Jack: Secret Vengeance Page 3

They laughed. Yeah, Karina Haddon was pretty cool. So was Weezy, but in a different way.

  Weezy … he wondered how she was doing.

  3

  They had the same lunch period on Mondays, so after finishing his burgers Jack looked for Weezy in the caf. They’d never once eaten together here—the class barrier was hard to cross. Lots of barriers in this room.

  The caf was like a medieval kingdom with all sorts of fiefdoms. The jocks had their domain, which cut across classes but kept out non-jocks. The brainiacs had their groups, the bow-heads and big-hairs had theirs.

  And then there were the pineys. They didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. Jack guessed it was because they looked different.

  A dozen or so sat at two tables in one of the corners. All wore odd, mismatched, ill-fitting clothes—no Swatches, Puma sneakers, parachute pants, or Jordache jeans at that table. Their biggest sin, Jack figured, was being too poor to afford all that stuff.

  Some kids, like Jake Shuett, seem to have it in for the pineys, calling them retards and inbreds. A lot of folks talked about brothers and sisters or first cousins getting together and having kids. Jack didn’t know if that was hot air or not. He did know that some pineys—Lester Appleton was a good example—sure didn’t look right.

  He spotted Elvin Neolin, a pint-size frosh from his civics class, getting up from his seat next to a girl with snow-white hair. They exchanged nods as they passed. Elvin had ruddy skin, black spiky hair, and dark eyes. A lot of Lenape Indian in him from the look of it. Not much of a talker, but he seemed like a good kid.

  But where was Weezy? He wanted to hear how her morning had gone. This “Easy Weezy” stuff could last only so long before everyone got tired of it.

  Or so he hoped.

  He found a table with the girls she usually ate with, but she wasn’t there.

  “Where’s Weezy?” he said.

  A couple of them glanced up and looked through him like he wasn’t there. Another said, “You mean Easy?”

  The others giggled.

  Jack gripped the end of their table and leaned on it. It took all his will not to tilt it and tip their lunches into their laps.

  “No. I mean Weezy. Where is she?”

  Maybe he was radiating something, because the nearest girl leaned away and said, “She disappeared between algebra and social studies. We heard she went home sick.”

  “Hey, maybe it’s morning sickness!” someone else said, and this cracked up the table.

  Jack stalked away before he said or did anything stupid. He wandered into the locker area that lined the hallway running between the main class building and the caf. There he saw Carson Toliver, in the flesh, closing his locker door, spinning the dial on his combo lock, and sauntering down the hall.

  Jack felt his anger come to a boil but held it in check. No point in starting something he couldn’t finish. And no point in drawing attention to himself as Weezy’s defender. Who knew? Some odd accident might befall this guy, or something bad might happen to his precious car, and Jack didn’t want any suspicion—unwarranted, of course—aimed his way.

  He had a few minutes before his next class, so he followed.

  Didn’t take long for Jack to start shaking his head in wonder. The guy was amazing. Mr. Popularity. Girls would go, “Hiiii, Carrrrsonnnn,” as he passed and he’d wave and smile back to one and all, pretty or not. Jack could watch the googly-eyed, weak-kneed, ga-ga reactions in his wake. The heartthrob of SBR. Made him sick. If only they knew.

  But girls weren’t the only ones after his attention. Guys looked for high fives, or even a simple nod, anything to be acknowledged by Carson Toliver, varsity hero. And Toliver ate it up. All he needed was a white suit coat draped over his shoulders and he could have been playing Don Fanucci from Godfather II.

  Jack remembered with relish what the young Vito Corleone had done to Don Fanucci.

  Then a surprise. They came upon Teddy Bishop and his goon buddy Joey hassling little Elvin Neolin, pushing him around. Jack had had a run-in with them over the summer. Nearly got his face rearranged. Everyone else in the hall was ignoring the scene, but as Toliver passed he made a sudden turn and shoved Teddy against the wall.

  “He’s kinda little for a big guy like you to be messing with, don’t you think?” he said.

