Inside Passage. Burt Weissbourd

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СКАЧАТЬ can do. I’m leaving tonight. On the boat. If I don’t, they’ll send me back to jail. And, even worse, they’ll send you to jail.” She threw the pictures in his lap. “What are you thinking? What are you doing?”

      Billy looked at the pictures, one by one. “Who did this?”

      “The same man who put me in jail, who do you think? For christsakes, who do you think is supplying your weed?”

      “An older kid, at the foster house.”

      She shook her head. “He works for these people. They tell him what to do. They set you up. Do you see that?”

      Billy fingered the pictures. “Oh man. Shit…it’s because of you, isn’t it?”

      “Yes—” And that would haunt her. But right now it wasn’t the point. “Billy, you’re their best way at me, like it or not. So you have to be smart about this. What are you doing? Selling dope to rich kids? Staying at their houses?”

      “You can lighten up, you know. Their houses are better than any other place I can hang out.”

      “I’m sorry. I really am, but right now we don’t have time to work this out. Here’s the deal. I’m going to get set up in Canada. You have to come join me in a month.”

      “And if I don’t?”

      “It’s not up to you.” She pointed at the pictures. They still scared her. “Billy, they know you’re here. They gave me this address. These pictures could send you back to juvie, or worse. Don’t make it any easier for them. What you have to do is go back to the foster home, work it out with Sally. I’ll call you every night. Where’s the cell phone?”

      Billy took it from a pocket in his Chargers jacket, lying on the floor.

      She waited until she had his eyes. Their problems were real. “Turn it on, okay?”

      He did. “I don’t want to leave here. Things are finally good for me. There’s a girl I like—”

      “And you’re running away from your foster care, and you’re not showing up at school, and you’re dealing dope, and you’re ignoring messages from your mom.” Corey sat beside him. “I’m going to fix this. I don’t know how. But I’m going to fix it.” She let that sink in. “For now you have to stay clean for a month. You can still see your friends, but your dope-dealing days are over. Those pictures are a warning. These people can hurt you. Please be careful.” She massaged his neck. He moved away. “Let’s call Sally.”

      “I’ll clean up. No drugs. I’ll even listen to Sally. But I’m not moving to Canada. Unh-unh. I don’t even want to leave Seattle.”

      “Billy, this is like getting cancer. I don’t expect you to want any part of it.” She didn’t expect him to understand it either, a thing so perverse and humiliating. Corey closed her eyes, rubbed the back of her own neck. “There’s no choice—you’re going.”

      He turned away, faced the back of the couch.

      She tried to imagine how it would feel to start over in Canada at fifteen, on the run. Nothing about it felt good.

      Billy spoke to the back of the couch. “Jesus, mom. Why is this happening? Why? I mean, can’t we do anything?”

      “I don’t know why it’s happening now. And believe me, I don’t know what else we can do.” She hated her answer. Her face was drawn. “Your dad died because he underestimated what this man was capable of.”

      He turned around. “I don’t need to know who he is, I understand that. But I need something…I dunno…something.” He sat up. “Like why he hates us. Can you tell me that?”

      “I can tell you what I think. A lot of it comes from your dad.”

      He nodded. “Okay.”

      “It’s hard to explain. I thought about it a lot, though, at night in prison, when I couldn’t sleep.” She took a beat, aware that her explanation was important to him. “I know this is kind of round about, but…to start, I want you to imagine a very, very smart man. The thing is, he has no conscience. The way your dad put it—‘a part’s missing’. And he’s totally, totally ambitious. Unstoppable. Picture some kind of rapidly evolving creature—a predator—a predator who can be one thing while he’s doing another without anyone ever knowing it.”

      “That’s too weird.”

      “Yes, I know” She pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose. “But please hear me out.” She lowered her hand. “You can’t understand this guy in any of the normal ways. The next piece—and this is important—this man can fool anyone. On the surface he’s charming, smart, fair, sincere…you can’t imagine. And in some ways he is that person. But what you have to remember—always—is that when he smiles, even when he cries, he’s on task, after something. He’s a savage predator with a great big brain.”

      Billy’s face was grim. “Like psycho?”

      “Not exactly. He knows what’s real. The thing is that no one knows what’s real about him. He’s very, very careful, what you’d call a control freak. I think that if you cross him, or even worry him, he hunts you down quietly…patiently.”

      “Which is why he has these pictures.” He pushed them off the couch. “And knows all about me.”

      “I think so, yes.”

      “But why us?”

      “Your dad figured out something he had done years ago. He tied this guy to a murdered Russian gangster, a gangster who had stolen millions of state-owned Russian rough diamonds. Your dad told me the bare bones of the story. To make a long story short, the same guy that’s after us, he got away with millions in rough diamonds, and he got away with murder.” She watched Billy stewing. She didn’t blame him. “That’s how he got his start, and now people believe he’s this big upstanding success. He sees me as his weakness, his Achilles heel. And it makes him crazy. He can’t stand that I know what he did, what he really is. He just can’t stand it.”

      “Why didn’t he kill you too?”

      “He tried, in prison. I think that was part of his plan all along. Think how carefully he orchestrated everything that happened. He made it look like your dad disappeared with stolen drug money, and I was left holding the bag on a drug deal gone bad. That elaborate smoke screen doesn’t work if I’m dead. No, he waited until I was in prison…waited until no one would connect my death with your dad’s so-called disappearance. Only the murder-for-hire didn’t work, and then I threatened to expose him if anything else happened to you or to me. I wrote down what little I knew, what I suspected, and he backed off. Until I got out, it was a stand off. Now, I don’t know, something changed and I don’t even know why. I don’t…” Her voice trailed off.

      Billy ran both hands through his long hair. “Can we go to the police?”

      “With what? We have no evidence. None. Without your dad, we can’t tie him to anything. And remember, he’s this big shot. They’d believe him when he said I was just a crazy ex-con.” She touched his arm. More than anything Corey wanted to be a mother who solved problems for her son. Instead, she kept causing them…awful problems that no fifteen year old should ever have СКАЧАТЬ