Gino gave him a lopsided smile. 'Obviously. Let me know when he's between girlfriends. My daughter may not be the brightest bulb on the tree, but she's a sweetheart, and a looker to boot, and I'd sure like to see her hooked up with a young man who takes education seriously.' He shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged at Magozzi. 'Come on, Leo. Let me tell him what's up. The guy's got the army at the door and has every right to be concerned.'
Magozzi looked down at his shoes and pretended to think for a moment.
John was watching the two cops without saying a word, thinking he'd learned more in the past three minutes than in all his years of law enforcement.
'I suppose,' Magozzi finally said.
'Great. Okay, Mr. Zellickson, this is the deal,' Gino said. We got some surveillance video from some of the sites where the boxes were planted, and we caught a pic of Kyle and his friend' - he pretended to consult his notes - 'Clark, something…'
'Clark Bradley?'
Yeah, that's the one. They weren't carrying a box or anything, and we're not thinking for one minute they were involved, but they were pretty close to a spot where one of the boxes was found, so we figured maybe, if we were really lucky, they might have seen something… like somebody setting down a box, for instance. And what's so freaky about that? A guy setting down a box? You'd never think twice about it. But in this case, maybe it means something.'
Kyle's dad frowned. Where was this?'
'The Metrodome.'
The man got manicures, Magozzi realized, wondering why that still gave him the creeps. His hand was pressed against his chest as if to quiet a relieved heart, and his buffed nails glinted on the black silk of the silly robe.
'Oh, for crying out loud,' Mr. Zellickson said, smiling for the first time since he'd opened the door. 'They have open skating at the Dome on a couple of floors whenever nothing else is going on. Kyle and Clark go all the time. They love their Rollerblades.'
Gino opened his hands and grinned. 'And they were blading on the film.' His grin disappeared. 'However - and I'm telling you this as a father, because I'd want to know if it were my kid - neither one of them was wearing a helmet.'
Mr. Zellickson's eyes narrowed. 'I will definitely talk to him about that. Come in, gentlemen. Kyle's in the basement doing some homework. With Clark, as it happens. You can talk to them both at the same time.'
Gino beamed at him. 'How lucky can we get?'
Kyle's mother pretty much hated the basement, which suited Kyle just fine since it meant she didn't come down here very much. Once in a blue moon the tornado siren on the corner blew its brains out and busted everybody's eardrums, and that was the only time she came down to the space Kyle had made his own. He and Clark had tacked up band posters on the wall, and hidden under those were the really fab posters of girls with big hooters hanging down to their belly buttons that made you want to do things to yourself no matter who was looking.
Clark was kind of a superdweeb. He'd been wearing jackets with zippers instead of snaps, duh, when he and Kyle had first hooked up, but he was a pure CSI genius. He'd seen every show about a million times, and watched all the cop and autopsy shows on cable until he nearly fried his brains out with a TV Ph.D. in how to do crime and make assholes out of the cops. Better yet, he carried a bong in his backpack and scored a lot of green from somewhere, because he always had a Glad bag full in his jockey shorts.
They were slumped on the sprung-out couch in the basement room mainlining tortilla chips and chocolate, watching the big screen Kyle's dad had hung on the wall to keep his precious progeny occupied while he and the mother of the year did whatever the hell they did upstairs. Last time he'd checked they'd been watching some reality show about a bunch of weird people trying to beat each other at stupid games on a deserted island. Tonight they were glued to the coverage of all the boxes that were turning the city upside down.
'Well, that sucks,' Clark said quietly, just in case Kyle's dad was still at the top of the basement steps, trying to think of something else to say. Most of the time he worked about forty hours a day, which made him the ideal dad in Clark's opinion, if you had to have one at all. But occasionally, when he took a day off because the world was ending or he had a killer hangover, he took a shot at father-son bonding with Kyle, and those days were just plain creepy. He'd come down to the basement and ask them how they were doing, and they'd say they were doing fine, and he'd say, 'No shit,' as if that kind of talk would put him in the cool-dad category or something.
'You and Mom want to watch this with us, Dad?' Kyle called up the stairs. Kyle was kind of brilliant at parental management. He knew damn well if he invited his parents down, they'd assume they were actually watching that stupid Civil War thing and didn't need any supervision; plus, it allowed them to tell themselves they'd be good parents if they trusted the boys and just stayed upstairs, watching the Great Mystery Boxes show while they had a few cocktails.
As predicted, Kyle's dad said thanks very much but they'd stay upstairs so they didn't interrupt the boys while they were watching a homework assignment, which meant it was perfectly safe to light up some green.
Kyle turned on the HEPA air machine, opened the windows, and pointed at the big screen. 'Oh, that is so sweet. Look at the traffic cams.'
Clark focused on the screen for a while, grinning at the endless lines of cars frozen on all the freeways out of town. It wasn't like earlier this afternoon, with all the cars dodging and speeding and one spectacular rollover on 94 into Wisconsin, but all the same, he felt his gut tighten and ripple like that super fool who hip-hopped to super- abs. 'It's kind of weird, watching this, isn't it?'
'Weird, how?'
'Well, they're idiots. Assholes. Freaked out over nothing. They've blown all the boxes, for Chrissake. They know they're empty, and look at those fools, still running'
'They don't know if they found them all.'
'I want to tell somebody,' Clark said.
'Who?'
'Carrie Wynheimer, for one.'
'She's a loser. Wears a push-up bra.'
'So what? It's pushing up something'
Kyle snatched the stick away and pulled a load into his lungs, thinking he might have made a big mistake hooking up with Clark.
They were both mellowed out by the time the sun started sinking and the basement started to get murky. Bad thing about basements and their little window slices at ground level, especially when your parents planted yew bushes to hide the top four courses of cement blocks, as if no one knew they were there.
They'd watched a lot of the news coverage of the panic in the city. At first it had been fun to see the traffic jams and wide-eyed residents packing up their minivans with kids and pets. After a while it got old. And then the doorbell rang.
The door to the basement opened onto the hall just beyond the foyer, so Magozzi was front row center to read the body language of the kids when they came upstairs.
Gino had wanted these kids to be the perps, partly so they could sew this thing up fast, and partly because he hated all teenage males. That kind of prejudice was the price of doing business when you were the father of a drop-dead sixteen-year-old daughter. Magozzi hadn't known what to wish for or what tack to take until he heard the footsteps plodding up from the basement. The way he figured it, you didn't stop running up any flight of stairs until you were at least twenty, unless you were nervous about what was at the top.
