Stone Cold Dead by James Ziskin (great novels of all time txt) 📕

then froze in place. His buddies closed in. The oldest of them was all of sixteen, but I was scared.

“What’s your name, baby?” asked one of the boys behind me. I didn’t look to see which one.

“Scram, Dooley,” said the boy across from me. “I was here first.”

Where was that smelly guard who’d shown me in? Another boy touched my hair from behind me. I jumped.

“Screw you, Frankie,” said the voice at my back. “Maybe you saw her first, but I’m here now, so shove off,” and he gave my hair a quick twirl with his hand.

Yet another boy sat down next to me and grinned. His incisors were gray with decay where they touched his canines. His breath smelled, too. With no help in sight, and seriously fearing the worst, I took a gamble.

“Okay, who wants to be first?” I blurted out. The boys all gave a start. “You, Breath of Death?” I said to the one next to me. “Have you ever even kissed a girl before? And Frankie here doesn’t count.” Their jaws dropped, and the other boys roared with laughter. “You think this is funny?” I said, turning to face the boy who’d twirled my hair from behind. “Hairy palms, gaunt, sallow expression . . . You’d better cool it with the self-abuse, or it will fall off.”

Howling laughter from across the room, and red faces all around me. Breath of Death and Hairy Palms crumbled instantly under the weight of derision from their mates and lost their swagger. Still the boldest of the bunch, Frankie didn’t budge. He just smirked at me.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, fixing me with his eyes.

I leaned forward and placed my elbows on the table before me, returning his stare. I tried to reflect his animus back at him and force him to blink. But that wasn’t working. Then I laughed, I don’t know why. It was one of those nervous, uncontrollable explosions that snorted through my nose. That made things worse. The laughter turned into a fit. My eyes watered, I pointed at Frankie in derision, and slapped the table. I must have looked crazy, and everyone in the room was watching.

“Cut it out!” said Frankie, but I laughed harder and louder. “I said shut up!”

I’d unnerved him. He broke off his glare and glanced around to gauge the reactions around him. He sneered some more, yelled at me again to can it, but I was beyond reason now. Then he swore and called me an unflattering name. He pushed away from the table and screamed, “Weirdo!” as he threw his hands in the air.

He began to walk away, and his fellow reprobates directed a chorus of jeers at him. But he had one last salvo to fire as my laughter finally subsided.

“I’ll come looking for you when I get out of here,” he snarled. “And you’ll get yours.”

Frankie exited stage right, and the assembled quieted down. I had won the round, but beneath my self-satisfied smile, I was trembling. My God, why had I taunted him so? A rush of panic overcame me, and I had to drop a pencil underneath the table so I could bend over and hide the tears I could not control. I wiped my face as I pretended to reach for my pencil. Then I righted myself and stared down at my notebook, praying no one had noticed. Slowly, I caught my breath and willed myself to calm down, if only in the interest of self-preservation. I really needed to control my more daring impulses.

Just then the smelly guard returned with a boy in tow.

“Where have you been?” I asked. “I was nearly manhandled by these delinquents.”

He shrugged his indifference. “Cry me a river, sister. Here’s the kid you wanted to see,” and he ambled off somewhere, surely to scratch himself against a tree.

The kid standing before me was short with longish, unkempt hair. His eyes were big pools of brown, desperate and angry. He had full, red lips, chapped and raw from the dry cold.

“Are you Joey Figlio?” I asked.

“Yeah. Who wants to know?” he said, taking the seat opposite me at the table.

“My name’s Ellie Stone. I work for the paper. Darleen’s mother asked me to help find her.”

“They told me a reporter was here to see me. I wasn’t expecting a Girl Scout.” And he chuckled.

“That’s funny,” I said, playing along. “You can have a good laugh over that one when I drive home, and you’re still stuck in here.”

That wiped the smirk off his face. He fidgeted in his seat, scowling for a moment, then asked me what I wanted.

“I’m trying to find out what happened to Darleen. I assume you’d like to help me.”

“I know what happened to her,” he mumbled. “The only way you can help is to get me out of here so I can get the guy that did this to her.”

“Did what exactly?” I asked.

He gazed at me with those big brown eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was seething mad or about to cry.

“You know as well as me that she’s gone,” he said softly.

I had to admit that a happy conclusion was growing more unlikely by the hour. Darleen had been missing for two weeks in the middle of a frigid cold spell. Chances that she was alive were slim, unless she’d actually run off with an unknown man, as the sheriff maintained. Like Darleen’s mother, Joey seemed to have accepted the worst as well. Irene Metzger just wanted to know what had happened to Darleen and to close the book on her poor daughter’s life. Joey Figlio wanted something more.

“You said you wanted to get the guy who did this,” I prompted. “You said it as if you knew who he was.”

Joey stared deep into my eyes, unblinking, and said he did.

“Mr. Russell, the music teacher,” he said quietly. “I’m going to get out of this crazy place, with its crazy food and music, and I’m going to kill him.”

“This place is