“Come on, hang out awhile,” Stinky says.
“Can’t,” Richie says. “WWE Smackdown, dude. Can’t miss the awesomeness.”
“Homework,” Tommy says glumly. “Book report.”
The two boys leave, skateboards under their arms. Stinky does a couple of runs, tries a kick-flip and falls off his deck (glad Richie and Tommy aren’t there to see). He looks at his skinned elbow and decides to go home. If his mother is upstairs, he can watch the Smackdown himself, keeping the volume down low so he doesn’t bother her while she does her accounting shit. She works a lot since she cleaned up her act.
The Whip is open and he’d kill for a cheeseburger, but he only has fifty cents. Plus, Wicked Wanda is on duty. If he asks her for credit—or maybe a buck and a half out of the tip jar—she’ll laugh in his face.
He heads back to Red Bank Avenue and once he’s outside the misty circle cast by the light at the front of the parking lot—where Wicked Wanda can’t see him and laugh, that is—he starts dispatching enemies. Tonight, having reached a more mature age, he’s imagining himself as John Wick. It’s harder to bring down his enemies when he has his deck under one arm and only one hand with which to cut and chop, but he has great skills, supernatural skills, and so—
“Young man?”
He’s jerked out of his fantasy and sees an old guy standing just outside the security light at the edge of the parking lot (not to mention the Dairy Whip’s lone video surveillance camera). He’s hunched over a cane and wearing a cool wide-brimmed hat like in an old black-and-white spy movie.
“Did I startle you? I’m sorry, but I need some help. My wife is in a wheelchair, you see, and the battery died. We have a disability van with a ramp, but I can’t push her chair up by myself. If you could help…”
Stinky, currently in full hero mode, is perfectly willing to help. He’s been told repeatedly not to talk to strangers, but this geezer looks like he’d have trouble knocking over a row of dominoes, let alone pushing a wheelchair up a crip ramp. “Where is it?”
The old guy points diagonally across the street. Through the rising mist, Stinky can just make out the shape of a van parked on the tarmac of the old Exxon station. And beside it, a wheelchair with someone sitting in it.
Roddy and Emily take turns being the one stranded in the dead wheelchair, and it’s really Roddy’s turn, but Em’s sciatica is now so bad—mostly thanks to the damned stubborn Craslow girl—that she actually needs the chair.
“I’ll give you ten dollars to help me push her up the ramp and into our van,” the old guy says.
Stinky thinks of the burger he was just wishing for. With a ten-spot he could add fries and a chocolate shake and still have money left over. Plenty. But would Jackie Chan take money for doing a good deed?
“Nah, I’ll do it for free.”
“That is very kind.”
They walk into the misty night together, the geezer leaning on his cane. They cross the avenue. When they reach the sidewalk in front of the gas station, the old lady in the wheelchair gives Stinky a weak wave. He returns it and turns to the geezer, who has one hand in the pocket of his overcoat.
“I was just thinking.”
“Yes?”
“Maybe you could give me three bucks for pushing her up the ramp. Then I could go back to the Whip and get a Burger Royale.”
“Hungry, are you?”
“Always.”
The geezer smiles and pats Stinky’s shoulder. “I understand. Hunger must be assuaged.”
July 23, 2021
1
“Are you sure about the night this friend of yours disappeared?” Holly asks. Jerome has purchased the boys milkshakes and they’re sprawled on the grass in the picnic area, slurping them up.
“Pretty sure,” the redhead—Tommy Edison—says, “because his mom called my mom to see if he was staying over and he was absent from school the next day.”
“Nah,” says Richie Glenman. This is the resident clown with the disgusting habit of putting French fries up his nose. Holly has all of their names in her notes. “It was later. A week or two. I think.”
“I heard he ran away to live with his uncle in Florida,” says the boy with the hightop fade. This is Andy Vickers. “His mother’s a—” He tips an invisible bottle to his mouth and makes a glug-glug sound. “Got arrested for drunk driving once.”
The boy with the acne shakes his head. He’s Ronnie Swidrowski. He looks solemn. “He didn’t run away and he didn’t go to Florida. He got grabbed.” He lowers his voice. “I heard it was Slender Man.”
The others break out laughing. Richie Glenman gives him a shoulder-punch. “There’s no such guy as Slender Man, you douchebag. He’s an urban legend, like the Witch of the Park.”
“Ow! You made me spill my shake!”
To Tommy Edison, who seems the brightest, Holly says, “Do you really think your friend Peter disappeared the night you last saw him?”
“Not positive, that was over two years ago, but I think so. Like I said, he wasn’t in school the next day.”
“Skippin,” Ronnie Swidrowski says. “Stinks did it all the time. Cause his mother’s a—”
“Nah, it was later,” Richie Glenman insists. “I know because I was matching quarters with him in the park after that. Over in the playground.”
They go back and forth about it and Swidrowski starts giving a reasoned and logical argument for the existence of Slender Man, who he hears also got some teacher from the college back in the old days, but Holly has heard enough. The disappearance of Peter “Stinky” Steinman (if he has in fact disappeared at all) almost certainly has nothing to do with the disappearance of Bonnie Dahl, but she intends to find out a little more, if only because the Dairy Whip and the auto repair shop are just half a mile apart. The Jet Mart, where Bonnie was last seen, is also fairly close.
Jerome gives Holly a look, and she gives him a nod. Time to go.
“You guys have a nice day,” he says.
“You, too,” Tommy Edison says.
The clown points at them with a ketchup-stained finger and says, “Veronica Mars and John Shaft!”
They all break up laughing.
Halfway across the parking lot, Holly stops and goes back. “Tommy, the night you and Richie saw him here, he had his skateboard, right?”
“Always,” Tommy says.
Richie says, “And he still had it a week later when we were matching for quarters. That lame Alameda with the crooked wheel.”
“Why?” Tommy asks.
“Just curious,” Holly says.
It’s the truth. She’s curious about everything. It’s how she rolls.
2
As they walk back up the hill to their cars, Holly takes the earring out of her pocket and shows it to Jerome.
“Whoa! Hers?”
“Almost positive.”
“How come the cops didn’t find it?”
“I don’t think they looked,” Holly says.
“Well, you win the Sherlock Holmes Award for superior detection.”
“Thank you, Jerome.”