Buried on Avenue B by Peter de Jonge Page B

thinking a nice piece of fish.”
    â€œI mean the homicide.”
    â€œThis afternoon Kelso’s giving it to the media in time for the evening news. We got so little, he has no choice.” Jandorek adjusts his voice downward to the basso profundo of a TV newsreader. “An idyllic East Village garden has become the scene of a grisly discovery . . .”
    â€œIdyllic my ass.”
    â€œYou need the contrast, Dar—the idyllic and the grisly—otherwise it doesn’t sing. In any case, a towheaded Yankees fan with a limp, someone’s going to pick up the phone. In fact too many people will pick up the phone, and ninety-nine percent of it will be useless. The rest will be atrocious. It always is when you set up a hotline for a murdered kid. The shit you hear . . .”
    They are interrupted by a call to O’Hara from the desk sergeant.
    â€œI got a Ben and a Jamie here to see you.”
    When O’Hara is slow to respond, the sergeant adds some memory-jogging detail. “Long hair, about eighteen, skateboards. They claim they’re pals of yours.”
    â€œThat’s an exaggeration,” says O’Hara. “They don’t by any chance reek of pot?”
    â€œI don’t think they’d roll into a police station if they did.”
    â€œDon’t be so sure.”
    â€œYou want me to bring them up?”
    â€œAbsolutely not. I’ll be right down.”
    Rather than wait for the elevator, O’Hara and Jandorek take the back stairs to the lobby and hustle the visitors outside to the sidewalk. “I guess you really are in homicide,” says Ben.
    â€œThat’s what I tried to tell you.”
    â€œBullshit you did,” says Jamie.
    â€œListen,” says Jandorek. “I don’t know what the fuck this is about, but if you came here to cause trouble, you picked the worst place on the planet to do it. And you didn’t pick a good time either.”
    â€œThat’s not why we’re here,” says Jamie.
    â€œI’m glad that’s settled. Why are you here?”
    â€œAbout a friend of ours,” says Ben, “a little kid, who we haven’t seen in months. We’re worried about him. We’d been thinking about what to do for a while, but we couldn’t get it together to go to the police. Then yesterday, we met Darlene in the park, and even though we had a little fun with her, we decided she’s basically good people.”
    â€œSo we went to look for you,” says Jamie, picking up the thread and now addressing O’Hara. “We started at the Nine, but they weren’t very helpful. Then we tried the Seven, and they sent us here. We thought, Damn, homicide, pretty good for a sto—”
    â€œJamie,” says O’Hara, cutting him off. “Tell us about your friend. What’s his name?”
    â€œWe don’t know his real name. He didn’t tell us. We called him Hercules.” Jesus Christ, thinks O’Hara, her hopes sinking again.
    â€œWe called him that as a joke,” says Ben. “Because he was so skinny. He was this little guy, about eight, nine, who hung around the skateboard park the last year or so, and he was such a cheeky little gink, we sort of adopted him and made him our mascot.”
    â€œWhat color hair?”
    â€œBlond.”
    â€œDark blond or light blond?”
    â€œAlmost white, like a little surfer. And he had a slight limp from when he broke his leg. I guess it never healed right.”
    â€œWhy wasn’t he at school?”
    â€œGood question. I asked him once. He said he was homeschooled, not that I believed him, because he was never at home either. I guess I should have gotten on his case about it, but it’s not like he was the only one of us who should have been at school. And maybe he was homeschooled. He could read okay.”
    â€œHow do you know that?” asks O’Hara.
    â€œHe read comics,” says