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  I start to go for her ear again, but she cups her hand over it. “You’re such a little bitch,” I tell her. But I have to admit she’s not altogether wrong, at least when it comes to Gillis.

  8

  In my room, I flop down on my bed and listen to the phone ring. Without even checking, I know it’s Gillis. He’s afraid to come over here and face me eye to eye, but he’s called and texted me so many times today it’s not even funny.

  This time, though, he leaves a message on my voicemail I’ll have to respond to. And if it turns out he’s lying, that’s the end of us. For sure. Not only that, but I ought to crack his other eyebrow. Give him a fat lip. An Indian burn. A Dutch rub. Pink belly. An atomic wedgie. I could tell him he’s ugly too, but he already knows that.

  It’s not like he’s the greatest friend anyway. Actually, he’s the kind of person you hang out with not so much because you like them as that they’ve just been around forever. What kind of real friend tells you he has testicular cancer and he needs you to help him rub salve on it?

  But I have to wonder about this message. Maybe it’s just his way of making sure I finally call him back. Or maybe he’s actually telling the truth. There just might be a chance I wasn’t imagining things the other day when I thought I saw Bobby in Sophie Lowell’s Toyota. Because that’s what Gillis’s message is about.

  “I wanted to talk to you in person about this,” he says, “but since you’re so stupid and won’t call me back, I have no choice but to talk to your voicemail. After you left the party, Sophie Lowell showed up, and I told her how you thought you saw her and Bobby.” There’s a pause. He probably thinks I’ll go ahead and pick up, but since I don’t, he goes, “And so Sophie’s like, ‘Maybe she did. Maybe I was driving him over to see my sister.’ ”

  I almost drop the phone.

  Now I have to call him back. The phone rings about six times. I know he’s just letting it ring to get back at me. Eventually, he answers. “Oh, hey, Ceejay,” he says casually. “What’s up?”

  “You know what’s up, leprechaun. What’s the story on Sophie?”

  “Oh, that. Nothing much, except she told me Bobby might have called up her sister Mona a couple nights ago and said he was staying at Chuck Dunmire’s place.”

  Chuck Dunmire! He was Bobby’s best friend in high school. The two were thick. But still, it doesn’t make sense. Why would Bobby come back and not tell his own family? Sure, he hasn’t exactly been in close contact with us for a while now, but last time I talked to him he said he had to lie low for security reasons. Still, you’d think the military would let him call and tell us he’s coming home early.

  I go, “What’s all this maybe and might have stuff? Did any of this happen or not?”

  “I’m just telling you what Sophie told me,” Gillis says.

  “Well, you should’ve asked her more about it.”

  “She was plastered. There wasn’t any getting any more out of her.”

  “You mean you were plastered.”

  “How about this, then,” he says. “I’ll take you over to Chuck Dunmire’s and we’ll see what’s up for ourselves.”

  I pause for a moment. Gillis is not exactly who I want to hang out with today, but checking into this Bobby and Mona deal is the most important thing right now, so I tell him to come over as soon as he can. I’m not getting my hopes up, though. I’ve done so much hoping where Bobby’s concerned, I don’t hardly trust hope anymore.

  When Gillis shows up at my front door, I have to admit it’s pretty satisfying to get a good look at his face. His eyebrow’s all swollen and yellow-purple around the edges from the head butt. He probably should’ve got stitches, but his parents are the type that won’t send their kids to the doctor unless there’s actually a bone poking out somewhere.

  On the way to Chuck’s, Gillis never says he’s sorry for acting like such a jackass at the party. I guess he figures driving me around is as close to an apology as he wants to get. Even so, I know I’ll end up forgiving him sooner or later like I always do, but I’m not going to make it easy. One- or two-word answers are about all he gets out of me the whole way over to Chuck’s apartment.

  Chuck was a real cool guy in high school, but now he’s kind of a lowlife. Always stoned, can’t hold down a job, knocked up Layla Evans but doesn’t have anything to do with the kid. He used to be pretty good-looking, a real player with the ladies. I even had a crush on him for about a year—but he’s swelled up a little bit since high school. Now he lives in Truncheon Gardens, a flimsy stack of cardboard-boxlike apartments behind the Quick Stop.

