Watching Greer drive was a bit like watching a pilot at the helm of a spaceship in a low-budget sci-fi flick. Chunky plastic boxes with red-and-green lights and dials surrounded the steering wheel, turning it into a cockpit area. The driver’s seat had been removed, allowing Greer in his wheelchair to enter the van in the back via a lift and then roll straight forward to the steering wheel. On either side of the wheel, mounted on small posts that rose from the floor, sprouted a trio of vertical handles, each wrapped in black foam, arranged in a triangle with the point facing forward. Now, as we pulled out of the parking lot by the gym, each of Greer’s hands grasped the foremost handle, the other two handles surrounding his wrists. He glanced once at me as we drove down the Hill toward the lions. “Freaks people out, first time they see me drive,” he said conversationally.
“I like being able to see your hands,” I said. “Make sure you don’t have any other batons.”
He turned his head to look at me. “Yeah, ’cause I’d be trying to bash you in the face with one while I’m driving.” He smirked and turned back to the road. “Thought you were supposed to be smart.”
It had taken a bit of doing to convince Greer to take me to Kevin Kelly, but when I pointed out that the police would be very interested in his taped confession of selling drugs to students, he agreed to drive me. The trick was that I needed to tell Briggs, but I didn’t want to call and have a conversation Greer could overhear. So when Greer rolled into his van and was out of sight, I texted Briggs and told him that Greer was taking me to his supplier, who apparently knew something about Fritz. Briggs immediately texted back that I should just go ahead with what we had planned: make a citizen’s arrest on Greer so he and I could take Greer to a state police station. I replied by texting Briggs to follow us and shoved my phone into my pocket before climbing into Greer’s van. The phone had buzzed three times since then, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t want Greer to know Briggs would be following us—I’m not sure why, other than some half-assed idea of keeping an ace up my sleeve.
We rolled past the lions, Greer applying the brakes with a squeeze of a handle to bring the van to a stop at the road. I purposely did not look to our right, where I knew Briggs was in his truck about a hundred yards away.
Greer turned right onto the state road. “So where are we going?” I asked.
“Like I said, a place outside Charlottesville.” He glanced at me. “It’s not far, don’t worry.”
And then we were driving on, past empty fields and stands of trees, a distant yellow square indicating the lit window of a house. We were easily half a mile from the lions, but I saw no sign of Briggs’s truck. I wondered if he had driven off, fed up with me ignoring his calls and deviating from the plan. A knot of anxiety tightened in my chest. This is not a good idea, said a voice inside my head, but I shut it off as best I could. I thought about taking out my phone to text Briggs, but Greer kept glancing at me.
“He’s not going to want to talk to you, you know,” Greer said.
I shifted in my seat. “I’ll worry about that,” I said. “Just drive.”
“Not going to be happy with me bringing you to his house, either.”
“I think he’ll like me coming up there better than the state police.”
Greer snorted. “So, what, you’ll just go up and ask him where Fritz is?”
I had no reply, mostly because this was essentially my plan.
Sometime in the past half hour the cloud cover had begun to fray and tatter, revealing the silver-white coin of the moon. Beyond the headlights, I could see snowy fields and hillsides glow with a milky translucence. Trees forked up from the ground, black claws tearing at the sky. Suddenly I remembered one February night in college, riding in a car out to a party at a country house, and as a joke the driver had turned off the headlights, plunging us into an eerie darkness. A girl in the backseat beside me had shrieked in my ear, and for a moment I had been terrified we would crash into a tree or another car. But there had also been something ghostly and beautiful about driving down the road with only the moon and stars to guide us, almost as if we were flying through the night sky. I felt an echo of that as Pelham Greer drove through the dark countryside toward Kevin Kelly and whatever he knew about Fritz. It felt strangely reassuring, but also ominous.
Soon, however, a sodium glow appeared on the horizon ahead, the lights of I-64. Greer took the on-ramp and headed east through the foothills toward Charlottesville.
