“Look,” I added quickly, “you know how people get ...” I had already accumulated around nine hundred bucks, thanks to Dead Jennifer. When it came to missing persons, pretty chicks were almost as lucrative as blond children. A couple more and I would have a good chunk of my Bally’s Visa paid off, and I could go back to playing craps for real Cover my odds instead of rolling naked. “There’s a big difference between what they say when they think everything is off the cuff as opposed to, you know, all official.” I made a Who-likes-that-crap?face for emphasis.
“Well ...”
I grinned and waved dismissively. “Don’t worry, Caleb. We’re keeping close track of who gave us what. It’ll be all returned.” I turned to prod some expression of affirmation from Molls. “Even the nickels and dimes.”
Nolen laughed at that. I think an excuse to laugh it off was all he really wanted.
I steered the conversation back to what mattered and away from the dope on my breath and the dough stuffed in my pocket by asking him how things went with Jill and Eddie Morrow. I couldn’t resist a you-people grin at Molly when he pulled out his notebook. I could have hung silver dollars from his forehead, his frown lines were so deep. Pressing the thing flat like a Gideon on the table, he gave me the rundown on his interview, responding to each of my successive questions with what seemed more and more anxiety. He was one of those guys who became more nervous the more he heard the sound of his own voice. Molly watched with the look of patient boredom women often get while waiting for men to confirm their mutual intelligence.
“So neither of them said anything about Eddie going out after dropping Jill off?” This was a rhetorical question: Nolen had already told me that he interviewed the two together, and I had gathered enough from my short conversation with Jill to know this was something both would be keen to paper over with silence. This is the glue that holds most relationships together: things unspoken and wilfully overlooked.
“No ... I mean, yeah, that’s right. You mentioned something about that, didn’t you?”
Do you see why I feel like I’ve been stranded in a life skills class for the developmentally challenged? Don’t laugh. The whole world rides the short bus, you included.
“Letme look into it,” I said.
Okay, just because I score large with the ladies doesn’t mean I understand them. They always seem to come at me sideways. Here I think we’re taking a pleasant stroll in the park heading toward soft pillows and cool sheets and suddenly, click—
I’m standing on a land mine.
Nolen beat an awkward retreat partway through our dinner. Neither of us said much—just munched in that silent too-much-fun-in-the-sun way. It seemed a joke, driving the car across the street to the motel. It happened too fast for me to pick up on any telltale signs. In all honesty, I was doing cartwheels of joy inside, the way she simply followed me to my door after we got out of the Vee-Dub.
Naked time, I thought as I ushered her in. I could almost feel the soft skin of her ass.
“Us?” she cried the instant the door clicked shut. “Us?”
The thing about carnal fantasies, I find anyway, is their stickiness. Typical daydreams wink into nothingness at the first sign of trouble. Spike them with the promise of sex and they get as hard to flick as boogers or gum.
So I could only stare at her, trying to blink her clothes back on. Fawk.
“Don’t play stupid, Disciple. You’re not stupid.”
That was when I realized she was talking about my collection scam.
“Well, technically, you are standing next to me when they break open their wallets.”
Now I know you know exactly the kind of bewildered gaze she shot me, either because you’ve weathered it a thousand times, like I have, or because you’ve looked it just as many.
“Are you a sociopath, Disciple? Are you a fucking lunatic?”
“No, babe. Just stupid.”
“Ah!” she cried. “Fucking aaaah!”
“Molly ... C’mon.”
But she was laughing to herself—rarely a good sign. “You know, Disciple, I fucking knew this would happen. I glanced at you on my way in and said to myself, ‘Now that guy, Molly my girl, is bad fucking news.’”
I was actually relieved to hear this, vain prick that I am. Here all along I’d worried she had said “Eew” because of my age.
“Well there you go,” I said with a grin. “News is news. You had no choice but to cover me ... “
The shadow of a smile.
“This routine of yours actually work?”
I tugged her closer by the hands. Maybe I could turn this around after
all.
