since I put the kid through his paces, which probably accounted for his early morning visit. He was throwing his stars into my tree from about forty or fifty feet. The kid couldn’t throw a kick without landing on his backside and he couldn’t string together more than ten pushups, but he was pretty accurate with the stars.
“Sir, yes sir.” He snapped to attention when he saw me despite the fact that I was wearing ratty old sweats and a dirty wife-beater. Today’s zit was at the point of his chin and he had a dollop of Clearasil on it. “Sir, we haven’t trained in a few days.”
“Sorry about that, Billy.” The kid looked at me with a face sadder than Al’s. “We can train tonight if you want.”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“One ‘sir’ is more than enough, kid.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Meet me at the Y tonight, but not in our usual place. Let’s meet in that aerobics room on the second floor around eight.”
“Sir, yes sir.”
“Geez… Hey, Billy, let me ask you a non-karate question.”
“Sir.”
“How has this crazy shit going on in school with the killer affected things?”
“Sir, kids are scared.”
“Did you know any of the kids at school?”
“Sir, I keep mostly to myself. The girls that were killed were cheerleaders.”
He said it like the fact that they were cheerleaders made him unworthy to be in their presence. I remembered what high school was like for guys like Billy. Teenagers weren’t a kind, accepting bunch, especially if you were a little goofy-ask Howard Rheinhart-and Billy was more than a little goofy.
“I’ll see you tonight, kid,” I said. He bowed and ran down the street.
I brought Al with me to the Y and took advantage of his low profile to sneak him past the front desk. The disinterested teenager knew I was a regular and didn’t look away from the TV as I waved to him. I had seen Smitty’s car was in the lot, like it always was, but I wasn’t ready to say hello yet. Smitty was a lot of things and in many ways a complex man, but he didn’t trouble himself with small talk. He didn’t care for bullshit ambiguity and I was ambivalent about just about everything going on in my life. He would look at me and I’d divert my eyes and stutter. For the time being, I decided to avoid him.
The Y was a sniffer’s paradise, and the combined aromas of bad BO, talc, and liquid soap had Al a little overactive. There was just a bit too much for him to process, so by the time we got to the aerobics room he collapsed on a mat, rolled over on his back, and started to snore with his four legs in the air.
It was five after eight and my karateka was no place to be found. Billy had never been less than half an hour early for anything. When he was fifteen minutes late I started to worry, and at half an hour, I began to panic a little bit. Something was wrong.
While I sat there and grew more anxious, it dawned on me that I knew very little about the kid. His dad was dead and his mother worked a lot, but I didn’t even know an address or a phone number. Whenever I gave him a lift he asked me to leave him a mile from his house so he could run home. I don’t know what that was all about-maybe he was embarrassed about his house or his mom. Shit, maybe he was embarrassed about me. Maybe he just wanted to run. I swear, working in human services screws you up for life.
It wasn’t like I ever needed to contact him-God knows, Billy made himself available. At eight forty-five I figured he wasn’t coming, and I left the Y more than just a little nervous.
As we walked out Al pulled me all over the Y, once again overwhelmed with the sniffles. When we hit the parking lot he was like a burning man who had jumped in a swimming pool. He seemed to relax and say “Ahhh…” We walked past Smitty’s Olds and were headed toward the Eldorado when we came upon Mitchell and Harter’s SUV. At first Al paused like he didn’t want to encounter the pit bull, but then he proceeded over to it.
There was no barking, so the pit bull probably didn’t take the ride that night. Al was back, sniffing like a mad hound. He went up one side and down the other and then focused his attention on the back gate. He got up on his hind legs and sniffed all over the handle, pulled back, and barked twice. Then he sat at attention staring at the back of the SUV.
I pulled him and he strained his neck, but he wouldn’t leave his position. There was no point in looking in the vehicle because the windows were tinted. I called to him and pulled hard enough to shake him out of his stance, but he continued to resist to the point where I nearly had to drag him. As we walked away, he whimpered.
I knew something was up the second I got to AJ’s. The Foursome weren’t talking and they were riveted to the TV screen. Kelley was there too, but no one paid any attention to me when I walked in. The TV was on MSNBC and they were in a special report.
“… It is a sign of ritualized murder, a thought-out process and one in which the murderer is expressing more confidence. He’s actually thumbing his nose at the authorities trying to apprehend him,” the head profiler said.
“The draining of blood from the bodies, is that a particular sign of something?” the anchor said.
“Draining a human body of blood takes a level of expertise. It takes a particular commitment to totally drain the life out of an individual, if you will, and it also indicates to everyone involved that he has the power to control others.”
“Holy shit,” I heard myself say.
“Two more teenagers. Throats slit, blood drained from them and discarded in a field. This is getting beyond sick,” Kelley said.
“This isn’t Howard. This is something else,” I said.
Kelley didn’t say anything, which told me a lot. All of AJ’s sat in silence for a long time, which gave everything an even more surreal feel. AJ’s and silence just didn’t fit together. When my thinking got back to normal I thought of Billy and got scared.
I borrowed Rocco’s cell phone and called my machine. There was a message from Marcia asking me why I haven’t called and just because we weren’t going out anymore we could still be friends, but that was it-nothing from Billy.
Then I called Jamal. He was never without his cell.
“Jamal.” It was the way he always answered.
“It’s Duff, J. Salami and bacon,” I said.
“ Salaam alaikum… Why you got to fuck with Allah?”
“Sorry. Hey, tonight Al did something really weird.”
“Duff, that all that hound ever do.”
“He sniffed all over this car, jumped up sniffed the handle, barked twice, and then sat at attention. He wouldn’t move.”
“Uh-huh. You remember what I told you Al was trained for?”
“He sniffed explosives.”
“Yeah, but he was trained as part of the Fruit of Islam’s security team.”
“So, what’s that mean-he guarded Al Sharpton’s pomade?”
“Nope-it means the crazy-ass hound knows how to sniff out illegal drugs.”
24
I went in and out of sleep that night, worried about Billy. Sure, he was a goofy and annoying kid, but I didn’t want anything to happen to him. I also didn’t know what to make of Howard, his life in prison, and what if any role this Blast shit had to do with anything. Then there were the karate guys, their drug dealing, and why a God-loving guy like Abadon would hang around with them. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that he trained with them; after all, I’ve boxed with some of society’s real pariahs and enjoyed my time in the gym with them. People are rarely one thing and I do my best to see them that way. Don’t forget, Hitler loved dogs.
Of course, I don’t know if he put up with them barking at five a.m. like I did. Al rousted me out of my restless slumber with his attention to the door. I was hoping it was Billy, but this was a bit on the early side, even for him.