I HAD BEEN GLANCING in the side mirrors to see if anyone was following us. I still hadn’t seen Briggs, but he’d been a cop—he was probably good at following people without their knowing it. Or maybe he went home, a voice nagged me in my head. Once I thought I’d seen a pair of headlights behind us before we had gotten on the highway, but no one had followed us onto the on-ramp, and then we were driving through light traffic. I broke down and pulled out my phone to read Briggs’s texts, but as I swiped the screen to unlock it, Greer said, “What the hell you doing?”
“Checking my messages.”
“You’re not calling anybody out here,” he said coldly. “This is you and me going up to his house, no one else. You call anyone and I stop the car right here and you don’t ever find out about your friend.”
I raised a hand, palm out as if warding him off. “Fine, okay,” I said. “Jesus.” But I’d had enough of a chance to see that Briggs had in fact texted me back only once—Where r u—and then the other two times were phone calls, no voice mail messages. I put my phone in my pocket and stared out the window at the passing mile markers. I was alone.
“How’d you hook up with Kelly?” I asked, more to keep my mind occupied than anything else.
Greer screwed up his face, as if tasting something unpleasant. “Showed up out of the blue one weekend about two years ago. Looking for me. I thought he just wanted to feel better about himself, have a beer with the cripple. But it wasn’t like that at all. He had a ‘business proposition’ for me. That’s what he called it. We went outside to the Lawn, away from everybody, and he told me he’d heard I was having problems, headaches and all. He said he was in contact with some medical marijuana groups, could help me out. Gave me a bag right there. I figured out pretty quickly he wasn’t just being generous. Turned out he wanted me to sell for him, on campus. Said I could make a lot of money toward that operation I wanted.” Greer’s lip twitched, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Dude had me figured out to the ground. Don’t know how he learned all that about me.”
I stirred in my seat. “He was like that in school,” I said. “Obnoxious little fucker.”
“He’s more than that,” Greer said. “He’s smart. Acts like this is some sort of chess game, and he’s five moves ahead of everybody else. Pretty soon it wasn’t just pot but oxy, Vicodin, E, even ADD meds. I don’t think I’m the only guy he has out there selling, either. But he seemed to really want me to sell for him.”
Or he wanted someone to sell at Blackburne, I thought. Kelly had been kicked out of Blackburne, I’d heard. If Kelly had been expelled, then I could see why selling drugs to Blackburne students would be particularly appealing to him.
“So, you just . . . pick up drugs from him and then sell them?” I asked.
Greer shrugged. “Basically.”
“And you don’t care that you’re selling to teenagers?”
He glanced at me and then turned his eyes back to the road—he seemed to be looking for an exit sign. “How naive are you, man? They don’t buy from me, they’ll buy from someone else. They all smoke, man. I give them really good product, and I get a cut toward my surgery.”
“So Terence Jarrar was, what, just one of those things that happen?” I asked, unable to stop myself. Part of me marveled at my self-righteousness.
Greer’s jaw tightened, and he opened his mouth as if to reply, but all he said was, “There she is.” I looked ahead and saw an exit sign for Highway 29, and then we were curving off to the right, off the interstate. Orange light hung in the air ahead, a night glow reflecting off the bellies of the overhanging clouds—Charlottesville proper. But Greer was heading south, away from town, and we passed a new subdivision on the left, its inhabitants slumbering peacefully as we drove past into the dark, the hills rising on either side of us cutting off the glow behind.
After several minutes—we had passed a few isolated clusters of older homes and a pair of battered churches—Greer slowed and pulled over to the right shoulder. “Are we here?” I asked, surprised.
“Not yet,” Greer said, leaving the engine idling. He turned to me. “Give me your phone,” he said.
“What? No.”
“You want me to take you to Kelly, I want that phone with the voice recording on it. That’s the deal.”
I hesitated. A car approached from behind us, the headlights shining through the windows on the rear door and washing over Greer’s face so it looked like a skull. The car passed us, and Greer’s face returned to shadow. He held out his hand. “You want to see your friend again?” he said. “Give me the phone.”