“Only on intelligent, sensitive, highly educated nymphomaniacs.”
“Nymphomaniacs?”she cried. “Is that word even, like, legal anymore?”
She laughed aloud this time, and I really thought I had clinched things—I really did. But she abruptly pushed back against my chest, backed away looking down, shaking her head with four fingers held to her forehead.
“No ...” she said, her eyes fluttering. “No. I’m not going to let you charm your way into my pants. This is serious, Disciple. I have a fucking career I’m trying to build here. A fucking career! And not to mention poor fucking Jennifer Bonjour! But does Disciple Manning give a shit? Noooo. Apparently Disciple thinks—”
She was on one of those finding-her-way-back-to-her-anger rolls. I remember it all word for word, of course, but I suspect you’ve pretty much heard the whole thing before. The important thing, the crucial thing, was that she had mentioned Dead Jennifer, who had become, without me realizing it, a trigger of some kind.
And a strange one.
You know that feeling you have when you’re fighting with your husband or your wife, that aimless disgust which seems to blanket the world corner to corner? It has no bottom, believe me.
“The whole thing is a murderous con!”Mandy Bonjour cried.
“And if you suspect us,”Xenophon Baars said, “you will waste time and resources investigating us, time and resources that I fear Jennifer Bonjour desperately needs.”
“We’regoingto do this, aren’t we?”Caleb Nolen asked around a mouthful of potato chips. “We’re going to save this girl. ”
There was too much crosstalk for me to recognize, let alone solve, the problem fuming before me. “I have some Xanax,” I heard myself say, not so much as an insult but because I knew that was where I was headed.
She glared at me in horror.
(“You want some Xanax? You could probably use it more than I could.”)
She stormed out, leaving my door swinging, then slammed the door to her room (which was immediately adjacent) so hard that the goofy floral prints hanging on my wall rattled. I thought that was uncalled for.
“Drama queen!” I bellowed. But all I could hear through the wall was her TV cranking out the theme song to Jeopardy.
Can you believe that? Fucking Jeopardy ...
Women like that make me happy to be banging my secretary.
Now I know her sociopath comment has got you thinking. My army therapist used to tell me I have nothing to worry about, that unlike true sociopaths I actually have the neural machinery for “social emotions,” as the eggheads like to call them: guilt, shame, compassion—all that bullshit. The only way I can explain it is this: think of your worst long- term relationship, the way it just got to a point where you just couldn’t feel anymore, the crap was piled so high. Well, that’s pretty much how I feel all the bloody time.
Burnt out, not emotionless.
But still, I worry sometimes. It seems to me that even though I’m not a sociopath per se, I am kind of one, you know, for all practical and romantic purposes. I mean, when I think about all those people forking over their cash to help the Bonjours hire me to find their dead daughter when they had, like, already hired me, I know I should feel guilty ... But then I think about Vegas and hookers and Jimmy Beam and I smile.
Circus Circus, baby. Where the cheapskates go to win.
/>
Perhaps I am a kind of “as if” sociopath, pretty much indistinguishable from the real deal—except, of course, for the odd times when all that unfelt remorse comes crashing back in and I try to kill myself.
I continued mentally arguing with Molly as I drove into downtown Ruddick, looking this way and that for the bar, Legends, where Dead Jennifer was last seen alive. I pretty much kicked her verbal ass—same as you, I always win the fights in my head. I was about to land the argumentative death blow, some comment about her mother (whom I knew nothing about), when I sighted the joint on the corner of Talbot and Ross. Chapped paint. Covered windows. Half the sign’s neon had died, so that LEG S was all that glowed.
All in all, it struck me as my kind of place. Like school in July: no class.
A smart-ass-opath, I decided. That’s what I am. Fawk.
This is something I do quite often, pretend that I’m working a case when I’m actually looking for a way to get blotto. I’m a huge fan of booze, always have been, always will be, simply because I’m not a big fan of feelings.
Feelings fuck you up.
