Acceleration Page 9

  Wayne walks up to our table, off work now and out of uniform.

  “Right,” I tell Vin. “Just so long as I’m the Hardy who gets to do the forbidden dance with Nancy Drew.”

  Wayne grabs a seat with us. “The only dance you'll be doing is the one-handed mambo.” He pulls a wad of Dairy Barn scratch-and-win tickets out of his pocket.

  “Start scratching, boys,” he tells us. “We’re going to be millionaires. Get me out of this grease pit.”

  We start scratching.

  “Come on, new car,” Vin says to his ticket.

  “Come on, new life,” Wayne tells his.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Roach doesn’t write about his mother much. But when he gets on the subject—watch out! Raving lunatic.

  SHE phoned this morning. 1 had to answer it, because even with the ringer set on high Gran couldn’t hear it. The receiver's volume was maxed out too, so when 1 heard HER voice it spiked right through my eardrum. “Is that you, kid?” SHE said. 1 dropped the phone and yelled at the old bitch to deal with it.

  1 went down in the basement. But the walls in this place are like cardboard and Gran's a screamer. “What? What? I’m not sending you money! You’re a whore, go do what whores do to make money.”

  Turned the radio on. Loud. Tried to kill the sound of HER voice in my head, but it got past all the noise. Squeezed my eyes shut and covered my ears. But SHE got in, always does. And 1 see HER now, when she’d come home painted like a clown, bringing back Johns. At first 1 hated those perverts and the things they made her do. But they were nothing but dumb dogs running wild in the street. SHE's the one who dragged them back here, let them do any disgusting thing they wanted. SHE's the one who sent me hiding when they told her to lose the kid….

  It's all frantic scribbling after that, and I can only make out a few words.

  I need a break. My brain is fried.

  The sun set hours ago, but the heat sticks in the air. Even my eyelids are sweating. Somewhere in the Jungle, TV's are playing late-night talk shows, but the sounds of laughter and applause are muffled. Even the throbbing beat of acid rock from the nightly rave over in D building is subdued tonight. Everything seems stunned.

  But me, I’m bouncing off the walls trying to figure my way deeper into Roach's world. There's got to be a key somewhere in these pages. But when I’ve read the same sick passage for the third time without getting anything new out of it, I know it's time to quit for the night.

  I close the diary and stash it under my old hockey equipment.

  Out in the living room, Mom's watching a late late movie. She's got two big box fans set up so she's being blown from all directions.

  “Can’t sleep?” she says.

  I shake my head. “You?”

  “No. I need the snoring beast beside me, or the quiet wakes me up.”

  I go into the kitchen and grab a Popsicle from the freezer. While I’m there, I stick my head in for a chilly blast, resting my cheek on a bag of frozen peas.

  “Hey, make room for me in there,” Mom says.

  I pull out, the back of my head scraping a delicious dusting of frost onto the back of my neck.

  She gets a Popsicle for herself. “Come watch the movie with me. It's set in Russia during the winter.”

  “Sounds like heaven,” I say.

  On the TV, a train with a plow attached to the front chugs through an endless snowbound landscape. It must be thirty below.

  “So who's this Doctor Zavoogoo again?” I ask.

  “Doctor Zhivago. He's a surgeon and a poet, caught up in the horrors of the Russian revolution.”

  “Okay. Whatever,” I say. “I’m just in this for the weather.” I rest my feet on the coffee table, nudging Mom's pile of books over a bit.

  On the screen, a horse-drawn sled is speeding across a winter wonderland. Two figures swallowed up in furs huddle in back.

  “Oh, this is my favorite part. The ice house.”

  The doctor and his beloved Lara have traveled to his old summerhouse in the country. But the place is seriously wrecked, windows shattered, the roof caving in. No way he's getting the damage deposit back.

  Everything's covered in ice. Frost hides under the furniture like dust, with snow carpeting the floors.

  As I sprawl on the couch, my bare leg rests against Mom's. The body heat bugs me and I pull away.

