Blank Confession Read online

  BLANK CONFESSION

  ALSO BY PETE HAUTMAN

  All-In

  Rash

  Invisible

  Godless

  Winner of the National Book Award

  Sweetblood

  No Limit

  Mr. Was

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Pete Hautman

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Also available in a hardcover edition

  Book design by Krista Vossen

  The text for this book is set in Melior.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First paperback edition November 2011

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Hautman, Pete. 1952—

  Blank confession / Pete Hautman.

  1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A new and enigmatic student named Shayne appears at high school one day, befriends the smallest boy in the school, and takes on a notorious drug dealer before turning himself in to the police for killing someone.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-1327-6 (hc)

  1. Drug dealers—Fiction. 2. Bullies—Fiction. 3. Conduct of life—Fiction.

  4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] 1. Title.

  PZ7.H2887 Bl 2010

  [Fic] 22

  2009050169

  ISBN 978-1-4169-1328-3 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4424-3638-1 (eBook)

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: Rawls

  Chapter 2: Mikey

  Chapter 3: The Interview Room

  Chapter 4: Mikey

  Chapter 5: The Interview Room

  Chapter 6: Mikey

  Chapter 7: The Interview Room

  Chapter 8: Mikey

  Chapter 9: The Interview Room

  Chapter 10: Mikey

  Chapter 11: The Interview Room

  Chapter 12: Mikey

  Chapter 13: Mikey

  Chapter 14: Mikey

  Chapter 15: Mikey

  Chapter 16: Mikey

  Chapter 17: The Interview Room

  Chapter 18: Mikey

  Chapter 19: Mikey

  Chapter 20: Mikey

  Chapter 21: Mikey

  Chapter 22: Mikey

  Chapter 23: The Interview Room

  Chapter 24: Mikey

  Chapter 25: The Interview Room

  Chapter 26: Mikey

  Chapter 27: Rawls

  Chapter 28: The Interview Room

  Chapter 29: Mikey

  Chapter 30: The Interview Room

  Chapter 31: Mikey

  Chapter 32: Mikey

  Chapter 33: Mikey

  Chapter 34: Mikey

  Chapter 35: The Interview Room

  Chapter 36: Mikey

  Chapter 37: The Interview Room

  Chapter 38: Mikey

  Chapter 39: Mikey

  Chapter 40: Mikey

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Swati Avasthi, H. M. Bouwman, K. J. Erickson, Leslie Harris, Ellen Hart, Mary Logue, and Virginia Lowell for their many helpful suggestions, and to Jack Schaefer for providing the map.

  1. RAWLS

  Five lousy minutes.

  Detective George Rawls hung up the phone, brought his feet down from his cluttered desktop, looked at his watch, and sighed. If the kid had walked into the station five minutes later, Rawls’s shift would have been over. He would have been driving home to enjoy a peaceful dinner with his wife.

  Five more minutes and Benson would have caught this case. Rawls stood up and looked over the divider toward Rick Benson’s desk. Benson, looking back at him, smirked. Rawls rolled his eyes and hitched up his pants. They kept falling down—his wife’s fault, all those vegetables she’d been feeding him since his cholesterol numbers came in high.

  He opened the upper left-hand drawer of his desk and took out his service revolver. Rawls was old school; he still used the weapon that had been issued to him as a rookie. He emptied the cylinder into the drawer and slid the unloaded weapon into his shoulder holster.

  The unloaded gun was a prop. These young punks were impressed by such things. Most of them. He left his jacket hanging on the back of his chair and made his way out of the room and down the hallway toward the front entrance. He walked past the long citizens’ bench, automatically checking out the four people sitting there: A slight, pale-faced boy—black jeans, black T-shirt, scuffed-up black cowboy boots—sat with his elbows resting on his knees, staring at the floor. Probably some middle-school bad boy picked up for shoplifting. Next was a young woman wearing a tight skirt, smeared mascara, and a nasty bruise on her right cheek. A hooker, no doubt. Then an anxious-looking older woman, probably there to report a runaway husband, or a purse snatching. At the end was a scowling middle-aged man in a rumpled suit—could be anything.

  Rawls made these assessments automatically and effortlessly. Part of the job.

  Directly facing the front doors of the police station, John Kramoski sat behind his elevated desk flipping through the duty roster. Rawls stopped in front of him. The desk sergeant looked up.

  “Sorry, George,” Kramoski said. “I know your shift is almost over, but you were up. And it’s a kid—your specialty.”

  Rawls was the precinct’s unofficial “Youth Crimes” officer. He had once believed that, working with kids, he might actually make a difference. These days he wasn’t so sure.

  “Where is he?” he asked.

  Kramoski jerked his thumb toward the bench.

  Rawls looked over, surprised. “How come he’s not in the interview room?”

  “He walked in here by himself. Besides, look at him. What’s he gonna do?”

  “We’re talking about the kid on the end, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Rawls shook his head. “He looks, like, twelve.”

