The last place I should have been with a tracking bracelet on my ankle was a juvenile detention center, but I had to get Bobbie Lyles to drop the burglary charge. I was stunned when the guard let me in. “Perfectly legal and more common than you would think,” she said. “Parolees visiting prisoners, you know?”
Angela was considered too dangerous to others and herself for a non-secure, face-to-face meeting. A guard escorted her to the chair behind the Plexiglas partition. She was a mess with a black eye and a split lip. Her mother gagged and hurried out for the bathroom. Angela eyed me. “So sweet of you to visit, Jameson.” She was definitely medicated, spacey eyes. All the face jewelry was gone, of course. The pinhole by her lip was infected. She was pale. “The other girls aren’t really feeling me,” she said.
“Especially when you’re around anything liquid, right?” Her jumper was an oddly cheerful color, bright teal. “Why’d you follow us to my apartment house that day?” I said. “What, you just couldn’t resist?”
“I was bombed.”
“Driving drunk. Nice. Lucky you weren’t killed.”
She laughed. I’d never seen her laugh before. “Yeah, lucky me.”
The room was freezing, but Angela’s sleeves were rolled up. Her arms were a mess, lots of scars, cigarette burns. One of them was elaborate, a pentangle. She caught me looking at it. “Pretty, right?”
“The test run?” I said, referring to that very first email she sent Mrs. Marks.
She turned her forearm out so we both could see the burn better. “I think it looks righteous. Should have seen when I did it, the tiny little bubbles. I swear, I was salivating. Like it was juicy, you know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t, Angela. So that thing about Nicole giving you her jeans. You made it up.”
“No, it was true.”
“Then how could you burn her after she was so nice to you?”
“Because she was so nice to me.” She picked at the pentangle scar. “You don’t think it looks cool?”
“Why are you protecting him?”
She rolled down her sleeves. “Have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Angela, did you ever ask yourself, Why me?”
“Are you kidding? Since I’m like three years old.”
“No, I mean why this nutcase picked you to do the job. He must have known you hated Nicole, right? The only dude that comes to mind there is Dave Bendix. I know about you two, okay? I have video.”
“No you don’t, Spaceman. You have Dave Bendix at a wrestling match I happened to be at. You have me cheering him on, like the three hundred other people in that gym. You have shit. Look, my lawyer tells me that in like a week the shrinks will have gotten together and deemed me nuts, and I’ll be whisked to a psych center for four years. I’ll be drawing pictures and watching movies all day and getting all these great meds. After that, three years probation, self check-in parole. I’m not saying anything about anybody else who may or may not have been involved.”
“But Dave can’t touch you now. It’s done. You’re not going to get any more time added to your sentence for turning him in.”
She smiled and shook her head. “You just don’t get it. You don’t get any of this. You’re perfectly incapable of understanding.”
“You don’t want to see the dude who put you up to this fry?”
“I would love to see him fry-are you kidding? But it wasn’t Dave. Trust me.”
“Trust you? Are you kidding? Then who did it? Who paid you to burn Nicole?”
“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.