Hold Tight

The women wore spaghetti straps and small shorts, and at the risk of seeming hopelessly old-fashioned and politically incorrect, he wasn’t sure if these were just teenage partyers or working girls.

He stepped out of his car. A tall black woman approached and said, “Hey, Joe, want to party with Latisha?”

Her voice was deep. Her hands were big. And now Mike wasn’t sure “her” would be accurate.

“No, thanks.”

“You sure? It would open up new worlds.”

“I’m sure it would, but my worlds are open enough as it is.”

Posters of bands you never heard of with names like Pap Smear and Gonorrhea Pus plastered any free space. On one stoop, a mother propped her baby on her hip, sweat glistening off her face, a bare lightbulb swinging behind her. Mike spotted a makeshift parking lot in an abandoned alleyway. The sign said ALL NIGHT, $10. A Latino man wearing a wifebeater tee and cut-off shorts stood by the drive, counting money. He eyed Mike and said, “What you want, bro?”

“Nothing.”

Mike moved on. He found the address that the GPS showed him. It was a walk-up residence jammed between two loud clubs. He looked inside and saw about a dozen buzzers to ring. No names on the buzzers—just numbers and letters to indicate each.

So now what?

He didn’t have a clue.

He could wait out here for Adam. But what good would that do? It was ten o’clock at night. The places were just starting to fill up. If his son was here partying and had directly disobeyed him, it could be hours before he came out. And then what? Would Mike pop out in front of Adam and his friends and say, “Aha, got ya!” Would that somehow be helpful? How would Mike explain how he ended up here?

What did Mike and Tia want out of this anyway?

This was yet another problem with spying. Forget the obvious violation of privacy for the moment. There was the issue of enforcement. What do you do when you find something going on? Wouldn’t interfering and thus losing your child’s trust do as much or more damage as a night of underage drinking?

Depends.

Mike wanted to make sure his boy was safe. That was all. He remembered what Tia had said, something about our job being to escort them safely to adulthood. It was true in part. The teen years were so angst-filled, so hormone-fueled, so much emotion packed in and then raised to the tenth power—and it all passed so quickly. You couldn’t tell a teen that. If you could hand down one piece of wisdom to a teenager, it would be simple: This too shall pass—and it would pass quickly. They wouldn’t listen, of course, because that’s the beauty and waste of youth.

He thought about Adam’s instant-messaging with CeeJay8115. He thought about Tia’s reaction and his own gut instinct. He was not a religious man and didn’t believe in psychic powers or anything like that, but he didn’t like to go against what he would describe as certain vibes in both his personal and professional life. There were times things simply felt wrong. It could be in a medical diagnosis or in what route to take on a long car trip. It was just something in the air, a crackle, a hush, but Mike had learned to ignore it at his own peril.

Right now every vibe was screaming that his son was in serious trouble.

So find him.

How?

He had no idea. He started back up the street. Several hookers propositioned him. Most seemed male. One guy in a business suit claimed to be “representing” a variety pack of “steaming hot” ladies and all Mike had to do was give him a laundry list of physical attributes and desires and said representative would procure him the proper mate or mates. Mike actually listened to the sales pitch before turning it down.

He kept his eyes moving. Some of the young girls frowned when they felt his gaze. Mike looked around and realized that he was probably the oldest person on this crowded street by something like twenty years. He noticed that every club made the clientele wait for at least a few minutes. One had a pitiful velvet rope, maybe a yard long, and the guy would make whoever wanted to come in stand behind it for maybe ten seconds before opening the door.

Mike was turning to the right when something caught his eye.

A varsity jacket.

He spun quickly and spotted the Huff kid walking the other way.

Or at least it looked like DJ Huff. That varsity jacket the kid always wore was on his back. So maybe that was him. Probably.

No, Mike thought, he was sure. It was DJ Huff.

He had disappeared down a side street. Mike quickly picked up his pace and followed him. When he lost sight of the kid, he started to jog.

“Whoa! Slow down, gramps!”

He had bumped into some kid with a shaved head and a chain hanging from his lower lip. His buddies laughed at the gramps line. Mike frowned and slid past him. The street was packed now, the crowd seeming to grow with each step. As he hit the next block, the black goths—oops, emos—seemed to thin out in favor of a more Latino crowd. Mike heard Spanish being spoken. The baby-powder white skin had been exchanged for shades of olive. The men wore dress shirts unbuttoned all the way so as to show the bright white, ribbed tee underneath. The women were salsa sexy and called the men “coños” and wore outfits that were so sheer they seemed more like sausage casing than clothing.

Up ahead Mike saw DJ Huff bear right down another street. It looked like he had a cell phone pressed against his ear. Mike hurried to catch up to him . . . but then what would he do? Again. Grab him and say, “Aha!” Maybe. Maybe he would just follow him, see where he was going. Mike didn’t know what was going on here, but he didn’t like it. Fear started nibbling at the base of his brain.

He veered right.

And the Huff boy was gone.

Mike pulled up. He tried to gauge the speed, how much time had elapsed. There was one club about a quarter of the way down the block. That was the only visible door. DJ Huff had to have gone in there. The line outside the place was long—the longest Mike had seen. Had to be a hundred kids. The crowd was a mix—the emos, Latinos, African Americans, even a few of what they used to call yuppies.

Wouldn’t Huff have had to wait on line?

Maybe not. There was a super-huge bodyguard behind a velvet rope. A stretch limousine pulled up. Two leggy girls stepped out. A man nearly a foot shorter than the leggy girls took his seemingly rightful place between them. The super-huge bouncer opened the velvet rope—this rope being about ten feet long—and let them right in.

Mike sprinted toward the entrance. The bouncer—a big black guy with arms the relative thickness of your average hundred-year-old redwood—gave Mike a bored look, as if Mike were an inanimate object. A chair maybe. A disposable razor.