Scratch the Surface

“What?” I snapped at him.

“Where are you? I’ll come get you. Don’t be such a fuckin’ drama queen.”

“I’m sorry, what’d you just say to me?”

“Every time I come to Kingman’s you comp my kids’ food, Jere, and every time you see Linda walkin’ home from the library after school, you put her on the back of the death cycle and she’s thrilled, because ten-year-olds are stupid and she doesn’t realize she could blow up with you in a fiery ball.”

“But you said it wouldn’t literally blow up,” I reminded him.

He growled over the line. “You had less money than me growing up, but how many times did we share stuff from the dollar menu at McDonald’s?”

The answer was a lot.

“So yanno, taking into consideration ancient history and all that, I make a decent living now. I don’t live paycheck to paycheck like I used to, so if I tell you I can wait for you to pay me until you get fuckin’ paid, you fuckin’ believe me, you prideful piece of shit!”

I stopped walking and picked up the phone from where I had it balanced on the seat of my bike, took it off speaker, and put it to my ear. “I just don’t wanna ever take food outta the mouths of your kids.”

“Yeah. I know that. But I take good care of my kids, so does Marcie, and between the two of us, we do okay. Better than you. So when I show up to get you and that piece-of-crap bike that needs to go into the ground, you say, ‘Thanks, Zack.’”

It was so hard for me to accept help. Any kind of handout, charity—I couldn’t do it. From the psychology classes I’d taken to get my degree, I knew why. If I didn’t accept anything, nothing could be taken away. It was basic, but even when I tried to turn it off, I couldn’t. Zachary Bishop was one of maybe three people in the world I could say was an actual friend. We’d been close since he ran away from home and started living on my couch in my trailer when he was seventeen. I had no idea how people at school had missed the beatings his father gave him, but we lived in a bad part of town. No one gave a crap about the poor kids.

His mother had left too, like mine, the difference being Zack’s mom ran for her life; mine left because she was sick of Barrett Crossing, and of me. It was sad Zack got left behind, but self-preservation, I knew firsthand, made people do crazy things.

“Are we good?” he asked pointedly, almost daring me to say anything else.

“We’re good.”

“Ohmygod, look out for Jesus, this might be the rapture.”

“You know, Zack, I––”

“Where the fuck are you?”

“You shouldn’t swear around your kids.”

“I’m at the shop, asshole. Now where are you?”

“By Galvin’s Creek,” I answered him, stopping, leaning the bike on the kickstand and straightening up, stretching my back.

“Okay,” he grumbled, “I’m coming. Don’t push it anymore. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Thank you.”

He gasped.

“Oh, go to hell,” I groused and hung up.

Standing there in the dark—it was November, so the sun went down early—my phone buzzed with an incoming call from a number I didn’t know, but it had a Sacramento area code, so I picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Jeremiah Wolfe?”

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“Jeremiah, my name is Detective Robert Aguilar, and I’m calling to inform you that a friend of yours, Shawn Pelham, has been taken into protective custody.”

Friend was a stretch. Zack and I were friends; Shawn was a guy I knew from school. We were acquaintances, nothing more. The only time we’d had any interaction beyond seeing each other on campus was when he confessed to me that he needed money fast. He was in over his head with his drug dealer, and there was nothing to pay the man with because Shawn had already blown through his monthly allowance from his folks.

I couldn’t offer him any cash; I didn’t have it to loan him. But since him getting beaten up wasn’t something I could live with, I offered to let him crash at my place. No one was going to look for him in Barrett Crossing. I even told him he could get a job at Kingman’s. We always needed people to load and unload the dishwasher, if nothing else, but two days later, in class, he announced he was good. He’d found another way to make money. Apparently he’d been introduced to Gina—no last name—by one of the guys in his dorm, and she had hooked him up with a great job.

“Doing what?” I asked.

He shrugged, and when I pressed, he told me he was going to be an escort.

“Are you kidding?”

He explained that it was all high-end, high-class, very rich men and women who wanted a pretty boy or girl to take to different events. No harm in it at all.