by J. D. Barker
Motel notepad next to the phone.
Fogel tore off the topmost three sheets and shoved them in her pocket before ducking and taking a look under the bed.
When she stood back up, three men were standing in the doorway. A plainclothes detective, a uniform, and Officer Jun.
Jun’s face was red. “I told you to wait in the car.”
“She’s with you?” the detective said. A pudgy man, half a foot shorter than Jun, with stringy hair combed back over his flat head.
“You’re standing in evidence,” Fogel said, glancing down at the concrete.
The detective followed her gaze. “Oh, hell.”
The three men spread out around the stain.
“The rain took most of it, but you should be able to get a blood type.”
“You’re standing in my crime scene, miss.” The detective glared.
Fogel glanced around the room. “Really? I’m sorry. It wasn’t marked. I thought I saw someone I knew up here and just came up to say hello.”
“Jun, who is this person standing in my crime scene?”
Officer Jun cleared his throat. “This is Detective Fogel, from Pittsburgh PD.”
“Oh, you mean the drunk woman with a gun we were kind enough to not charge last night? The one we could still charge this morning, if we changed our mind? Felony possession of a concealed firearm. Drunk and disorderly. That woman?”
“I wasn’t—” Fogel started to protest, then closed her mouth. She didn’t remember.
“Yes, sir.”
“What did her superior officer say about all this?”
“We haven’t called him yet, sir.”
The detective scratched at his chin. “No, we haven’t, have we? Not yet.”
Fogel forced a smile and started toward the door. “Sorry, professional curiosity. You’re right, though. Not my jurisdiction.”
The detective blocked her path. “Has her firearm been returned to her?”
“Yes, sir. Her identification too.”
The detective’s head tilted slightly to the left. “Do you know who’s responsible for this, Detective Fogel?”
“I’m not sure what this is.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
“I work Homicide. Looks like you have a vandal running loose. That’s not my area of expertise.”
“We’ve got a vandal who looks to have disabled nearly a dozen cars, all the same color, mind you, at two different locations. He firebombed one of them with a Molotov cocktail. We’ve also got multiple reports of shots fired, two bloodstains, counting this one, indicating people were hit. Yet, we have no bodies. Nobody here, nobody at area hospitals. A whole lotta nothing. You know what else is weird about all this?”
Fogel said nothing.
“All these white cars, including that bonfire in the parking lot, have fake tags. Not stolen, mind you, but fake, and I’ll be damned if they don’t look as good as the real thing. None of the VIN numbers check out, either. They’re bogus. Never manufactured. These cars don’t exist. They don’t seem to belong to anyone. Not a single guest of the hotel or visitor. Nobody has claimed ownership of a single one.”
“Sounds very perplexing,” Fogel said.
“What brings you from Pittsburgh to Fallon, Nevada, Detective?”
Fogel shrugged. “I’m just a big fan of Top Gun.”
8
“You should slow down.”
I knew Stella was right, but every time I lifted my foot off the gas, some involuntary urge forced it back down. The yellow lines of the highway rolled under us as nothing more than a blur. Tumbleweeds and thin trees beside the road blew by so fast they appeared indiscernible from the barren desert floor. The rain of earlier had been burned away by bristling heat. I looked down at the speedometer, the needle hovered near ninety-three.
“Please, Jack.”
I lifted my foot and eased the Jeep down to seventy; forced myself to keep it there.
We were about an hour outside of Fallon.
I needed a drink. I didn’t have anything, though. Nothing in the car or my pack.
My fingers were white, I gripped the steering wheel so tight. I peeled my hands away one at a time and wiped the sweat on my jeans.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Stella’s voice was timid, meek. “Point blank like that?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve only killed bad men. Men like Leo.” She turned to me. “It’s important you understand I killed Leo, not you. I don’t want him on your conscience. Your knife may have put him down, but he was already dead. There’s no saving someone like that. He had another minute at best. You shouldn’t fret about about the ones today, either. The one you shot in the gut, he’ll live. And the man on the stairwell, he was bad. Like Leo.”
“How do you know? What if he had a wife or kids? We don’t know anything about him.”
“He was bad. I know. Even worse, he was with them.”
She said this as if it were enough, and maybe it was. I had no idea what these people did to her, what they represented.
I killed a man.
The thought sunk down into my gut, and my stomach churned.
“The police will be looking for us.”
“They won’t find any bodies,” she said.
I killed multiple men.
Stella went on. “They pointed guns at you and me and would have shot one or both of us.”
Would they? Or were they really just trying to get Stella back? The gun was nothing but a bluff. If one of them pulled the trigger on me, would it have even worked?
My breathing quickened. Icy sweat covered my face and neck. Tiny blotches appeared in my vision, floating clouds of white obscuring my view of the road, the interior of the car.
The right front tire left the pavement, followed quickly by the back, the rough shoulder grabbing and tugging the Jeep away from the road.
Stella yelped.