I took the phone out of my pocket, making sure to thumb the power button on the top so it turned off. At least the pass code would keep Greer from swiping open the phone. I handed it to him. He dropped it into a chest pocket on his shirt, nodded once, put the van in drive, and pulled back out onto the road.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“He’s off a side road up here somewhere,” Greer said, leaning forward slightly and squinting through the windshield. “Never come up here after dark.” He made a little sighing grunt of recognition and swung the van to the right, onto a narrow road that wound uphill. We passed a field on our left, a few tufts of grass poking up out of the snow, and then we were among trees, the road getting bumpy and the light from the van’s headlights wobbling in and out of the tree trunks.
“How much farther?” I asked again.
“Maybe a quarter of a mile.”
“Stop the van.”
Greer looked at me but then manipulated the hand controls, pulling the van over to the left and bringing it to a gentle stop, the engine idling.
“Turn it off.”
“Why?”
“I’m going for a walk. Turn it off.”
Greer turned the key, leaving it in the ignition, and the idling engine cut off abruptly, the van seeming to settle down as if resting on its haunches.
I held my hand out. “Give me the keys.”
“The hell for?”
“So you don’t leave me alone out here.”
“I’m not—”
I leaned forward and jerked the keys out of the ignition. Greer grabbed at my hand, and I leaned back away from him. “Fucking dick,” he sputtered, pawing at me. “Piece of shit.” Fending him off with my left arm, I awkwardly grabbed the door handle with my right hand, still holding the keys, and swung the door open. Then I gracelessly half slid, half fell out of the van to the ground. “Give me my keys, you asshole!” Greer screamed. Instead, I stood up and slammed the door shut. “Fuck you!” Greer shouted, his voice muffled by the door. I held up the keys so he could see them and gave them a jingle. My well-developed sense of guilt kicked in for a moment—you’re taunting a man in a wheelchair—but only for a moment. The guy had sold drugs to students and then tried to frame me for it, after all. So I pocketed the keys, turned my back on Greer, and began to head up the heavily rutted road.
Leaving Pelham Greer in the van was actually smart, I told myself as I trudged up the dirt road in the dark. Driving up to Kelly’s front door didn’t seem like a good idea—if he was selling drugs, he might not appreciate a car pulling into his driveway in the middle of the night. I figured walking around a bit to scope out the area was a good idea.
Behind me, the van’s engine turned over and then roared. Headlights flared on, pinning me to the dark background of trees. I looked over my shoulder to see the van lurch forward. For a second I just stood there, mouth slightly open. He has a spare set of keys, I thought. Then I moved, stepping quickly off the road and behind a large oak. The van jerked to a stop ten feet away, the engine rumbling. I looked around the tree to see Greer’s face through the windshield, his lips curled back in a snarl. The trees were too big and too close together for him to drive between them and run me down. He raised a middle finger, and then the van was moving backward, turning tightly to the left before jerking again to a stop and then moving forward. It completed the turn and drove away from me into the night. “Damn it,” I said, staring at the red taillights winking at me. Greer had left me in the middle of nowhere, and he had my phone. At least the phone was locked, so he couldn’t call Kelly to warn him. Unless he had his own phone. Sighing, I turned and resumed my walk down the road toward whatever was waiting for me at the end of it. Snow crunched beneath my feet, and my face stung with the cold.
I was just beginning to think that Greer’s estimate of a quarter mile was off—I had walked more than that, I was sure of it—when the road hooked to the right, snaked between a pair of pines, and then opened into a snow-covered yard backed by a long ranch house. The house was trim and neat without being fussy, white siding on a brick foundation, a small covered porch shading the front door. A light shone on the porch, revealing a pair of empty wooden rocking chairs flanking the closed door.
Staring at the house, I walked right into a waist-high sign planted to the left of the driveway. It was oval with curled black text on a white background: “Ollie’s Orchids.”
I stepped to the side of the sign and moved behind a smaller pine tree, peering at the house. There were no other lights on besides the porch light, no cars in the yard. But I could see where tire tracks ate into the snow around the left-hand side of the house, so I sidled that way, trying to keep behind the trees as I went, my eyes on the house the whole time as I made my way around the back.
