Chin - 08 - Winter and Night by S. J. Rozan

Author:S. J. Rozan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Runaway Teenagers, Private Investigators, New Jersey, Smith, Private Investigators - New York (State) - New York, Women Private Investigators, Fiction, Women Private Investigators - New York (State) - New York, Lydia (Fictitious Character), Mystery Fiction, Chin, Bill (Fictitious Character)
ISBN: 9780312986681
Published: 2002-04-13T14:00:00+00:00

fifteen

kate Minor kicked the dirt beneath her feet at the playground picnic table and told us what she thought.

“When they don’t get what they want,” she said, “it’s totally fucked.”

“The jocks?” Lydia asked.

Kate nodded. “It’s, like, this famous tradition in Warrenstown. It goes back years.”

“And it’s still true?”

Kate didn’t look at us. “Like, last year, this one senior, Cody Macklowe? He wanted me to do his algebra homework for him.”

“When he was a senior and you were a junior?”

“Yeah, but I’m in honors and he was in, like, last math.”

“Not his subject?” Lydia tried a smile, and I knew it was to tell Kate, relax, it’s okay. But Kate didn’t smile back.

“Whatever,” she said. “He might have done okay in it, except half the time he never went to class or took notes or anything. He was a big football star.”

“He didn’t get in trouble for cutting classes?”

“He started both ways,” Kate said, offering this as an obvious reason a kid wouldn’t get in trouble for delinquent behavior. “We only had one other player that did that.”

Lydia nodded, asked, “What happened? About the homework?” as if she had any idea what it meant to start both ways.

“I told him to shove it. He kept telling me to and I kept saying no.” Kicking the dirt again: “So he beat up my dog.”

“He beat up your dog?”

“Lucky, my dog. We got him when I was eight. He came home all bloody one day, he couldn’t walk right. We thought he was hit by a car. The vet said he almost died. In the morning I found a note on my locker that said, ‘Next time, I’ll beat his fucking brains out.’ It was stapled to Cody’s homework assignment.”

“What did you do?”

From inside her army jacket Kate took out a pack of American Spirits. I lit a match, held it for her. She seemed slightly surprised, like when I’d offered to shake hands. Exhaling, looking away, she said, “I did his homework for the rest of the semester.”

“You didn’t tell anybody?”

“If I told somebody,” she said, “and Cody got in trouble and couldn’t play, the whole fucking town would be pissed at me. And Lucky,” she said, took another long drag on her cigarette, “Lucky would be dead.”

The wind gusted, lifting thin veils of dirt from the baseball diamond, herding them across the outfield grass along with a few stray gum wrappers, a sheet of newspaper, a Styrofoam cup. Over in Warrenstown, the park was kept clean by jocks in trouble: You’d never find this kind of trash there.

Lydia spoke. “Kate? What did you mean, about Tory Wesley? The jocks wanted something from her and she said no?”

I had a pretty good idea what Kate meant and I guessed Lydia did, too: What a teenage boy wants from a teenage girl. But as it turned out, I was wrong.

Kate Minor shifted on the bench. “The jocks. They can’t couldn’t stand Tory. She’s too smart, and she dresses wrong, and she has zits.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.