  Teddy was a junior and probably weighed as much as Toliver, but he was a lard bucket. And knew it. He looked instantly cowed. Especially since everyone in the hall had stopped to watch.

  “Aw, he’s just a piney.”

  “I don’t care if he’s a Martian, you’re a lot bigger.”

  “We wasn’t doin’ nothin’.”

  “Yeah? That’s not what I saw. Wanna try a little of that nothin’ on me? Huh? How about it?”

  “Hey, no, we was just—”

  Toliver shoved him again and turned to his blond-haired buddy Joey. “How about you? You up for a little nothin’ ?”

  Joey raised his hands and backed away. “Hey, no, man. We didn’t mean nothin’.”

  Toliver turned to Elvin. “These guys hassle you again, you come to me.” He pointed to Teddy and Joey each in turn. “And you two … I’ll be watching.”

  With that, Toliver continued his stroll as if nothing had happened, leaving Elvin staring after him with absolute, total hero worship in his dark eyes, while Teddy and Joey slunk away in the other direction.

  Amazing, Jack thought.

  He wondered if Toliver cared a bit about Elvin. Maybe he’d simply seen the situation as an opportunity to put on a performance.

  On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t completely a performance. Maybe he’d been sincerely ticked at seeing a little guy being pushed around by the likes of Teddy and Joey. Whatever the case, he’d made the most of it.

  “You okay, Elvin?”

  He nodded but said nothing. He rarely said anything.

  Jack felt a sudden shove from behind. “Hey, you botherin’ Elvin?”

  He turned to see one of the older piney kids, looking ready to fight. He’d met him before. Levi Coffin, tall and lanky with unruly brown hair. His gangly arms stuck out of his too-small shirt. He had one blue eye and one brown and both flashed anger.

  Elvin waved his hands and pointed back down at the retreating bullies.

  “Oh, them,” Levi said, his tone dripping contempt. “One of these days somethin’ real bad’s gonna befall them two.”

  Like many pineys, his voice had an almost Southern twang. Maybe that was why some people called them hillbillies without hills.

  He looked at Jack. “Sorry. Got my signals crossed.”

  He looked at Elvin, then at Toliver’s receding figure.

  “Don’t you go thinkin’ he’s your buddy and all.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You know what Saree says about him.”

  Jack looked and saw the white-haired girl from the piney lunch table standing a few feet away, staring at him with an odd expression. He realized with a start that she had pink irises. White hair … milk-white skin … what was that called…?

  Albino … she was an albino.

  Elvin and Levi joined her and the three of them walked off. Before they rounded the bend, the albino girl—Saree—stared at him again over her shoulder. What was so interesting about him? And Elvin and Levi … Jack had a weird feeling those two had had a conversation without Elvin saying a word.

  But they weren’t important. Toliver was.

  Being the gridiron hero wasn’t enough, apparently. Not only was he the guy who could do no wrong on or off the athletic field, but he’d set himself up as godfather of the whole damn school as well.

  And clearly he liked the role. He ate up the adoration like candy.

  But if people could see what lay beneath that Mr. Wonderful façade, it would be a way different story.

  The problem was, how could Jack expose the real Carson Toliver without involving Weezy … or himself?

  4

  “I’m heading for the Connells’.”

  His father loo
ked up from where he sat sipping a beer and listening to Mr. Bainbridge rant about Beirut. His fellow Korean War vet had come over in a rage and hadn’t stopped talking since he stepped through the door.

  “Homework done?”

  “Every bit.”

  “Don’t be late.”

  USED was closed on Mondays, so Jack had had the afternoon to himself. The first thing he’d done when he got home was call Weezy to see how she was, but Mrs. Connell said she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come to the phone. He tried a few more times through the afternoon but the answer was always the same.

  He often wished they’d invent something like the Star Trek communicator that you could carry in a pocket and call people when you needed to speak to them, or tell Scotty to beam you up. If he and Weezy each had one, he could have called her directly.

  Maybe someday …

  “Nuke ’em!” Mr. Bainbridge was saying as Jack ducked out the front door. “Kill ’em all and let Allah sort ’em out! Who’ll miss ’em?”