The irony, of course, is that booze turns you into an emotional slob. Drinking generally points you in the right direction—good times, baby—but things always turn, and like any rock tossed skyward, you end landing in the same dirt. Only harder.
So why do it? Why go toe-to-toe with the law of psychological gravity? Why hide in a bottle when that’s where the floodlights are certain to find you?
I could just as easily ask why you waste your money on lottery tickets. The laws of probability are just as ironclad, pretty much.
But you never know, do you? You could be a winner. I drink for the exact same reason. Someday I might find that perfect bottle of Jack or Johnnie or CC and blast myself into orbit. Good times forever.
That, and because it’s less addictive than crack.
So there I was, Legends, pretending to be working the case, wanting to get wasted, scoping the dance floor for poon. The place was gloomy in that bricked-in way. It smelled like an old houseboat, dank, like the underwear you peel from the bottom of the hamper. An asthmatic’s nightmare.
I had expected as much, but I had also expected to see a fair number of people, freshly showered and showing off the latest rural fashions. John Deere caps and bling and leather jackets—that kind of shit. What I had forgotten was that this was a weeknight in a small town. Christ, the place was as dead as Jennifer.
So I kind of stood there like an idiot—the way everyone does when they wander into an empty restaurant or bar. I stood there and blinked at the gloom, and felt kind of sorry for myself ... for being alone in a lonely place, I suppose.
Lights flashed across a mostly bare dance floor. Two dolled-up fat- bottoms swayed to the ponderous beat, their eyes clicking across various upward angles, anywhere they could avoid the gazes of the shadowy men who sat hunched here and there through the darkness. There were no shouts, no squeals or laughter. Just a living room filled with nervous strangers.
The last place Jennifer was seen alive.
And the perfect place to get drunk, I decided. Normally, when you get drunk alone, you want your surroundings to be noisy enough that you can at least pretend to be “partying.” Put enough losers in a pile and soon you have a heap of winners—such is the human contradiction. But the pathetic ambience of the place resonated with my hard-done-by mood. Legends had become Exhibit A, if not in the disappearance of Jennifer Bonjour then in how the world was out to get me.
I ambled toward a stool at the bar. I’m something of a talker, if you haven’t noticed, and I had an overriding need to pepper someone (I didn’t really care who, though a sense of humour would help) with various cynical observations, mostly about how everyone is so full of shit. You know, play the Philosopher Dick.
Of course, the whole time I would tell myself that I was working the bartender or whoever it was for information. But really, deep down, I was just trying to look smart—distinguish myself from the run-of-the- mill losers who get drunk alone on weeknights.
Then I heard: “Disciple! Hey! How’s it hanging, man?”
It was Tim Dutchysen, or, as he liked to be called, Dutchie. I had walked by his table without even noticing him.
“Same as always,” I said. “Nine parts bullshit, one part air freshener.”
Maybe I would accomplish something after all.
I joined him at his table, where he’d been sitting alone. He claimed to be waiting for some friends—just finished his shift at the Kwik-Pik, he said—but I didn’t believe him. Unlike me, he hadn’t come here to get drunk alone, he had come hoping to bump into somebody, anybody to fill the verbal void of another night alone. He would keep an eye out for chicks, of course, but I could tell he had encountered too much rejection to take search-and-inseminate missions all that seriously anymore. Besides, my guess was he had learned to make do with internet porn. The chicks were hotter.
He asked me about the fundraising and the state of the investigation. I quizzed him about the Framers, using a What-the-fuck-is-up-with-that tone to cover the systematic nature of my questions. He did little more than parrot several of their more outrageous claims—refracted through the lens of rumour—in the funny singsong voice people use to report the other, offending half of an argument: you know, the “and then she said, ‘mew-mew-mew-mew-mew’” bullshit, where people use mocking tones to make others look stupid.
“We laugh at them, sure,” he said. “Hard not to. The Reverend says they’re a sign.”
“Sign? Like for handicap parking?”
