Grendels . . . monsters outside our window, that I could handle. They only watched so far. The police—the state—the government, there was nothing I’d learned in a dojo that would make the fear of them any less.
“Nik, it’s a good idea. It is. We can wait until he’s gone, break in through one of the windows, drag a body out on the front sidewalk and let someone else call the cops on him. Genius.”
I sighed and reached across the table to wipe the mayonnaise/mustard mustache off his upper lip. “Cops . . . policemen, I mean . . . aren’t good.” I backtracked. “They are good, but . . .”
Cal gave me the look again. I’d gotten it so often in the past few days I was going to start assuming anything that came out of my mouth was so utterly ignorant that it made Cal’s very brain cells melt under the vast stupidity of it all. And what I’d been about to say was stupid. He knew as much as I did how badly things could go if the police looked too closely at us.
I held up both hands. “Sorry. I underestimated your enormous brain. You can have an extra cookie for dessert.”
Mollified, Cal started wiping mustard off his plate, licking it off his finger, and rocking back and forth on the back two legs of his chair. Multitalented, that was my brother. “We should move. Now. You have that nut job’s money. Sophia can find us when she comes back.” He shrugged. “Or not.”
I wished “or not,” but she’d already made it clear to us both if I left with Cal she would find us and she would involve social services, do jail time, whatever it took. Cal was an investment. If I wanted him, I was going to have to pay for him. Cal knew, he remembered, but memories were the twilight of lost hopes. In the bright of the day, they could be banished . . . for a while.
“How about this: we’ll go to the library”—because we weren’t going to have a computer of our own unless we stole it—“and research the victims. We’ll see if there’s a pattern to where they’ve been taken.” There. That had to satisfy him. It made it clear I wasn’t dismissing him and it kept him from breaking into our neighbor’s house. This was all Kithser’s fault. If he hadn’t disappeared, Cal would’ve stayed on his live and let live as long as the serial killer’s not killing you personally policy. But Kithser was too close. If he had only run off with his drug dealing loser friends, I’d be tempted to kill him myself for putting me in this situation.
“Boring.” His chair finally tipped too far and began to topple backward. I’d been waiting for it. I hooked an ankle around one wooden leg and caught it. After fifty plus times it was pure instinct now. Cal, who knew I wouldn’t let him fall, had never let him fall, kept talking, unfazed. “Let’s follow him.”
“Research,” I contradicted firmly. I’d disproved a hundred things in papers for school over the years with it. I could disprove a serial killer too.
“Following him would tell us for sure. You said we need to be sure.”
“I know what I said and I know what I’m saying now.” I settled his chair upright. “Research, grasshopper. Absolutely no following.”
“How did this happen?” I hissed out loud as my hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. If I’d kept the question mental, I thought the stress and humiliation of being outthought by an eleven-year-old might trigger some sort of psychotic split. I’d read some advanced psychology books. They hadn’t said that could happen, but it was an imperfect science at best. They didn’t know everything.
“I lied to Mrs. Spoonmaker about your age and you offered to get her oil changed. You were right there, Nik.” Cal was digging in the ancient glove compartment looking for candy bars or cookies in what was a habit so ingrained I didn’t remember when it started. Dogs humped legs. Cal sought sugar. Two universal laws. “How do you get straight As? You can’t remember anything.
“Cool!” He popped up with a petrified package of Ho Hos. “Besides, your research sucked. We didn’t find out anything except people at the public library are doing things in the bathroom they should do at home.”
“I told you to wait for me on the bathroom trips,” I said—a little more loudly than it needed to be said, but that good day I’d been savoring this morning was gone. Cal had driven a stake through its bright and sunny heart.
“You were glued to the computer, like, literally, superglue between your eyeballs and the screen and I had to go. So I went to the women’s just in case. Women can be perverts too. Who knew?”
That was a discussion for . . . not now. My knuckles turned whiter, if possible, under my darker skin as I tried to tail Junior’s beat-up pickup truck with a grimly dark camper, the serial killer–mobile as Cal was calling it, without being made in a giant metallic green Cadillac born long before I was. “And the research did not fail. It showed the people are disappearing from an area approximately fifteen miles in radius and no bodies have been found.”
“Yeah, you showed me the map with all the colors and miles and stuff. It was a big blob. On TV they’re a perfect circle, like a bull’s-eye, and the killer’s house is right in the center.” I heard a distinct crunch as he bit into a Ho Ho, the kind of crunch icing and cake aren’t supposed to make.
“Now you see why I tell you to stop watching so much TV.” I sighed and wove around a BMW. I’d learned to drive when I was twelve. It was a useful skill for picking up passed-out mothers at bars before the police came sniffing around. “But”—as much as I hated to admit it and I honestly did—“Junior’s house is inside ‘the blob.’ The outer part of it, but it’s there.” But so were a lot of very bad people, cheap and unsafe, how we always lived. “Which is why I let you talk me into following him.” And at night, making this area more risky if possible.
Along the rooftops of the cinder block–style apartment buildings I saw a Grendel racing along, our pale shadow. I wondered if it was curious. I wondered for the thousandth time why they watched. And I thought, with the denial of all that is wrong in the world, that it might be better not knowing.
I looked away and back at the street. “Now finish cracking your teeth on what used to be food and let me concentrate.” Then because I felt bad about letting Cal lie to Mrs. Spoonmaker, I muttered under my breath, “I think I’ll get her car washed too.”
Cal knew the signs of my guilt. In knowing me there wasn’t much Cal didn’t pick up on instantly. “Isn’t lying to borrow her car better than letting a murderer kill somebody?”
He wasn’t wrong. Cal had grasped the gray shades of morality before he grasped potty training. I was different. But I was learning. Too late and too slow, but I’d get there.
“Look! He stopped.” Cal bounced in the seat as if we were two rogue cops about to make a bust. I was throwing out the TV when we got home. In the trash. I rolled, yes, rolled down the window for a better look. The car’s windows were permanently cloudy from age. Cal followed my action because when it came to things not involving work that’s what Cal and most little brothers did. “He’s picking up a whore.”
I reached over and flicked his ear lightly. “Not a good word.” But I was also watching Junior talking out the window to a woman selling it for what looked like a harsh drug habit. Even in the night and where only one out of three streetlights worked, that was easy to see. She had a long black Goth wig, short leather dress with fishnet hose and skin yellow with hepatitis.