The Old Wheel, page 8
part #2 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
“Let me guess—Skye and that group.”
“Oh yeah.”
“And the Boy Band is Aston and his little gang?”
“More or less.”
She laughed again. “I love it.”
Frantic noises drew my attention. Holmes had Rowe in a chokehold, and the blond boy’s face was bright red. He was trying to pry Holmes’s arm free, and his heels scraped the mat.
“Hold on,” I told Emma. I called across the room, “H!”
Holmes made a face, but he released Rowe. The boy sagged and would have fallen if Holmes hadn’t steadied him.
“Level zero?”
“That was level zero,” he said without looking at me. “If I’d applied the hold in earnest, he would have passed out from lack of blood to the brain.”
Rowe was still hacking for breath, and now Glo was rubbing his back and giving Holmes dirty looks.
“Do you want to try that again?” I asked.
Holmes threw me a furious glare before turning his attention back to Rowe, saying something too quiet for me to hear. Whatever it was, it made Rowe nod—with an unbelievable amount of enthusiasm.
“I’m going to have to go over there eventually,” I told Emma. “He’s going to make me tan his ass.”
She gave me a curious look. “You two aren’t exactly what I expected. I’ve seen you around campus, and everyone hears—” She stopped, touched her face, and broke our gaze.
“Everybody hears the stories about Supercreep and Janitor Boy?” I asked.
“It’s like you said: this place is a bubble.” She made an effort to look me in the face. “I didn’t say everyone believed the stories.”
I shrugged. “People can say what they want. Having your whole world turned inside out makes it harder to care about shit like that.”
“Yeah,” she said, as though speaking to herself. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“Go on,” Holmes said to Rowe. The blond boy’s face was still ruddled, but he was grinning again as Holmes directed him. “Punch me in the face.”
“H,” I said.
He bristled but didn’t respond. Rowe threw a punch that looked almost as bad as one of mine, and Holmes moved out of the way. It was something, watching him. Everyone should have had the chance. To see silk ripple, to watch water part. Rowe threw another jab, but Holmes was already gone.
“Aston told you I beat a boy to death,” Emma said. “Because he broke up with me.”
“I heard a version of that. Almost to death.”
“Look at that,” Emma murmured. “He’s getting kinder.”
“I figure it’s bullshit, like the stories about me and H.”
Emma shrugged. She took the cat-eye glasses off, folded them, and held them loosely in one hand. Her face was more angular without them, more severe. Striking in a way that it hadn’t been before.
“Here’s what I was thinking,” I said. “Someone’s blackmailing Aston, and it’s possible you’re the one doing it; I mean, you’re the ex, and maybe you figured out something about Aston while you were dating, and now you’re using it against him.”
“Like the fact that he’s gay and has sex with Dawson?”
The only sound was Rowe’s harsh breathing and the whiff of blows that caught only air.
“Maybe,” I said. “Something like that.”
Her smile was tight. “The first part was pretty obvious after a while. The second part I didn’t figure out until after we broke up.”
I sorted questions like a deck of cards and settled on: “How did that make you feel?”
She laughed again, that same light, startled sound. “Relieved. I mean, I feel sorry for him; he’s in an impossible situation, and Dawson isn’t exactly the kind of partner you’d want to get you through something like that. But relieved, mostly.”
“Relieved about what?”
“I’m not blackmailing him. I don’t know how I can prove that to you, but I’m not. I don’t care about him. I don’t need his money. I don’t want to punish him or hurt him or destroy him. I want to be left alone.” Her gaze slid to Glo and Rowe, and in that quiet tone she’d used earlier, she said, “I want everyone to leave me alone.”
I nodded. I couldn’t hear Holmes—not his breathing, not his movement on the mat, not even the whisper of his clothes; it sounded like Rowe was shadow-boxing. The music in the hallway changed—Wham!’s “Last Christmas” came on.
Emma made a throwing-up noise. “Every year,” she said. “I hate this song.”