  The doctor shivers as an arctic breeze gusts through the ice house, blowing snow off the drifts in the dining room.

  “It's kind of a fixer-upper,” Mom says.

  “Who cares. When do we move in?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Man, if you keep this up,” I tell Vinny, “I’m going to promote you from sidekick to full partner.”

  We’re sitting at a booth in the Barn. Vin's flattening out a map of the city on the table, pushing the napkin dispenser out of the way. He's got it folded to show a certain section of north Toronto. Red and green marker dots are clustered in the Wilson Heights area.

  “How did you do all this?” I ask.

  “On the microfiche at the library. Old newspapers are not on the Net. And there was no index for the kind of thing we’re looking for, no way to narrow the search. I had to go through years of Crimewatch sections to dig this all up.”

  He gives me his “You owe me” look—the same look I got last year when he wrote a book report for me on The Sun Also Rises.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m impressed already. You the man! Now what's with the colored dots?”

  “The red dots are for older incidents—animal mutilations and fires—the oldest going back about ten years. Green is for newer ones, anything in the past five years.”

  “What about the yellow dot there?”

  “That's just some mustard,” Vin says. “I got hungry. Anyhow, most of the old ones are animal mutilations, with a few of what were probably his first fires in red too.”

  There must be almost thirty dots on the map. Roach has been busy. It's like he's in training, racing from one to two to three on the Homicidal Triad.

  “Not bad, Vin.”

  “Not bad?” Vin leans back on his side of the booth, offended. “How about amazing? How about genius? You know, I didn’t see you over at the Igloo, slaving away on the microfiche. I’m doing a lot of legwork here.”

  “I know. I know. Here comes some payback now.”

  Wayne walks over with our orders on a tray. I hurry to refold the map before he sees it. “Ladies,” he says, sliding into the booth to join us. “You know, I wouldn’t be insulted if you left a tip.”

  “Here's a tip,” Vinny says. “Try doing some laundry.”

  Wayne's uniform looks like it's been deep fried.

  “Doesn’t the management say anything?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “They’ve got me working in the back mostly now. And doing cleanup. The glamour jobs.”

  Wayne slouches in the seat beside me, watching us dig in to our burgers. Well, at least I dig in. Vinny always eats like he's performing an autopsy, examining each bite for evidence or something.

  “They really put sawdust in these for filler?” Vin asks.

  “We like to call it our secret formula. Nothing wrong with sawdust. It's good fiber.” Wayne stretches and groans. “I can’t take much more of this. The smell of those burgers—it's like monkey dung.”

  “Which I hear is also used as filler,” I say.

  “Good fiber,” Vin adds, examining his burger between bites.

  “Remember Brenda Hall, from school?” Wayne asks. “You know, with the serious curves? Anyway, I always got a good vibe off her, like she was open to me asking her out. So she comes in yesterday, and I’m chatting her up real nice. And I get nothing off her. It's like she was embarrassed I was even talking to her.”

  “Well,” Vinny says, “maybe you’re overestimating your natural charm.”

  Wayne ignores him. “It's this uniform. You put it on and you become like one of those guys—you know, with their balls chopped off?”
<
br />   “Eunuchs,” Vinny tells him.

  “Yeah. Eunuchs, like in a harem. The uniform castrates you. Girls don’t see past the polyester.”

  A guy in a slightly different uniform—I guess he's of higher rank—passes by our booth. “We need a mop-up in the back corner,” he tells Wayne. “By the men's room.”

  “Got it,” Wayne says, and makes like he's getting up until the other guy moves out of sight. “The assistant manager,” he tells us. “He's about two years older than me. Clawed his way up. Now he thinks he's lord of the fries.”

  He sags back down in the seat beside me.

  “Are you disobeying a direct order?” I say.

  A shrug. “Minimum wage, minimum effort.”

  “That's pretty good. You think that up yourself?” Vinny says.

  Wayne shakes his head, too depressed to rise to the bait. “It's written above the urinal in the staff washroom. I do all my reading there.”

