Beach Wedding(14)

“Where are you?” I yelled.

I tossed my room, looked in the bathroom.

“I can’t believe this! Where the hell is it?”

“Where’s what?” Tom said, appearing in the doorway.

I stared at him. I guess he had just come back from the Shore.

“Nothing,” I said, shooting past him, still in my grimy outfit from last night.

“What’s up with the catering outfit? That better not be my tie! And where are you going?” he said as I opened the door to the garage and jumped on my bike.

I headed straight to Nick’s, five blocks to the north. I went around back to his window and saw him sleeping. I knocked on the glass, but he was dead to the world.

“Screw it,” I mumbled as I went into his open garage and started combing through the Caddy.

“Please be here,” I mumbled as I checked everywhere, between the seats, under the floor mats, in the glove box.

But it wasn’t.

I got back on my bike again and retraced the route back to Meadow Lane. Maybe it had fallen out on our way back to the car?

As I reached Meadow Lane and got closer to the beach house, I noticed some cars out front at the Sutton place.

They were cop cars, I suddenly realized. A bunch of them. One of them was a van.

Was it a noise complaint from last night? I thought.

Just as I rolled up to the white gate, it opened and a car pulled out of it.

It was a gray Ford Crown Victoria. As I stood there balancing the bike, the window rolled down, and I found myself face-to-face with a lean, tough-looking guy with blue eyes behind the wheel.

“What the hell are you doing here?” my dad said. “Leave the bike there and get your butt in this car. Now!”



19

“Well?” my dad said as we flew south down Meadow Lane a second later.

Though my dad was actually a very nice guy, he could be really intimidating when he needed to be.

He was pushing fifty and in very good shape, though from all the deep-sea fishing he did, the corners of his eyes and the back of his neck looked cracked and beat-up, like a baseball mitt somebody left on the beach.

We were going at speed now. My dad had the worst lead foot in history. Especially if Mom wasn’t in the car. My mom would always say that someone had mistakenly taught Sean Rourke that in order to drive a car, its gas pedal must be kept in contact with the floor.

Despite how fast we were going with the window open, he managed to light up a Marlboro red with his Zippo before he looked over at me again.

“You were there last night. At the party at the Glass House. Catering with that Nick,” my father stated, not bothering to ask me if it were true.

“It’s okay, Dad. Mom knew about it. I was filling in for Tom.”

He looked at me, squinting, his hard blue eyes suddenly hurt.

“Seventeen,” he said, shaking his head. “You smell like a brewery. Now I have to worry about you, too, huh? Keeping Tom out of jail isn’t bad enough? Why don’t you all just get together tonight while I’m sleeping and put me out of my misery with a baseball bat? I’m insured.”

“Dad, I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t drinking. I was working. It’s my sneakers. They’re covered in spilled drinks.”

“Working! You’ll be working all right. You’ll be working a bid in Suffolk correctional if you keep hanging out with that Nick and Denny Milton.”

He looked at me very closely.

“Now you tell me, and don’t you even try to lie. What were you doing on Meadow Lane just now?”

“I was...looking for...a number. Some pretty girl at the party gave me her number. She wrote it on a coaster for me, and I can’t find it.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

We suddenly screeched to a stop on the side of the road in a huge cloud of sand, my seat belt locking painfully against my chest as we went from sixty to zero in about zero point zero seconds.

My father mashed his cigarette into the ashtray. I’d never seen him so worked up. Well, at least not with me.

He stared at me and then looked out at the Shinnecock Bay beside us.

“It’s okay, Terry,” he finally said after about thirty seconds of dead silence. “I believe you.”

He closed his blue eyes then and rolled his leathery neck.

“What is it, Dad? What’s up?”

He opened his eyes and looked dead level right at me.

“Noah Sutton is dead,” he said.

I shot back in my seat as if I’d been punched.

“What? No! That’s impossible!” I said.

My dad nodded his head.

“He’s dead. Just seen him with my own eyes.”

“Holy shit! Noah Sutton, dead? That’s horrible! What happened?”

“Shot in the head,” my dad said, lighting up another cigarette. “Twice.”

I felt my heart beat faster in my chest. I couldn’t believe my ears.

Shot?

“You’re saying he was murdered?” I cried.

“It’s a distinct possibility,” my dad said.

That’s when I realized why my dad was involved.

He wasn’t just involved either. As the head assistant district attorney of Suffolk County, and the head of the homicide unit, my dad was actually in charge.