“Everybody hates this song. They only play it because there’s an evil syndicate that promotes it in an attempt to destroy Christmas.”
A broad smile crossed her face, and when she glanced at Holmes and back at me, her smile got bigger.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said, and if anything, the smile got even bigger. “I can kind of see it now.”
I didn’t know what that meant, so I said, “Maybe you can still help us. Is there somebody who might hate Aston enough to do this? Someone on campus, I mean. A kid he bullied, or another ex, or, uh, a partner.”
Her smirk flared and vanished, and she shook her head, but she said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I don’t think it’s someone on campus. I mean, Aston is annoying, and he can be a bully—but, like, in passing. He’s the center of his own universe; he doesn’t have time to actively bully people. He and the—well, you call them the Boy Band—they’re jerks, sure, and they might say something mean, but they’re not like these afterschool-special bullies whose sole purpose in life is to make other people miserable.”
“But it might not be bullying. Someone might just want the money,” I said.
“I guess. He hasn’t dated anyone else seriously, not that I know. And at the beginning, he’s convincing. I don’t think any of the girls he’s hooked up with would have suspicions. It might be someone else in the Boy Band, or maybe the Bloopies, but I can’t think who—they’re pretty tight, and they know each other’s secrets, some of them. But they’re all so self-absorbed, and they’re all so…innocent.”
“Not exactly the word I’d use to describe them. Trust me, the shit they buy.”
“That’s not what I mean. Insulated, I guess. Naïve. They don’t know anything about the real world. Maybe Aston does because of what happened a couple of months ago, but—I mean, look at him. No consequences. Nothing. He’s back at school like it never happened. I don’t think any of them know how ugly the world can be, and you have to know that—have a sense of it, anyway—to do something like this.”
It was a surprisingly insightful comment. It was also the kind of thing you could only say if you’d seen some of that ugliness yourself.
“But you said maybe,” I prompted.
“Have you met his sister?”
“I didn’t know he had a sister.”
“She’s…a lot. She’s obsessed with him, actually. Like, she spies on him for their parents. To get him in trouble. She’s always showing up, surprising him like she’s going to catch him doing something. She talks down to him. She yells at him. He puts up with it; he says they’re close, that’s all.”
“But?”
Emma plucked lint from her sleeve, avoiding my gaze. “I don’t know. It’s weird. His whole family is weird. You asked who might hate him enough to do this. It’s not that she hates him, but…”
I nodded, and I was about to ask another question when the unmistakable thud of a body hitting the floor echoed through the room. When I looked over, Rowe lay flat on his back on the wrestling mat. His face was screwed up in that look of someone who’s had the wind knocked out of them. Holmes was straightening, reaching up to check that neat Ivy League cut. I’d been on the receiving end of a hip throw plenty of times over the last few months, and I knew what it looked like—and, more importantly, what it felt like.
“For Christ’s sake—” I began.
Rowe flopped over onto his side and made a croaking noise. Glo crouched next to him, her face screwed up with worry, and Rowe let her help him upright. Then I realized the croaking noise was laughter. Beneath the beard, Rowe’s flush deepened as he laughed—well, hacked—harder and harder.
“Dude,” he finally managed to wheeze. “That was dope!”
I would have given a month of jelly-jar money to have a photo of the look on Holmes’s face.
Then Rowe hugged him, and Holmes’s body looked like something strung out of steel and cables, his hands already moving to detach Rowe and, most likely, hurl him to the floor again. Or put him in a compliance hold. Or maybe break his neck.
I opened my mouth to explain, but Holmes must have figured it out himself, because he relaxed—well, he went from DEFCON 5 to his ordinary rigidity.
Rowe thumped him on the back a few times before releasing him, still laughing and, now, massaging his ass. “Dude, you clobbered me!”
“You put too much weight on your front foot—”
“Did you see that?” Rowe called over to us. “That was flipping awesome!”