A small floodlight mounted over the back door of the house illuminated a cluttered backyard. A pickup truck, dark and empty, was parked beside a stack of firewood. Beyond the firewood stretched a long glass building—a greenhouse. I could hear a fan running over there—probably a heater. I could see nothing through any of the house’s back windows. The truck made me cautious, though, and Greer had assured me that Kevin Kelly would be home.
Unbidden, the memory of my father’s words from years earlier surfaced. In times of crisis, a man’s instinct is to do one of two things: retreat to a place of safety, or gather up his strength and hurl himself headlong into the fray. I walked back around to the front of the house, stepped up onto the porch, and knocked loudly on the front door.
I didn’t hear footsteps or any other indication that someone was inside, but suddenly the door was pulled open. Startled, I stepped back.
Kevin Kelly was standing before me. He was taller than I remembered. He had a mop of curly hair and a week-old beard ringing his round face. He was wearing jeans, a dirty long-sleeved tee shirt, and a pair of wire-framed specs. “Matthias,” he said. “Come in.” He turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open behind him. I hesitated, and Kevin was swallowed in the shadows past the foyer. His voice floated out of the darkness. “Close the door behind you. I’m not paying to heat the front yard.”
I walked into the house and pulled the door shut behind me. Inside it was dim, the air still and close. At the back of the foyer, Kevin turned left down an unlit hall, and after a moment I followed. As I passed a closed door, I could both hear and feel a steady, muffled hum, as if a large piece of machinery were throbbing nearby behind thick walls. Then I entered a well-lit kitchen, a room with low wooden beams overhead, the stove and refrigerator, and what I presumed was the back door on the wall to my right. To the left was a heap of broken furniture, half covering a door that presumably led to one of the front rooms off the foyer. In the middle of the kitchen, Kevin stood by a square wooden table. I now noticed his tee shirt had a picture of a cartoon moose with skis, under which was the caption “Chase the Moose.” He was scratching his right arm. “Rash,” he said. “Occupational hazard. Don’t know if it’s from the plants or the nutrients. Anyway.” He indicated one of two straight-backed chairs. “Have a seat.” His voice was just as I had remembered—slightly nasal, assured, the voice of a man who knows exactly what he is doing.
I sat in the chair, facing him across the table, and he settled into the other chair, still scratching his arm. A light fixture overhead shone in tight white circles on his spectacles, giving him the look of a benevolent, otherworldly creature, eyes ablaze with silver light. Then he leaned forward, and I could see behind his specs a pair of dark eyes that gazed curiously at me, in the way someone might watch a strange new animal in a zoo.
“So,” I said. My lips were dry, and when I licked them, they stung. “Kevin. Good to see you.”
Kevin smiled and leaned his elbows on the table, bringing his hands together as if in prayer, and regarded me through his specs. I realized that Kevin had maneuvered me to sit with my back against a wall while he sat between me and the only two exits: the back door and the hall we had walked down. Sweat prickled in my armpits. Then I recalled Greer’s baton in my coat pocket, and I drew some comfort from that.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I said.
“Security cameras,” Kevin said. “Front and back doors. Saw you tiptoe across my front lawn and peek around back.” He cracked his knuckles and continued to regard me.
“Okay,” I said after a long pause. “Now what?”
Kevin scratched his arm again in a preoccupied sort of way. “Now you tell me why you’re here,” he said.
I realized belatedly how stupid this was. I was alone, in an isolated house somewhere outside of Charlottesville, with no cell phone. With a casual bravado I didn’t feel, I said, “This how you treat all your visitors?”
Kevin was grinning now. “Just the ones who are trespassing in the middle of the night. Or were you interested in buying some orchids?”
I looked blankly at him. He seemed disappointed.
“Ollie’s Orchids?” he said. “The sign out front?”
“Missed that,” I managed to say. “Who’s Ollie?”
“Olivia. Woman I bought the business from.”
“Which business?” I asked without thinking. Shit.
Kevin’s grin slowly drained off his face, and he now appraised me like a puzzle he needed to work out. He looked like a graduate student in his tee shirt and jeans, specs, and scruffy beard. “Ah,” he said. “Well, there it is. Which business. I bought the orchid business from Olivia. She wanted to retire, move to Florida. Her father built this place back in the fifties.”
