It was a no-win situation, but right then I had something else on my mind. “Jeanette, I saw the guy today.”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy who held the gun on me that night.”

  “What do you mean, you saw him? They had ski masks on.”

  “Yeah, but I saw his eyes. I’m almost positive that I know who he is.”

  “I don’t think so. None of us could have identified either one of those guys who came in.”

  “You were in the back. I was in the front. I looked him straight in the eyes. You heard Solway. They think the same guy shot someone in a store. What should I do?”

  “Nothing,” she said without losing a beat.

  “Nothing?”

  “If you identify him, you could get hurt,” she said.

  “Don’t they have some kind of room you sit in where you can see out but they can’t see in?” I asked.

  “I guess so, but did you meet this person face-to-face already?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then if he gets arrested, he’s gonna want to figure out who snitched.”

  “Snitched isn’t exactly the word.”

  “Sean, don’t be stupid,” she said. “Do nothing. Don’t get involved.”

  And she hung up the phone. I held it for a long time as if waiting for more, but the dial tone came on. And I knew then she was right. What was I thinking? Two things were clear. I could not go back downtown again. And I would not say a word.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I never knew my grandparents on my mother’s side. They lived in England and had visited only three times when I was a kid. They were polite and kind, I suppose, just not all that interested in me. He was an investment banker involved in the flow of international money, and she was a woman who spent her time with other women married to investment bankers. I think they gave my parents money for me to go to college. If I decided to go.

  On my father’s side, my grandmother died when I was very young, but my wonderful crazy grandfather, Hank, hung on until that fateful ultralight accident. What I remember most about him was his energy, his high spirits and his unlimited optimism. Whenever anything went wrong, he’d always say, “It will all work out in the end” or “We’re going to turn this around into something positive.”

  My father had decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps and was now a guy who believed in safety and caution. Two of his favorite words. And my mother, I believe, admired him for those assets. She claimed that she had lived a few reckless years in her early twenties before marrying, but she would never talk about it. Both of my parents had done an excellent job of keeping me safe for over sixteen years.

  “We think you should find another job,” my father said at the dinner table that night. “Or concentrate on your studies, maybe. Prepare yourself academically for university.”

  “I’m going back to my job,” I told him. “I know it doesn’t seem like much of a job, but I like it.” I wondered which, if any, of my former coworkers would be back there when I showed up Saturday night.

  “Then we’ll get Ernesto to switch your times.”

  “I like working nights,” I insisted.

  “But we’re worried about you,” my mother chimed in.

  “I know. But I’ll be all right. I need to do this for me.”

  I had a list of things I wanted to change about me. I wanted to be more assertive. I wanted to be more adventurous. I wanted to be more willing to take chances and I wanted to be able to make my own decisions. Including the one about going to the cops about what I thought I knew about the gunman.

  I guess I wanted to be more like my grandfather. I had thought about this more than once as I got older. What would old Hank do in this situation? Once, in an unguarded moment, when Hank had been drinking, I think, he took me aside and whispered, “Sean, you have to really live your life. You have to experience everything you can.” I didn’t really get it. But it was the way he said it.

  It was odd to think that Jeanette was claiming to be the voice of reason. Here was a screwed-up girl who couldn’t get her own life straight, and she was telling me to keep my mouth shut about a criminal. But she was right. If I opened my mouth and went to the cops, somebody back there on the street would be waiting to get me. I would be in over my head. There would be a gun involved or a knife or god knows what. It could be violent. The cops wouldn’t be able to protect me.

  The next day I went to school and failed a history test I had not studied for. I was a useless lab partner in biology and discovered that trying to read a nineteenth-century English novel was not all it was cracked up to be. Jeanette avoided me as best she could. Whatever spark there was between us before was gone. I still thought she was really hot, but I knew that nothing was going to happen between us.

  I began thinking about other girls I knew and plotting a way to actually get noticed by them. I had always been kind of invisible but I needed to work on getting noticed. I was looking forward to returning to work on Saturday. You never knew who might walk in through those glass doors.

  But right then I felt like I was going nowhere. The only woman in my life was Priscilla, and I was not at all sure it was a good idea for me to trek downtown to see her again. After school, I holed up in my room and played a couple of video games I’d been ignoring. They weren’t nearly as much fun now as I remembered them to be. I got bored and fell asleep early.

  My father was surprised to see me in the kitchen while he was eating breakfast the next morning. “You’re up early,” he said, setting down the morning newspaper.

  “I was hungry,” I said and popped a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster.

  That’s when I saw it. The story on the front page of the paper.

  There’d been another robbery. At a gas station this time. And someone had been shot and killed.