  But eventually he does slouch off. “Minimum wage, maximum rage” is the last thing I hear as he goes off in search of a mop.

  “Think we should bring him in on this?” Vin asks, salting his fries one at a time.

  “Nah. You can’t even take him to the library.” I feel guilty saying it, seeing how Wayne's kind of my best friend. But he's got that habit of screwing things up. “Let's see the map again.”

  He opens it to Wilson Heights, and the red and green clusters. “This is his comfort zone,” Vinny says. “Where he feels safe to do his thing. Somewhere in these six or seven blocks is our guy.”

  “Some of this stuff happened, what, ten years ago? What's to say he hasn’t moved out of Grandma's house?”

  “From reading the diary, I can’t see him moving out. He's always talking about how he hates her, but how she has this power over him, like she's some kind of witch.”

  “So let's see,” I say, trying to pull it together. “What do we have? There's his target list of potential victims. We’ve narrowed down where he lives to a few blocks. What else do we know?”

  “Okay. He's white, and—”

  “Hold on. How do we know that?”

  “The books say about ninety-nine percent of these wackos are white.”

  “Yeah? What's up with whitey?”

  “Who knows. Anyway, using the dates of the clippings, and that one time early in the diary where he mentions how old he is, we can narrow his age down to early twenties.”

  I lean back, staring at the map and trying to make something out of all those dots, something like an X marking the spot. “We’re looking for a white guy, early twenties, living with his grandmother in Wilson Heights.” I drop the map on the table, shaking my head. “So basically, we still got squat.”

  Vinny shrugs. “We’ve got more than we had a couple of days ago.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not closing the distance.”

  Growing up in the Jungle, you get programmed for failure. Most of the people who live there have the doomed look of lifers. They move in slow motion, never picking up enough speed to escape its gravity.

  So deep down, I just expect to fail.

  It's like I’ve skipped to the end of the textbook and looked at all the answers. I’ve seen the future. And I know I’m no hero. Last summer and the dead girl were just the latest proof hammered into my head. So why I keep trying, I don’t know.

  I run my fingers over those colored dots, trying to read them like braille.

  And I keep hearing something the coach of my old swim team used to say: “Doesn’t matter who starts out in front. Matters who can close the distance.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I’ve gone through this book a dozen times now, searching for that place, the moment where he slips up and gives himself away. But Roach's paranoia kept him from saying anything that would betray his identity, in case the diary fell into enemy hands, I guess.

  So I can’t figure out why I’m stuck on this one page, about two-thirds of the way through the diary. I’ve gone over it before. There's nothing there. It's just another entry, cataloguing the details of one of his targets.

  Bones, the anorexically thin woman with the pale skin and the sad face. Roach describes what she likes to read (thick romance novels), what she wears (baggy pastel clothes that hang on her), and the exact times of her arrival and departure at the subway. I can see him rushing home after stalking her to write this all down and relive it in his diary.

  At the bottom of the page, he's written down a scrap of conversation he overheard between Bones and a friend. It's scribbled on a slip of paper, glued to the page. I can just see him fumbling through his pockets for something to jot their words down on before he forgot them. He refers to the friend as Skank.

  Skank: Love that lipstick you’re wearing. Is it Mac?

  Bones: No. Revlon. Burgundy Flush. But it's too rich for my tone.

  S: God. You’ve got such perfect skin. Like porcelain.

  B: You’re crazy. I’d kill for your tan. I’m like a ghost.

  S: You shouldn’t put yourself down so much.

  That's all there is. Then Roach runs out of room on the scrap. It's a meaningless bit of conversation, doesn’t go anywhere. So why am I stuck here, staring at it?

  After another minute going in circles inside my head, I notice something about the paper. It's a plain, thin white slip, but it's got jagged edges on the ends, like it was torn off from a roll of paper. Like a receipt.