I said nothing. Kelly scratched his arm again, noticed it, stopped.
“But you’re not growing orchids,” I said.
He considered me. “No, I’m not growing orchids. And you, you’re teaching at Blackburne.” The way he said “Blackburne” suggested a sense of loathing that had not been in his voice before.
I took a minute to process this. “Why?” I managed.
He frowned slightly. “Why grow what I grow?” he said. “I’m good at it. It’s lucrative.”
“No, I mean why sell at Blackburne?”
Kevin’s eyebrows went up. “Why? Why the hell not?”
“Just seems like a lot of effort,” I said, keeping my voice at a casual register. “I mean, you’d get better sales in cities, at colleges. Blackburne’s isolated. It’s—”
“Do you ski, Matthias?”
I stared. “What?”
“Ski. It’s a beautiful sport. Trying to go as fast as you can without falling down or running into anything. There’s a kind of purity to it. A contest between you and the slope.”
I looked at the cartoon moose on his tee shirt—it was grinning madly as it apparently zoomed down a snowy hill—and tried to formulate a response.
“People ski for lots of reasons,” Kevin was saying. “Because other people do it and they’re like lemmings. Or because they think it makes them cool.”
“Or they like the clothes,” I said, trying to keep up my end of the conversation. “All that neon.”
Kevin smiled appreciatively, a parent indulging a wayward child. “Or they like the sport of it, the contest,” he said. “The rush as you fly down the side of a mountain fast enough to bash your brains out if you scrape a tree or hit a rock. And every time, something’s different. The snow pack is thicker, or the moguls icier, or the wind is blowing in your face instead of at your back.”
“It’s a game,” I offered.
Kevin nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “That’s it. A game.” He waved a hand around him. “Which is what this is. A game with a nice payout. But instead of a mountain, I’m playing against people.”
“I don’t—”
“People,” he said louder, “with their weaknesses and addictions and their need to take anything to make themselves feel better. People with their bullshit rules and narrow minds. But I provide a service that people want. You know how many customers I have who smoke because they’re sick and nothing else works? Cancer patients, people in constant pain.”
“Like Pelham Greer,” I said. I wondered how quickly I could get the baton out of my pocket if I needed to.
Kevin jabbed a finger at me. “My point exactly. Pelham Greer. There’s a guy who got injured in the service of his country, a country whose government won’t pay for a surgery that could make his life infinitely better. And that same government deems illegal the one thing that makes him feel better, that gets rid of his headaches. Back-ass-ward. Medical marijuana, my friend. It’s the future. Hell, it’s here now.”
A slow-building emotion turned over sluggishly in my chest. It took me a moment to realize what it was: anger at Kelly’s self-justification. “It’s not just pot,” I said. “What about the oxy, the Vicodin? And you aren’t selling to cancer patients at Blackburne.”
Kevin narrowed his eyes. He reached below the table for his waist—I thought he was scratching his stomach—and when he brought his hand back above the top of the table, I saw that he was holding a knife. It was broad, with a serrated edge like a shark’s mouth, the other edge polished and gleaming so I could see, even in the weak light, the sweep of the blade curve upward to a point. It looked like something you could use to kill and butcher a wild hog.
“No,” Kevin said softly. “I’m not. Which makes me a bona fide drug dealer to children. But there are reasons to do something other than altruism, or profit. Do you know what Blackburne kicked me out for, Matthias? I was caught having sex with a girl from Chatham Hall. We were on the golf course, and Mr. Downing comes around the hedges with a flashlight and sees us just fucking away on the ninth hole. I didn’t lie or get drunk on campus or get in a fight. I was getting laid. It was consensual, we were both eighteen, but her parents had a shit fit. Nothing they could do, legally. But Blackburne kicked me out. Said I’d ‘crossed the line’ one too many times. I was going premed to Richmond, but when I was expelled, they rescinded my acceptance. I had to repeat senior year at another school, apply to college all over again.” Kevin’s voice grew even quieter. “I begged them. Begged them to let me stay at Blackburne. And they told me to fuck off with six weeks left to graduation.” His eyes gleamed with cold fury. “I was wronged, Matthias. And you should understand that. We were both wronged. Blackburne laid down a black mark on each of us.”
