Felicity wondered what she was doing out there, she didn’t ask. There was a work sink in the garage, where Des was able to wash up. As she was drying off her hands on a fresh paper towel she heard a faint crunching of leaves nearby. They had a small enclosure attached to the garage for their trash cans. Someone was crouched behind it, watching her. Des sidled over and stuffed her used paper towels in one of the cans.
Then swiftly grabbed little Ricky Welmers by the scruff of the neck and yanked him to his feet. “Got something you want to tell me, Ricky?” she demanded angrily.
“N-no…!” he cried out, bug-eyed with fear. “N-nothing, I swear!”
“You’re a real comedian, aren’t you? Had yourself a good laugh.”
“No way!”
“How would you like me to run you in for defacing public property? You could spend the night at the youth detention lockup in New London with the gangbangers and drug addicts. Would you think that’s funny, too?”
“M-my brother made me do it. Please don’t… Please!”
Des stood there a moment, scowling at him and thinking: Here is the job. This is where it officially starts. She released her hold on Ricky, softening. “You know I’m on your side, don’t you?”
He peered up at her, tugging at the neck of his T-shirt. “How so?”
“I kept you out of the principal’s office yesterday, didn’t I?”
“So what?”
“I’m not running you in for trashing my ride, am I?”
“Not yet…”
“Right,” she affirmed, nodding. “Because I’m your friend. Now it’s your turn to show me the love. That’s how it works with friends.”
“Like what?” he demanded suspiciously.
“Take a spin with me in my cruiser.”
His jut-jawed young face lit up. “Really?!”
“Did you eat dinner yet?”
“We were maybe going to order a pizza.”
“Well, I have to get me some dinner, and I hate to eat alone. Sound okay?”
“Okay!” he replied eagerly.
Des got her briefcase out of the front seat and dug around in it for a Citizen Ride Along release form. She filled in Ricky’s name and address. “This is a permission slip. Have your dad sign this and we’ll hit the road.”
Ricky went dashing off through the trees to his house, form in hand. While she waited for him to return she spotted Ronnie watching her from under the trees, the lit end of his cigarette growing brighter as he pulled on it.
“Why don’t you ease up on him, Ronnie? He’s just a little kid.”
“I don’t know what you mean, lady.” Ronnie still had a reedy, adolescent voice. He sounded like a boy, not a man.
“Sure you do. You put him up to trashing my ride, didn’t you?”
“He told you that?” Now Ronnie stepped out of the shadows into the floodlights, his smoke stuck between his teeth. His hands were buried deep in the pockets of an oversized silver-colored ski parka. His red bandanna was tied over his head. Dressed that way on the wrong block in Hartford, he’d be shot on sight.
“He didn’t have to tell me. I’ve got two eyes of my own.”
Ronnie stood there hipshot, his head cocked at her defiantly, body language straight out of a rap video. Des remembered Moose Frye saying that he was probably the brightest kid in the entire school system. “My old man cheesed off Mrs. Beddoe again, didn’t he?” he demanded.
“He’ll have to be the one to tell you about that.”
“They want the new school, he doesn’t. I heard him arguing with them about it in the driveway the other day.” Ronnie took one last pull on his cigarette and flicked it off toward the Beddoes’s gravel turnaround, where it continued to burn among the fallen leaves. He smirked at her, daring her to give him a fire safety lecture. She kept silent. She was more interested in keeping him talking. “The old people are always arguing,” he went on. “But they never do anything. They’re, like, total lying hypocrites. Like with the new school-they say they want it because they care about us. But that’s bullshit. They just want another trophy to feed their egos. It’s all about trophies. We’re trophies. If we do well, it makes them look good.”
“Your dad wants to save Center School, doesn’t he?”
“Only because he’s afraid his taxes will go up. If his career wasn’t in the toilet he’d be flying a green ribbon, too. Anything to make himself look good.”
“Maybe he wants you to do well because he wants good things for you. Maybe he loves you. Ever think of that?”
“You know dick about it, lady,” Ronnie shot back, sneering.
She nodded her head slowly. She’d had feral strays living out of Dumpsters who were exactly like this one. Always, their first impulse was to rake you across the face. “Understand you’re a major film freak.”
“So what?” he demanded.
“I’m friends with a film critic who lives here in Dorset. He works for one of the New York papers.”
“Mitchell Berger, sure,” he said. “Me and my friends read his reviews out loud and laugh at them.”
“He loves to talk about movies. Sometimes I can hardly shut him up. Maybe you’d like to meet him sometime.”
“What for? He’s an officially sanctioned bore.”
Not only bright but a smarty-pants, too. An off-putting combination, to be sure. The question was: Did it add up to the Mod Squad?
Ricky came scampering back through the trees now, signed form in hand. She started to invite Ronnie to join them, but the older boy had already vanished into the darkness without a sound.
It was as if he’d never been there at all.
Ricky hopped in next to her in the front seat. She adjusted his seat belt for him while his eyes took in her crime girl stuff, especially her new three-thousand-dollar digital handheld radio on the seat between them. It was something to behold. Looked as if it belonged on the space shuttle.
She circled back down the driveway and headed down the cul-de-sac toward the Old Post Road, Ricky riding with his jaw stuck out and his beefy arms crossed. His feet swung back and forth in the air, heels striking the seat again and again.
She took him to McGee’s Diner, a shabby and much-beloved local greasy spoon down on the Shore Road. During the summer McGee’s had been packed with sunburned, boisterous beachgoers who stopped there to munch on lobster rolls and gaze out the windows at the sun setting beyond the Big Sister lighthouse. Tonight, the parking lot was deserted except for a landscaper’s pickup truck and an ancient Peugeot wagon. Some of this was attributable to the time of year, but much of it had to do with the red SAVE OUR SCHOOL colors Dick McGee was proudly flying out front for all to see. Most of Dorset’s business owners had stayed neutral, not wanting to lose precious customers. Not so Dick, and he was feeling it-the WE CARE crowd were definitely boycotting him.
Inside, not a newcomer was to be found. Just an old geezer having pie and coffee in a booth and a pair of twentyish swamp Yankees hunched over bowls of chili at the counter. They hunched even lower when they caught sight of Des in her uni. An older-than-oldies radio station was playing Perry Como out in the kitchen. Dick McGee clung stubbornly to the prehistoric when it came to music.
She and Ricky slid into one of the booths and Sandy, Dick’s waitress, came sauntering over. Sandy was about forty, stubby, and frizzy-haired. Highly sour, but a ripe prospect if ever Des had seen one. She’d been working on her for the past couple of weeks.
“Hey, Sandy, have you talked to your boyfriend about adopting one of my kittens?” she asked her warmly.
“Not possible,” Sandy answered. “Chuckie hates cats. If I take her, he’ll never spend a single night at my place.”
“So you can stay at his place.”
“No, I can’t. His place is a dump.”
“Girl, you folks need a cat. Your lives aren’t complete yet.”
“You going to order anything, or or are you just going to tell me how to live?”