  My father watched me as I read the story. The blood drained from my face. There was a picture of the victim, a university student who had been working part-time at night at the service station. And there was a fuzzy in-store security cam image of the guy holding the gun. You couldn’t see his face but it was a guy with a ski mask. I was pretty sure it was J.L. I even recognized the sweatshirt he was wearing.

  I prayed that I was wrong, but I knew I had to go talk to Detective Solway, and I didn’t want to give my father or anyone a chance to talk me out of it. Once I made that first step into the police station, I knew my life might never be the same again.

  But it was a step I had to take.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I knew that my father was looking at me and I tried to act natural. And then I realized something was different. My father was not dressed for work. No suit and no tie. I looked at the clock. It was 8:30.

  “Aren’t you going to be late for work?” I asked.

  “I got fired,” he said.

  “What? Not again!”

  “Fired. Done. Finished.” He tried to smile. “You could say I’m on vacation.”

  This didn’t make any sense. “There must have been some mistake, right?”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t call it a mistake. I wasn’t willing to go along with what my boss wanted. So they fired me.”

  “What did they want you to do?”

  “It’s probably not a big deal. In fact, it’s probably done all the time. You know all those twenty-five-cent slot machines in the casino?”

  “Sure.”

  “You can set the odds of winning on them. It’s supposedly regulated by the government, but everyone is pretty sloppy about it.”

  “But you don’t work on the slot machines. You’re an accountant.”

  “Right. But somebody along the way reset the odds of winning on those machines. They did it months ago. And as a result, my company was making higher profits. Significantly higher profits. The odds of a customer winning went down. The odds of us making more money went up. I was just curious about why our revenues were so much higher on those machines.”

  “And?”

  “And they told me to look the other way.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I didn’t think they’d fire me. I just thought I was doing my job by keeping them on track.”

  “But they didn’t see it that way.”

  “I went out on a limb. I said we should come clean and admit the mistake, make an apology, pay a fine or whatever and move on.”

  “Only it wasn’t a mistake,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Can’t you fight this?” I asked.

  “I probably could but I’m not sure I will. I just know I did the right thing.”

  “Balls to the wall,” I said, not exactly sure why.

  “What?”

  “It’s what Hank used to say, remember?” I said.

  My father suddenly smiled. “Balls to the wall. I do remember that.”

  “So this is your ultralight,” I said, wondering if he’d understand.

  He smiled again but said nothing.

  I looked down at the newspaper and took a deep breath.

  “Dad, I guess I have to tell you something.”

  He saw the look on my face. “About the car?” he asked. “Don’t worry about that. I keep an eye on the odometer and noticed that it had a higher number on it than where I left it. Don’t know why I do that. I just have a kind of photographic thing about numbers. Guess that’s why I became an accountant. I was a little disappointed in you at first, but then I talked to your mother. She said she was surprised it took you this long, that it was quite a temptation.”

  “You’re okay with that?” I asked.

  “Now I am. This weekend, let’s do it right. We’ll go out to the country and you can drive all you want.”

  “I don’t have a license. You know that.”

  “Balls to the wall,” he said. “Want some more toast?”

  “Sure.”

  As I stared down at the newspaper again, I suddenly realized I didn’t know my father, not really. I’d always thought of him as the opposite of Hank, my grandfather. Now this.

  As he popped the bread into the toaster and poured himself another cup of coffee, I stared at the photo of the victim in the paper again, a guy not much older than me. And I now understood that I wasn’t in this alone after all.

  “I think I know who held the gun that night. I think I can identify him.”

  My father had his back to me and he seemed to freeze. Then he turned around slowly.

  “I could be wrong,” I said, “but I don’t think so. I met a guy on the street. I’ve seen him twice in fact. I was already pretty sure it was him but I didn’t want to get involved. But now this.” I pushed the newspaper toward him. He looked down at it and saw the photo of the victim.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I have a choice,” I said.

  “You always have a choice. You could do nothing. The police are going to get serious now that someone’s been killed. This guy can’t keep getting away with this.”

  “Detective Solway told me they don’t have much to go on.”

  “That may have changed. Now they have this picture from the security cam.”

  I looked at the fuzzy image again. “It’s not much to go on.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he admitted.

  “Will you drive me down to the police station?”

  The toast popped up just then. My father looked frightened.

  “Part of me wants to talk you out of this,” he said.

  “I know. I thought about what it might mean,” I said. “It could be a rough ride.”

  “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “I know that too,” I said. “But if I go down there now, this guy with the gun could be off the street today. I’m fairly sure of that. If I let it go until tomorrow or the next day or wait for the cops to figure it out on their own...”

  I didn’t finish the sentence. I just let it hang there.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My father called Detective Solway and told him we were coming. He drove me to the police station in the Mustang. It somehow felt right.

  Solway asked him to sit in a waiting room and led me into the same room where he had questioned me before. I could tell he was upset about something.