  He’d really built up a head of steam. Dad was simply sitting there letting him blow it off.

  He biked over to Weezy’s and was just setting his kickstand in the driveway when he heard a girl scream.

  He froze and listened.

  “No! I’m not going!”

  Weezy …

  “The hell you aren’t!” Her father’s voice.

  And then her mother’s. “Weezy, you can’t just quit school. Did something happen?”

  Weezy … screaming: “Nothing happened! I’m just never going to school again and no one can make me!”

  Weezy never going to school again? He couldn’t imagine what it was like for a fifteen-year-old girl to be called “easy” by everyone. Bad enough if it was true, but when it wasn’t …

  And worse, no one would believe it wasn’t. Jack had seen the Carson Toliver charisma running full throttle today and it was awesome. No way anyone would believe he’d force himself on Weezy Connell. He was too good a guy. And besides, why would he force himself on any girl when there were so many of them drooling over him?

  Even so, it would all blow over eventually. But Weezy probably couldn’t see that. She was an all-or-nothing sort. No half measures for her. When she got into something, she was into it all the way. So from where she stood, everyone thought she was a slut and would think of her as a slut for the rest of her life. She couldn’t face that on a daily basis so she was never ever going back to school.

  Sooner or later she’d come around, but her parents didn’t seem to see that. Her father kept yelling that she was going back to school tomorrow and she kept screaming that she wasn’t.

  The screams bothered Jack. He’d never heard that tone from Weezy, hadn’t imagined she was even capable of it. She sounded totally out of control, maybe even a little crazy.

  Crazy … she’d been on his case about calling her that, and he remembered her getting in Eddie’s face for it a few times.

  A door slammed, and then her father’s voice again. “Weezy! Open up! You open this door this minute!”

  Jack heard Mrs. Connell say, “All right, that does it! I’m calling Doctor Hamilton.”

  “Not again!” Weezy wailed.

  Something about the way she said it gave Jack an uneasy feeling. Dr. Hamilton? Who was Dr. Hamilton? Jack had never heard of him.

  Sad and worried, he turned his bike around and headed home.

  5

  Mr. Bainbridge was just going out as Jack came in.

  “He sure was mad earlier,” he said to his father when he was gone.

  “Well, he has a right to be. We all do. But he’s mad at just the Arabs. It’s more complicated than that.”

  “How? Those marines were there just to keep the peace, right? They shouldn’t have been killed.”

  His expression turned bitter. “Murdered is more like it.” He sighed. “But that ‘keep the peace’ bit is a big part of the problem. I just don’t see why every time there’s a dustup somewhere in the world, we have to put our guys in harm’s way. Those boys died for nothing. Absolutely nothing. It’s the law of unintended consequences.”

  “‘Law’?”

  “Well, not a law, per se, but it happens enough that it’s seen that way.”

  Confused, Jack shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  His father leaned forward. “Used to be, if you wanted to steal a car, you’d cross a few wires under the dashboard to get it started, then drive off. To prevent thefts, car makers installed safeguards against hot-wiring. So what are car thieves doing now? They’re waiting for drivers to get in and start the car, then attacking them and pulling them from the car, and driving off. So, measures to prevent hot-wiring had the unintended consequence of replacing simple theft with violent carjacking.”

  Jack got it … sort of.

  “But Beirut?”

  “The peacekeeping force had the best intentions: Calm the violence so cooler heads could prevail. But the fanatics saw it as an invasion. The result: An attempt to save Middle Eastern lives results in the slaughter of the U.S. peacekeepers. An unintended consequence.”

  Shaking his head, Jack wandered into the kitchen and pulled out the phone book.

  Mom came in then, drying her hands on a towel. She had hair and eyes the same shade of brown as Jack’s. The weight she’d gained over the past few years had made her face rounder than Jack’s.

  “How’s my miracle boy doing?”

  Jack snapped the phone book closed and suppressed a groan.