I stared at him, unable to speak. He leaned forward. “You know what I mean, don’t you,” he said. “You ever feel that if things were just a little different, you’d be set? If just one thing were different, your problems would be gone?” He smiled grimly. “Course you do. Your life has never been the same since your roomie disappeared. That’s your one thing. Well, Blackburne is that one thing for me. ‘Prep school.’ Prepping for what? Go to college, get a degree, become successful? How many Blackburne grads went to college and now sleep on their parents’ sofa? All that crap about honor, work ethic, achievement? Horseshit. So fuck ’em.”
As I sat in that kitchen and continued to stare at Kevin Kelly, I realized, with a sickening drop of the soul, that this infuriated, bespectacled drug dealer across the table was not so different from me, that with a few twists and turns in my own life, or perhaps only one—like being kicked out of Blackburne—I could easily have turned into what he was: self-indulgent, cruel, and vindictive, a damaged man who took out his fear and pain on others. What was even worse was the realization that perhaps I had been that man, could still be.
Then Kevin leaned closer, so that I could see the pores on his cheeks, his eyes behind his specs wide and intense. He raised the knife in his hand, blowing away every other thought in my head except for a bright yellow fear. “Now tell me,” he said, “why you are here.”
“Fritz,” I said.
He seemed taken aback. “Fritz?” Then he suddenly laughed. “The clown,” he said. “Ah, fuck. You talked to Greer, didn’t you?”
“What . . . clown?”
He shook his head dismissively. “He told you how to get up here? Greer?”
“I made him drive me up here. He said—”
“Hold on,” he said. “Hold the fuck on. You had Greer drive you up here?”
Maybe I could shove the table at him, give myself an extra second or two to get out the baton. “He brought me in his van,” I said. “I made him stop and let me out a little ways down the road so I could walk up here. He drove off and left me, I don’t know—”
“Why would Greer drive you up here?” he asked.
“Do you know where Fritz is?”
“Why the fuck would Greer—”
“Do you know—”
“Shut up!”
“—where Fritz is?”
“Did you bring the cops? Did you call the fucking police?”
“No! I didn’t—”
He was so fast, I didn’t have a chance. One second he was shouting at me from across the table, and the next he was on his feet and right next to me, the knife pointing down at my face. My fingers twitched for the baton, but he put the point of his knife right up to my nose and with his other hand batted my fingers away from my pocket. As he reached into my pocket with his left hand and fished around, all I could see was the knife a couple of centimeters from my eyes. Bizarrely, I thought of teaching Oedipus Rex last fall, and how my students had been gruesomely fascinated by how the proud Greek king had stabbed out his own eyes. Jesus God, don’t blind me, I thought. Then Kevin pulled the baton out from my pocket, glanced at it, and threw it onto the floor behind him, where it fell with a loud clatter and rolled underneath the refrigerator.
“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asked. “Because I will cut you up and bury you alive where animals will find you and snack on your balls.”
“No, listen,” I said, desperation in my voice. “They fucked me, Kevin. Greer fucked me. He set me up, and the school believed him. They didn’t even try to listen to me. But I’ve got proof that Greer did it. Then he said you knew where Fritz was, and I told him to bring me here, or I’d call the cops. I—”
“What proof?”
“I . . . He talked about planting drugs in my desk, selling to students. I recorded him saying it. It’s on my iPhone.” Then a thought shone in my mind, a bright warm light that drew me to it like a moth. “You could listen to it. It’s on the Memos app. He doesn’t say anything about you on it—he told me that later, after I’d stopped recording. You could use that. We could send him to jail.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We?”
I drew a shaky breath. “I want in,” I said. “On selling. At Blackburne.”
He laughed, incredulous. “You do think I’m stupid.”
“No! Look, Blackburne tried to ruin my life, Kevin. I went to jail. They took me out of my dorm in handcuffs, in front of students. But if they realize I didn’t do it, that it was Greer, then he’ll get fired and I’ll be set. I’ll be pure as fucking snow, Kevin. The school will freak out about lawsuits, or, or they’ll be scared I’ll write a book. That’d terrify them. They hate anything that could hurt their reputation. They’d practically beg me to come back and teach. And once I’m there, fuck them. I want in. I’ll help you. You can have my phone, do whatever you want with it.”