  When Gillis knocks on Chuck’s door, we can hear the TV through the thin wall, but no one answers. Gillis knocks again, and I yell, “Hey, Chuck, it’s me, Ceejay. Open up.”

  The door still doesn’t open, so we keep knocking and yelling till finally Chuck calls out, “Hey, hold on, dammit, Ceejay, let me put some pants on.”

  Finally, he opens up, but he just stands there blocking the doorway, nothing on but his jeans. He has a beard now, and it’s so thick you can hardly tell where it leaves off and his chest hair begins. Without bothering with any small talk, I come right out and ask him if he’s heard anything from Bobby, and he’s like, “Bobby? How would I hear anything from Bobby? He’s still out on the east coast, right?”

  “The east coast?” I say. “Last I heard he was in Germany.”

  So Chuck’s like, “Yeah, right, that’s what I meant—the east coast of Germany.”

  Something’s weird. Germany doesn’t even have an east coast, does it? Besides, Chuck seems antsy. I look around his shoulder into his apartment. Beer bottles clutter the coffee table, and right in the middle of them sits a single girl’s shoe. A pair of panties lies next to the couch. No trace of Bobby, but obviously Chuck has some kind of action going on in there.

  “Look,” Gillis says. “We got it on pretty good authority Bobby came back to town early and he was staying over here.”

  “Who’d you get that from?” A surprised look passes across Chuck’s face, but it seems exaggerated, like a bad soap-opera actor.

  “Sophie Lowell,” I say. “Mona told her.”

  Chuck shrugs. “Well, why don’t you go talk to Mona, then. I don’t know anything about it.”

  Just then, a voice calls out, “Are they gone yet?”

  Chuck turns around, and that’s when I see who he has in there with him—Amber Galen, one of the cupcake twins! I can’t believe it. There she is at the end of the hall, nothing but a blanket draped around her. I know Chuck gets around quite a bit, but I never expected an uppity type like Amber to go for a guy like him.

  When she sees me staring at her, she ducks back into the bedroom, and that’s when I see the army-green duffel bag leaning against the wall at the back of the hall.

  “What’s that duffel bag back there?” I ask.

  Chuck looks at it for a second like he’s waiting for it to answer the question, then he goes, “That’s just my laundry. That’s all that is—laundry.”

  His whole attitude seems out of whack, but that might just be because he’s in a hurry to get back to his cupcake. One thing for sure—we aren’t going to get anywhere else with him right now.

  “Come on,” I tell Gillis. “Let’s take Chuck’s advice and go over to Mona’s and find out just what’s going on around here.”

  “I wouldn’t go over there,” Chuck warns.

  “Why not?”

  “Her husband’s kind of paranoid. He’s liable to freak if you start in asking questions about his wife’s ex-boyfriend.”

  “Let him,” I say. “Doesn’t make any difference to me.”

  9

  If Bobby’s likely to look up anyone in town before his own family, it’s Mona—even if she did go and get herself married while he was gone. She and Bobby dated all through his senior year. She was almost as wild as he was. One time he jackknifed into the Little River from the highest flimsy limb of this gargantuan oak tree on the bank, and she followed him righ
t in. Hit the water so hard her bikini top came off. When Bobby used to climb out the window of one car into another while racing down the highway, she was one of the drivers. I was in the backseat when she came within two inches of sideswiping Brian Greer’s Chevy. She just laughed and laughed.

  Not that they didn’t fall out every once in a while, but they were still tight when Bobby got sucked into the army. She cried on his shoulder the day he left and everything, said she’d wait on him for a million years. Three months later I saw her riding around town with Garrett Dillon. Guess they don’t make a million years like they used to.

  At nineteen, she moved in with Mark Schnabel. A year after that, she dumped Mark and married Rick Nichols. He’s fifteen years older than her and has a beak like an owl, but he makes more money in a day from the construction business than poor Mark makes in a year driving a Coke truck.

