Authors: G.M. Ford
“It’s the IAFIS report on that water glass you gave me.”
“We got a hit?”
He checked the room and then bobbed his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. “Did we ever.”
It was obvious. He was going to make her read it on her own. He liked to do things like that. She put down her spoon, wiped her hands and mouth again, and picked up the report. She read it slowly, being careful not to miss anything.
“No shit,” she said when she finished.
“No shit,” he echoed. “Can I quote you on that, Ms. Kane?”
“The one who disappeared . . . right before the . . .”
“That’s the one.”
“After all these years?”
“Yup.”
“This is a prank.”
“That’s what I thought, so I ran them through again. They say the prints are no more than three months old.”
She checked his expression for irony and found none.
“I mean . . . where’s he been all this . . .”
“On Unsolved Mysteries.”
She chuckled. “I’ve seen it half a dozen times.”
“It’s become folklore.” He made quotation marks with his fingers. “Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, D. B. Cooper, and our boy here. ‘Unexplained Disappearances.’ ” She thought it over. “We get this wrong . . .” she began.
“We look like a pair of yodels.”
“We become folklore.”
“Think Geraldo Rivera.”
The thought caused her to shiver.
He interrupted her thoughts.
“I got us a continuance on the ethics hearing.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs in Tibet?”
He tapped his nose with his forefinger. “I smell something here,” he said. “There’s a lotta juice being floated around. And it’s all connected.”
“What makes you think that?” she asked between bites.
“’Cause I had to pull out all the stops to get some bullshit ethics hearing postponed.” He had her attention now. His voice began to rise. Heads were turning their way. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “I went to Billy, just like I always do.” Billy was the Honorable Speaker of the State House of Representatives William F. Crowley III, with whom Bruce Gill had been conducting mutually profitable business for the better part of twenty years.
“And he turned you down?”
“Flat. Just about told me to kiss his ass,” the D.A. whispered.
“Which means what?”
“Which means he’s found himself a bigger, hairier ass to kiss.”
She finished her yogurt and dropped the spoon in the container.
“Round theses parts, Chief, there ain’t no bigger, hairier ass than yours.”
“Exactly,” he said.
And then she got it. Somewhere in D.C. somebody was exerting a lot of pressure. Pressure whose upside promise was sufficient to make Crowley risk his long-standing relationship with Gill. What-ever it was . . . it was heavy. Crowley was no fool. If he was changing partners, the dance was a doozy.
“And you thought, what? . . . This . . .”—she gestured toward the fingerprint report on the table— “you think this is all connected somehow?”
“How could it not be?” he asked.
Much as she disliked the idea, he had a point. Either they were looking at some serious statistical unlikelihood, or the recent string of events was all, in some manner or another, connected.
“What do you need from me?”
“Make some calls, find out what in hell is going on here. Make damn sure we’re not being duped. How come some dude who’s been missing for years winds up in a home for the disadvantaged. How this guy mentions the name Wesley Howard and feds come raining all over our asses.” He shook his perfectly sculpted head. “This is big-time shit here.”
What he meant was that this was big-time TV exposure— 60 Minutes, Evening Magazine kind of stuff.
“Big-time shit,” he said again.
She stood up. He followed suit. “Maybe not the best dining conversation I’ve ever heard,” she said.
Sit still,” Acey said. “Ain’t never gonna get this done you keep actin’ like a bitch.” He dabbed antiseptic onto the topmost of Randy’s wounds.
“Not a nice word,” Randy said.
“What’s wid you and words? They just words, dog.”
“It matters.”
He daubed the wound quite a bit harder than necessary. “Ain’t nothin’ but words.”
“I got an idea,” Randy said.
“Yeah . . . whassat?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t refer to women as anything you wouldn’t want somebody to call your mom.”
Acey stared a hole in the side of Randy’s head, dropped the gauze on the bed, and walked over by the window, where he stood looking out at the bricks of the building next door. “I got me an idea, too,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Maybe you oughta go fuck yourself.”
