Starbucks was, per usual at this hour, empty, until Puglisi showed up around 3:45, just as Pete’s friend in the
Puglisi barked a coffee order at Cherry and situated himself in the corner, setting up his lens. Four o’clock came and went, and neither Nicole nor the beau or whoever he was showed up. Ten after four came and went. At about twenty after four Puglisi’s phone rang. He answered angrily and then hung up even more angrily, having been told that the tip turned out to be bad information. Just as he was about to pack up his stuff, Angela, seated two stools down the window counter from Puglisi, yawned and stretched and said, “Can you watch my laptop for a couple of minutes while I go to the bathroom? Thanks.” And off she went.
Puglisi sized up the situation. The bathroom door was closing behind Angela. Behind the counter Cherry was cleaning the espresso machine, her back to Puglisi. He shrugged, tucked the laptop under his arm and headed out to his car. He stopped when he noticed a thick glass Coke bottle on the hood of his Honda. It had been placed there as a paperweight to keep the smiley face Angela had drawn from flying away in the considerable wind. The smiley face also had hands, and both of them were flipping off Puglisi. He turned around to find me walking toward him. I was holding out Angela’s phone, playing the video of Puglisi’s robbery. He took a swing at the phone, but I saw it coming and held it high over his head. Being much taller than the dude, I had no problem keeping the phone away from him. “Besides,” I said, “she got you too.”
Cherry was out with us now, looking at her phone camera screen. “So weird. From
“I believe that’s grand larceny,” I said.
“It’s entrapment,” Puglisi said.
“Wanna gamble on a six-year minimum sentence?” I said.
Puglisi smirked and looked around the parking lot. “I’m guessing Nicole isn’t coming?”
“I’m happy to relay any message you have for her. Maybe a final good-bye?”
“Okay, champ, I’m off her tail. Be about a day before the
I reached through the window and casually took back the laptop. “I need you to do one more thing for me.”
Twenty minutes later, the picture I got of the black Civic swerving out of the parking lot in front of my building the previous night was up on the tabloid sites with the headline BREAK IN BURNED BEAUTY CASE IMMINENT, RECLUSE ON THE RUN.
I’d tried to leak the picture myself, but no media organization would take my anonymous submission seriously. Only the likes of Shane Puglisi and his Scorpion Imageworks had the credibility to get such a shot picked up. He actually sold the picture for five grand, over the phone, from right there in the Starbucks parking lot.
Basically I was trying to buy us some time. The Recluse would see the story. She wouldn’t be able move around so easily, not with that picture in hot circulation. She would have no choice but to lie low. At the same time, I knew that if she’d been crazy enough to follow Nicole and me to my building, she wouldn’t be backing off for good. We’d get an extra couple of days to do some digging before the
Angela and I took the bus west. She fell asleep, her face on the window. Her left hand was closed tightly but her right was open. Her fingernails were chewed bloody. A razor wire tattoo circled her wrist. She caught me looking at it. “Cool, right?” she said.
“Cool,” I said.
We got to the Route 22 stop, and from there I walked her home. We stopped at this bodega a block from her house. “I heard you have rock-solid fake ID. Any chance I can get you to man up and buy me some beer?”
“How about a Snapple Green Tea?”
“I believe you’ve already had the pleasure of seeing me hurl all over the street?”
I was suspended, but she’d cut that day. “Thanks for taking off from school for this,” I said.
“Oh, it was a sacrifice. If you were really thankful, you’d get me the Budweiser.”
“I feel bad saying this, but as your friend, I have to.”
“We’re not friends, but go ahead.”
“Can I help you get yourself to a rehab program?”
“Many have tried, all have failed, but I’ll tell you what. Help me get that fifty-thousand-dollar reward, and I’ll check myself into a luxury spa to dry out. Maybe in South America. Maybe I’ll never come back. Yeah, that sounds good. Hey, I’m wondering what it would be like to suck your tongue really, really hard.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“Saving yourself for Nicole?”
Nicole or not, it wasn’t going down, not with all that lip metal. “Thought you weren’t into me like that anyway.”
“Spaceman, that was like two days ago. The way I feel today, anybody’s fair game. When you’re hungry, meat’s meat.”
“I’m truly flattered.”
She headed into the bodega and I went home.
THIRTY-NINE
From Nicole’s journal:
Friday, 29 October-
Nye: “We’re in this together, Nicole.”
“Really, Dr. Nye, we’re not. I feel like I don’t have enough skin on my face. That the skin that
Later, I pull up the pictures from my Facebook, the Before, the comments, so many of them, all wishing me a speedy recovery.
Ctrl + click gets you the Mac Word dictionary and “Recovery, n., 1. the return to normal health. . 2. The return to a normal state. . 3. The regaining of something lost or taken away.” The definition neglects to mention the maps, the ones that delineate the return trip to normal or the site of the sunken treasure.
A touch to my shoulder. Mom. “Honey, take a nap.” She tucks me in and strokes my hair. When I wake, she’s asleep next to me. Her eyelids are puffy. They will be puffier soon. Tomorrow, going away with Dad to lake house for weekend. Don’t really want to go. Yesterday, Jay rested his head on mine.
FORTY
The Recluse was quiet all that weekend. I pulled half a shift at BJ’s but mostly I faked like I was fighting a cold and slept during the day. When my father went to bed, my laptops came out. Angela and I had split the list of female students at the Hollows. Basically, we were on Facebook all the time, looking for Nicole-hate, not finding any. Late Sunday night/early Monday morning Angela buzzed me with a red alert text, a link somebody had posted to the fan page set up by Nicole’s well-wishers.