  I told Solway what I thought. He was skeptical. “He had a ski mask on and you only saw his eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you believe you’ve met him on the street, and you can describe what he looks like?”

  “His name is J.L. I don’t know what it stands for and I don’t know his last name, but it shouldn’t be that hard to find out.”

  “Why didn’t you come in before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “Downtown. South Main.”

  “You might have saved a life if you’d come to us sooner,” he said after a long pause. “You know how hard it is these days to get anyone to come forward? Young men in gangs get knifed or beat up and they refuse to say a word about who did it. Even little kids don’t want to point the finger at the bully. No one wants to be the snitch.” He rubbed his forehead and looked at me. “But you’re different, right?”

  He was silent for a minute. “Look, it’s just that sometimes someone starts out offering information and then they crap out on me. They don’t follow through. This happens. A lot. Are you going to be able to follow through?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’ll follow through.” I remembered that moment again, staring at the gun, looking in those insane eyes.

  “If your guy is smart, he’s long gone from here by now. He’s done too much damage. But my guess is he isn’t smart. Just lucky. But I think his luck just ran out. I’m going to get Jack Kacer in here and you’re going to give him features to work with.”

  Solway went away. He came back with a heavyset guy who looked like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. He sat down at a computer in the corner and nodded.

  “Eyes first, right?”

  We went through forty images of just eyes until I saw them.

  “Those are his,” I said.

  “Not his really. They’re computer generated. But it’s a start. Now we have to come up with a face. You say you saw this guy without the mask?”

  “Yeah.”

  Solway said, “I’m going to run ‘J.L.’ through the system and see if anything comes up.” He left the room.

  Jack put me through a series of head shapes, chins, noses. It was slow and tedious and eventually we came up with a face that was not quite right. Over an hour had passed.

  “Can I take a break?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I went out of the room. My father was still in the waiting room, looking nervous. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “I think so. But I’m having second thoughts.”

  “Me too,” my father said, and he gave me a hug. He hadn’t done that in a long time.

  Solway came our way just then. He had a handful of manila files with him. He pretended he didn’t see us. “No J.L. came up, but I’ve got a dozen or so here with first-name and middle-name initials that match that. Ready to look at them?”

  We went back into the room and Jack Kacer showed me a newly revised face. “What about this one?” he asked.

  “Closer,” I said.

  “Good,” Solway said. “At least now we have some pieces. Look at these.”

  The eighth file was that of someone named James Leroy Pender. It wasn’t a recent photo, but I was pretty sure it was him. I looked up at the computer likeness, then at the real photo.

  Kacer did a quick scan of the file photo with a wireless hand scanner and pulled it up on his screen almost instantly. “Now we’re cooking,” he said. “What do we need to do to it?”

  I didn’t realize at first what he was asking me. “Um...make his face a little thinner. The eyes a little crazier. Shorter hair.” Kacer was clicking away with the mouse. “Now give him three or four days of not shaving.”

  It was him. It was J.L.

  “We still don’t know if he’s our target,” Solway told Kacer. “But this is the guy Sean thinks is the one. We haven’t seen him in a while. All I have here is petty theft, selling marijuana and a break-and-enter. But it could be he got himself in deeper with the drugs. That’s what sometimes makes them more reckless. Some of them get hooked on the risk in a holdup. We’ll bring in this James Leroy Pender and see what he has to say.”

  Jack Kacer looked even more tired than before. “Good work, kid,” he said to me.

  Solway’s look didn’t say anything of the sort. He turned to me. “All this is based on what you say, Sean. You know that, right? Things have just gotten a bit more serious. What are the odds that this J.L. person will know it was you who made the connection?”

  “I don’t really know but I think the odds are pretty good.”

  “If we get anything at all to work with, we can detain him. If not, he may be back on the street in no time. I’d steer clear of him if I were you. And even if we keep him, he may have friends.”

  I was thinking of Keeg, Vicente and Robert. Maybe even Monroe. Was it possible they were in on these robberies too? “What do I do?”

  “Go home. Go to school. Avoid being alone anywhere. And avoid going anywhere near South Main for a long, long while.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Later that day I got a call from Solway. My father and I picked up the phone at the same time, and I know he stayed on the line.

  “We found J.L. and we found a gun— looks like it’s the gun he used to kill the kid working at the gas station,” Solway said. “This means that you will be a whole lot less important in his conviction. It means the whole case doesn’t hang on just you. You see what I’m saying?”

  “So that’s it? I don’t have to go into a room and identify him or anything like that?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “No. Not yet anyway. We’ve got enough here to charge him and keep him in custody. But if this goes to trial, you may have to appear as a witness, and yes, J.L. would be in the courtroom. As long as we know how to find you, you don’t need to do anything more for now.”

 

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