  I stand and hold the paper up to the light. Beneath the scribbled conversation I can just make out something printed in ink on the other side. Using my thumbnail, I try and peel the slip off the page, but I have to stop when it starts to tear.

  Ripping the page from the book, I go to the bathroom and turn the shower on, full-blast hot water. I wait as steam fills the room, wiping the sweat from my forehead. It takes a while, but as the steam builds into a fog the page gradually starts to warp. I grab Mom's tweezers and very, very slowly peel the slip off the page. I lose a couple of bits that refuse to pull away, but it's pretty much intact when it finally comes loose.

  It's a receipt from Nut Factory Hardware Store. Under the name it says YORKDALE MALL. The purchases listed are for a padlock, eight stainless-steel screws, and sandpaper. A total of $22.69. It's dated last October. At the bottom of the receipt it says WE’RE NUTS ABOUT NUTS.

  He shopped at Yorkdale last year. But so did a million other people. This is absolutely useless.

  I let out a long sigh. The shower's still going and the steam is drenching me. I’m about to reach over and turn the water off when I notice something funny about how the prices are totaled up.

  Blinking the sweat out of my eyes, I finally see the thing I’ve been searching for. The place where he gives himself away.

  “What am I looking at?” Vin asks.

  We’re in the living room of his apartment, with its tangerine walls, burgundy couch, and amber carpeting. It looks like a sunset puked in here. It's closing in on nine in the morning and his mom has already left for work, so we’ve got the place to ourselves.

  “It's a receipt,” I tell him.

  “I can see that. Why am I supposed to care?”

  “I peeled it off a page in his diary.”

  “Right. So he shopped at Yorkdale a year ago. Not exactly a hot lead.”

  I’m sort of pleased that I’m ahead of Vin for once, pointing out what he's not seeing.

  “Look at the line between the subtotal and the taxes.”

  He holds the slip up to inspect it.

  “Ten percent off,” he says. “So they had a sale?”

  I shake my head. “Look at the letters beside the ten percent.”

  “Emp dis,” Vin reads. “What is that, Latin?”

  I allow myself a small smile. “Emp dis: employee discount.”

  He locks eyes with me, then studies the receipt under the lamp. “No way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He works at a hardware store?”

  I shrug. “Guess he's got to wor
k somewhere.”

  Vin walks over to the windows, thinking it all through. He peels back a section of the tinfoil that covers the glass to block out the harsh sun in the afternoon. White morning light shines on the street outside.

  “Where do we go from here?” he says.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Dad would love this place. It's a tool guy's dream. There's a whole long aisle devoted to screws and nuts. They have screwdrivers ranging from mouse-sized to ones they must use on aircraft carriers. Every tool known to man.

  I wander down the aisles of the Nut Factory, getting the feel of the place. Vinny's watching from out in the mall.

  I’ve spotted two guys working right now, helping people find stuff. Besides them there's the cashier, a woman. I walk over to her.

  “Hi. I was wondering if you’re hiring right now?”

  She shakes her head. “Not at the moment.”

  “Ah,” I say, trying to look disappointed. “I hear you get a ten-percent discount working here.”

  “No. Twenty-five, actually,” she tells me.

  “Twenty-five?”

  “Yep. Ten percent is what the mall staff gets.”

  “You mean, like people working in the other stores?”

  She shakes her head. “No. Like the maintenance workers, administration, security guards.”

  “Really?” I say. “Okay, thanks.”

  Walking out of the store, I go over to where Vinny's sucking down an iced coffee. This whole thing just got way more complicated.

  “So?” he says.

  “He doesn’t work there.”

  “No?”

  I explain the ten-percent discount. “And there's got to be a hundred people cleaning and guarding and administrating this place. No way we can go through them all.”

  “Wait up,” Vin says. “Maybe we can narrow it down.”

  “How?”

  “Let me think a sec.” He chews on his straw. “Sometimes these guys find it hard keeping a job. They’ve got, like, antisocial behavior and they hate authority, so that gets in the way. When they do manage to hang on to a job it's low-level, unskilled.”