Infinite(36)

“You saw me on Monday?”

Edgar stared at me through eyes that were sunk into the bags on his face. “You got bats in your belfry, kid? Of course I did. You brought in fried rice and chop suey from Sam Lee’s.”

I shook my head. “Edgar, Sam Lee’s closed six years ago.”

“Well, wherever, some Chinese place. I thought it was Sam Lee.”

“You’re sure it was Monday? Three days ago?”

“I know you think I’m losing my marbles, but yeah, it was Monday. Shit, Dylan, what’s wrong with you?”

I ignored his question, even though I was wondering the same thing. “Was I acting normal? Did I tell you about anything strange going on?”

“We didn’t talk. You and me never talk, remember? We watched the Cubs beat up the Phillies and ate chop suey. I got a fortune cookie that said, ‘Love is a four-letter word, but so is hell.’ I laughed so hard I snorted.”

I shook my head. Three days ago.

Three days ago, I was awake, conscious, and having dinner with my grandfather. If the police were looking to pick me up, why didn’t they do it then? Why didn’t I remember any of it?

And where had I been for the past two days?

I was quiet for another long stretch. More people came and went to stare at the painting. I thought about what Edgar had said: We didn’t talk. You and me never talk. That was true. We’d been hostile strangers since I was a teenager.

“Can I ask you something?”

Edgar didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. So I plunged ahead.

“What happened to my dad? Did you see it coming?”

Edgar looked at me as if I’d started speaking a foreign language. We never talked, and we definitely never talked about that. He chewed on the question like it was a bad shrimp, and I didn’t know if he’d actually say anything or just pretend that I’d never even brought it up.

“No,” he told me finally. “No, I never saw it coming. Your dad was an angry drunk, I knew that. And things were bad between him and your mother. But I never thought he’d go that far. Definitely not.”

“Do you hate him for it?”

Edgar sighed. “Hating my son’s not in the rulebook for parents. No matter what he did.”

“Well, I hate him. I hate that I’ve lived my whole life afraid of becoming him. Every time I get angry, I think, ‘This is the moment when I snap.’”

“You? Snap?” Edgar snorted. “I’d like to see that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, a turtle’s more likely to walk out of his shell than you.”

“Are you kidding?” I practically laughed at the absurdity of that comment. I couldn’t imagine Edgar saying something like that about me. The kid who’d argued with him at the top of his lungs practically every day of his teenage life. The kid whose fighting nearly got him kicked out of school half a dozen times. If I was afraid of my temper, it was only because it had gotten the best of me so often.

“Kidding?” Edgar retorted. “Hell, no. Yeah, it was awful what your father did, but I think the worst thing was that it turned you into a goddamn robot. Face it, Dylan, you run away from emotion before it has a chance to get anywhere close to you. I thought maybe you’d change when you got married, but you froze her out, too.”

“That’s not true. I only froze her out over the affair, and that’s because I couldn’t stand the idea of being angry with her.”

Edgar shook his head. “Affair? What affair?”

I realized I had never told him what Karly had done. “It’s not important. Not anymore.”

“Look, Dylan, you feeling sick or something? You’re not looking good.”

“Yeah, I’m a little out of it. Sorry.”

I shut up at that point. My experiment in opening up to Edgar hadn’t exactly gone smoothly, and I didn’t need to argue with my grandfather on top of everything else that was going wrong in my life. I let him go back to Nighthawks.

That was when I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket. A text had come in. I checked it and saw that there was no caller ID associated with the number. Whoever was reaching out to me was anonymous.

I read the message and didn’t like it.

Meet me at the Horner Park house. We need to talk.





CHAPTER 15

The house across from Horner Park, where the police thought I’d killed Scotty Ryan, looked deserted. I stayed in the back of the park’s baseball field, which gave me a view of the entire street. No one watched the house from any of the parked cars, and I saw no one who resembled an undercover cop. If this was a trap, they’d done a good job of concealing it.

There was no police tape around the house, which surprised me. Then again, a week had passed since the murder, and no doubt the owners wanted to get back inside their house. They’d also taken down the FOR SALE sign; there was no large poster for Chance Properties outside. Crime scenes didn’t exactly fly on the Chicago real estate market.

I waited to make sure I was right about the lack of surveillance. Then I made my way across the street, still on the lookout for police, still ready to run. As I approached the house, I cursed silently, because of all the people I could meet, I spotted the same elderly woman walking her Westie who’d seen me after the fight. I doubted that she’d forgotten me or the blood on my hands. There was nothing I could do, so I gave her my friendliest I-am-not-a-serial-killer smile. We both stood outside the house’s white picket fence.