December Park(103)



After returning home from what passed as a job interview with Callibaugh, I had gone up the walk to the Gardiners’ front door and knocked loudly. The car wasn’t in the driveway, and I knew Adrian’s mom worked on weekdays, so I had no concern that she would answer. She didn’t. Neither did Adrian. He had been missing now for nearly a full week.

“If he had been taken by the Piper and was seriously missing, his mom would have called the police by now,” Peter rationalized. “I don’t care how crazy she is.”

The four of us were sucking down neon-colored ice pops in little plastic sleeves. Michael’s backpack sat on the patio table spewing textbooks across the pebbled glass, and the sight of such incongruity—schoolbooks in summer!—was nearly blasphemous.

“Angie said she’s a zombie,” Michael responded. “She might not even know how to use the phone.”

“Don’t be an ass,” I countered.

“It’s just so weird,” Scott spoke up. “I mean, if he was going to go someplace, don’t you think he would’ve told us?”

“Maybe he didn’t know,” Michael suggested. “Maybe his mom sent him away somewhere.”

“Why would she do that?”

“To keep him out of the hands of the Piper, for one thing.”

“But where would she send him?”

“Maybe he’s spending the summer with his dad,” Peter said.

“His dad’s dead,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned the suicide to my friends because I felt it had been told to me in confidence, but I didn’t think I was betraying Adrian’s trust by surrendering this one morsel of information.

“Yeah?” Peter said. “I just assumed his folks were divorced.”

I waited for them to ask how he had died, but they didn’t. I was silently grateful.

“Hey,” Scott said. “You don’t think he’s dumb enough to go off searching for clues on his own, do you? That could be dangerous. Even if the Piper didn’t get him, he could have gotten lost somewhere. Hurt, even.”

I considered all the places in the Werewolf House that, were someone not careful, could bring about serious injury or even death.

“Still,” Peter said, “his mom would have called the police when he didn’t come home.”

“But we don’t know that.” Michael’s tongue, electric green from the ice pop, lashed out to moisten his lips.

“Maybe we should look for him,” I said. “We can check the places he might have been searching on his own. If something did happen to him, we might be able to find him.”

“Good idea,” Peter said. “Who’s got the walkie-talkies?”

“They’re at Echo Base,” Scott said.

Because it had become too laborious to lug all our stuff back and forth every day, we left the equipment, including the walkie-talkies and the dynamo-powered radio, in the woods. Peter had salvaged an old nylon beer cooler from his garage, and we had packed the stuff inside it, then wrapped the whole thing in a trash bag so that anyone who might accidentally stumble upon it wouldn’t think twice about it. The only time Scott brought the walkie-talkies home was when they needed to be charged.

“Great,” Michael said, standing up so fast that his chair fell backward and clacked against the floor. “Let’s ride.”

Less than three minutes later, the four of us were pedaling like demons. Peter was nearly sideswiped by a blue van on Ridgley Avenue. Two policemen with a German shepherd on a short chain gaped at us from beneath the sagging awning of the drugstore as we whizzed through City Center and burned up Second Avenue.

When I heard the deliberate growl of a car’s engine behind me, I realized I’d been hearing it for the past several seconds without actually registering it. I whipped my head around and saw Eric Falconette’s mud-streaked Fiero grinding its gears as it came up quickly behind us.

“Hey!” I shouted, alerting my friends to the danger.

They all turned and saw the Fiero just as its front bumper lurched out in an attempt to thump the rear tire of my bike.

I swerved across the street, nearly losing it and spilling myself to the pavement in the process, but still managed to avoid the collision. I hopped the curb onto the sidewalk, my bike chain rattling.

The car’s passenger window went down, and someone shouted at us. Then an empty Budweiser bottle cartwheeled through the air and shattered on the sidewalk mere feet in front of me.

Unable to avoid it, my bike tires crunched over the broken glass. I winced. All I could do was hold my breath and hope I wouldn’t blow a flat.

More bottles launched into the air; they smashed all around us like the blitz, leaving sunbursts of colored glass glittering on the pavement. One struck Peter’s thigh, and he howled like a wounded hound.

In the car, I heard a pair of thugs cackling like hyenas.

Then the Fiero pulled up right alongside me. The driver’s side window was down, and when I glanced over, I saw Falconette’s greasy white face gibbering at me like a wind-up Halloween toy. His long hair was slicked back from his face, and I caught the shimmer of a cross-shaped earring in his left ear.

Nathan Keener had it in for me because he thought I had ratted him out to my dad. Eric Falconette, on the other hand, had no reason to come after any of us, except one: he was an evil son of a bitch who was more than just a little bit crazy.

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