Rob Thurman - Slashback

And it was ruined by the paper fluttering against the wood where it was pinned.

Cal saw it first, but then he had been watching for something like this. I hadn’t. He didn’t point it out. He stopped the skateboard that was all but useless on the cracked and broken sidewalk and squatted down to pretend to tie his sneaker. I noticed that it was already tied in an effective, if sloppy, Cal knot almost at the same moment I noticed the poster. It covered layers of LOST posters but it didn’t say LOST. It said MISSING in bold black letters. I always wondered about that-the difference between missing and lost. Whichever word was chosen for you, you were still gone all the same.

Whichever was chosen, you rarely came back.

“Kithser.” I studied the face on the cheap photocopy. “David.” I hadn’t known his first name was David. I’d only known him as the seventeen-year-old drug dealer and probably thief three streets over who’d once tried to sell crack to Cal. It was the week we’d first moved in. Kithser was big for someone who did crack. Big boned, muscle-bound enough that if he wasn’t doing crack, he was certainly juicing. Definitely well fed, I guessed, by the family who was now looking for him.

Did his family know how he was on the streets? That he was mean and nasty with the steroid psychosis lurking in the twitching beside his glassy eyes. Who knew? Either they were softhearted and hoped he’d change or they’d made him the way he was and missed that drug money.

When had I become this cynical? I reached out to fold a corner under and keep the paper from flapping in the wind. “It’s an old picture,” Cal noted, giving up on his sneaker. A finger plopped directly in the middle of David Kithser’s face. “See? It doesn’t show where you broke his nose.”

Whether someone loved him or not, you didn’t try to sell my little brother crack. Cal wouldn’t have taken it, but the next step would’ve been Kithser trying to steal any money he had on him. That would’ve led to Cal bashing him in the balls. . testicles. Damn it, whacking him in the testicles with his battered skateboard. From that point on, it was hard to say what would’ve happened. Cal had been armed. I didn’t let him take a knife to school, but after school and on weekends, I wanted him able to protect himself. Against Grendels. Against Kithsers, against those even worse than the Kithsers. The only good neighborhoods we knew were the ones we rode through on buses.

Luckily I was two blocks down, saw it, and that was the end of Kithser bothering my brother. I could’ve taken him down without hurting him much. Steroid muscle is useless muscle for the most part. But with drug dealers, bullies, perverts, and what else oozed about, you needed to make an impression. A thoroughly broken nose did that and was essentially harmless in the long run. Kithser had never seen a drop of his own blood in his life until then, I could tell. Most bullies haven’t.

And Cal helpfully kicking him in the b- testicles when he was down and rolling around screaming about his nose hadn’t done much for his pride either. Kithser had paid attention to the lesson and he hadn’t come back to our street. So I’d thought.

Or maybe someone had gone over to his street instead.

Expectant eyes slanted up at me in a rainwater gaze. Now I’d see the truth. No way to avoid it. Not even I could ignore this. “You know the killer got him. Right, Nik?” You’re not an oblivious idiot anymore, are you? Because worrying about keeping you alive is getting to be a chore. I could see all those thoughts spinning under the dark hair.

I rested a hand on his shoulder and squeezed lightly. His bones were thin and light under my fingers. Fragile. Breakable. A spun glass version of a brother. I hoped for that growth spurt soon. A knife and some hand-me-down martial art moves from the dojo wouldn’t always be enough.

“Maybe,” I answered, noncommittal. “He leads a bad life. Lots of trouble.” Missing a week now, the poster said. Not crashing at a friend’s place then. “But. . maybe.”

Cal blew a random strand of hair out of his eyes and rolled up the too-long sleeves of his cast-off sweatshirt one more time. “Can we get pizza after?”

I’d already ripped the stapled poster free. I’d done it completely without thought and stared at it with a combination of dread and curiosity. What was I doing? “After what?” I asked, distracted.

Picking up his skateboard, Cal tucked it under his arm and nodded at the paper. “After you go around the neighborhood asking stupid questions about Kithser.”

“How do you know that’s what I’m going to do?” Bemused at his sudden psychic ability to know what even I hadn’t known, I folded the missing poster in half.

“Because that’s you. Good.” He had an expression of patient resignation on his face that I knew was identical to the one I wore when I was cleaning up his SpaghettiOs and soda handprints in the kitchen. “Just. . good. You can’t help yourself. You don’t want to get someone in trouble if they don’t deserve it. You know, in case the weirdo next door is a butcher.” There was a heavy load of sarcasm on the word butcher.

“Wouldn’t you want the same benefit of the doubt?” I knocked lightly on top of his head. “Although all the trouble you get in you almost always deserve,” I added with exasperated affection.

Cal was stubborn and getting him off topic wasn’t easy at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times. “You’re right, Nik. He is a butcher. But he butchers people, not cows.” That’s when the glow that hung in the air faded and the sun was only the sun again. The wizard behind the curtain was just a man, possibly one with an inhuman grin and huge, serrated knife dripping blood.

By then Cal was already walking toward our rental, done trying to convince me. There was work ahead and he wanted it over with as soon as possible. “Bible or crutches?”

We’d learned a few techniques from watching Sophia. She could work an entire block in twenty-five minutes lifting valuables to be fenced later and she had a routine that didn’t fail often. It was difficult to get into a house to talk to and scam suspicious neighbors in our crumbling section of town. It helped to have one of two things.

“The Bible or the crutches?” Cal asked again. “And what about the pizza?”

“The crutches,” I decided. The Bible worked less and less for Sophia. It seemed people were as upset by pushy Christians knocking on their door as much as they were the possibility of a home invasion. “Yes, pizza, but vegetarian. You need some vegetables. Otherwise you’ll turn into a can of SpaghettiOs.”

“Okay, but extra cheese.” Which was remarkably agreeable for a kid who loved pepperoni and any other kind of questionable meat more than life itself. It made me wonder uneasily exactly how bad the smell was to him coming from next door. Was there meat in that basement and was it questionable in a very different way?

I planned to find out.

After retrieving the hard-used crutches, we started canvassing the neighborhood. I went from a fifteen-year-old who looked seventeen to a teenager with a hugely swollen foot and ankle, two pair of socks stuffed with more socks, a pathetic limp, and a solemn-eyed little brother holding a box of cookies he could only be selling for school. Granted it was an empty box, another prop and victim of Cal’s appetite, but it would get the job done.

Crutch and drag. Crutch and drag. I looked down at Cal. “This is wrong, all right? We don’t do things like this unless we’re trying to find out if a killer lives next to us and I don’t think that will ever come up again. We don’t do it to steal. We’re not Sophia.”

“I know, Nik. You’ve said it like a thousand times. We’re not. But sometimes I think things would be easier if we were.” That was true. I wasn’t so naive I didn’t know that, but that didn’t mean it was the way it was going to be. Not for me and not for Cal. I’d remind him as often as I had to. If it had to be a thousand, then a thousand it would be. He was holding up the box, taking a whiff, and giving a small smile at the lingering aroma of cookies.