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The hike back down was almost as difficult as going up the hill had been. Noah and I hung back and kept an eye on Kyle. Darren knew what we were doing and gave us a thumbs-up but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t giving any lectures today, but he knew what he was doing. The hike, I think, was good for all of us. It was a challenge, and we did it as a group. As a family, Darren might have said. A weird little family.

  That night the house was quiet. I had plugged my cell phone in and left it on. It rang at about two in the morning. It was Lindsey.

  “Where were you today?” she asked.

  “We went for a hike. In the woods. Sorry I didn’t call.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  I didn’t quite know what I was feeling about her, but I remembered what Noah had said. “No,” I said. “How can I be mad at you?”

  “Can we do something tomorrow?”

  “I guess. What did you have in mind?” I was worried about what she might have in mind. What kind of scam would she come up with next?

  “Nothing, really. Let’s just hang out together. Do something…normal. Maybe go to the park.”

  “The park sounds good.”

  “When I see you, I’m going to give you a really big hug.”

  I fell back asleep, dreaming of Lindsey. Dreaming of Lindsey and me, hand in hand like some kind of dream couple.

  Lindsey’s idea of normal was finding a quiet spot near the duck pond at Sullivan’s Cove and smoking some weed. I didn’t want to, so I pretended to smoke but didn’t inhale (as the politicians say). Lindsey got kind of dreamy-eyed and laughed a lot and kept commenting on how cute the ducks were.

  I asked her about her family and growing up, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Then I asked her how she’d gotten into this scamming thing, and she grew much more animated.

  “Well, I always liked to pretend things. Just kid stuff. But when I was about twelve, I was really bored. I was walking home from school one day. I stopped this lady and asked if I could use her cell phone to call home. She said yes. I made a fake call home and pretended I only got message. Mom, I said, it’s me. I lost my wallet and my phone and don’t have any money to catch the bus home. I don’t know what to do. And then I hung up. The lady looked at me and asked how much I needed. I told her that five dollars should do it. She handed me the five, and I started to shake and look worried. She asked me what was wrong. I said I wasn’t sure I’d make my bus connection on time and that I might get stuck downtown. I said I was scared to be there on my own. She ended up giving me twenty dollars and told me to take a taxi. She tried to stop one for me, but I said I’d be okay.”

  “That was the beginning?”

  “Yep. I started coming up with inventive strategies after that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Boy, you want to know all the tricks of the trade.”

  She was giggling a bit now and leaning toward me in a flirty way. She ran her fingers through my hair, and I began to wonder if she was just acting with me as well. She could probably get any guy to believe what she wanted him to believe. I remembered Noah’s words about robbing a bank.

  “Well,” she said, “I picked up some flyers from an animal rights group, and I went to the university. I had a clipboard, and I made up a fake petition. I stopped people and showed them photos of animals used for medical testing. I got them to sign the petition and asked for a donation to the organization. I was very convincing.”

  “Let me guess. You kept the money.”

  She smiled and dipped her head. “I guess that’s bad, huh?”

  “Some people would say so.”

  “Do you think I’m awful?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I think you’re great. You’re a little warped though.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  I smiled and decided to push my own limits. I leaned into her and gave her a kiss.

  Chapter Eleven

  The more time we spent together, the more I tried to change her.

  “I’m addicted,” she admitted finally. “I’d miss the challenge and the buzz I get from the game. Let’s do another wedding.” “No way.”

  “What did you do with your money?” she asked. “The money we split from that wedding party?”

  I hadn’t done anything with it. I’d hidden it in my room. I was saving it for an emergency. I never did let her take me on that spending spree. “I don’t know,” I answered, knowing she’d bug me for saving it.

  “I don’t know what I did with my share either. Just spent it on this and that.”

  Things weren’t that bad at the group home. In fact, it was pretty quiet until one night in the middle of July. We were all sitting in the living room, watching a really bad science-fiction movie about psychic aliens who read your mind and then sucked your brain out. There was a loud explosion in the backyard. Darren led the charge as we all ran outside. Brian was lying flat out in the middle of the yard, unconscious. His face was a horrible red, and his clothes were burned and blackened. There were scraps of metal around the yard and a small fire in the grass where something had exploded.

  “Call 9-1-1!” Darren shouted, and I flipped open my old phone and punched in the numbers. When asked what the emergency was, I had a hard time explaining. But I guess I said enough to get an ambulance headed our way.

  Connor started walking around the yard in circles, ranting. “Brian, you freaking idiot,” he said. “You could have killed us all. You dumb, stupid piece of shit.”

  This really pissed off Kyle, who I had never seen really angry before. Kyle said, “Shut up, Connor. Just shut up,” and then Kyle kicked him hard in the ass, making Connor slam forward into the high wooden fence.

  Darren started cpr on Brian and told Noah to go watch for the ambulance and wave it down. “What can I do?” I asked.