  “Says he’s sixteen.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And Mary and Joseph, bro.” Kramoski returned his attention to the duty roster.

  Rawls walked back down the hall, past the man in the suit, past the older woman, past the prostitute. He stopped in front of the kid and waited for him to look up. It took a few seconds. The kid’s hair was thick, the color of dried leaves, maybe three weeks past needing a cut. He slowly sat back and raised his head to look directly into Rawls’s eyes, his expression devoid of all emotion.

  Rawls felt something throb deep within his gut. He had seen that expression before, on other faces. The face of a mother who had lost her only child. The face of a man who had just learned he would be spending the rest of his life in prison. The face of a girl who woke up to find that she would never walk again. A look of despair so deep and profound …it was as if the connections between the mind and the face were severed, leaving only a terrible blankness.

  He had seen that expression in other places too. The morgue. Funeral parlors. Murder scenes.

  The face of the dead.

  But this boy
was not dead. Somewhere behind those eyes there existed a spark—a spark that had brought him here, to this building, to this bench, to George Rawls.

  “Are you Shayne?” Rawls asked.

  The boy dropped his chin. Rawls took that as a yes and sat beside him on the bench, feeling every last one of his forty-three years, fifteen of them as a cop. Despite having conducted hundreds of such interviews, he found himself at a loss. Something about this kid—who could not have weighed much more than his Labrador retriever—frightened him. Not fear for himself. The other kind of fear: fear that the universe no longer made sense, that everything was about to change.

  “So …,” Rawls cleared his throat, looking straight ahead, “…who did you kill?”

  2. MIKEY

  I met Shayne the same day I got busted for having drugs in my locker, which was also the day after this huge thunderstorm that knocked over a bunch of trees, including the giant elm in our backyard.

  I was walking to school. I had left home early so I could look at the storm damage. I could hear chain saws from every direction. Each block had three or four trees down. Some had fallen on houses, some against power lines, and there was even one big oak tree completely blocking Thirty-first Street.

  None of the buses had arrived yet when I got to the school. As I started up the wide, shallow steps leading to the front door I heard a humming, burbling sound and looked back to see a motorcycle pull up to the curb. A battered BMW, at least thirty years old. The tank and fenders were painted primer gray. The seat was patched with duct tape. The rider, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, put down the kickstand and took off his helmet.

  My first thought: He looks too young to have a driver’s license.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, hung his helmet on the mirror, looked at me, looked at the school, looked back at me.

  “Nice suit,” he said. He had a soft, crisp voice, and some kind of accent.

  “Thanks.” I was wearing my dark gray three-button, the one with the cuffed trousers. “Nice bike,” I said. I can be a little sarcastic sometimes.

  He looked down at his battered motorcycle. “Not really.” He gestured at the school building. “You go here?”

  “Why else would I be here?”

  He nodded. “Me too. I just moved here. I start today. Where’s the student parking?” Definitely an accent—maybe southern, but with a sharp edge to it.

  “See that sign?” I pointed. “That huge sign that says STUDENT PARKING?”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Once again looking at my suit, he said, “Is there, like, a dress code or something?”

  I took in his frayed T-shirt, his holey jeans, his beat-up black cowboy boots. “Lucky for you, no. As long as you don’t wear gang colors or a T-shirt with swear words.”

  He nodded. “So what’s with the suit?” He didn’t ask it meanly, just in a mildly curious way.

  “Some people like to dress nice,” I said.

  He nodded as if he understood, popped the helmet back on his head, turned the bike around, and rode off toward the parking lot.

  I didn’t even know his name, but already I liked him.

  Mi nombre es Miguel Martín, and no, I am not Mexican. Actually, I am Haitian on my mom’s side. Her parents came from Haiti back in 1971. They speak Haitian French. I am learning Spanish, however. My mom wanted me to learn French, but learning Spanish is more useful on account of I am often mistaken for Mexican, even by Mexicans, which is weird because Pépé—Mom’s dad—is black. That deep purple-black skin color that comes from the west coast of Africa via Haiti. My grandmother, Mémé, is freckled, red-headed, and white. Her ancestors sailed to Haiti from France back in the 1600s. That’s her story, anyway. These days her red hair is from a dye bottle, but she claims it’s her real color.

  My mom turned out to be a medium-brown-skinned woman with Afro hair that turns reddish in the summer. My dad is white, third or fourth generation Italian American.

  Anyway, when all those genes got mixed up, I somehow came out looking Mexican. Imagine a Mexican kid, kind of small, wearing a suit and oversize tortoiseshell glasses. That’s me. My sister, Marie—we’re in the same grade even though she’s ten months older than me—has light skin and our grandma’s freckles, but her features are more African-looking.

  My real name is Mike Martin, aka Mikey the Munchkin, and a buenodía is any day I don’t feel the need to slink, or, in español, escabullirse. Do you know about slinking? It’s a way of moving from place to place so people don’t notice you. Cats are very good at it. Rats are even better. Lions and polar bears never slink. Okay, maybe a little, but only when they’re sneaking up on you.

