“I don’t know. Try and look inconspicuous, I guess. Follow him and see what he does. Call and tell Sheriff Munik, too.”
“Yeah, we’ll be real inconspicuous,” she allows herself to joke. “A scar-faced man, a one-eyed woman, and a freaking bear.”
TWENTY-TWO
A
SHOWER LATER
we’re back on the road. I get my first glimpse of the huge man-made body of water when we turn off Lake Powell Boulevard and onto a smaller street that leads into the residential neighborhoods. The water is a brilliant blue beneath red and white sandstone cliffs. Islands, really massive buttes, rise directly out of the water. The lake’s surface is alive with the wakes of powerboats, Jet Skis, and the leaping acrobatics of water-skiers. From staring at a map in the motel room while Kim showered, I know that what I’m glimpsing is only the tiniest portion of the lake. It winds and twists through hundreds of sheer canyons for two thousand miles of shoreline. The climbing potential here is astounding. The thought of being belayed from the deck of a boat makes the corners of my lips raise a fraction in an involuntary grin. It gives new meaning to the climber’s term for falling—“decking out.”
Beside me, Kim seems less pleased with the view. She barely gives it a glance. Instead she flips restlessly through her address book, staring at it for a moment, then at the street map we’d torn out of the motel’s phone book, then at me, then out the window at the signs on each corner, and then starting all over again with the book. Every now and then she tells me to turn right or left.
“Are you all right? You seem tense.”
She starts at my words and puts the book back in the nylon bag she uses as her purse. “I’m worried about Sunny, is all. What if she’s hurt? She must be scared out of her mind.”
I simply hope she’s here, that she’s alive, but don’t say that.
Kim’s nervousness increases as we navigate the streets of Page toward the home of Sunny’s parents. Even for a cheap, plastic town like Page, this neighborhood isn’t a good one. It’s a mix of beat-up trailers and small, prefabricated cottages with crumbling porches and dry, weedy lawns. The yards are decorated with beer cans and cigarette butts instead of the gnomes and flamingos closer to the main part of town. Cars in a state of either regeneration or deterioration are propped up on driveways. Pickups with huge tires and American muscle cars seem to be the vehicles of choice around here. Young white men and women hang out in groups on tobacco-stained sidewalks. A majority of the men wear a haircut known as the mullet: long in back, short on the sides and top. The women have a style all their own: frizzy hair with the bangs ironed straight up, sometimes almost six inches, as if in imitation of a steeply cresting wave. Tattoos seem popular, too. I wonder for a moment if it’s the neighborhood that has Kim so upset, but realize it’s not unlike certain parts on the outskirts of Tomichi. Only the view down some streets to the blue water of Lake Powell would make me prefer this town over the ugliest of neighborhoods I’ve seen in third-world countries.
The temperature outside the truck is visible in the blurry waves of heat rising off the asphalt as we pull up in front of the address. This particular lawn is better cared for than most of the others on the street, well watered and neatly cut. But the house itself is a perfect representative for the neighborhood: part trailer and part stucco. It appears to have begun as a large mobile home that’s been added onto with discounted materials of varying generations. The porch is lined with a variety of potted cacti.
We leave Oso in the car with the engine on and the air conditioner blasting. I’m not concerned about some young mullet-head stealing it—not with Oso inside. Kim pauses at the start of a crumbling concrete walkway.
“Why don’t you go to the door alone, Anton? They might have heard some things about me from Sunny, things they might not like. I think I’d really prefer to stay in the car,” she says. Her voice is quiet and sounds somehow small.
“With my face looking like this? They’d call the police.” At the motel I’d done my best to make myself as presentable as possible, putting on a clean T-shirt with my single pair of jeans. I’d also shaved for the first time in almost a month, revealing a pale and generous length of Celtic jaw beneath darkly tanned Latin cheekbones. The two-toned effect is probably more disconcerting than it had been with the beard. The mirror showed that my eyes are still purple with bruising and the scar on my left cheek is red and vivid. It’s a colorful look.