My left hand, slick with sweat again, slipped on the steering wheel as I pulled hard left. Gravel, rocks, and dirt sputtered against the undercarriage. Weeds smacked against the front grill, swallowed beneath. I smashed my foot down hard on the brake, too hard, and we fishtailed off the pavement entirely, skidding through the dirt, the steering wheel useless. The Jeep began to spin to the left, so I tugged the wheel to the right, in hopes of gaining control. With such a high center of gravity, Jeeps flipped easily, and I felt the right side lift off the ground. I pulled the wheel back in the other direction. The front wheels caught, gained traction, and the back fell in line. I brought the Jeep to a clunky stop, ripped off my seat belt, jumped out, and bent over in the grass.
I couldn’t remember the last time I ate, and what came up was a sickly yellow, so acidic it burned my tongue even as my stomach clenched, heaved, and I buckled further over with more.
I felt Stella’s hand on the small of my back, her other on my shoulder, squeezing through my shirt. With the last of it, I stood and wiped my mouth. “God, I’m a fucking mess.”
“You took a life. You’re human. I’d be worried if it didn’t upset you.”
When I turned back to her, I realized how pale she had become. Both her hands quivered now, not just her right. “Is that because of what just happened, or…”
“I’ll be okay.”
I ran my hand through my hair. “You need to…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. I wasn’t sure what word even fit—feed? Eat? Drain? Absorb?
Stella understood, though. She said, “No. Not anymore.”
“I shouldn’t have shot that guy. You needed him. You could have fed on him.”
She was already shaking her head. “I wouldn’t have done it. I was just trying to scare him.”
“You have to, though. Don’t you?” I took a step closer. “What’s the longest you’ve ever gone…between?”
Stella drew in a deep breath and looked down at her hands. “A year and two days. I’ve found ways to slow it down, but only slow it down. Only a person seems to stop it en
tirely.”
“The cornfield in ’95?”
She nodded. “That bought me a few days, not much. I found a park that night. Parks are always good. I was there for less than an hour before a man started following me. Ten minutes after that, he tried to put a knife to my throat. He didn’t think I noticed him hiding in the bushes, but I did. I always do. I remember how horrible he smelled, like spoiled onions. I wasn’t wearing my gloves. He died fast.”
“Did anyone find the body? I didn’t see anything that year.”
The corner of Stella’s mouth turned up. “They don’t always find the bodies, Pip.”
I thought of Leo Signorelli somewhere at the bottom of Harmon Reservoir in his BMW.
“I won’t do it again, though,” Stella said emphatically, attempting to steady her hands again.
“We’ll find another way.” I said the words before, and I meant them, but I had no idea how I could make good on such a promise.
I went back to the Jeep and bent, inspecting the undercarriage. Then I circled around. Aside from several fresh scratches, I found no damage. I stared at the torn trail behind us, two long gouges in the earth where our tires left their mark. Stella was looking back down our path, too, but she was watching the road, the cars roaring past. The last one, a blue station wagon.
“Where are we going, Jack? We can’t stay here. They’ll be coming soon.”
“Carmel, California,” I said. “I found Cammie Brotherton.”
I told her what Dunk told me.
“We’ll need a new car.”
9
I can’t tell if it says 803 or 303 Windmore,” Fogel said, frowning down at the topmost page of motel stationery she swiped from the room at the Chestnut. After rubbing a pencil gingerly over the page, she was able to read a hastily scrawled address and a single word, sort of.
The Nokia mobile phone was pressed to her ear, Stack on the other end of the call.
Stack said, “But the rest—the word Charter?, with a question mark at the end, you’re sure on that?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“I know that word. I’ve heard it or seen it somewhere before.”
“Where?”
Stack went silent for a second. “I’ll call you right back.”
The line went dead.
She was in the parking lot of a small strip mall at the edge of Fallon. The Nokia battery died, so she picked up a cigarette adapter at Radio Shack, then called Stack. The notepad was a long shot. She couldn’t be sure that was Thatch’s room, and even if it was, there’s no way to be sure he wrote on the pad. The address might have been written by a guest (and she used the term loosely for that place), months ago, maybe even longer.
The lead detective at the Chestnut wanted to hold her, but he had no reason and after twenty minutes of badgering, she left with Officer Jun and retrieved her car from the parking lot of Mike’s Gentlemen’s Club. She had been told to leave town, Old West style. Apparently they still did that in Nevada.
Officer Jun no doubt received instructions to follow her. He was parked two cars over in the same lot, making no effort to hide. Fogel waved at him.
Ten minutes passed before the Nokia chirped.
Fogel hit the answer button.
“I’ve got nothing on Windmore, but the word Charter, I figured out where I’d seen it. Remember Calvin Gurney?”
Fogel’s head still hurt, but she felt the gears beginning to turn. “1978?”
“Yeah. The only victim identified that year. One of the three guys they found in the house where the Nettletons were squatting. The last record of employment for him was as a janitor for an outfit called Charter Pharmaceuticals outside of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Chadds Ford’s about four and a half hours from Pittsburgh.”
“No streets called Windmore nearby?”
“I don’t see anything on the map, but I can keep working on it. I’ll dig up what I can on Charter Pharmaceuticals, too.”
Fogel rubbed at her temples. “I could catch a flight and be there by tonight.”
