the building, pulling on their backpacks, poking at their phones, messing with each other, screeching like monkeys. Akeem! Over here, dude! Oh my God, that’s like crazy! Text me, okay? Don’t forget! The energy coming off them was thrilling at first but then it made him angry and sad. None of the girls fit the bill. They were too old or too big or too grown-up looking. Come on, come ONNN, there’s got to be SOMEBODY. And then he saw her. Pretty and skinny, her hair in a long braid that went down below her waist, her laugh like the wind chime on his grandmother’s front porch, the boys punching each other to get her attention.

Somebody called her. “Carmela! Carmela! We’re going now, okay?”

Her name was Carmela.

Boyd went back to his shitty apartment and took a bath. He floated in the water like a corpse and imagined the panic in her eyes when she woke up in the dark and felt the duct tape stretched over her mouth and heard his hot breath whistling through the space where his tooth used to be and saw the black button eyes, vicious and glittering.

Hellooo, Carmela.

CHAPTER ONE Unlicensed and Underground

July 2013

Isaiah’s crib looked like every other house on the block except the lawn was cut even, the paint was fresh, and the entrance was a little unusual. The security screen was made from the same heavy-duty mesh they used to cage in crackheads and bank robbers at the Long Beach police station. The front door was covered with a thin walnut veneer but underneath was a twenty-gauge steel core set in a cold steel frame with a pick-proof, bump-proof, drill-proof Medeco Double Cylinder High Security Maxum Deadbolt. You’d need some serious power tools to get past all that and even if you did there was no telling what you’d be into. Word was, the place was booby-trapped. A cherry eight-year-old Audi S4 was parked in the driveway. It was a small, plain car in dark gray with a big V8 and sports suspension. The neighborhood kids were always yelling at Isaiah to put some rims on that whip.

Isaiah was in the living room, reading emails off his MacBook and drinking his second espresso, when he heard the car alarm go off. He snatched the collapsible baton off the coffee table, went to the front door, and opened it. Deronda was leaning her world-class badonk against the hood, smothering a headlight and part of the grill. She wasn’t quite a Big Girl but damn close in her boy shorts and pink tube top two sizes too small. She was pretending to sulk, sighing and sighing again while she frowned at the sparkly things on her ice-blue nails. Isaiah chirped off the alarm, one hand shading his eyes from the afternoon glare.

“No, I didn’t forget your number,” he said, “and I wasn’t going to call you.”

“Ever?” Deronda said.

“You’re looking for a baby daddy and you know that’s not me.”

“You don’t know what I’m looking for and even if you did it wouldn’t be you.” Except she was shopping around for somebody who could pay a few bills, and Isaiah would do just fine. Yeah, okay, he did make her uneasy, he made everybody uneasy, checking you out like he knew you were fronting and wanting to know why. He looked okay, not ugly, but you’d hardly notice him at a club or a party. Six feet tall, rail thin, no chain, no studs in his ears, a watch the color of an aluminum pan, and if he was inked up it was nowhere she could see. The last time she’d run into him he was wearing what he wore now: a light-blue, short-sleeve shirt, jeans, and Timberlands. She liked his eyes. They were almond shaped and had long lashes like a girl’s. “You not gonna invite me in?” she said. “I walked all the way over here from my mama’s house.”

“Stop lying,” he said. “Wherever you came from you didn’t walk.”

“How do you know?”

“Your mama lives on the other side of Magnolia. Are you telling me you walked seven miles in the heat of the day in flip-flops with all those bunions growing out of your feet? Teesha dropped you off.”

“You think you know so much. Could have been anybody dropped me off.”

“Your mama’s at work, Nona’s at work, Ira still has that cast on his leg, and DeShawn lost his license behind that DUI. I saw his car in the impound yard, the white Nissan with the front stoved in. There’s nobody left in your world but Teesha.”

“Just because Ira got a cast on his leg don’t mean he can’t drive.”

Isaiah leaned against the doorway. “I thought you said you walked.”