After a stop at an all-night drugstore for bandaging supplies, they were holed up in the Whispering Palms Motel about fifty miles south of the Grove. One look at Randy and the desk clerk had demanded a hundred-dollar deposit on the room. Between the two of them, they ran the hot water out three times before they managed to wash all the debris from themselves.
“I was just trying to make a point,” Randy said. “Sorry.”
“Fuck you.”
Randy went to work on his own shoulder, placing a sterile pad over the wound and then winding gauze over it to keep it in place until finally covering the whole thing with white surgical tape. He ripped the tape with his teeth and smoothed the end down.
“You seen her, huh?” Acey said out of the blue.
“Yeah,” Randy said. “I saw her.”
“She . . . I mean . . . did they . . .”
“She never knew what hit her.”
Acey turned his way, trying to read his face. Randy hid behind a grimace as he shouldered himself into his last clean shirt.
“She always say that how she wanted to go.”
“How’s that?”
“You know. Quick like. One minute you here. One minute you gone.”
“She got her wish.”
Acey sniffled and then wiped his nose on his sleeve. “What she say? Live fast. Die young. Leave a great-lookin’ corpse.”
“Fonzie.”
“Who?”
“Guy on TV used to say that.”
“Guy wid the motorcycle.”
“That’s the one.”
“We used to watch that on the TV when I was little.”
“You’re still little.”
Acey wiped his nose again. “You remember when you was little.”
“No.”
“How far back you remember?”
“My memory’s not like that,” Randy said. He could see Acey didn’t understand, so he kept talking. “There’s no before and after in my memory. It’s like everything happened at once. I have all these individual memories floating around in my head, none of which is attached to any of the others. I lack context.”
“What’s that?”
“Context is who you are. It’s the thing you filter everything else through.”
“But you doan know who you are.”
“Nope.”
“So you got no filter.”
“You got it.”
“Tell me one.”
“One what?”
“One of them things you got floatin’ around inside yo’ head.”
Randy thought it over. “I’m good at math,” he said finally.
“How you know that?”
“I just do.”
“How you get good at math?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I suck at math,” Acey said.
“How do you know?”
Acey made his “damn you’re dumb” face. “School.”
“Probably the same way I got good at it.”
“But you doan remember school?”
“Nope.”
“That’s fucked up, man.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“What we gonna do now?”
“We probably better get out of here,” Randy said. Acey looked pained. “We just got here.”
“Best we keep moving.”
“Wasn’t nobody following us here, dog. We was careful.”
“They’ll be along.”
“How they gonna find us?”
“I don’t know, but they will.”
Randy stuffed the torn and bloody shirt into the wastebasket, picked up his bag, and headed for the door. Acey tagged along behind.
“I’m hungry, dog,” he said as they closed the door and started down the littered walkway along the front of the motel.
“Soon as we get up the road a ways, we’ll stop and get something to eat.”
Acey kicked an empty Diet Coke can, sending it spinning off in front of them.
“What you gonna do after you get rid of me?”
“No idea,” Randy said.
Acey kicked the can again, sending it clanking end over end this time.
“You goin’ back to dat house.”
“Maybe,” Randy said. He eyed the kid sideways, wondering how a nine-year-old could be so adept at reading his intentions. Of course he was going back to the house.
What had she called it? . . . A little charade. And something about the guy . . . how the dude kept using the name . . . like he was talking about himself in the third person or something . . . almost as if . . . Randy nearly missed a step on the sidewalk. He stopped walking. Acey kept going . . . as if maybe Wes Howard wasn’t his name either . . . all of which made it possible that Randy was really Wes Howard after all . . . and then he heard her voice again . . . it isn’t like he’s coming back, she’d said. He who? Randy wondered. Was she referring to him? Didn’t sound like it, and how would she have any idea whether or not he was going to come back? And what were all those papers she felt a need to hide in the bomb shelter? And what was she . . .
The sight of the car scattered his thoughts. He kept walking as he found the keys and pushed the green button. Acey got in and was ready to go as Randy slid into the driver’s seat and buckled up. Above his head, one of the buttons on the headliner was blinking a blue light. On Star. Randy wondered whether it always blinked and he just hadn’t noticed, or whether this was something new. He looked over at Acey. The look of terror painted on the kid’s face froze the blood in Randy’s veins.
