Wendy Hornsby - Midnight Baby

“Don’t matter.”

“Sure it matters. It’s your name. What do you want to be called?”

“Like I give a fuck?” he sneered. But he sat down at the opposite end of the sofa, with his stuff tucked in beside him.

“You look like you’re okay,” I said. “Are you?”

He shrugged, avoiding eye contact. He had no expression at all on his face, not even dumb shock.

“Getting enough to eat?”

Again a shrug.

I passed him the bag of burgers. “Thought you might be hungry.”

He fished out a drippy cheeseburger and, staring blankly at a point in front of him, wolfed it down in four huge bites. “Sorry the food got cold,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter.” There were two more burgers, a jumbo order of fries, and a chocolate shake still inside the bag. He rolled the top of the bag closed and set it on the floor between his feet.

I took a deep breath. “Can you talk about her, Sly?”

He said nothing, but a single tear finally rolled down his cheek. I moved closer to him and put my arm behind him, not touching him. When he didn’t shy away, I let my hand rest on his shoulder.

“Did you see it happen?”

He nodded.

“Tell me about it.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I want to nail his balls to a tree. Don’t you?”

Sly’s chin quivered, but he held on to his composure. He also pulled himself out of his stupor to speak to me. “She picked up this guy.”

“What did he look like?”

“Just a guy.”

“Short, tall, fat, skinny, old fart? What?”

“Tall, I guess. Big fucker. Not real old like that Mike dude.”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“Yeah. Like, I seen him around before. Just cruisin’.”

“He had a car?”

“Real sweet car.” He perked at the mention of the car. “Red ‘vette. Someday I’m gonna get me a car like that. So sweet.”

I also perked at the mention of the car. If it was the same one, I had it on videotape.

“So,” I said, “he picked her up. Then what?”

Sly squirmed around uncomfortably.

“You know, Sly, you can tell me anything and all that will happen to you is you’ll get a pat on the back and maybe some more burgers. Whatever went down, it’s not your fault. You’re a kid. You’re not going to jail, no matter what you think you’ve done. Do you understand that?”

He thought about it. Then he turned in his seat to face me. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Okay. Here’s the deal,” he said. “Like, Pisces wasn’t really no hooker. She’d pick up some guy and talk like she was going to do him. They’d go someplace and she would get his pants down, get him all hard talking to him. Then I’d come out, make like I took their picture, and tell the guy how old she was and he better pay us or we’d give the picture to the cops.”

I smiled. “You’re a little blackmailer.”

He had a self-satisfied smirk on his pinched little face. “It worked real good. You shoulda seen those guys. Scared the shit out of ‘em.”

“It was a very dangerous game, Sly.”

“Better than fuckin’ ‘em for real. Most the time, the guy paid off. If he got real weird or real pissed, we just took off. Fuckin’ fast. Mostly you should see her run. She told me she used to be this like really big swimmer and shit. It could be pretty comical, these assholes runnin’ after two little kids with their pants all fallin’ off and their limp old dicks flappin’ around.”

I had learned two important things about Sly. He liked cars and he liked making adults look like fools. Both pleasures could get him into a lot of trouble.

“Night before last, Sly, something went wrong with the scam. What happened?”

The question unnerved him. He spoke to me staring ahead again, but this time I had the feeling he was seeing beyond the space in front of him, searching deep into his mind’s eye.

“That guy?” he said slowly. “He was different. He’d been cruisin’ us for a coupla days and she was scared of him. She took him into the park, like she does a lot of the time, but she told me to hang real close. The guy didn’t want her to touch him. He wouldn’t let her get his pants down. She has to get his pants down right off, in case we gotta get away. But he pulls her up by her hair and says to her, ‘Give me a little kiss.’ And she yells for me. I get out from where I’m hiding and he’s got her head all the way back. He sees me and he turns her and he goes…” His finger slashed his throat. “I never saw no knife. He just did like that with his hand. And she kind of looked at me scared and fell down and he ran away.”

“She fell down?” I meant to prompt him, to get him to finish the story. Then it hit me that that was the end. I saw the boy standing there in the park, felt time stop because what had happened was so horrible it could not have occurred, had to be something like a scratch in an old record that played its distorted screech over and over until you gave the arm a push. I hugged Sly and gave it a push. “And she was dead?”

He scooted up against me, but he did not cry.

“Oh, Sly.” I hugged him.

“I wasn’t fast enough,” he said.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I shoulda been faster.”

“I’m sorry you saw it happen.” I was crying, as angry as I was sad. “I wish I could take it all away. But I can’t, any more than you could have changed what happened.”

“Fuck that,” he whispered.

“You going to help us get this asshole?”

He nodded.

“Good. We’ll be a team, okay? You and me and Mike.”

“Yeah.” He gave me a limp five and a grim smile.

“Know anything about her family?” I asked.

“Usual assholes.”

“Do you know where they are? They need to be told.”

“I don’t know where, down by the beach. When her mother was fucking her boyfriend and making a lot of noise, Hilly used to run down and sneak onto some boat till it was over.”

“Who is Hilly?”

“That’s like her real name. You know, like Ronald.”

“Hilly what?”

“Don’t know.”

I took out the little opal ring Mike had found on Pisces. “Was this hers?”

“Yeah. Her old man gave it to her.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Nothing, except he’s not gay.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She always says, ‘My mother fucks at home and my father fucks a broad.’ So I guess he does girls.”

I tried not to laugh. I gave his shoulder a squeeze and stood up.

“You’re a good friend, Sly Ronald. For the next couple of days, while you’re hanging here, try to remember everything that happened that night. And while you’re at it, think about everything Hilly ever told you about herself and her family. Will you do that?”

“I guess.” He got up and gathered his package of stuff in one hand, his leaky bag of burgers in the other.

“You comin’ back?” he asked. “Not that I give a fuck.”

“I’ll try to come by every day. If I can’t come, I’ll call you, okay?”

“I guess.”

“Mike Flint is a good friend of mine, Sly. He’s going to be coming to see you, too. I know you don’t like cops. Just remember that you haven’t done anything you should be worried about. You can talk to him. Finding people like the guy who killed Pisces is what he does. Help him out.”

Sly narrowed his eyes at me. “You fuckin’ him?”

“None of your business.”

He chuckled wisely. “If you’re fuckin’ him, I’ll talk to him.”

“Then talk to him.” I went with him to the door. “Where’s your cage?”

“Cottage three. You don’t have to take me. I know the way. Shit, I’ve been dumped in this place lots of times.”