First Grave on the Right

“Then what? You have to tell me.” She grabbed my shirt collar with her free hand. I tried not to giggle. “When will you realize I live vicariously through you?”

“You do?”

“Duh.” She smoothed my collar and went back to her coffee. “I have a teenage daughter. I have no social life. No agenda that doesn’t involve the Disney Channel. And sex,” she said with a dramatic wave of her hand. “Don’t even get me started. I haven’t had sex with anything non-battery-powered in years. I need details, Charley.”

After I recovered from the non-battery-powered comment, I said, “I tried to set you up with Delivery Dave.”

“The bread guy?” She thought about it, her mouth a grim line. “I guess I could do worse.”

A chuckle escaped me, and she smiled.

“So, are you gonna tell me what happened last night?” she asked.

“Ah, yes. Last night.” I went into the whole evening with Rosie’s asshole husband, assuring her I’d gotten Rosie on the plane and safely out of the country. Then I told her about my morning with the other asshole, Garrett the skeptic skiptracer. Then I told her about my disastrous time with Elizabeth’s sister. Then I told her the best part. The Reyes part.

“So, Reyes, huh?”

“Yeah.”

She laughed. “Could you say that with a little more sigh?”

I grinned and scooped a layer of strawberry cream cheese onto a blueberry bagel, getting a serving of grains, dairy, and fruit in one shot. “The first and only time I’ve ever seen him was that night in the South Valley with Gemma.”

“What night?” Then Cookie’s eyes widened. “You mean?”

“I mean. If I’m not mistaken, it’s him.”

She knew the story. I’d only told her a dozen times. At least. As Cookie sat speechless, I thought back to what I knew about Reyes. Unfortunately, I didn’t know much.

I was a freshman in high school the one and only time I’d seen him, and my psycho sister Gemma was a senior. Ever true to form, she was trying to graduate high school a semester early so she could start college full- time, but graduating early involved a class project she was too chicken to pull off by herself. Enter Charlotte Davidson, supersister, saint, and project getter-doner.

Not, however, without complaint. Oddly, I could remember our conversation like it was moments ago. But twelve years had passed since that terrible and beautiful night. A night I would never forget.

“If you ask me,” I’d said, mumbling through the red scarf wrapped around my nose and mouth, “no class project is worth dying for, even with that whole ten-points-extra-credit thing going for it.”

Gemma turned to me and lowered Dad’s camera to push back a blond curl. The cold of December at midnight added a metallic luster to her blue eyes. “If I don’t get this credit,” she said, her breath fogging in the icy air, “I don’t graduate early.”

“I know,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed. “But seriously, if I die two weeks before Christmas, I’m totally coming back to haunt you. Forever. And trust me, I know how.”

Gemma shrugged, unconcerned, then turned back to the autofocused images of Albuquerque. Luminarias lined sidewalks and buildings, casting eerie shadows over the deserted streets. For a final on community awareness, Gemma opted to make a video. She wanted to capture life on the streets of Southside. Troubled kids in search of acceptance. Drug addicts in search of their next high. Homeless people in search of sustenance and shelter.

So far, all she’d managed to get on tape was a skateboarder wiping out on Central and a prostitute ordering a soft drink at Macho Taco.

Our curfew had come and gone and still we waited, huddled together in the shadows of an abandoned school, shivering and doing our best to be invisible. We kept getting hassled by gang members who wanted to know what we were doing there. We had a couple of close calls, and I got a couple of phone numbers, but all in all, the evening had been pretty quiet. Probably because it was thirty below out.

Just then I noticed a kid huddled under the steps of the school. He wore a semi-white T-shirt and dirty jeans. Even though he wasn’t wearing a jacket, he wasn’t shivering. The departed weren’t affected by the weather.

“Hey, there,” I said, easing closer.

He glanced up, shock plain on his young face. “You can see me?”

“Sure can.”

“No one can see me.”

“Well, I can. My name is Charley Davidson.”

“Like the motorcycle?”

“Something like that,” I said with a grin.

“Why are you so bright?” he asked, squinting.

“I’m a grim reaper. But don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.”

Fear crept into his eyes anyway. “I don’t want to go to hell.”

“Hell?” I said, sitting beside him and ignoring Gemma’s sighs of annoyance that I was once again talking to air. “Trust me, hon, if you’d been penciled in for a personal interview with evil incarnate, you wouldn’t be here now.”

Relief softened his expressive eyes.

“So, you just hanging?” I asked.

It didn’t take long to find out that the kid was a recently departed thirteen-year-old gangbanger named Angel who took a nine millimeter to the chest during a drive-by. He was the driver. His redemption, in my eyes, came when I learned that he had no idea his friend was going to try to kill the puta bitch vatos trespassing on their turf until the bullets were flying. In an attempt to stop his friend, Angel actually wrecked his mother’s car, then wrestled his friend for the gun. In the end, only one person died that night.

While I was busy lecturing Angel on the benefits of bulletproof vests, a scene in a distant window caught my attention. I stepped out of the shadows for a closer look. A harsh yellow glare illuminated the kitchen of a small apartment, but that wasn’t what got my attention. At first I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me. I blinked, refocused, then sucked in a deep breath as shock crept up my spine.

“Gemma,” I whispered.

Gemma’s saucy “What?” was quickly followed by a gasp. She saw it, too.

A man in a filthy T-shirt and boxers had a teenage boy pinned against a wall. The boy clawed at the man’s hand clenched around his throat as a meaty fist shot forward. It slammed into the boy’s jaw with such violent force, his head whipped back and hit the wall. He went limp, but only for a moment. His hands drifted up blindly to fend off the attack. In the span of a heartbeat, the boy’s disoriented gaze seemed to lock on to mine. Then the man hit him again.

“Oh, my god, Gemma, we have to do something!” I screamed. I ran for an opening in the chain-link fence that surrounded the school. “We have to do something!”

“Charley, wait!”

But I was already through the fence and running toward the apartment. I glanced up in time to see the man wrestle the boy onto the kitchen table.

The steps to the apartment building weren’t lit. I stumbled up them and pounded on the locked entrance door to no avail. A postage stamp window revealed a dark, deserted hallway.

“Charley!” Gemma was standing in the street outside the apartment. Because the window was set high, she had to stand back to be able to see in. “Charley, hurry! He’s killing him!”

I ran back to her, but I couldn’t see the boy.

“He’s killing him,” she repeated.

“Where did they go?”

“There. Nowhere. They didn’t go anywhere,” she said in a rush of emotion. “He fell. The boy fell, and the man—”

I did the only thing I could think of. I sprinted back to the abandoned school and grabbed a brick.

“What are you doing?” she asked as I scrambled through the fence and rushed back to her.