Ian turned back to his game. “Let me finish, and then you can play.”
“Sure,” I said, even though I didn’t want to.
I watched as he worked the controls. The main guy was a Special Forces type. Navy Seal, I think. He was chasing a bad dude across an airfield. The bad guy stole the plane, flew for a while, strafing people who were shooting SAMs at him from the ground. Finally the bad dude landed on a beach. He raced across the sand, getting shot at some more before breaking into what looked like a drug lab. There was another shootout, and this time the Navy Seal guy shot him right between the eyes.
Ian handed me the controls. “You try. The guy in camouflage with the Nazi hair is a terrorist. He steals, maims, murders—all the good stuff. Your job is to kill him before he blows up a passenger jet.”
I took the controls. Ten seconds in, the terrorist guy hijacked a car and threw the owner over a cliff. The guy bounced off a bunch of rocks, leaving his brains behind. Seconds later, I was in a Hummer, chasing him, but I made some mistake, because the Hummer went off the road and into the woods. Somehow I came out on the main road again, with the pyscho-terrorist, now on a Harley, right in front of me. I forced him off the road and into a tree. The Harley was totaled, but the guy got up, blood pouring down his face, and took off running. I chased after him. I thought—I’m doing okay—when I turned up a pathway and a bunch of his terrorist buddies jumped out of a cave and shot me a zillion times. The word WASTED! filled the screen as an evil chuckle came through the speakers.
Ian snickered. “That was fast.”
I handed back the controls. “I d-don’t play much.”
“What do you have? PlayStation, Xbox? Wii?”
“N-nothing.”
He leaned back. “Nothing? No wonder you suck.”
I wanted to take him out to his fancy batting cage, stick a bat in his hand, and strike him out on three pitches, but I kept my mouth shut.
He switched to Grand Theft Auto. “You live near Aurora Avenue, right? I mean, where you used to live,” he said, his eyes on the screen.
“Yeah.”
He laughed. “My mom is kind of freaked about that.”
I felt myself straighten. “W-Why?”
“There are prostitutes working around there, right?”
“I g-guess.”
“You ever see them? Prostitutes, I mean.”
Did I ever see them? A half dozen worked out of trailers in Jet City. “Yeah, I’ve s-seen them.”
He paused. “You ever—you know?”
“N-No.”
“You ever think about it?”
“Sure.”
“So why didn’t you? If they were right there.”
“I d-don’t know.”
“Scared?”
“Not scared. I j-just haven’t.”
“How about drugs? There are dealers there, too, right?”
I felt my blood pounding in my head. “I d-don’t know.”
He paused the game and then looked from the screen to me. “Come on, Laz. There’s a guy there, he calls himself G-Man. Drives a black Subaru. Your brother or half brother or whatever he is hangs out with him. You must know him. This G-Man guy sells pills.”
“Yeah, ok-kay. I know who h-he is. B-But my b-brother doesn’t s-sell anything.” I stood. “Look, I’ve g-g-got s-stuff to d-do.”
He grabbed my arm. “Wait. I’ve got a proposition. Sometimes on Friday night one of us goes up there and buys from that G-Man guy. We cut his pills in half, wash them down with a beer or two, and then chill. No big deal. Once a month. Maybe twice. No more than that.”
He stopped talking and looked at me, as if he expected me to say something.
When I stayed silent, he screwed up his face. “The thing is—none of us likes going into Jet City. No offense, it’s your home and all, but that place is sketchy. So I was thinking that I could give you money and you could buy from G-man. You could keep twenty bucks for yourself, and it would be work out for everybody.” He paused. “What do you say?”
I shook my head. “N-No.”
“Why not?”
“J-J-Just n-no.”
He sat still for a minute; then his eyes returned to the screen. “All right.”
I started for the door.
“Hey, Laz, you won’t say anything about this to my dad, will you?”
I shook my head. “Don’t w-worry.”
Back in my new room, I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. Ian was an idiot. He could choose either a major-league baseball or a college scholarship, but he’d lose both if he got caught doing drugs. Then another thought came, and I felt numb.
Kids at Laurelhurst High—which was five miles from Jet City—knew about Garrett. I suck at math, but I know that if you draw a circle with a radius of five miles, you get an area that’s more than seventy-five square miles.
What if the wrong guys inside that circle found about Garrett and came after him? What if Antonio was hanging out with Garrett when those wrong guys showed up?