Racing the Devil Read Online Free

him I can’t come today.”
    “I’ll tell him.”
    “I’d rather.”
    I could almost hear him shrug. “Okay. Just a minute . . . Here he is.”
    “Hi, Daddy. Mama crying.” The gravelly little voice made my heart twist. I could see him perched there, maybe on Maria’s lap, his stubby fingers curled around the receiver, his slanted eyes crinkling. A little Buddha with Down syndrome, happy to hear from me, worried about his mama.
    “I know, Sport. You give Mom a hug for me, okay?”
    “You come get me?”
    “Not today, Sport. Something came up. I’m sorry, buddy.”
    “Moon pie, Daddy. You said Moon Pie.”
    “Next time, Paulie.” The festival would be long over, but he wouldn’t care. I had promised him Moon Pies; it didn’t matter where they came from. I was proud of him for remembering.
    “You come get me,” he said again. “Today.”
    “I’m sorry, Sport. Another day. I love you.”
    “I love you. Come today.”
    There was a long pause as the phone switched hands. D.W. again. “He’ll be all right. You just get this business taken care of. And call Jay, if you haven’t already. He’s frantic.”
    JAY WAS CHRISTENED with three first names. Theodore Jay Ambrosius Renfield. If names are destiny, Jay was destined to be an entrepreneur, an actor, a brigadier general, or gay. His parents, I think, had visions of a wealthy southern gentleman in a white linen suit. Pert blond trophy wife; three perfect, berry-brown children; sprawling estate with a pillared mansion and rolling green hills dotted with walking horses.
    When we were in preschool and he preferred paper dolls to matchbox cars, his mother called him “sensitive.” When he wore her eye shadow to school in the fifth grade, she called it a phase and took comfort in his manlier pastime of assembling models of plastic horror movie monsters. By the time he reached junior high school, it was obvious to everyone that the trophy wife was out, and that Theodore was, in his own words, a flaming fag. He went by ‘Ted’ then, and the guys in P.E. called him ‘Ted Red.’ “Hey, Ted,” they’d call. “You on the rag?”
    He began to call himself by his second first name (Ambrosius being out of the question). This resulted in a brand new nickname—‘Gay Jay.’ Since, objectionable as that was, it was preferable to being named after a woman’s monthly inconvenience, he decided to keep it.
    When we were in grade school, we hung out together—Jay and Jared, two tow-headed boys that people often mistook for fraternal twins. But I was no more comfortable with his burgeoning homosexuality than the rest of the guys in our class, and by our junior year, we had pretty much drifted apart. Then one afternoon, I walked into the locker room and found the captain of the football team pushing Jay’s head into the toilet.
    I didn’t think.
    I charged.
    Two cracked knuckles (mine) and half a dozen stitches (the football captain’s) later, I found myself with a seven-day suspension and Jay’s undying gratitude.
    We lost touch not long after high school. I went to the police academy, got married, got a Criminal Justice degree with a minor in Psych, and had a son. Jay got a scholarship to Vanderbilt and moved in with a leather-clad, B&D biker boy with bleached blond hair and a Marilyn Monroe tattoo. His parents disowned him. He made a small fortune designing computer games and graphics.
    I was lucky to get the bills paid.
    Needless to say, we moved in different circles.
    I hadn’t seen Jay in ten years when he called me up out of the blue and told me that the biker boy, to whom Jay had always been utterly faithful, had left him high and dry and HIV positive. A lingering cold had been the impetus for him to get the test, and it had shown him to be on the brink of full-blown AIDS. He hadn’t even known his lover was infected. When they’d been tested years before, they’d both been clean.
    Months after my divorce, when I’d lost my job on the force and was