How to Disappear(5)

I have to deal.

I’m dealing.





6


Jack


It takes everything I’ve got not to gun the car past the prison gates and fishtail out of there.

Don’s envelope is pressing against my chest like a dead weight, like a rat corpse you pick up by the tail and chuck into the incinerator. It pokes me through my shirt. I’d reach down and scratch, but I won’t risk a move that could make the car jerk and give the Highway Patrol any excuse to stop me. Face it, when those guys see my name on my driver’s license, they’ve been known to come up with a bogus excuse to pat me down.

I don’t know what’s in this envelope, but I know enough not to let a cop find it on me.

I count the minutes, miles, and tenths of a mile to the first turn-off. I pull into a bar and grill that looks least likely to have electronic surveillance, as if the security cam at the Jack in the Box could see into my car and call me out me for taking step one in Don’s deranged plan.

Tearing open the envelope, I have the feeling I get when I’m crouched in the scull at the starting block, just before the starting pistol fires, waiting to pull back on the oars and launch across the water.

Bang. There she is, staring out from under the envelope’s flap. A girl with long hair and doe eyes, all narrow shoulders and collarbone and small breasts.

Hello, Nicolette.

I’ve lost it. I’m seeing thought bubbles over her head that aren’t there: “Don’t.” “You aren’t going to, right?” “Guns don’t kill people; *s kill people.”

I think, At least she’s got a sense of humor. Then I think, Stop hallucinating.

Her face is heart-shaped, freckles across the nose, and a wide mouth. She’s not completely confident when the camera catches her eye, but she gives up the suggestion of a grin. There she is in the next picture, prancing around in a cheerleader uniform. She could be junior varsity, that’s how young she looks—young and in-your-face pretty. This girl doesn’t even look as if she’d kill a spider.

The Weedwacker that keeps me in line starts up in my gut.

This is f*cked. Heavy-duty guys like Karl Yeager aren’t supposed to hand small-time hoods at Yucca Valley Correctional school portraits of future dead girls, with the girls’ addresses printed on the back. A penciled annotation says it’s Esteban Mendes’s house—surprise, surprise—with a note to stay away. I’m happy to oblige.

Why go to her house when I’ve got the address of her school, her Tumblr, her Instagram, her Pinterest board of fancy dresses, and her defunct three-year-old blog where her last entry was about Twilight? (She was thirteen. She liked it. She was Team Jacob.) I have her log-in and her password for a dozen different sites: BUTTERcup9. Apparently, no one told her it’s smart to change things up.

I unwrap her driver’s license. I don’t mean a scan of it: it. Sixty seconds later, I’m in the men’s room at the back of the lounge with my Swiss Army knife, slicing the license into pieces small enough to flush. It’s a liability. She’s a missing-killer-crazy-girl, and I have her driver’s license on me?

Think, Jack.

I pull out the ID my friend Calvin and I trade back and forth for emergencies and buy a beer. I’ve held on to this ID for most of senior year. My mom won’t let me drink, whereas Calvin can take a beer out of the refrigerator in his kitchen. Calvin is the only person I talk to about Don. His older brother, Gerhard—the guy with the legitimate claim to the twenty-one-year-old ID—goes to MIT.

I want to call Calvin up, but how would that conversation go? First I’d listen to him moan about how his girlfriend, Monica, might leave him when he takes off for Caltech in August, then he’d listen to me explain how I’m supposed to kill somebody?

Not with a whimper but a bang.

What’s wrong with me? Don’t say genetic predisposition, I already know that. On one side, we have Art Manx, whose family crest might as well say, Live by the sword, die by the sword. On the other side, meet Isabella Rossi Manx, the sweetest insanely strict mother alive, but weak as jelly at the center.

You learn from the Killers-’R’-Us side of the family that weak-as-jelly has its pitfalls. You are never weak as jelly. Then you take the envelope, and you want to bang your head on the bar you shouldn’t legally be sitting at.

Don thinks this is happening.

I sit there eating old peanuts, making myself visualize this Nicolette creeping up behind Connie Marino. I imagine the soft skin of Connie’s neck peeling open, gaping like a thin-lipped mouth, drooling blood. I picture Connie lying on a linoleum floor, bleeding out while this twisted little cheerleader, this tiny evil Nicolette (5' 2'' according to her license) stands over her, laughing.

But the image that keeps interrupting is a cheerleading Nicolette bouncing around with pom-poms, so compact, so deceptively delicate, doing cartwheels in a lit-up stadium during a night game.

I make myself see her kneeling on the linoleum floor next to Connie’s corpse, swishing her crazy hands in Connie’s blood and laughing, getting blood on her pom-poms. I stalk her, catch her from behind, drag her away.

Shit.

I can’t do this. I can’t pretend I’m going to do this or let Don think for five more minutes that I’m doing this.





7