Holmes threw me a look that, on anybody else, I would have called nervous. I gave him a thumbs-up from low at my side, and he relaxed a little more, but confusion still mapped itself across his face.
“You could have gotten hurt,” Glo said. She was holding on to Rowe’s arm, and for the first time, I noticed how she looked at him. And then I thought about how Emma had looked at the two of them, and I thought about the three of them down here, all by themselves, and I thought, Oh, got it. Glo pulled Rowe around to face her, but she snapped at Holmes, “He might have a concussion!”
“He took the fall surprisingly well—” Holmes began.
At the same time, Rowe said, “I don’t have a concussion; I’m fine.”
“He’s like a puppy,” Emma said to me. “I swear, he could fall down a flight of stairs, dust himself off, and ask if we could do it again.”
I laughed.
“I’ve got to fuss over him,” Emma said. “You know how it goes.”
I watched Holmes, who was straightening his coat and not looking at me—the way little kids try to avoid your gaze if they know they’re in trouble. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
Rowe ignored Emma’s and Glo’s questions, talking a mile a minute at Holmes instead, asking him how he’d done the throw and what he could have done better and if he could show him how to do that chokehold—on and on. Holmes’s eyes got wider and wider.
“Come on,” I said, touching his arm. His flinch was tiny, but it was there. I ignored it for a moment, checked Emma and Glo with a look, and, in a louder voice, said, “No more roughhousing today, boys. Let’s get out of here.”
Rowe protested something about another round, but Emma and Glo herded him toward the door, and Holmes and I fell into place a few yards behind them.
“Did you get hurt?” I asked.
Holmes forgot about being guilty long enough to direct an indignant look at me.
Laughing, I shook my head. “On accident, obviously. Maybe you pulled something from throwing that meathead around.”
“I’m fine,” he said stiffly.
“Are you mad at me?”
This time, his look was searching. “Are you mad at me?”
I snorted.
Something changed in his expression—a hint of the wily Holmes that occasionally surfaced. “You were able to conduct an effective interview because I provided a suitable distraction.”
“Uh huh. And you were able to vent all those big boy feelings about losing Paxton and witnessing Rowe’s total incompetence.”
Circles of color bloomed in Holmes’s cheek.
“And you didn’t even use one pain compliance hold,” I said with a smirk.
His back got ramrod straight.
Laughing again, I squeezed his nape. “Relax. Rowe was right: watching you do that was fucking awesome.”
He didn’t smile, but his shoulders softened, and the lines around his eyes eased.
When we emerged from the athletic center, Rowe spun around to face us. “You guys, we’ve got to do that, like, every day. H could teach us, and, like, Jack too, obviously.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I mean, that was seriously badass.” He wound up for a huge punch. “H, you’re fricking fire. You know that, right?”
Holmes darted a look at me. This time, I managed to swallow the laugh. “We’ll see; H is pretty busy most of the time. But maybe.”
“So, when I did that uppercut,” Rowe said, “you barely even moved your head, which means you totally knew it was coming—”
The squeal of tires cut through his words. On the campus road that ran past the athletic center, a truck screeched to a halt—a haze of smoke and the smell of burning rubber drifting up. I had just long enough to process a few basic facts: it was black, it was massive, and it didn’t have license plates. Then the window went down, and I caught the glint of blued steel and glass. A scope, my brain suggested.
Holmes, distracted by Rowe, was still turning around.
The shock only lasted a moment, but I knew it had been too long.
Rowe’s tackle carried him into Holmes, and then it was like being caught up in some sort of weird scrum-slash-bum rush: the three of us stumbled into the girls, and all of us went down. A gunshot cracked the air a moment later, and then two more came. Something whizzed past me, and there was a weird, soft noise of impact. A fine grit of dirt sprayed the side of my face, and a moment later, my brain told me a bullet had hit the ground inches from me.
An engine roared, and tires squealed again.