“That’s a long shot. Might be better to stay around there—head back to the strip club and try and pick him up if he goes back,” Stack suggested.
“He’s done around here. I think he got what he came for.”
“The girl?”
“Yeah.”
“You see her? What’s she like?”
Fogel wasn’t quite sure how to describe what she saw last night. She finally settled on a single word. “Dangerous.”
“That seems about right.”
Fogel looked back over at Officer Jun. This time, he waved. “I’ll call you when I land.”
10
David’s eyes snapped open.
His mouth was dry.
“You were dreaming,” Latrese Oliver said from the seat beside him.
He closed his eyes again and leaned back into the seat. The rumble of the private jet was usually soothing, but he couldn’t get comfortable. He preferred these trips without her, but she had insisted. She always insisted when it involved that girl.
“How much further?”
“A few more hours before we land, then another hour by car.”
“And she’s still there?”
“Yes, and we’ve confirmed Stella is on her way with the boy. All together, nice and neat,” Oliver said. Her breath stunk almost as bad as that damn arm of hers.
He did smile at the thought of seeing Stella again. It had been far too long.
11
Sixty miles outside of Fallon, I turned left off Interstate 580 and took the South Lake Tahoe ramp toward Minden. “Do you have any cash?”
Stella looked up from my copy of Great Expectations. She had been reading it for the past hour. “I have $2,463.00.”
“On you?”
“Under a stone back in Fallon.”
My heart sank.
“Of course, on me, Jack. I don’t trust banks, and stones aren’t much better.”
Her spirits had improved, but her skin had managed to grow even more pale. Although the air conditioning in the car was blowing at full, her temples glistened with a thin sheen of sweat. The shaking had come and gone. I pretended not to notice, but she caught me looking down at her hands more than once.
“I’ve got about sixteen hundred, I think. I withdrew all I could last night. If we trade in the Jeep and use about half the cash, we should be able to get something decent.”
“Or we could just steal a car and keep our money.”
“We’re not stealing a car.”
“Okay, we borrow a car and return it at a future date, to be determined, at a location of our choosing,” Stella said, her gaze falling back to the book.
“I’m pretty sure that’s still stealing.”
“I’m not suggesting we borrow a nice car. It can be a clunker, something that won’t be missed.”
“A nice car is more likely to be insured.”
“Settled, then. A nice car it is. Perhaps a BMW.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Stella marked her place in the book with her thumb and closed the cover. “I’d prefer never to set foot in a place like the one where you found me, but for a girl on the run, options for earning an income are limited. I’ve learned the value of a dollar. I fully understand how difficult it is to earn a dollar, and when it comes to vehicles, I prefer to stick with the ones purchased by someone else’s dollars, particularly when they are so readily available.”
“So you steal?”
“Now that I think about it, I do believe I prefer the term ‘borrow.’ I never should have said ‘steal.’ Stealing is wrong. Borrowing is neighborly, friendly. Like when you say you’d like to borrow a cup of sugar, which you then use and are unable to return, but still, everyone wears a smile. Moving forward, I will only ‘borrow’ cars.”
The exit ramp dropped us on 395, and the town of Minden popped up around us. Not much of a town at all. Most of the buildings stood only one or two stories. A large num
ber appeared vacant. Minden looked like an old mining town that managed to claw its way into the twentieth century but was now living on life support.
“A place like this, I don’t think you could borrow or steal a car without getting caught. We need a big parking lot, someplace where nobody will see us,” I said, studying both sides of the street.
“You’ve clearly never borrowed a car before. Pull in there—” she said, gesturing toward one of the largest buildings in town.
“A hospital?”
I swung a quick left and slowed as we followed the pavement over a quick dip, then into the parking lot surrounding the building. About a quarter of the spaces were occupied. More than I would have expected, for such a small town.
“Doctors and nurses work extremely long shifts, sometimes days at a time. A borrowed car may go unnoticed for nearly half a week. Plus, you said you wanted a nice car.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“There!” She pointed at a small area off the main lot marked Staff Only, blocked by a gated arm. “Park here somewhere, in the visitor’s section. It will be some time before someone finds it among the visitors.”
I pulled into a space at the back against a hedge row between a large pickup truck (green) and a beat up Winnebago (tan and brown). The employee lot was about fifty feet away, kitty-corner.
“Gather our things. I’ll find something,” Stella said, unfastening her belt.
“Are you sure you’re okay to—”
She was out the door and halfway to the lot before I could finish my sentence. There was a slight wobble in her step, but she steadied herself as she went.
What’s the longest you’ve ever gone…between?
A year and two days.
Today was August 9—a year plus one.
I pulled my backpack and Stella’s duffle bag from the back seat and set them next to the Jeep. The book Stella was reading, too. I placed the stolen shotgun behind the bags in case someone drove close enough to see what I was doing. Circling around to the passenger seat, I popped open the glove box. An empty bottle of Jim Beam rolled out and dropped to the floorboards. Without thought, more of a reflex, I picked it up, twisted off the cap, and held it over my mouth, hoping for a least a drop. Nothing dripped out, though. When I realized what I was doing, I cast the bottle into the bushes, thankful to be alone.