“What case?”
“Mr. Caldwell. He’s a drug dealer, right?”
Detective Waters glanced at Myron, then back at me. “That isn’t your concern.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
“On what charge?”
I stared at him. “I just told you. The stuff in that gym bag-”
“What about it?”
“It came from his house.”
“Do you have any proof? How are we going to prove any of that stuff belonged to Henry Caldwell? Maybe if you’d left it there and told us about it, maybe something could have been done. But now?”
He shook his head and walked out the door.
By the time Ema and I met up in the hospital waiting room, the sun was up. Uncle Myron and Angelica Wyatt had wanted to take us home, but we were not about to abandon Spoon. We sat in the waiting room. Ema and I were in one corner. Angelica Wyatt, decked out in sunglasses and a head scarf for disguise, and Myron kept their distance.
“Wow,” Ema said to me.
“Yeah.”
Her eyes were tinged with red from tears and exhaustion. I imagined that I looked the same.
“He’s going to be fine,” I said.
“He better be,” Ema said, “or I’m going to kill him.”
A few minutes later, I saw a thin black woman wander into the waiting room zombielike, looking worse than we ever could. It was Spoon’s mother. We had never met, but I had seen her hug her son when I dropped him at his house. The devastation was written all over her face. Her eyes had that thousand-yard stare you sometimes see in war documentaries.
I looked at Ema. Ema took a deep breath and nodded. We rose together and started toward Spoon’s mother. It seemed to take forever to reach her, like the more we walked, the farther she moved away from us.
When we finally arrived in front of her, Mrs. Spindel had her head down. We didn’t know what to say, so we just stood there, waiting. A few seconds later, she looked up at me and when she saw who it was, a shadow fell across her face.
“You’re Mickey,” she said. “And you’re Ema.”
We both nodded.
“What are you doing here?”
“We just wanted to know how Spoon-I mean, Arthur-is doing.”
She looked at Ema and then back to me. “He’s… he’s not good.”
It was like my heart was on the top of a long staircase and someone shoved it off.
“He’s out of surgery, but the doctors… they don’t know.”
“Is there anything…?” I tried, but I couldn’t finish. Tears started brimming in my eyes.
Spoon’s mom said, “I don’t understand why you were all at the school so late.”
“It was my fault,” I said through the tears.
Ema was about to add something, but I gave her arm a nudge.
I saw the shadow cross Mrs. Spindel’s face again and then she said something I didn’t expect but completely deserved. “Oh, I know it’s your fault.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, her words landing like punches.
“I never heard of you a week ago. Now you’re all Arthur talks about. He wanted everyone to start calling him Spoon. He said his new friend gave him that nickname.”
My heart crashed to the bottom step, and now a foot with a heavy boot stomped on it.
“You were Arthur’s friend,” she went on. “Maybe the first real one since the fourth grade. You probably don’t get how much you meant to my son. He looked up to you. He worshipped you-and how did you repay him? You used him. You used him to break into some stupid locker and now look.” She turned away in disgust. “I hope whatever was in there was worth it to you.”
I opened my mouth, closed it, tried again. But what could I say?
“I think,” Mrs. Spindel said, “that you should both leave.”
“No.”
I turned toward the voice and recognized Mr. Spindel, Spoon’s father.
She looked up at her husband and waited.
“Arthur just woke up,” Mr. Spindel said, turning and meeting my eyes. “And he’s insisting that he speak to Mickey.”
CHAPTER 40
There were tubes and machines and beeping noises. There were curtains and antiseptic smells and monitors with green lights. I saw none of it. All I saw as I entered the room was my friend lying in the middle of all this horrible gadgetry.
Spoon looked so small in that bed. He looked small and as fragile as an injured bird.
Mrs. Spindel’s voice-Oh, I know it’s your fault-still echoed in my ears.
The doctor, a tall woman with her hair pulled back, put a hand on my shoulder. “Normally I would never allow it, but he’s so agitated. I need you to make this short and keep him calm.”
I nodded and slowly walked toward his bed. My legs felt rubbery. I stopped at one point because the tears were starting to come. I turned around, bit down hard on my lip, and gained enough composure. It wouldn’t help Spoon if he saw me hysterical. To keep him calm, I knew that I needed to be calm.
When I got to the bed, I wanted to pick him up and take him home and make it somehow yesterday. It was all so wrong, my friend lying here in this hospital.
“Mickey?”
Spoon seemed suddenly to be straining to move. He looked distressed. I bent down low, close to him. “I’m right here.”
He lifted his hand and I took it in mine. He was struggling to talk.
“Shh,” I said. “Just get better, okay?”
He shook his head weakly. I bent my ear to be closer to his mouth. It took him a few seconds but eventually he said, “Rachel is still in danger.”
“No, Spoon. You saved us all. It’s over.”
Spoon’s face tightened. “No, it isn’t. You can’t sit here doing nothing. You have to save her. You can’t stop until we find the truth.”
“Calm down, okay? Those two guys shot her. They’re in jail.”
I saw a tear escape his eye. “They didn’t do it.”
“Of course they did.”
“No, listen to me. Get out of here and help her. Promise me.”
Spoon was getting more agitated. The doctor rushed over and said to me, “I think that’s enough. You should go wait in the other room.”
She started to add something into his intravenous tube, a sedative, I guessed. I tried to let go of Spoon’s hand, but his grip grew tighter.
“It’s going to be okay, Spoon.”
Nurses came to the bedside too. They tried to hold him down and pull me away.
“She was shot in her house,” Spoon managed to say.
“I know, Spoon. It’s okay. Calm down.”
But he suddenly had new strength in his arm. He pulled me close, desperate. “You said they asked you which house was Rachel’s. Remember? When you saw them that first time on the street?”
“Right, so?”
The doctor finished injecting the medication. The effect was immediate. Spoon’s grip grew slack. I was about to pull away but now-
That the Caldwell house?
– Scarface’s voice came back to me. Spoon looked up at me and managed to ask me the same question I was suddenly asking myself:
“So if those two guys had already been at the house, why would they ask you where it was?”
CHAPTER 41
Spoon was right.
I was hustled out of the room. Mr. and Mrs. Spindel were in the corridor. They rushed past me into the room. It took a few minutes, but Spoon was stable again. I thought I heard one of the nurses say something about his legs not moving, but I immediately shut that out. I couldn’t deal with that. Not now.
When I got back to the waiting room, I grabbed Ema and pulled her to the side. We found a quiet corner away from the television.
“What happened?” Ema asked. “Is he okay?”
I quickly explained about what Spoon had said-if Sunglasses and Scarface had already been at Rachel’s house when they killed her mother, why would they ask me which house it was?
“Maybe they were just, I don’t know, playing with you,” Ema said.
I frowned. “Playing with me?”