She was stunned. “Don’t you snap at me. Don’t you dare.”
“I need help!”
“What?”
“You’ve got to help me.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Real bad trouble.”
“What the hell have you done?”
“It’s not what I’ve done. It‘s-”
“Where are you?”
“I’m over here at-”
“Have you been arrested?”
“What?”
“Is it that kind of trouble?”
“No, no. I‘m-”
“Are you at the police station?”
“Nothing like that. I‘m-”
“Where are you?”
“Near the Broadway Diner.”
“What trouble have you caused at the diner?”
“That’s not it. I-”
“Let me talk to someone there.”
“Who? What do you mean?”
“Let me talk to a waitress or someone.”
“I’m not in the diner.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“In a phone booth.”
“Colin, what’s the matter with you?”
“I’m waiting for you to come get me.”
“You’re only a few blocks from home.”
“I can’t walk. He’s waiting for me along the way.”
“Who?”
“He wants to kill me.”
A pause.
“Colin, you come straight home.”
“I can’t.”
“This minute. I mean it.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m getting angry, young man.”
“Roy tried to kill me tonight. He’s still out there, waiting for me.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not joking!”
Another pause.
“Colin, did you take something?”
“Huh?”
“Did you take a pill or something?”
“Drugs?”
“Did you?”
“Jeez.”
“Did you?”
“Where would I get drugs?”
“I know you kids can get them. It’s as easy as buying aspirins.”
“Jeez.”
“It’s a big problem these days. Is that it? Are you high and having trouble getting down?”
“Me? You really think that’s a problem with me?”
“If you’ve been popping pills-”
“If that’s what you really think-”
“-or if you’ve been drinking-”
“-then you don’t know me at all.”
“-mixing booze and pills-”
“If you want to hear about it,” Colin said sharply, “you’ll have to bring the car and pick me up.”
“Don’t use that tone with me.”
“If you don’t come,” he said, “then I guess I’ll just rot here.”
He banged the receiver into the cradle and left the telephone booth.
“Shit!”
He kicked an empty soda can that was lying beside the walkway. It spun and rattled across the street.
He went to the Broadway Diner and stood at the curb, looking east, where Weezy would turn the corner if she bothered to come for him.
He was shaking uncontrollably with anger and fear.
He felt something else, too, something dark and devastating, something far more disturbing than anger, far more debilitating than fear, something uglier, like a terrible loneliness, but much worse than loneliness. It was a suspicion-no, a conviction-that he had been abandoned, forgotten, and that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people, an object of scorn and derision, an outsider, secretly loathed and ridiculed by everyone who met him, even by those few who professed to love him.
He felt as if he would vomit.
Five minutes later she drew alongside him in the blue Cadillac. She leaned across the front seat and opened the door on the passenger’s side.
When he saw her, he lost the grip that he’d had on himself ever since the nightmare at Hermit Hobson’s place. Tears streamed down his face. By the time he got into the car and closed the door, he was sobbing like a baby.
27
She didn’t believe him. She refused to call the cops, and she wouldn’t disturb the Bordens with a call at that hour.
At nine-thirty the following morning, she talked to Roy on the phone. Then she talked to his mother. She insisted on privacy, so Colin didn’t even hear her side of the conversation.
After she had spoken with the Bordens, she tried to make Colin recant his story. When he wouldn’t she became furious.
At eleven o‘clock, after an extended argument, she and Colin went to the junkyard. Neither of them spoke during the drive.
She parked at the end of the dirt lane, near the shack. They got out of the car.
Colin was uneasy. Echoes of last night’s terror still reverberated in his mind.
His bicycle was lying near the front porch steps. Roy’s bike was gone, of course.
“You see,” he said. “I was here.”
She didn’t respond. She wheeled the bike around to the back of the car.
Colin followed her. “It happened exactly the way I said it did.”