  “Pray,” Darren said. I didn’t know if he meant it, but I tried. I wasn’t at all sure I believed in God, but I silently asked for Brian not to die. I felt helpless standing there, but a strange feeling came over me. It was like someone had heard my request. There was a voice in my head, the voice of my mother, telling me everything would be okay. Looking at Brian, it didn’t seem that way at all.

  When the paramedics arrived, Darren went with Brian to the hospital. He didn’t get back until late that night. Connor was sulking in his room. Noah, Kyle and I were sitting in the kitchen.

  “He’s gonna be okay,” Darren said. “The burns are bad, but they’ll heal. But it’s not going to be pretty.” He looked at the three of us. “Can anyone tell me what he was up to?”

  “He was making a bomb,” Kyle said. Kyle roomed with Brian. “Some kind of homemade bomb he found out about on the Internet. I thought it was just talk, but I guess he figured out how to do it. I’m sorry. I should have said something.”

  Darren looked at Kyle and then at Noah and me. “No secrets,” he said. “Let’s keep it all out in the open. Even if you think you are ratting on someone.” I couldn’t tell if he was mad at us for some reason or mad at himself for letting something like this happen. He ran his hand through his hair. It was the first time I’d seen Darren when he didn’t seem to have it all together. “Do you think he was hoping to blow us all up?” he asked no one in particular.

  “No,” Kyle said. “He likes it here. Sort of. He said that. He had this thing about wanting to do something, um, dangerous. I thought it was just an act.”

  Darren shook his head. Then he got up and looked around the kitchen. We were all a bit shocked when he clenched his fist like he was going to hit something. Instead, he kicked over a chair and walked out of the room.

  Things were quiet around the house for a week or so after that. We visited Brian a few times at the hospital. He apologized to all of us and said he’d never do something that stupid again. Looking at his burned face, I couldn’t help but think what a sorry lot we were. Each of us was damaged in some way and looking for a way to act it out. But I knew it wasn’t just us. There were a lot of
screwed-up people out there.

  On our way back to the house, I said some of what I was thinking to Darren.

  “You’re so right, Josh. I don’t know why it is, but you are bang on. Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got a life ahead of you. Why not try to heal some of that damage?” He looked at me and he was dead serious.

  I almost laughed. “I have a hard enough time holding myself together. I doubt I could do much good for anyone else.”

  “Yes, you could. Use your own pain to do some good for others.” It was the preachy Darren that I knew.

  In those days after the bomb I did some serious thinking about where I was and where I was going. I thought a lot about Lindsey. I missed her even though I knew that she was trouble. If I hung out with her long enough, she’d get me involved in another one of her scams. I figured she could probably talk her way out of anything. Or she would just cry and get away with it. But not me.

  I hadn’t heard from her for a while, and she wasn’t answering my calls. That didn’t feel right. I wondered if maybe she’d lost interest in me and moved on. When she finally did answer her phone, I asked her what she’d been up to.

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Internet,” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Just having some fun,” she said. “Man, summer can be so boring.”

  “Not around here,” I said, and I told her all about our recent catastrophe. But I was afraid to ask her more about what she was doing on the Internet, afraid to hear what kind of scams she was up to.

  Chapter Twelve

  Darren announced that he had volunteered Kyle, Noah, Connor and me to spend the next three days at a day camp not far away, working with little kids from disadvantaged homes. Connor complained that it wasn’t his responsibility “to babysit impoverished rug rats,” and we wasted an evening hearing him rant about it, but in the end he went along, even if he was a pain in the butt about it.

  All we did was kick some balls around and play games. I’d never really spent much time with younger kids, and I was kind of shocked that they treated me like an adult and that I was actually good at keeping them occupied.

  I talked to Lindsey on the phone each evening, and each time she seemed more distant. I wondered if she’d found a new guy on the Internet or maybe just lost interest or invented some new devious hobby to occupy her time. When I began to believe that I was losing her altogether, I got up my courage and asked her to meet me downtown. I said I’d buy her dinner at McDonald’s.

  “I’d like to, but I’m busy, Josh. I have some new friends that I’m getting together with.” We talked a bit more. As I said goodbye, I felt a sharp twinge of sadness. I was pretty sure Lindsey was slipping away from me. She’d probably realized what a loser I was and was ready to move on.

  I spent a couple more days at the summer camp, and I liked it even more than I had at first. Some of these kids were starved for attention. It wasn’t hard to get them smiling and involved in games. I told Darren I was willing to work at the camp as long as I could.

  Darren smiled. “Nice. I watched you. You’re a rock star to them. Keep it up.”

  My calls to Lindsey went unanswered. I’d get her voice mail and leave a message, but she never called back. I guessed I was ready to close that freaky little chapter in my so-called life.

  But then she called. It was about eleven thirty one night. Noah had already woken me up by shouting during one of his nightmares. In Noah’s mind, his father just kept beating the crap out of him, even long after he was gone.

  When I answered the phone, all I heard was sobbing. I knew it was her. “Lindsey, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  At first she didn’t answer. Just more sobbing.

  “Tell me,” I insisted. “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have called.” And she hung up.

  I called her right back. At first she didn’t answer. But finally she did.

