Free Bullet Point by Peter Abrahams

justbefore it would have hit the floor. He turned, put the dish in the cupboard.
    “Do you know her?” he said, his back to Aunt Hildy.
    “Not face-to-face,” she said. “This is a small town, Wyatt—maybe not as small as East Canton, but small enough so nothing stays secret for long. I just feel your mom wouldn’t be too comfortable with you and someone like Greer Torrance.”
    Wyatt turned. Sometimes he got stubborn, and when he did his chin tilted up, pretty much on its own. It was doing it now. “I don’t see anything wrong with her.”
    “No, of course not. She’s very attractive—maybe a bit too old for you, what with girls being more mature to begin with, no offense—but there’s no way you’d be aware of her reputation.”
    Wyatt’s chin tilted up a bit more. “Which is?”
    “For one thing, I’m sure you don’t know that her father’s an arsonist. A firefighter of my acquaintance got burned that night.”
    “Greer told me.”
    “Told you about the firefighter?”
    “Not that part, but about her father, yes.”
    “And what about her role in it?”
    Wyatt felt himself turning redder. “What role?”
    “It was pretty clear that she was involved, too—they couldn’t prove it, is all.”
    Wyatt didn’t believe that. He just stood there, shaking his head, not trusting himself to stay calm if he replied. He was starting not to like Aunt Hildy.
    “And before that, she was into drugs—very lucky shedidn’t get thrown in jail herself.”
    Into drugs—that could mean a lot of things. What did it mean to someone like Aunt Hildy, a middle-aged, small-town woman?
    “I’m talking about serious drugs, like heroin,” Aunt Hildy said. “The police knew.”
    Serious drugs? He’d seen no sign of that—her apartment was tidy, her skin unmarred, no mention of drugs, not even once, in any context. A thought came to him. “Do you have friends in the police?”
    Aunt Hildy nodded. “A coworker is married to one of the sergeants.”
    “This sergeant,” Wyatt said, “a beefy guy with a pink kind of face?”
    She nodded again.
    “He ran my plate?”
    “It’s a small town, Wyatt, but with rough edges. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
    He gave her a long look, not friendly. She blinked a couple of times. “I’m going for a walk,” Wyatt said.
     
    The rain had stopped but the wind still blew, very cold. Scraps of cloud raced fast across the moon. Wyatt found shelter behind a tree, called Greer, got put straight into voice mail. He wondered about driving over to her place. Not cool. But he still hadn’t rejected the idea when his phone rang.
    “Hello?” he said.
    Not Greer, but a man. “Hi, there,” said the man. “This Wyatt?”
    “Yeah—who’s this?”
    “Sonny.”
    “Sonny?”
    “Sonny Racine,” the man said. “Your father, to one way of thinking.”

10
    WYATT HAD NO IDEA what to say. He stood in the shelter of the tree, halfway down the block from Aunt Hildy’s house, the cell phone pressed to his ear.
    “But that’s not my way of thinking,” came the voice from the other end, a fairly deep, pleasant-sounding voice. “Father’s got to mean a lot more than getting a girl pregnant.” Silence. “Agree or disagree?”
    Wyatt stood there, phone pressed to his ear. The wind curled around the tree, rippled the hems of his pants.
    “Hear me all right?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t mean to ask questions I’ve got no right to. Got no rights at all, where you’re concerned. No illusions on that score.” A long pause. “The right to ask questions is all yours.”
    Wyatt didn’t speak.
    “Or not, up to you. I can just hang up, that’s your preference.”
    Wyatt cleared his throat, suddenly thick feeling. “Where are you?”
    “Right now? The pay phone in B pod, why?”
    “In prison?”
    “That’s right. Sweetwater—thought you knew.”
    “I wasn’t sure. How—” Wyatt stopped himself. How had his fa—this man, better stick to that—how had this man