Paul Griffin - Burning Blue

“I. Don’t. Know. Like I told Barrone. I wish I knew. She offered to get the DA to halve my sentence if I could ID the contract issuer. Why are you winking at me?”

“I’m not. My eye twitches when I haven’t slept in three days. How could you not know who made you burn her?”

“I got a letter, maybe three months ago, no return address. Letter says, basically, ‘Nicole Castro needs to burn.’ Letter says how it might happen, maybe somebody should throw battery acid into her face. If I do the job, I get a hundred grand, enough to get the hell out of here, maybe go to France, where people are cool and leave you alone, start a new life, go to art school or some shit, you know? Of course I’m like, this is too good to be true. There was a combo code and an address to this storage place off I-95. I go there, small locker, only things in it are a pair of Priority Mail envelopes, again no return address of course, but lots of hundred dollar bills with a note that says half now, half after. And what do you know, all of a sudden I have fifty k in my backpack.”

“Why two Priority envelopes? He couldn’t fit the money in one?”

“You don’t have to go to the post office window if a package is under thirteen ounces, which both were. Fifty k weighs a little over a pound-I checked. Cut the stack in half, you have two roughly nine ounce packages, just drop them into any old mailbox.”

“You believed him, that he would pay you the second half?”

She leaned in. “Dude, are you serious? I would have done it for five thousand. And anyway, he paid me the balance.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Unbelievable, right? A psycho with morals. Barrone seized it all anyway, the bitch.” She leaned back. “Not doing the job wasn’t an option. He had my address. Anybody nuts enough to advance me fifty k to burn Nicole is nuts enough to drop a bullet into the back of my skull if I tried to beat him out of the money. I’m the victim here too, Jay. I had no choice.”

“Except maybe to go to the police?”

“You’re funny. I tried to get info on him, in case he tried to get away with not paying the second fifty k, but I couldn’t turn up anything. I hacked the storage place’s files. Dude ordered the locker rental by mail, like sent a hundred-dollar cash down payment with an actual paper form. Who does such things anymore, I ask you. Registered as Joe Smith of Hopper Lane someplace in Florida. That checked out to be an unoccupied HUD-owned foreclosure.”

“You tapped HUD?”

“Please, it was easier than planting Trojans in Canadian discount drug spam. You know, Spaceman, you just might have the chops to run this dude down.” She waved me closer to the glass and whispered. “The money? It was actually a hundred k for the down payment. I left fifty of it where Barrone could find it, but I have the rest tucked away. You track this nut down, get me his name, let me be the one to break the news to Barrone, and I’ll take care of you. I swear.”

“First, you’re lying. You don’t have any money.” Her eyes had ticked right when she mentioned it. “Second, the idea of helping you halve your sentence and getting you back out and at large on the street two years earlier? Not terribly appealing.” I got up to go.

“It was a business transaction, Jay. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would’ve. It was unstoppable. Take comfort in that.”

“But it wasn’t somebody else, Angela. It was you. For the rest of your life, you’ll be the girl who burned Nicole Castro.”

“Dude, you are hilarious. So that’s her problem, then. And you really think people will remember any of this? It’s old news already, now that there isn’t going to be a trial. Then again, Nicole’ll probably remember it, right? But even you, Jay. Year from now, you’ll be moon-eyed over some other fantasy queen, and Nicole Castro will just fade from your heart. I’m saying cheer up, champ. Time heals all wounds, excluding burns. Hey Jay, how much are you hating on me right now, scale of one to ten?”

I turned back to take her in one last time. She showed just the slightest hint of a smile as she waited for my answer. She would be out in four years, maybe less. With therapy, counseling, meds, she’d recover, get a job, marry, have children. Her kids would never know what she had done. And then there was Nicole: How would she get through the next sixty or seventy years with half a face? “Angela, to be perfectly honest, you’re too much of a mess to hate. I feel sorry for you.”

Her half smile turned into a nasty little pout. Her lips quivered. She winced as she wiped her split lip. “Look at me. Look what they did to my face. ” She glared at me now. “That bitch deserved it.” She pounded her fists into the Plexiglas. “I hate you, Jay. Seriously. You and Nicole.” She slammed her head into the Plexiglas, and then slammed it again. The guards were on her and pulling her away from the glass.

A horrible thought came to me only just then. “The storage place,” I said.

“I hate you, Nazzaro!”

“Was it in Marathon?”

“I hate you.” She sobbed as they dragged her around the corner and out of sight.

Angela Sammick was right. I needed a lot more than that wrestling match video to connect her to Dave. Somewhere she had to have something big on him. Why else wouldn’t he have come forward and told Detective Barrone about Angela?

The cops had her laptop, and she wouldn’t have kept anything incriminating on that drive anyway. She undoubtedly had it stored in the cloud somewhere. I could hack her password, but without a username, I had no chance of finding it. The best I could do was go back to those BinarTREE phone tower logs. I kept picking up on a data string that Angela repeatedly imported from a cutters’ chat room. I spent the rest of that Tuesday night throwing darts into the void, setting up my laptop to shoot endless combinations of usernames and passwords into iCloud and the thousands of other digital storage warehouses. I was firing scattershot. Finding Angela Sammick’s data was hopeless. I was feeling pretty down. Nicole still hadn’t called me back.

Wednesday morning, my father woke me, shaking my foot. He was on the phone. He tapped out a one-hand piano tune on the wall, and then he punched the air in silent triumph. “Mrs. Lyles, I cannot thank you enough. You’ve literally saved the boy’s life. Your compassion will inspire him to be a better man. He truly is sorry.” They talked for another minute, my father clicked off the phone, and we high-fived. Now all I had to do was get Detective Barrone to drop the obstruction of justice charge.

“You don’t seem so happy,” my father said.

I smiled, but I had a hard time maintaining eye contact with him. Steve Nazzaro was hiding something down in Marathon.

“Dude, chill, she’ll call,” Cherry said. This was Wednesday afternoon the tenth of November, though it felt like September. The weather was sixty degrees and sunny. We were hanging out in a skate park at the edge of the Meadowlands. “So if the detective gets the obstruction of justice charge to stick, where’s that leave you?”

I was showing her how to coast a curb rail. “For starters, forget about college with a felony on my record.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go anyway. Oh, I get it, we want to follow Nicole to school now.” Cherry landed hard on the recycled rubber. “I refuse to keep bruising my ass. I’ll do anything but this. Your call.”

I studied the highway. The I-95 traffic was moving fast. “Let’s go for a ride.”

Cherry’s duct-taped Civic chugged south down I-95 to the Marathon exit. “What are we looking for, by the way?” Cherry said.