  Miracle boy … he hated that almost as much as “Jackie.” He’d broken her of calling him Jackie—at least he hoped he had. It had been a whole month since she’d said the word. But he didn’t think he’d ever break her of the “miracle boy” thing. On the plus side, she used it when only family were present.

  “Fine.”

  “What were you looking up?”

  “Just browsing through, looking at the yellow pages and stuff.”

  The “stuff” he’d been looking for was a doctor named Hamilton.

  She gave him an amused look. “Since when are you more interested in the phone book than football?”

  Oh, yeah. The Monday night game. Normally Dad would be glued to it. Jack loved watching football but the voice of one of the Monday night announcers, Howard Cosell, got on his nerves at times. The guy had made some comment a couple of weeks ago that upset lots of people, but Jack had already forgotten what it was.

  “Forgot about it.” No lie there. This thing with Weezy and Toliver had blown it out of his mind. “Who’s playing?”

  She gave a dismissive wave. “How should I know? I don’t understand what anyone sees in grown men fighting over a silly ball.”

  “You play tennis with Dad, and that involves a ball.”

  “Yes, but we’re hitting the ball, not fighting over it.”

  As Mom puttered in the kitchen, Jack peeked in and saw the light from the screen reflecting from his father’s glasses and balding head. The Dolphins were playing the Raiders. He wasn’t a big fan of either team.

  He wondered when the Eagles would make the Monday night game again. He was still stinging from the Phillies’ World Series loss to the stupid Orioles. People had called it the I-95 series, but Jack called it the Crap Series. Just a week ago they choked in the fifth game—a five-nothing shutout, of all things—and went home losers. A black day for Phillies fans like Jack and his dad.

  Well, at least they’d made the series. No hope of the Eagles making the Super Bowl this season. They were awful.

  He heard Mom go upstairs, so without saying anything to his dad he returned to the kitchen and reopened the phone book. He found the Physicians section again and ran through the names. His finger froze when he came to the only Hamilton.

  Selena Hamilton, MD

  Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

  Medford, NJ

  Psychiatry? Weezy was seeing a shrink? No. Couldn’t be. And yet … Weezy had said, Not again! And Medford … she
and her mother had made a trip to Medford every Friday throughout the summer. Weezy had never said what for and Jack had never asked, assuming they were shopping trips.

  So many things fit together now, especially her sensitivity about the word “crazy.”

  But what was wrong with her head? Her moods bounced all over the place. When she was up she was flying and when she was down she was in the basement, but she wasn’t crazy.

  Although she’d sure sounded crazy tonight. Maybe she’d been standing on the edge of some kind of psychological cliff and this “Easy Weezy” business knocked her off.

  Only one person to blame for that.

  Jack felt a surge of dark and cold sweep through him, as if a latch had suddenly lifted, freeing something that should remain safely locked away. He closed the phone book and slammed out the back door. He headed for the garage and went straight to the corner where they kept all the sporting equipment—tennis racquets, tennis balls, birdies, badminton racquets, footballs, baseballs, mitts … and bats.

  He pulled a Louisville Slugger from a bin and hefted it.

  Yeah.

  6

  Jack crouched in the shadowed shrubs along the side of the Toliver garage and waited for Carson.

  The Tolivers lived on Johnson’s western boundary, at the tip of the cul-de-sac that capped Emerson Lane. People who lived in this relatively new and ritzy development on the far side of Route 206 liked to call it “New Town.” The name hadn’t stuck.

  But Jack hadn’t arrived via Emerson Lane. He’d hidden his bike among the used cars in Sumter’s lot and hiked through the sprawling orchard on the north side of the development. Along the way he’d passed Professor Nakamura’s house; through the rear windows he’d seen the professor sitting at the desk in his study. Here was another guy who’d let Weezy down, but not on purpose.

  From the orchard it had been easy to slip through the Tolivers’ backyard to the side of their garage where he peeked through the window to check out what cars it held. He found two: a Cadillac DeVille and a Mercedes sedan. No Mustang convertible in sight. Which meant the Boy Wonder wasn’t home yet.