“I think we’d be better off if you did this alone,” I tell her. “What could they have heard about you—that you’re an environmentalist?” That makes some sense. People in towns like this usually don’t join the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society. “Besides, you said you don’t even know them.”
“But they might know me.”
“Kim, how about giving me a hint as to what you’re so worried about.”
She opens her mouth, looking as though she might, but it’s too late. The front door to the modified trailer swings open and an older man wearing the neighborhood uniform of a dirty tank top and Bermuda shorts steps out onto the porch. He’s chicken-necked and skinny but for a grossly protruding belly. In one hand he holds a can of beer; in the other is a stubby cigar. The screen door slaps shut behind him. Even though it’s still morning, the man is already swaying on his feet. “Help you?” he asks, his voice and stance more aggressive than the words.
Kim doesn’t speak or move, so I smile as innocently as possible and ask, “Mr. Hansen?”
“Never met him.”
I remember Kim saying that Sunny’s mother had remarried. “Are you Sunny Hansen’s stepfather?”
“Depends. Who the hell are you?”
“This is Kim Walsh, and my name’s Antonio Burns. We’re trying to find—” but he isn’t listening to me. He’s staring at Kim with his mouth writhing somewhere between a frown and a smirk.
“The lesbian lawyer,” he says slowly, the nasty smirk winning out. “What do you want, girl? My Sunny run off and leave you for some man?”
I look at Kim, finally understanding her reluctance to come here. Finally understanding a lot of things. My desire for her goes from hopeful to hopeless in less than a second, and I feel a flush of anger at the man who has so crudely revealed her secret.
Kim, on the other hand, appears to be composing herself. The man’s aggressiveness brings her out of the embarrassed trance she has been in since we left the motel. I realize that she’s a lot like me in other ways than just liking women—she’s learning to be stronger in the face of adversity.
“Mr. Villanova, is Sunny here?” she asks coolly while moving up the walkway.
Sunny’s stepfather is still leering at her unpleasantly. “I thought you lesbians were supposed to be all butch-looking or something. Like clomping around in motorcycle boots with a man’s haircut.”
“No, sir. We’re not all like that.” And Kim clearly isn’t. “Look, Sunny’s a friend of mine and I need to talk to her. Is she here?”
The stepfather remains standing in front of the door, making no move to invite us in. He takes another swig from his beer and puts out the cigar in one of the cactus pots. “Girl, I’ll tell you the same thing I told everyone else who’s come poking around for her today. Sunny was here sometime real late last night, then she took off again real early in the morning. Don’t know where to. Don’t know if I’d tell you even if I knew.”
Kim lets out a sigh of relief. Sunny’s here, somewhere. And I’m pleased we’re on the right track, that at least Sunny’s alive, but concerned that someone else has been looking for her. “Who else came by asking about her?”
He looks at me for the first time since I’d said Kim’s name. “Who’d you say you are? Some queer? Another ‘friend’ of Sunny’s?”
I smile, but not as nicely as before. “Nope. My name’s Antonio Burns. I’m a special agent with the Attorney General’s Office in Wyoming.”
“Then let’s see some ID, cowboy.”
Stepping up the creaking porch stairs, I hold my wallet open just two inches in front of his face for a moment. Then I snap it shut.
“I know what the lesbo wants with Sunny,” he says with another leer toward Kim, “but what the hell does a Wyoming cop want with my girl? Far as I know, she’s never even been to that goddamn state. You trying to get in my girl’s pants, too?”
I can see why Sunny chose to live in Colorado rather than Arizona. I’m surprised she didn’t leave the country. With a stepdad like this guy, it’s a miracle she made it out of here at all.
“Wyoming,” Mr. Villanova says to himself as he takes another swig from the beer can he grips in one fist. “Where the men are men and the sheep are scared.”
“I’m sort of involved, helping out, on a Colorado case,” I say evenly. I want to lie as little as possible out of habit, knowing it could tangle me up later with Sheriff Munik if I try to make it sound too much like I’m here in an official capacity.
“Maybe you should explain that to the Colorado boys. When they came by this morning, they didn’t say nothing about getting any sheep-friendly help.”