  Now she and Rick have a pretty fancy house in the Summer Gate addition. Obviously, she won’t be able to say a whole lot if Rick’s there, but I figure maybe I can get her out on the front porch. No way am I just going to call her. It’s too easy to lie over the phone.

  After a few punches on the bell, the door finally opens. It’s Rick. He’s not very tall but pretty wiry, the kind that thinks he’s a tough guy, but I get the feeling, if it came down to it, he’d find a way to back out of a fight with a real badass.

  “Is Mona here?” I ask him. He looks at us more like we’re a couple of panhandlers stopping by to put the bite on him.

  “Mona’s not home,” he says, and starts in quizzing me about what I want with his wife. I give him a made-up name and say I’m trying to find Sophie, that she’s a friend of mine. That loosens him up, and he tells us Mona and Sophie took a trip into the city to shop, but we might be able to catch Sophie back at her place around eight o’clock or so.

  “If you happen to see Mona over there,” he says as we start to turn away, “tell her I’ll be waiting up for her.”

  It’s kind of creepy the way he says it. You get the idea he’s trying to keep Mona on a short leash, but he can’t get a good grip on it.

  Sophie’s a couple of years out of high school and lives in a duplex with Kara Jackson, which is quite a few steps down from the house Mona scored for herself. Sophie and Kara are sitting on the front porch steps smoking cigarettes when we get there. No Mona in sight.

  “What’s up, Ceejay?” Sophie says as we come up the sidewalk.

  I’m like, “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me? Gillis here says you’ve been going around telling people my brother’s back in town.”

  “I’m sure Gillis says a lot of things.” She glances at Kara, at the shrubs, at the porch step, but never makes eye contact with me.

  “Come on,” Gillis says. “You’re not going to pretend you weren’t at Dani Grant’s party saying Bobby called Mona up, are you?”

  She exhales a stream of smoke through her nostrils. “Oh, that. Turned out he wasn’t actually in town after all. He was calling from New Jersey or somewhere.”

  I’m like, “New Jersey? Are you sure? He’s supposed to be in Germany.”

  “Look.” She stubs her cigarette out on the porch step. “Maybe he is in Germany. I’m not the one who talked to him.”

  “You’re going to tell me I didn’t see Bobby in your car driving by Corker Park?”

  “Wasn’t me,” she says. “But I let Mona drive my car all the time.”

  Thinking back, I can’t be sure Sophie actually was driving. I was paying too much attention to the passenger. “Well, where’s Mona then? We went over to her house and her husband said she was shopping with you.”

  She’s like, “Uh, yeah, right, we already went shopping.”

  She’s about as convincing as a politician promising to cut taxes. So I tell her maybe me and Gillis will head back to Mona’s house again.

  She doesn’t think that’s such a good idea. Mona wouldn’t be back yet, she tells us. She had some more shopping to do. “Don’t mention it to Rick,” she says. “She’s looking for a gift to surprise him with.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” I say. She just shrugs, and I’m like, “Don’t worry, I’m gonna find out what it is one way or another.”

  “Knock yourself out.” She stands up. “I’m going in. My show’s coming on.”

  Back in the car, Gillis is like, “You know she’s lying out her ass, don’t you?”

  “No doubt. She’s covering something up, but I just can’t believe it’s really about Bobby. He wouldn’t come back without telling me. No, I’ll bet Mona’s running around on her husband, all right, but there’s about six other guys I can think of off the top of my head she could be doing it with.”

  “I guess we go home now then, huh?”

  “No way, leprechaun man. If Mona’s got herself a boy toy, I know exactly where she’d take him.”

  10

  When Bobby was in high school, I don’t know how many times I walked into the house in the afternoon and caught him and Mona going at each other. And I didn’t have to barge into his bedroom either. They did it all over the house, the living room couch, the kitchen, even on the washing machine—while it was running! Bobby told me later Mona liked how the vibrations felt.

  Finally, I told him he better start going somewhere else before Mom or Dad caught him. Actually, Mom wouldn’t be so bad since she’d probably just act like she didn’t really see what was plain in front of her face, but Dad was likely to grab him by the ear and pull him out the front door by it. Give him a kick in the butt for good measure.