  “It’s my brother,” she said. “Caleb. He fell. He was way up on the side of an abandoned warehouse.”

  “Is he okay?”

  There was a long pause. I heard Lindsey sucking in a breath. “No. He’s dead.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt frozen. I pictured a kid high up on the side of a building with a spray can of paint, leaving his silly nickname. For what? Just to say, Look at me. I was here. Aren’t I great? It made no sense.

  “Are you going to be okay?” I asked foolishly.

  “No. I’m not going to be okay. I lost my brother.” She now sounded like she was angry at me.

  “I’m going to come over.”

  “No.”

  “Are you home?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do I find you?”

  While I was putting on my clothes, Noah woke up. I explained what had happened and where I was going. “Don’t tell Darren,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Tell Darren.”

  “What if he doesn’t let me go?”

  “Tell Darren,” he repeated.

  And when I told Darren, all he said was, “I’ll drive you.”

  There were no lectures on the way. No advice except “Do what you have to do.” And as I closed the car door and walked to Lindsey’s front door, I didn’t have a clue what I could do to help. All I knew was that I wanted to be there for her.

  It was a pretty fancy house, and there were two cars in the driveway—a Mercedes and a BMW. Lindsey must have heard the car drive up, because she opened the door. She looked like she’d been crying for a really long time.

  “Where are your parents?” I asked.

  “Finally asleep, thank God. The police came to tell us. It was horrible. When they left, my mom was crying and my dad started blaming her for this. Then she tore into him. They’d been drinking. I just shut myself in my room. That’s when I called you.”

  “Why me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I just knew you were the one I needed to talk to.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and held her close. “Stay with me,” she said. “Don’t leave.”

  She led me up to her bedroom, and she threw herself down on top of her bed. I cautiously lay down beside her. A little lamp was on, and there was a soft glow in the room. I lay on my back with her beside me and she cried a bit more, and then I held her until she fell asleep. I didn’t fall asleep that night. I just listened to her breathe—ragged at first, and then slower and more steady.

  What happens next? I kept asking myself as I lay there. What do I do?

  But there were no answers.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I awoke to a knock on the door.

  “Lindsey,” a male voice said. “Your mother and I have to go deal with this. Will you be okay?”

  Lindsey sat upright and saw me lying there on top of the bed. She cleared her throat. “Yeah, Dad. You go do what you have to do.”

  Then a woman’s voice said, “Lindsey, are you sure you’re okay? Can I come in?”

  “No, Mom. Really. I’m okay. Don’t come in. I just want to be left alone right now. I just want to sleep.”

  “Okay,” she said. And I heard their footsteps on the stairs, and then the front door opened and closed.

  I sat up beside Lindsey and looked around her room. It seemed odd that it was filled with so many little-girl kind of things—dolls, stuffed animals and photos of her when she was younger.

  I was still blinking the sleep out of my eyes when she leaned into me and began to cry again. “I can’t believe he’s gone. This can’t be happening,” she said. “I just want to go somewhere and hide.”

  “Were you two close?”

  “We used to be. When we were young we did a lot of things together. Bike riding, swimming, skateboarding.”

  “Somehow I can’t picture you on a skateboard.”

  “I was awesome,” she said, trying to smile, but the smile gave way to a new wave
of sadness.

  “I bet you were.”

  “But we were bad too.”

  “I can believe that,” I said.

  “We put our parents through hell.” She looked at me long and hard. “And now this.”

  “Yeah, this.” I hugged her to me and couldn’t help but think about my own loss.

  “Caleb wasn’t much good at any particular thing until he got into the graffiti. I mean, he was always trying too hard to be like someone else. Always trying to be good at sports when he wasn’t. Trying to be tough when it wasn’t his nature. Trying to win over girls when they didn’t want anything to do with him. He would get depressed. Really depressed. For days at a time. And I’d try to snap him out of it.

  “And then he decided he wanted to be an artist, and he ended up with spray cans of paint. Most people would think of it as vandalism, but it was his thing. He was proud of what he did. Kids admired him for it. The crazy dangerous and difficult places where his work would show up. And he never got caught. Not once. But he didn’t deserve this.”

  “No, he didn’t. I wish I could have gotten to know him.”

  “Thanks for saying that.”

  We sat in the kitchen and drank coffee. There was mostly silence between us now. I was wishing I could do more, say the right things, but I knew from my own experience that it didn’t matter much what people said to you. The pain didn’t go away. After a while Lindsey’s cell phone beeped. She had a text.

  She read it and then pounded back some message, with an angry look on her face.

  “What?” I asked after she slammed the phone down on the table.

  “They’re at a funeral home. They want me to get a cab and meet them there. I said no way.”

  By midmorning she said she just wanted to go back to bed and sleep. “It would be better if you weren’t here when my parents get home.”

  I didn’t ask why, but I didn’t want to complicate things. I kissed Lindsey on the forehead and held her hands. “Just let me know what I can do,” I said. “I’ll do anything to help.” And I meant it.