Slowly he turned his eyes toward the front of the car. Chester Berry. The cop. Big old bruise running all the way across his forehead. Big black automatic pointed at Randy’s head. Jaw wired shut so’s his tongue could heal. He growled an order that sounded like: “Gggowwwwdcar.”
“I think he wants us to get out,” Acey said.
“Stay put,” Randy said.
“Gggowwwwdcar,” louder this time. Chester Berry was waving the gun back and forth. “Gggowwwwduckingcar,” he roared through a mouthful of gauze.
Randy showed his palms, then made like he was reaching for the door handle, instead dropping the Mercedes into reverse, crimping the wheel, and flooring it. A slug came roaring in the open window, passing so close beneath Randy’s chin that it rattled his teeth.
“Hang on,” he said to Acey as the car rocketed backward. He heard two more shots and then another as he straightened the wheel and bounced out into the street. He dumped the car into drive and went speeding off in the direction of the ocean. In the rearview mirror, he saw Berry come out from between buildings, assume the combat position, and then change his mind, choosing instead to go ambling back out of sight.
Like he was in no hurry at all, Randy thought to himself. Like . . . like he could find us whenever he wanted to.
A minute later, the blue light began to blink. “Shit,” Randy said out loud. He made two quick right turns and then squealed the car to a stop at the curb. The blue light blinked incessantly now.
He got out of the car, looked around, and there it was . . . right in front of his face, a little black square, no bigger that a matchbox, right at the junction of the roof and the back window. He hurried back, grabbed hold of it with his fingers, and ripped it from its magnetic mooring. He jerked until the wire broke and then threw the antenna in the street. He ran back to the driver’s side and jumped into the car.
The blue On Star light was cold and dead. He turned to Acey. His exultation at finding how Berry had found them died in his throat. The kid sat staring straight ahead. Sounded like his breathing was labored . . . like he had a lot of congestion in his lungs . . . except the sucking noise wasn’t coming from his mouth . . . it was coming from . . . Randy reached over and touched him. His hand came back warm and sticky. That noise again . . . coming from the bubbling hole in his chest.
“Oh, Jesus,” escaped Randy’s lips.
Landon Street was a zoo. The first “shirtsleeve” day of the year. Couldn’t have been much more than sixty degrees or so, but after a tumultuous winter and early spring, anything in the vicinity of a warm day was greeted with unbounded enthusiasm. Helen and Ken stepped aside and let a pair of baggy-pants skateboarders thread their way up the sidewalk. Joggers wound their way through the crowded sidewalks, showing acres of pale skin to the crackheads and the junkies and the panhandlers who’d crawled squinting from winter dens and returned to their haunts along the avenue.
“I really think he was the best,” Helen said. “I’ve always loved the old ones with Sean Connery, but this guy . . .”—she waved a hand—“this guy was a dish.” She pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. “Whatshisname . . .”
“Daniel Craig,” Ken filled in.
“I mean . . .” The hand across the brow again. They’d just been to the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale. Something about Daniel Craig had pushed her buttons. Her breathing got shallow every time he came on-screen, which was about 99 percent of the time. At one particularly erotic moment, she’d leaned so far forward her Coke spilled onto the floor.
“It was good,” Ken said. “More like the books than the others.”
He made a disgusted face. “None of the supertechnology crap. None of the toys. No giants with steel teeth. No foolishness like that.”
“How about an ice cream?” Helen asked.
Ken threw an arm around her shoulder, pulling her out of the way of another pair of skateboarders, whose noisy wheels ground over the uneven concrete like an oncoming train. She leaned against his chest and watched as the skaters propelled themselves through the crowd.
“Cherry Garcia?” Ken asked.
“Of course,” she said.
Walking through a crowd, holding each other close, isn’t the easiest thing to do. They’d had to dodge this way and that and even come to a complete stop a couple of times before they made it to Ben & Jerry’s.