Terrific.
Of course, I had a pretty good hunch what this caller had said. But if the answer was, indeed, Oakwood, it would mean that things were starting to fall together.
Mrs. Merker put beer and crackers on top of a newspaper pile and began wandering the living room, peering at the white edges of various newspaper stacks. “I scribbled it down someplace, so I could tell Gary when he called. He calls me every couple of days. He don’t get home much, but he cares about his mother. I hope you call your mother regular.”
I smiled sadly to myself. “I would if I could,” I said. “But I’m in touch with my dad more these days.”
Mrs. Merker scoffed at that. “Gary’s fucking father, I hope the son of a bitch is dead someplace and has been for a long time. He was a no-good cocksucking bast-Hang on, here it is, I think.” She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “Yeah, this friend phoned and said to tell Gary that cunt was in Oakwood.”
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“I guess he lives down that way, saw her picture in the paper, remembered Gary was looking for her.”
“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Guess I made this trip here for nothing. I was going to pass on the same information.”
“No harm done,” she said, taking a seat on the small clear spot on the couch. She pointed to the television. “That crickets they’re eating?”
I looked. “Maybe.” She cackled. I asked, “So what’s Gary been looking for Candace for, anyway? He kind of got a thing for her?”
She let out a laugh. “Ha! I don’t think he’ll be dipping his dick in that pussy!”
“Then why does he want to find her?”
“Well, if some bitch stole something from you, wouldn’t you want it back?” She looked at me like I was some sort of an idiot.
“So that’s why he wants to find her?” I said. “Because she stole something? Not because, I don’t know, for revenge?”
“Revenge?” The old woman cocked her head at an odd angle. “I suppose. If you stole something from me, I guess I’d want revenge. That what you gettin’ at?”
“I was just thinking back to that time. When Gary’s three friends got shot.”
“Oh, that,” she said, and waved dismissively. “He got over that. Only real friend Gary’s ever had is that retard Leo.” She turned her attention to the TV, where contestants were working up the nerve to swallow tiny wiggling things. “For fifty thousand dollars, I’d put anything in my mouth,” she said, and laughed.
She barely noticed as I slipped out the front door and walked down the sidewalk to Cherry’s truck. I felt, in some small measure, slightly relieved about what I’d learned.
“Well?” Cherry said as I pulled the door shut.
“Someone, some old friend of Merker’s, called his mom, told her to tell her son that this woman he’d been looking for, that her picture had turned up in the newspaper in Oakwood. So he knew where she was, where to look for her. And, I’m just guessing here, he ran into Martin Benson by mistake, and ended up killing him, maybe trying to get some info out of him about Trixie, or Candace, or whoever the hell she really is.”
Cherry waved his hand impatiently. “I don’t mean that shit,” he said. “Is the hole still in the wall?”
I paused. “Yes,” I said.
Cherry banged his fist on the steering wheel and let out a whoop. “Fucking awesome,” he said.
23
I got myself a cheap room at a Holiday Inn clone, dumped my bag in the room, and wandered down the hall to the vending machine. I bought a Coke, a bag of Doritos, and a Milky Way. In any given week, I might succumb and treat myself to one trashy snack, but splurging on all three at once seemed to be evidence that I was feeling sorry for myself.
I watched the news without taking in what any of the stories were about, then Letterman without laughing at any of the jokes, then turned off the light and tried to get to sleep. I tossed and turned and punched the pillow. I don’t sleep well when there’s not someone in the bed next to me, and at two in the morning I felt overwhelmed with the notion that there might be a lot of nights like this in my future.
I had too much time to think, and worry, about a great many things.
First, Sarah. I could only hope that by finding out the truth behind this mess I’d been dragged into, and by trying to take control of the situation instead of letting it control me, I might somehow redeem myself.
Then there was Trixie. My quest to find out just what kind of trouble she was in, and what had led her to this point, was motivated by more than a desire to help out a friend. I needed to know, for myself, what the hell I’d been dragged into. And if uncovering that truth brought some aggravation and inconvenience to Trixie, well, if it happened, it happened.
And then there was me. Well, I guess it was already about me. About me and Sarah, about me and the kids, about me and Trixie, about me and my job. As I lay there in the hotel bed, staring at the ceiling, turning to the side and watching the luminous numbers of the digital clock work their way to 3:00 a.m., I hoped that maybe these events, and perhaps the story that city health inspector Brian Sandler detailed for me, would help me win my way back into the newsroom, and liberate Sarah from Home!