He had a strange laugh, like his sense of humour had never developed past the age of five. In a bizarre way it actually made me feel, well ... protective.
“No-no! A sign, you know, for the end of days—Armageddon.”
I found this boggling. A religion using an end-of-the-world cult as proof the world was about to end? The World Court really needed to start prosecuting crimes against irony.
“Has anyone from your church tried to convert them?”
I had a hard time keeping a straight face asking that one. Baars may have been crazy as a shithouse rat, but I could see him giving Tim’s reverend the intellectual equivalent of a body-cavity search. Then saying something like, “So sorry, my friend, but there’s nothing up your ass but more ass.”
Tim shrugged. “Not us. No use talking to crazies. But they used to recruit all the time, handing out flyers and whatnot. Apparently there were quite a few arguments ...” He trailed off to take a long drink. He had that look people get when talking about something they’re not sure they should be talking about, not because they’ve been told to keep it quiet, but because they’ve suddenly realized they’ve never heard anyone else discussing the matter. Nothing quite so spontaneous as small-town conspiracies. “Then the Reverend went out to visit that Baars guy and they agreed to, you know, split the difference. They agreed to leave us alone, Ruddick alone, and we agreed not to burn their Compound to the fucking ground ... ”
I took a moment to absorb what he had said. He was still young enough to marble his talk with kick-ass bravado, so I chalked the burning comment up to that. The idea of a gang war between a cult and a church was just too rich.
“I was still in high school back then,” Tim nervously added. “So this is all, you know, hear-talk ... or whatever it’s called.”
“Hearsay,” I said.
I drank three beers, all the while pining for whisky. I really didn’t think that hard about what was said, knowing that I could sift through it all afterward anyway. Wasn’t in the mood.
Besides, the kid was starting to reek of dead ends. I meet a lot of mouthpieces in my line of work, people who desperately want to contribute and yet have nothing whatsoever to add. It pays to be able to identify them early, otherwise they suck the time right out of you.
“You should come out to the barbecue day after tomorrow,” he said. “Really.”
“Church, huh?”
He gri
nned, as if unconsciously sensing my rekindled interest. “Yeah. Our annual pig roast.”
I crinkled my nose.
“Not a church guy, huh?”
This is always a touchy question, no matter who happens to be asking it. It could be a little old lady with a baby’s daft smile and you could find yourself wiping spit off your face in seconds flat. One wrong word is all it takes. So all I said was, “Nope.”
“C’mon. You gotta believe in something.” The implication being, of course, that everybody believed in something, which meant that most everybody believed wrong, given that everybody believed so many contradictory things. But I wasn’t about to say as much. I said something worse instead ...
“Too easy to be fooled.”
“How do you mean?”
I shrugged, took a long draw on my Bud. “A guy pulls a gun in a convenience store,” I said. “What is he?”
Tim jerked his head back like a turkey. “What?”
“Play along with me for a sec. A guy pulls a gun in a convenience store. What is he?”
A big, gum-revealing grin. Tim was one of those kids who was so gratified to be included in whatever that he was pretty much game for whatever.
“A robber,” he said. “What else?”
“Yeah, but he’s got a badge.”
Tim laughed as if he had suddenly seized the entire point. “Okay. So he’s a cop.”
“There’s a Brinks truck parked out front.”
Now he frowned. “So he’s a security guard?”
“Yeah, but there’s two men in their underwear bound and gagged in the back of the Brinks truck.”
He rolled his eyes in what I had already pegged as a characteristic Tim expression. “He is a robber, then! Like I said.”
I raised my shoulders, shot him a look of heavy-lidded skepticism. “Yeah, but there’s a camera crew next to the canned goods, filming him.”
Now the kid was thoroughly perplexed. “So he’s an actor?”
“But what about the News 7 van parked behind the Brinks truck?”
“Then I was right in the first place! He’s a robber!”
“Yeah, but he has a beard, and he’s wearing a vest stuffed with explosives.”
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