Kevin looked at me as if I were raving. But he wasn’t telling me to shut up or doing anything with the knife. He had even pulled it back a few inches from my face.
“Listen to the recording I made,” I insisted. “Greer said that you know where Fritz is. And . . . I want to know. I want to know where Fritz is. Just . . . please—”
“Shut up.” Kevin stood there, calculating. Abruptly he held out his left hand, his right still holding the knife. “Give me your phone,” he said.
“I—” Then I remembered. “I don’t have it. Greer took it. He made me give it to him before he drove me here. Call him and ask. Call my phone if you want. Or his. Whatever. He’ll tell you—”
“Shut up,” Kevin said again. I could almost see things moving into place in his head, facts and perceptions rearranging themselves like so much furniture. Then he pulled out a cell from his jeans. “What’s your number?”
I told him, and he dialed it into his phone with one hand, the other still holding up the knife. Maybe I could rush him . . . and get stabbed in the gut, or the face.
“Stay here,” Kevin said, holding the phone up to his ear. “Don’t fucking move.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen and into the back hall. Clearly he wanted to talk to Greer in private. I let out a long, shaky breath. My hopes didn’t exactly rise once Kevin left, but they lifted a bit. I figured Kevin would talk to Greer to corroborate my story with the voice recording. What Greer would have to say, I didn’t know. And I didn’t think for a second that Kevin would truly consider my insane offer. But it gave me time. The problem was, I had no idea what to do next. Maybe I could reach the baton under the refrigerator, or find a knife of my own in a drawer? Or I could run out the back door. I recalled Kevin saying he had security cameras, but I could hide in the woods.
I stood up and started for the back door, and then nearly cried aloud. Lester Briggs was peering in through the back door window. I darted a glance at the back hall, but I didn’t see Kevin. Now Briggs gestured at me to open the door. I looked again at the back hall, the thought of that knife causing my skin to crawl. I got up and went as quietly as I could to the back door and turned the bolt to unlock it, letting Briggs in. He wore a heavy red-and-black-checked wool coat and a black knit cap, and his nose was red with cold, although he grinned at me.
“How the hell did you find me?” I whispered.
He actually chuckled. “Think I don’t know how to follow a car?”
“There’s a man in here, Kevin Kelly. He’s got a knife. He’s on the phone with Pelham Greer and coming back any second.”
Briggs shook his head. “I doubt he’s talking to Greer. State police should have him in custody. I called in a favor.” He peered around the kitchen. “You say he’s got a knife?”
“A big one.” I looked back down the hall but still didn’t see Kevin. I could still hear that low, throbbing hum from somewhere in the house. When I looked back at Briggs, I saw he had a revolver in his hand.
“Did he have a gun on him?” Briggs murmured.
I shook my head. “Don’t know. Didn’t see one.”
Kevin had to have heard us by now. Where was he? The rest of the house was silent, dark.
“Let’s go,” Briggs was saying.
I shook my head again. Kevin hadn’t said anything about where Fritz was. Now that Briggs was here, I felt together we could persuade him to talk.
“Matthias,” Briggs said.
“He’s in here somewhere,” I said, stepping into the back hall. I could barely make out something in the hall—a slightly open door. The throbbing sound was louder. Behind me I could hear Briggs bite back a curse. I reached the door, looked down the hall again, and still saw no sign of Kevin. I pulled the door all the way open. That hum grew louder—definitely some kind of machinery—and I saw a set of stairs leading down to a basement lit by a dim light. Quickly I went down the steps, keeping an eye out for any hands reaching for my feet.
The room at the bottom was small, about fifteen by fifteen, with a concrete floor and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. A set of metal shelves lined one wall and reached to the ceiling. The shelves held plastic containers with labels I couldn’t read. There was a closed door across the room—the throbbing hum I heard was coming from behind it. Between me and the door were a pile of junk and bric-a-brac, moldering boxes, and more broken furniture.
