She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,28

in front of you, and you had to save yourself,” Dunk said. “When the cops come for you, you just tell them you found the body, thought he was dead, pulled his wallet to figure out who he was so you could tell police when you called like the good Sumerian you are.”

“Good Samaritan. Sumeria is an ancient civilization in Mesopotamia.”

“Whatever, Einstein.”

“I didn’t call the police, either. I ran. And he was alive when I ran.”

“You don’t tell them that part, dummy, only what I said. If they try to get more out of you, just start crying, that’s what I’d do. You’re a kid. Nobody wants to deal with a crying kid, play it up. We can only play the kid angle for a few more years, might as well use it.” Dunk sucked the last bit of his strawberry shake up through the straw with a loud slurp.

I glanced at the alley, visible across the street—a dark maw between the two adjoining buildings. “They took the tape down.”

Dunk slid his empty milkshake glass forward. “Yesterday, around lunchtime.”

“I can’t believe you sat out there all day.”

“There were about a dozen of us. I blended, needed to do recon. You couldn’t do it, being an accessory to the crime and all. Gotta stay on the down low, live in the underground. Oh, I almost forget, we gotta get you a fake ID for when you run. What’s your cash situation like? Did you get another envelope?”

“Yeah, another five hundred. It was sitting on my bed, like all the others.”

“Geez, how much is that now?”

“Sixty-five hundred. Thirteen envelopes all together.”

“Sixty-five hundred dollars?”

“Shhh!” I whispered, glancing at the people eating around us. Nobody heard him, though.

“Sorry. But geez, Thatch, what are you going to do with all that money? You really could buy a car and run away somewhere. Maybe buy a house in Florida or something. On the water with a boat, so you can go to Cuba if that Detective Brier catches up with you. Or maybe London.”

The truth was, I had no idea what I would do with the money. I couldn’t spend it. If I spent the money, even a little bit, I had to explain where it came from. Even giving money to Auntie Jo had been a problem. Luckily, we’d kept busy enough at the diner to keep our heads above water so I didn’t have to do that again. I really wanted to buy a new bike. I had a BMX Skyway with a silver frame and blue accents. It had been a great bike…ten years ago when it was manufactured. Now, though, the frame was covered in rust, the silver had flaked off in most parts, and there were so many holes in the seat I had taken an old Jackson Browne tee-shirt, wrapped it over the original seat, and covered the whole mess in duct tape. I worked four nights per week at Krendal’s, three hours each night, at minimum wage. That brought in a whopping thirty-nine dollars per week under the table. Buying a new bike was not an option. “It’s rainy day money,” I finally answered. “I gotta just keep it safe for now. I’ll figure out something.”

“You’re about to go to the big house for murder. I think it’s time to open the umbrella. I hope you at least stashed it someplace safe. Harwood in 107 got broken into just last week. Someone took their stereo and TV, trashed the place, too. Pulled everything out of every drawer and cabinet, sliced up the mattresses—the whole place got wrecked. They even dumped out his cat’s litter box. Who does that? Maybe you should move the cash to someplace safer, or spread it around a little bit so if someone does break in, they don’t get all of it.”

Dunk was right about that. I had spent more nights than I could count worrying about it. A few months back, I had taken a knife to the pages of my hardcover copy of The Iliad, a monstrously large book I never had any intention of reading again. I hollowed out the center and placed the money inside, then I put the book in a box at the bottom of my closet, a box filled with a dozen other books. Three more boxes of books rested on top of that one. It was hidden pretty good, but no place was good enough. This was better than my sock drawer, though. The money spent a