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out slowly around the back side of Steckel Park and made my way up through the rolling hillsides east of Highway 101 toward the home where Freddie had taken me.
    We had our windows down. Conner played music videos on his drop-down DVD screen. The music was loud and wild and it made me feel so free. Conner was pumped, too—he sang along, hanging his arm out the window. I smiled as we drove.
    “Fuck yeah,” Conner said. “This is the way we take care of shit.”
    I held out my right hand for a high five and Conner squeezed it so hard it hurt, but I wasn’t going to let go. I tested his grip by squeezing back just as tight as I could.
    I was glad we did it, convinced in the rush I was feeling that Conner was the greatest friend I would ever have, because I knew he would do anything for me and I wouldn’t even have to ask him.
    It wasn’t until I’d turned around to back Conner’s truck into that sick bastard’s driveway in Dos Vientos Ranch that we both noticed the truck bed was empty.
    Freddie Horvath was gone.
    Conner said, “Oh Jesus Christ.”
    We backtracked.
    What looked like a pile of old blankets lying discarded on the asphalt in the middle of the darkest stretch of Nacimiento Road turned out to be Freddie Horvath.
    I turned the headlights off and pulled Conner’s truck onto the dirt shoulder and parked it beneath a towering black oak tree.
    “Oh, fuck,” Conner said. He laughed nervously.
    “He must have gotten up somehow,” I said.
    “Do you think he’s dead?”
    “Shit, Con.”
    We sat there in the dark for no more than a minute. Neither of us said anything. Didn’t have to. We were scared, and we both knew it.
    I opened my door.
    Conner and I crept across the blacktop to where Freddie was lying. His hands and feet were still bound, and he was resting with the side of his face against an orange reflector that was stuck down in the middle of the roadway. His feet were turned around backwards and his dull eye and a black puddle of blood around his head reflected the nighttime stars. He exhaled once, that was all. Then there was nothing.
    “Jesus, Conner,” I whispered. “We killed him.”
    “We didn’t do anything to him. He did it to himself.”
    “What are we going to do with him?”
    “Don’t touch him, Jack,” Conner said. “We need to get out of here before someone else comes.”
    I stood over Freddie, my mouth hanging open, frozen.
    Conner grabbed my shoulder. “Give me my keys and get in the truck.”
    And as he pulled away from the spot where we’d left Freddie Horvath’s body, heading back down Nacimiento Road toward Glenbrook—nobody else on the road at all—Conner turned to me and said, “Don’t even think about it, Jack. It wasn’t our fault, so forget it. No one’s ever going to know.”
    Except us.

Twelve
    Stella assumed the reason I was so mopey around the house for the next couple days had to do with me being nervous about going on the trip. By Wednesday, the night before I was supposed to leave, the newspapers and television stations began running stories about the doctor who’d been murdered and dumped in the middle of the road; and how the search of his home turned up items that linked him to a fourteen-year-old boy who’d been missing since the summer before. They suspected there were others, too, but I already knew that.
    Conner kind of gloated over it. Even though he was every bit as scared as I was that we might end up in trouble over what we did, he whispered to me how we were actually heroes for ending the career of one sick bastard. It scared me to think about it, though, because I felt like a hunted animal, so I just begged him not to talk about it anymore.
    But I didn’t sleep at all for those next three nights after what we did to Freddie Horvath; so I must have looked like a walking dead kid Thursday morning when Conner and my grandparents drove me up to San Francisco Airport. The whole ride there, I felt so torn: I didn’t really want to go, but I