Nitro Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page B

looked at my face. “Now I’m interested,” he said.
    “Oh,” I said. “Nothing.”
    “Really?” He walked up and, without taking his eyes from mine, grabbed the toilet paper. “Because that looks like my double ply.”
    Back in the car, Rachel and I kept quiet. It seemed darker even though there were still no clouds. Or maybe there was just one big one that had slugged in to cover everything.
    “Well, that was weird as hell back there,” she said.
    “What’d he say to you?”
    “Nothing, really. I’m talking about what you did. The toilet paper.”
    “How well do you know him?”
    “Met him the other night,” she said. “First time. Swear.”
    “You know what’s going on at that place?”
    “Those guys are weirdos, straight up. But I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing.”
    “Let me tell you what I saw.”
    “But I won’t believe you, right?”
    “You decide,” I said, and then told her about the little thing on the toilet bowl, that guy in the closet with his iPhone. “They were watching. Or whatever. Somebody ought to call the cops on him.”
    “Then where would you play? Where would we drink?”
    I thought about that. She had her points. “It’s just nasty,” I said. “What he’s doing in there, it’s wrong.”
    “Somebody bring in the string section. Why you think he asked
you
into the closet? He probably thought you came off as the kind of guy who’d like that sort of thing.”
    “Well, I’m not.”
    “You sure about that?”
    —
    After we went back to her place to pick up my bag, I asked her to drop me off at my sister’s. Krystal lived in a white-and-tan apartment complex called River Creek. The name gave me a headache. Why not just call it Alive Dead? When Rachel pulled away, before I’d made it up onto the sidewalk, she blew me a kiss without looking.
    I heard talking through Krystal’s door, set my stuff down outside on the walkway against the wall and wondered how I could have forgotten. It was Bible study night. She’d begged me to come many times, especially the morning she picked me up from the hospital.
    This Bible group wasn’t the usual do-gooders, and that’s what bothered me the most. It was a collection of tattooed freaks and pierced punks. Goth Christians. One of them stepped outside to smoke while I was still looking over the railing down at the parking lot. Fog covered everything and the lights at the entrance had rings around them in the haze.
    They fed me dinner that night, vegan casserole. One guy kept farting and making people laugh. Everybody asked me personal questions, which I answered honestly, which surprised me, then pissed me off, and when I excused myself from the table to go crash on the couch, a chubby girl asked if she could pray for me.
    “If you got to,” I said.
    —
    The next day I went back to my parents’ place.
    “Who’s breaking in?” Dad called from his bedroom.
    “Just me.”
    “Go ahead and take it all.”
    There was a TV in my room that picked up a couple stations, and the days just dragged by. I knew I was going to need money for a lawyer. My first hearing, to set the date for the trial, was in a few days, and I figured it might be good to have somebody even for that. Walk in already lawyered up and shit.
    Jones was a veteran of drunk driving charges. One time when he got pulled over, he stepped out of his van, forgetting there was a fifth in his lap, and sent the whiskey splashing all over the cop’s feet. He got out of that one because the lawyer proved he’d done nothing to get pulled over in the first place. The attorney’s name was Wesley, who everybody called Greasy Wesley because of the unbelievable help he’d given them. He was just the slime I needed.
    I took the phone out of my dad’s room and called Jones. He gave me the number before I even asked.
    “Who you calling now?” my dad said through my door.
    “Quit listening,” I said.
    “You’ll need to quit talking for that to happen.”
    I