“Who came by?” I’m amazed that Sheriff Munik would send deputies all the way to Arizona when he could just call and request some assistance from the local police.
“Just a couple of Colorado pigs.” He sucks down more of the beer.
“The Colorado cops, were they in uniform?”
“Nah, but one of ’em had a badge kinda like yours. Wanted to know if she’d been by, just like you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That she came barging in at like three in the morning, all weepy about something. Wouldn’t tell me what it was about and her momma’s off in Vegas. I went back to bed, then the little bitch stole my boat this morning. I found my trailer down at the ramp.” His eyes become a little unfocused. “Goddamn that girl, I just paid that thing off. A twenty-seven-foot Sea Ray, brand-new 350 Mercs. Was going to call the police myself, but figured since the law was already after her I wouldn’t bother.”
“Tell me what the Colorado guys looked like.”
“What do you care? I thought you was working with them.”
“Just tell me, Mr. Villanova,” I say, trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice. I have a strong urge to put my hands around his scrawny neck.
He looks quickly at my face, correctly gauges the threat there, then stares down at his beer.
“One of ’em stayed in the car, some big black yuppie-mobile—a Suburban—and another guy pounded on the door. Guy at the door was dressed like he’s a rich bastard. Acted like it, too. Probably on the take, like all you—” He pauses, looks again at my face, and decides not to pursue the thought. “Had a badge. I didn’t get much of a look at the guy in the truck—I only saw that he was as bald as a bowling ball, ’cept for some funny sideburns.”
Fast and Burgermeister, no doubt. I need to call Sheriff Munik and let him know that his benefactor isn’t on his property in the White River National Forest as his secretary had claimed.
Kim asks from behind me, “Where would she have gone in your boat, Mr. Villanova?”
The man leers at her again and holds up his beer can in the direction of Lake Powell. “The frigging Arctic Ocean. Where do you think, girl?”
“Where in the lake?” I ask, not smiling at all now as I step up onto the porch, deliberately invading his space.
He yanks open the screen door and half staggers inside. He tries to close the flimsy door but I catch it first. “Hey! What the hell? You can’t—”
“Where in the lake?” I ask again, giving him my hardest look from my swollen eyes.
“Get the hell off my property! I’ll call the police!”
“Go ahead. I expect they’ll be more happy to listen to me than to you,” I say. “And I bet it’ll take them a while to get here.” From the disparaging way he referred to the police earlier, and the fact that he’s drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, I have a feeling he’s not too friendly with the local force. “Now, where in the lake,
sir
?” I grab his wrist and pull him back out onto the porch.
“I swear I don’t know.” He tries to tug his wrist away from my grasp. I hold it tight for a moment, letting him feel the grip that comes from years of hanging by one’s fingertips, then let it go. “But you can tell her if she brings back my boat in one piece, she won’t be in any trouble. Not with me, anyways.” He steps back inside and tries again to close the screen door. I let him.
“Tell me the names of some of her friends around here.”
Mr. Villanova is more confident again, now that he’s back inside his home. His watery eyes twitch and I can tell he’s trying to decide whether to be mad or scared. He evidently chooses cooperation along with the risk of a little more impertinence. “Ask Freddy Kruge,” he finally says. “He was her boyfriend before that dyke came along.” He points the beer can at Kim with an angry shake, saying, “Now get the hell off my property before I call the police!” and then he quickly slams the interior door.
TWENTY-THREE
W
E GET BACK
in the car and drive to a local coffee shop on Lake Powell Boulevard. From a vinyl booth with a window, Kim orders orange juice and dry toast, which explains her slim, athletic figure. I request coffee, pancakes, eggs, and bacon. Although Kim appears more confident now, no longer in the agitated trance that had affected her earlier in the morning, she still sits across from me unsmiling and preoccupied. I’m sure she must be enormously relieved that Sunny is unhurt. And maybe also relieved that the secret regarding their relationship is no longer a secret.
“We’re off to a good start, Kim. At least we know she’s okay. At least she wasn’t physically hurt. Even her drunken, scumbag stepfather would have noticed if she was injured.”