“Anything down there?” Briggs said from the top of the stairs.
“There’s another door,” I said. “Maybe—”
I heard a sharp scuffling on the stairs. I turned to see Briggs seem to launch himself down the stairwell, arms out in front of him as if he were diving. He hit the floor like a sack of wet cement, and there was a muffled crack, like an old tree branch snapping in two.
Kevin Kelly came down the stairs, the knife in his hand. Backpedaling away from him, I stumbled over the pile of garbage in the center of the room. Frantically I looked around me for something I could use as a weapon. Damp boxes of magazines, blooming with mold. A disintegrating rattan side table. An empty, rusted paint can. Broken pieces of terra-cotta pots. A sagging leather golf bag, stained and worn through at the bottom. Groping inside, I grasped and then withdrew a golf club, its head a flat-faced wedge. Kevin had nearly reached the bottom of the stairs. I continued backing away from him, holding the golf club up in front of me like a sword. Then I bumped into the door on the wall opposite the stairs. As Kevin stepped over Briggs, a snarl on his face, I threw open the door and ran over the threshold.
The sound and the dank heat hit me simultaneously. That throbbing hum I had been hearing was now sharper but still muffled, like the sound from a lawn mower encased in bales of cotton. In front of me was a long room full of brightly lit bulbs hung over a small forest of spiky green plants. The marijuana seemed to be growing out of large trays of water arranged neatly in rows down the length of the room. At the far end of the room, on the left, was another doorway, this one with no door, and the hum seemed to emanate from there. A generator. There were no other doors or exits.
Kevin Kelly came through the doorway behind me, knife raised with the tip up. The golf club forgotten in my hands, I ran down the middle aisle away from him, knocking marijuana plants over to try to slow Kevin down. He gave an angry cry as I threw down an entire tray of plants, leaves thrashing and liquid spilling onto the floor. He kicked the tray out of the way as I continued to run down the aisle. “Where you going?” he asked, waggling the knife at me. With my left hand, I grasped the top of another plant and flung it backward at him. He ducked and batted it away with a forearm. He was laughing. Fuck this, I thought, and I raised the golf club and swung at him. Kevin spun to the side, and my club smashed another tray of plants. There was a searing pain on my right arm just above my elbow. I stepped back and saw blood welling through my sleeve.
“That’s for the damages,” Kevin said. The tip of his knife was wet, and although he was smiling at me, his eyes were furious. “I’m going to hurt you down here. No one will find you. You’ll just disappear like your precious roommate.”
I swung the club again, backhanded, and struck his left knee. He cried and stumbled, but didn’t fall. Instead, he jabbed at my face with his knife. I backpedaled and swung at him again. He bobbed out of the way, and instead of hitting his forehead, my club smashed a low-hanging lightbulb with a spectacular pop of light, showering him with glass. Raising his hands to protect his face, Kevin staggered back and tripped over another tray. I tried to angle around him for the door, but he scrambled to his feet and swung his knife in a vicious arc, forcing me to leap back. Gripping the club, I swung hard and up, as if hitting down the fairway, and he sidestepped, the club missing his chin by inches. The follow-through of my swing made me lose my balance, and I planted a foot to regain it, but my foot splashed down into a puddle of liquid from the overturned grow trays. Something hit the back of that foot near the heel, and pain flared up my calf, my ankle suddenly numb. My leg crumpled beneath me and I fell, crushing yet another tray of marijuana, the heavy, pungent smell of the plant, like citrus and skunk, filling my nostrils. I lay on my back on the floor, the club gone from my hands and my foot aching—I could already feel the swelling. Kevin Kelly stepped forward, looming over me, the blade of his knife now reversed and pointing down at my chest.
“This will hurt,” he said.
There was a loud bang like a detonation—I thought something had happened to the generator until Kevin, who had frozen in the act of plunging his knife down into me, opened his mouth. Blood stained his lips. He fell forward onto his face just beside me, his body no longer obstructing my view of the doorway, where I saw Briggs leaning against the door frame. A revolver was in his hand, smoke curling lazily from the barrel.