  Bobby said maybe he’d just go downtown to the Laundromat, screw on top of one of the professional washing machines—and I wouldn’t have put it past him—but he ended up becoming a regular over at the rattiest motel in town. That became their place, and I’m sure Mona hasn’t forgotten it.

  “Okay, Detective McDermott,” says Gillis, “where to now?”

  “The Tip-Top Motel. And hurry it up, leprechaun.”

  The Tip-Top is a single-level motel next to the truck stop out by the highway. When we get there, Gillis asks how we’re supposed to tell if they’ve checked in. The motel clerk isn’t likely to give us any names, and we don’t know what car to look for since Mona’s known to drive a different car about every six months. I don’t figure it’ll be too hard to figure out, though. All we have to do is look for the most expensive car in the parking lot.

  Sure enough, most of the cars at the Tip-Top are run-down rust buckets, but around the back, there it is—a brand-new gold Escalade. I couldn’t be more sure it’s Mona’s if it had a personalized license plate saying GOLDDIGGER on it.

  I guess I should be pleased with my detective work, but actually my heart sinks. I’m like, Could it be true? Could Bobby actually be in that room, just a crappy thin motel wall between us?

  For a while Gillis and I sit there next to the Escalade playing stakeout, but that gets old pretty fast. Since there are no other cars within three parking spaces, we’re pretty sure which room Mona must be in, so we decide to check it out. A narrow gap between the drapes is just wide enough to give us a peek inside. Not that I’m exactly crazy about going all Peeping Tom, but it’s time to take action.

  Gillis reaches the window first, and I have to elbow him out of the way. There’s not much to see. The light’s dim and the angle’s bad, but I can make out a purse sitting on the table right in front of the window—an expensive Coach purse. Just the kind Mona’s likely to spend Rick’s money on.

  “Come on,” Gillis whispers as he nudges me out of the way. “Let me have a look.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” I tell him, and he’s like, “Not even a little tittie?”

  I grab his shirt and pull him away. “Jesus,” I say. “You really do have a sickness, you know that? You need to go to the doctor and get a sedative for your hormones.”

  He just grins his leprechaun grin.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get in the car and wait. They can’t
stay in there all night. She has to get back to Rick and his platinum MasterCard sometime.”

  “Screw that,” Gillis says, and walks over and pounds on the door. “Maintenance!” he yells. “We need to take a look at your air conditioner.”

  “What are you doing?” I can’t believe that idiot. The last thing I want is to get caught spying.

  “Just speeding this deal up,” he says. “I don’t want to scrunch down on the damn floorboard all night.” He knocks again. “Maintenance! We think your wiring might be loose.”

  This time, I’m pretty sure the curtain moves. “Crap, Gillis,” I say, grabbing his arm. “Get back in the car. You gave us away, you moron.”

  “We also have to restock your toilet paper,” he hollers as I drag him away.

  Back in the car, he’s like, “I guess we’ll have to give it up and go home. If they saw us, they’ll never come out.”

  “We’re not going home,” I tell him. “Not on your life.”

  Instead, we park behind the truck stop next door, where we still have a view of Mona’s Escalade and the motel room. Gillis goes in to get a burrito, and when he comes back, there’s something too irritating about the way he wolfs his food. “So,” I say, watching a chunk dribble onto his shirt. “You were a real asshole last night.” Obviously, he could’ve gone forever without bringing it up, but I’m not going to let him off the hook so easy.

  “What do you mean?” he says, putting on the dumb act. It’s not much of a stretch for him.

  “You know what I’m talking about. You try something like that again, and I’ll bust you somewhere worse than your eyebrow. I mean it. I’ll kick you so hard it’ll hurt to even think about sex for the next ten years.”

  “Yeah, right, I’m scared.”

  “You better be. You better be one hundred percent scared.”

  “I don’t know what you’re whining about anyway. You ought to take it as a compliment.”

  “God, I hate you.”

  He just laughs. But the weird thing is I know he feels bad. He wouldn’t have driven me around all day doing everything I told him to if he didn’t. But can a guy just come out and admit it? Not in this lifetime.