She plays with the utensils in front of her, not looking at me. “Now it’s her emotional state I’m worried about.”
I nod. I’m worried about that, too, but not nearly as much as I’m worried about David Fast and Burgermeister finding her first. Neither of us speaks while I fill my coffee cup to the brim with sugar and cream.
“I didn’t know you were gay.” The words just slip out.
“Does it matter?”
“No, not really. But since we’re working and traveling together, I’d like to know a little about you.”
She finally looks up at me. Her thin lips are tight with something like exasperation. “I’m not
gay,
okay? I’m into people. If I’m attracted to someone, then I’m attracted to someone. Subject closed. Don’t bust my balls, Anton.”
“Weird. A lesbian with balls.”
She doesn’t want to, but she smiles. “That’s right, kid. Big balls.”
I think about the way she let me hug her outside the courthouse yesterday. The way she’d pressed herself against me—chest, hips, and thighs—making it a full-body hug. And the way she’d touched my arm during the night and then laid her head in my lap. I wonder if I’m one of those people she could be attracted to. We’re both staring out the window, watching the street. Mid-morning now, it’s jammed with the pickups and muscle cars of the locals as well as tourists in motor homes and Cadillacs.
“So how do we find her?” Kim asks. “We know she’s in a Sea Ray with Mercs, right, whatever those are. Do you know what one looks like?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know anything about boats. Just that we need one to find her. And we need a clue where to look.”
My knowledge of Lake Powell extends to having read
The Monkey Wrench Gang
years before and the brief glance at the map and tourist information in the motel room. What I know is that Lake Powell, with its innumerable canyons, islands, and inlets, has more shoreline than the entire western coast of the United States. Almost two thousand miles of it. According to the Visitors’ Guide, the geography of the water-filled canyons includes natural arches, Indian ruins, and hidden slot canyons. The lake was artificially formed in 1956, when the Colorado River was dammed at Glen Canyon, just a couple of miles to the west. Someday I’ll have to come back here and climb.
“We’ll find this Freddy Kruge and ask him if she has a hangout somewhere, or if he knows anyone who might know of a hangout. Did she ever mention that guy’s name to you?”
“Yep. He’s an ex-boyfriend who liked to smack her around. I only remember his name because it was so unusual. Freddy Kruge. She called him Freddy Krueger, like the evil character in those horror movies.” She stares at my bacon with distaste. “You’re the cop. How do we find him?”
The waitress walks over and refills my coffee cup. She does it with a flirtatious smile and I’m flattered to receive such a gesture in my current condition. She’s a pretty Indian girl; her face is full and round yet her body is still slender despite working in a greasy diner. She wears a halter top under a baggy pair of overalls. When she leans over the table, I can’t help but notice a pair of black panties down the side of the denim.
Turning to Kim, she asks, “Would you like more juice, ma’am?”
“Please,” Kim says with a smile of her own, then, “And please don’t call me ma’am. I’m not his mother.”
I laugh, catch a half-chewed piece of bacon in my throat, and spend a minute alternatively coughing and drinking water while my eyes leak tears. It’s the first time I’ve heard Kim make something akin to a joke. The suddenness of it has surprised me.
When I’m recovered and the pretty waitress has come back with more orange juice for Kim, I ask her, “Do you know a guy named Freddy Kruge?”
The girl frowns. “You mean Freddy Krueger, that freak. Yeah, I know him. Everybody does. He works down at the Lube Monkey. Whatcha want to see him for?”
“I just want to hit him with a few questions.”
“You ought to hit him with your fist.” She gives me a good look. “You look like you could do it. The guy’s an asshole.” She’s embarrassed by the use of the obscenity and colors slightly, looking away.
“How about Sunny Hansen? Do you know her?” I ask, hoping to get even luckier. But the girl shakes her head.
“Not really. I know who she is, but she was a couple of years ahead of me in high school. She used to date Krueger before she left for college in Colorado. God, I hope I can get out of this place someday, too.”