  I have noticed that most short guys (I am the shortest guy in the eleventh grade) adopt one of two strategies. Some, like Chris Rock, or Prince, or Napoleon, have these enormous, noisy egos and make up for their lack of size by dressing and talking big. Others just try not to get stepped on. This is also true of small dogs, which tend to be either world-class barkers or world-class slinkers.

  I do it all. I dress big, I bark, and I slink.

  I escabullirsed into American Lit class and took my usual seat near the windows a few seconds before the 7:40 chime. A few minutes later, the kid with the BMW walked in. Mr. Clemens gave him a raised-eyebrow look.

  “Sorry I’m late, sir,” he said. “My name is Shayne. With a Y. Shayne Blank. I just transferred here.”

  Mr. Clemens, startled by all his politeness, directed Shayne-with-a-Y Blank to the empty desk next to me.

  Here’s what was weird. Every one of us had our eyes on him, the way we would stare at any new face, but this kid appeared to be perfectly comfortable, relaxed, confident, and alert. I’ve met cats that could pull that off—that combination of hyperalertness and megaconfidence—but I’d never seen it in a human. So, after class, being a friendly and inquisitive type of guy, I followed him into the hall and introduced myself properly. We went through the whole where-are-you-from-what-are-you-doing-here routine—he told me he was originally from Fartlick, Idaho, and that his dad was on a secret mission to Afghanistan, and that his mom was in the Witness Protection Program, and he was living with his aunt.

  “I suppose she’s an astronaut or something,” I said.

  “Yes. But from another planet.”

  I liked his sense of humor.

  “I thought maybe you were from the South. Because of your accent.”

  “I have no accent,” he said, in an accent.

  “So is Blank your real name? Or an alias?”

  He frowned. “You don’t like it?”

  I was opening my mouth to say something back to him when I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder.

  “Hey, Mikey.”

  “Hey, Jon,” I said, trying to act as if I was glad to see him.

  Jon Brande was borderline movie star handsome, with blond hair, sparkly blue eyes, a strong chin, and a toothpaste-ad smile—the picture of a vibrant, healthy teenager, ready to graduate with honors, accept a basketball scholarship to a Big Ten university, and go on to enjoy a brilliant career in politics. Except that Jon had been kicked off the basketball team his sophomore year and his grades were just barely passing.

  Also, he was a violent, psychotic, drug-dealing creep.

  “Listen.” He hung his arm around my shoulders and turned me so our backs were to Shayne. “You got room for this in your backpack?” He handed me a brown paper lunch bag. It was limp and wrinkled, as if it had been opened and closed several times. “Just hold it for me. I’ll get it back from you after school.”

  All my alarm bells were going off, but there was no way I could refuse. Jon was big, he was a senior, and he scared the crap out of me. I took the bag. I didn’t have to ask him what was in it, but I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

  “No reason.” He winked and walked off.

  Believe me, it is very creepy to get winked at by Jon Brande.

  Shayne said, “Friend of yours?”

  “N
ot really.” I stuffed the paper bag into my backpack. “He’s my sister’s boyfriend.”

  3. THE INTERVIEW ROOM

  On the way to the interview room, Rawls noticed that the kid was limping. The right leg of his jeans was dark and stiff below his knee. Dried blood? It was hard to tell with those black jeans.

  “Hurt yourself?” Rawls asked.

  “I’m okay.”

  “In here. Have a seat.”

  The kid limped around the table and sat down. Rawls left the door standing open. Some suspects were more forthcoming if they didn’t feel trapped—it made them think they were there by choice, that they had some say in their immediate future. Also, Rawls preferred the door open because the room reeked. Years of citizens with poor hygiene and fear-sweat had permeated the gray-green walls. It got repainted every couple years, but the smell never really went away.

  Rawls let the kid settle himself, then said, “Now, there’s something you don’t see too often.”

  The kid looked around, then met Rawls’s eyes with a silent question mark.

  Rawls smiled—he had been told he had a friendly smile—and sat down. He let a few seconds pass, then said, “Your shirt.”

  The kid looked down at his T-shirt, then back at Rawls.

  “It’s a T-shirt.”

  “Yes it is,” said Rawls.

  “What’s weird about it?”

  Rawls waited a few more seconds to see if the kid would say more. He didn’t. Rawls raised the kid’s toughness quotient by a degree or two. Most people had a hard time not filling a silence.

  Rawls said, “What’s weird is, it’s blank. No rock band, no logo, no message, no nothing.” Rawls once again gave the kid room to respond, with no result. He said, “I didn’t even know they made the things in plain.”

  The kid nodded, as if to say, Okay, I get it. Next?

  Rawls pulled out his small blue notebook, set it on the table, and flipped through it until he came to a blank page. He clicked his ballpoint pen.

  “How about we start with your full name.”

  “Shayne Blank.”

  “B-L-A-N-K?”

  “Yeah. And Shayne with a Y.”