The Gentlemen's Hour

31

He drives over to Corey’s “place of work,” as they say in the police reports.

Corey delivered pizzas.

Drove around in one of those little cars with the sign on top, carting twelve-dollar extra-large specials to college kids, slackers, and parents too busy on a given night to get supper together for the kids.

Yeah, okay, but what was rich kid Corey doing delivering pizzas for minimum wage and minimum tips? Tip money is good money if you’re waiting tables at Mille Fleurs on a Saturday night, but not when you’re pushing the pepperoni in dorms. Corey’s daddy is slapping up half the luxury homes infesting the coastline, but the kid is driving around wearing a funny hat and taking shit for not getting there in twenty minutes?

Turns out Corey was about to lose even that job.

“Why?” Boone asks the franchise owner, Mr. McKay.

“The job was delivering pizzas,” Mr. McKay says. “And he wasn’t delivering them.”

Worse, he was stealing them. McKay suspected that Corey had his friends call up, order pizzas, and then deny it when Corey went to “deliver.” Then Corey ate the “spoilage.” It got to the point where McKay insisted that Corey bring the spurned extra-large-with-everything-except-anchovies back to the store to be officially thrown away.

“Anyway, I think he was stoned,” McKay says.

“On what?”

McKay shrugs. “I don’t know anything about drugs, but he seemed like he was hopped up on speed or something. Really, I was about to terminate him when . . .”

He lets it trail off.

Nobody liked talking about the Kuhio killing.

Depressing, Boone thinks as he drives over to Corey’s old high school. The guy had a gig hauling pizzas and jacks his own product. Like, if you were around pizza all the time, is that really what you’d want for dinner?

Boone checks himself. Are you feeling sorry for this kid now?

Yeah, sort of, especially after he leaves the school.