sweet-talk them sometimes, I think they'd die of verbal abuse. It just ... happened. We were fooling around with it ... you know how these things are! She shouldn't have bought it in the first place."
His explanations irritated the hell out of me. He lived about six doors down from the DeWinters, but somehow I didn't quite picture him as having the best interests of old people in his heart. I just glared.
"I wasn't looking when it went off, man!" He held his arms out. "I had just walked away from Alisa after Stacy left us. I was gonna leave, being that I can only take so many
hours of her right now. I was taking a leak in the ticket booth first and just wasn't looking."
Barnes shook his head. "I didn't see it either, Kurt. Sorry."
I just looked back at Stern. The skin on his face was jumping all over the place.
"You look guilty," I muttered.
"I ...
feel
guilty!" Mark stammered. "Casey was ... my girlfriend!"
"What do you mean
was
?"
I shoved him hard, and suddenly Todd and Drew were in between us, in the echoes of "Take it easy..." and "Not the time or place, man..." It was just the type of slip of the tongue you'd see cops jump on during episodes of
CSI.
If somebody describes a missing girlfriend in the past tense—he tried to kill her.
Stern mewled, "I didn't mean it like that! I mean, she'll probably not want to go out with me anymore after I was passing that gun around and she took a hit! That's all!"
I watched him squirm until I couldn't stand it. "We just found out that Stacy's pregnant."
He nodded hard, like this was something he knew, though the words didn't follow quickly. "Right! So ... why would I shoot Casey? How does A relate to B?"
I couldn't quite answer that, but I wasn't ready to leave it alone, either. "Stacy was in the ticket booth with you and ... put you up to it..."I stammered one thought.
"Stacy drives a brand-new Audi, lives in a big-ass house with its own pool and tennis court! She would not be caught dead in our smelly ol' ticket booth," he said. "She'd explode first"
"You were the last known person to have the gun," I argued.
"I was not! One of Casey's friends had it, and the last I saw of it, the thing was being passed down the line. The moon went under when I had to take a leak. I have no idea where it is!"
I kept watching him as he went on adamantly, "Besides. I might feel sorry for the old people she lives with, but I don't feel sorry for Stacy. Her mood swings could draw in the tide. Breaking up with her was the best thing I've ever done! If you think Stacy had it in for your sister, why throw me into the equation? Why don't you find Stacy and see if
she
pulled the trigger?"
I didn't feel like looking for Stacy as well as my sister. I didn't feel like asking him what he was doing at Stacy's if he was going out with my sister. I was sure I'd get a runaround answer, so there was no point. "You don't sound very upset about being a father," I pointed out.
Even in light of the dull moon, I could not miss the rise in his eyebrows. "Uh ... the kid is not mine"
Typical.
"Don't laugh, man! I'm telling you the truth!" He inched closer to me. "There is no way that kid could be mine!"
I felt Drew watching him beside me, felt Drew almost
smiling, same as I almost smiled. There's some sense of weird power in getting a polecat like Stern to say in front of three guys that he hadn't worked any magic on a girl. I didn't know if I believed him—I just wanted to watch him squirm.
"So how do you
know
it's not yours?"
"Look. We all know how her mother is. Stacy's been taking lessons, obviously."
"So Stacy cheated on you," I singsonged. "With who?"
"Hey, the boyfriend is always the last to know! But if I had ever
done it
with her, I would surely know
that,
wouldn't I?"
Ahhh, gratification. A snort slid out of Drew's nostrils. But Stern's injured prowess must have been slightly less important than saving his neck, because he went on.
"And no, we didn't 'almost' do it. Stacy always
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