It wasn’t a thought so much as something at the back of my brain taking over—instinct, maybe, or a genetic predisposition for trouble. I got to my feet and sprinted after the truck. For the first five yards, I narrowed the distance. Then the driver hit the gas, and the truck began to pull ahead.
I tossed my phone sidearm, and it landed in the bed of the truck.
A moment later, the truck was gone—disappearing around the next corner. It had all happened in a matter of a minute, maybe two. Holmes was already jogging toward me, and Emma was helping Rowe and Glo to their feet. There had been no witnesses. No screams. No sirens. If Rowe hadn’t been so quick to react, some of us would have died, maybe all of us, and no one would have known until they stumbled across our bodies.
A hand on my arm yanked me around. Holmes’s eyes blazed wide and silver, and for a moment, I couldn’t think, couldn’t say anything. He curled a hand around my neck. He touched my shoulder, my chest. Patting me down, my brain supplied. He’s checking for injuries. He’s being practical.
And then, as quickly as it had happened, he stepped back. He held his hands out to his sides like he’d been burned. For one long moment, he continued to gaze at me, and I couldn’t read what was in his eyes. Then he looked away. Someone else might have missed the shiver—someone who hadn’t watched him, studied him as long as I had.
“Are you hurt—”
“Fine.” I tried to blunt the adrenaline edge in my voice. “I’m fine, H. Come on; we’ve got to go after him.”
Chapter 9
Mormon Boyz
We left Rowe, Emma, and Glo with instructions to call the police, and then we ran. I wanted to go straight to the cottage, but Holmes insisted on a quick detour to pick up one of his gear bags from his residence hall. When we got to the cottage, Dad wasn’t home, but the keys to the Dakota were on the hook by the door. I had Holmes send him a quick message, telling him we were taking the truck and would be back soon, and then we started down the canyon.
While I drove us off campus, Holmes used his own phone to pull up the Find My Device prompt and enter my information. A moment later, he showed me a map, with a pin marking my phone. When the map refreshed, the pin had shifted toward Provo.
“Ok,” I said. “Buckle up.”
“My seat belt is already buckled,” Holmes said.
“Do you do it on purpose?”
“Yes. Seat belts reduce the risk of death for front-seat passengers by up to forty-five percent.”
I counted to ten in my head. “Do you ruin every single badass moment for me on purpose? That’s what I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I shook my head.
“Is saying, ‘Buckle up’ badass? Because typically teens correlate danger with high social prestige, not safety.” In a rush, he added, “Although I think it’s admirable that you’re safety minded.”
“Please stop.”
Holmes wasn’t smiling, but then, he was carefully keeping his face turned down, and he was such a little weasel sometimes that I couldn’t trust the silence.
December in Provo Canyon is, well, about as beautiful as any other time of year. In spring, you see everything coming back to life, and the Provo River runs high from the melt, wildflowers everywhere and the trees in bloom. In summer, you get the cool breezes to break up the heat, and all the shady riffles on the water, and the spray of Bridal Veil Falls like samite spun out into the air. (Samite: a rich silk fabric woven with gold and silver threads—thank you, Mr. Scholz, eighth-grade Language Arts.) In the fall, you got the trees changing color, the scrub oak burning red on the slopes.
In the winter, it was an anatomy of snow and ice and stone. The air was crisper, clearer, and the granite pitch of the canyon walls looked fresh cut, all sharp edges. Ice hung in toothy sheets. But the snow softened everything, giving it a kind of fairy-tale quality, and the green of the pines and the green-blue of the cedars reminded you this place was still alive. When we came around a bend and saw the river, it was slaggy with ice, the slabs breaking up on the rocks and then spinning, trapped.
Following the tracker, we left the canyon and drove into Provo. You could tell where the oldest parts were—most of the homes built around Center Street and then moving east, around Brigham Young University’s campus and up into the foothills. But the tracker led us west, across town and toward Utah Lake. The closer we got, the more signs there were of new development. Land in Provo—well, land in Utah generally—had gotten more and more valuable, and people were squeezing homes into every nook and cranny.