After leaving her a large tip, we follow the girl’s directions to the Lube Monkey just a couple of blocks away. Taking the waitress’s word for it, I assume Freddy’s going to be an asshole and decide it’s time to take Oso for a walk. Even outside the building I can smell the odor of marijuana wafting through the open garage door. The three of us walk into the garage together, ourselves as motley a trio as the three young men we find inside. They’re all marked by grease, acne, and spotty facial hair. But they have one redeeming quality—they stare at the beast with admiration.
“Check that out!” one exclaims to the other two, coming forward and hesitating before reaching out to pet Oso. “He friendly?”
“Not really,” I tell him.
“Cool.” He draws back his hand. “What do you need? Oil change?”
I see a grimy patch on his shirt that reads “Fred.” Pulling out my wallet and giving him a flash of the badge, I ask, “Are you Freddy Kruge?”
“Uh, no,” he says, then looks down to where I’m pointing at the name on his shirt. “Shit.” His two pals catch on and snicker at him before moving away, closer to the open garage door. It’s clear none of them are strangers to the police. “What are you after me for, man?” Fred whines at us. “I’m not saying nothing, not till I get lawyered up.”
“Actually, I just want to ask you some questions. Tell me what I need to know and I won’t mention that pot you just smoked to your PO,” I say, guessing that he has a probation officer.
He grins at me, suddenly eager to please. “Shoot, man.”
“Outside.”
Freddy Kruge follows us out to some browning grass on the side of the building. His eagerness has me a little suspicious—I worry that he might try to run. But I look at the baggy pants he wears halfway down his ass and figure he won’t get far without being tripped up on his own clothing. Besides, Oso keeps his yellow eyes fixed on the young man. There’s a predatory gleam in those eyes, as if he’d like nothing better than to chase a man down like a fleeing deer and rip out his hamstrings.
Fred keeps his distance from the beast and watches him warily but admiringly. Although the hair on the top of his head is close-cropped and the sides are shaved white, a long ponytail of glossy black hair hangs over one of his shoulders. On his upper lip and chin a few straggly dark hairs dangle in a pathetic attempt at a goatee. I can’t picture the Sunny I’d met, the girl with the blonde dreadlocks and free spirit, having anything to do with a punk like this. But I can picture her all too well with Kim—I push the thought from my mind.
As I study Fred he rolls an empty soda can under his Doc Martens while Kim leans against a scraggly tree, content again to let me do most of the talking. From my experience dealing with lawyers, knowing when to be quiet is a rare and valuable trait among them.
“When was the last time you saw Sunny Hansen?” I ask.
“Sunny?” he looks surprised. “Look, man, I don’t know what that bitch told you, but I never touched her. And I haven’t even seen her in like two years. Isn’t there a statue of limitation or something on whatever bullshit she said I did?”
I’ve always wondered just what a “statue” of limitation, as all the suspects I’ve met refer to the statute of limitations, might look like—maybe something like Fred?—but I don’t let a smile come to my mouth.
“You haven’t heard about her being back in town lately?”
“Hell no. When she split, she split for good. She always thought she was too good for this place. I hear her folks are still around, though.”
“How long did you date her?”
“Year, maybe two.”
“You guys ever go out on the lake together?”
“Sure. All the time. She used to like kicking around in the canyons, you know. She was crazy about that shit. Why you want to know?”
“Don’t worry about it.” I want to think of some excuse so that he really doesn’t worry about it, but can’t think of anything plausible. “Any canyons in particular?”
“Don’t know. Maybe out around Last Chance Bay or somewheres. She dug it back in there. C’mon, tell me. Why are you looking for her, dude?”
Kim helps me out by saying, “We’re trying to serve a subpoena on her, Freddy. She’s a witness in a federal case. You see her, you stay as far away from her as you can get. If we hear you were near her or went looking for her, then there’s going to be some assault and battery charges filed against you, young man. And I can promise you that your probation will be revoked like
that
.” She snaps her fingers in front of her eye patch while fixing him with an angry gaze. “You’ll find yourself in the state pen. You understand?”
“Yeah, I got it.” His eyes are sullen but he smiles at us again, displaying dirty and uneven teeth. Then he crushes the can beneath his boot.