I couldn’t have known then I’d be happy just to come out of all this with my life.
I woke up at eight-thirty. For me, that’s sleeping in. I had a quick shower, dressed, and went to the hotel lobby for breakfast. They’d laid on Special K and Frosted Flakes in sealed, single-serving plastic bowls, muffins, doughnuts, Danishes, coffee and tea. It was self-serve and all-you-can-eat, and a family of four was taking full advantage, stuffing cereal and pastries into bags for the road ahead.
Once in the car, I got out my map and double-checked how I was going to reach Groverton. There was a yellow wooden pencil in the tray between the seats, and I used it like a pointer, tracing the route I would take.
It was a long shot, of course. All I had was a gas receipt leading me there. But it was the best, and only real clue I had. Groverton was farther away than I’d first realized-two hours, and still heading in the direction away from home.
I didn’t have much of a game plan for when I reached my destination. I figured I could find the gas station where Trixie got her receipt, but beyond that, I couldn’t think of much to do but drive around looking for my car, the one Trixie had fled in. Perhaps, once I got there, other opportunities would present themselves.
As I drove, tuning in Trixie’s eight-speaker stereo to a jazz station-my friendship with Lawrence Jones had expanded my musical tastes in the last couple of years-that was playing some Stan Getz, Oscar Peterson, and Diana Krall, I tried to sort out the things I had learned in the last day.
Trixie, if she was the person I’d been hearing about named Candace, or Candy, certainly had a colorful background. She’d come to work at the Kickstart, fallen in love with a man named Swain, who ended up plastered onto the front of a locomotive. She’d had a child. She’d disappeared after three members of the Slots motorcycle gang were murdered at the Kickstart. And the surviving gang leader, Gary Merker, trying to earn a bit of cash selling presumably stolen stun guns, had been putting the word out, for years, that if anyone ever saw her, they were to let his mother know, so that she could pass the message on. And shortly after that happened, Martin Benson was found dead in Trixie’s basement dungeon, with two telltale marks on his body indicating that he’d been shot with a stun gun before he’d had his throat slit.
And Merker’s charming mother had said that the reason her son wanted to find this Candace so badly was because she’d taken something from him. Something that he wanted to take back from her.
I had a hunch that Merker wanted more from Candace than just something she’d stolen from him. He wanted to take from her the memories of what had transpired the night of that massacre, her memories of what she’d witnessed. And I was guessing Merker would have a permanent way of dealing with a witness.
There’d been that little vo
ice in the back of my mind, wondering whether Trixie might have played any role in the deaths of Merker’s gang associates, but his mother’s responses seemed to suggest otherwise. Gary seemed to have moved on with his life pretty quickly after the tragedy. “He got over that,” Mrs. Merker had said.
The highway to Groverton was two-lane all the way, and between all my ruminating and the music, the trip went quickly. I passed through some gently rolling hills the last twenty miles or so, and the outskirts of Groverton were marked by a lumber store and, across the street, a tractor dealership. There wasn’t much to get excited about once I passed the Welcome to Groverton sign advertising a population of 4,500-maybe twice the size of the closest town to my father’s fishing camp north, and west, of here. There were enough locals to justify two grocery stores, half a dozen convenience stores, another lumber operation on the other side of town, and a main street with three traffic lights and about ten blocks of businesses.
It didn’t take long to find Sammi’s Gas Station, a block past the center of town. Eight self-serve pumps, five do-it-yourself car-wash bays, and a kiosk just big enough to hold a cashier, a counter, and a rack displaying candy bars, chips, and pine-scented car deodorizers.
The car needed gas, so I pulled up to the pump and popped the fuel lid by pulling on a lever on the floor by the front seat. There was a label on the lid advising me to use the high-octane stuff, so I hit the button for super unleaded, shoved the pump into the car, and squeezed the handle.
Rather than pay by credit card at the pump, I went into the kiosk when I was done and handed the short, dark-skinned, East Indian-looking man at the computerized cash register my credit card.
“How you doing?” I said.
He nodded as he swiped my card through the reader. “You want anything else? Some snacks? I have got the chips and candy bar.”
I passed. I’d had my fill of junk at the hotel. “I wonder if you could help me, though,” I said. “Do you recognize this car I’m driving?”
The man peered out the window at it. “That is a nice car,” he said. “Very expensive, I am betting, yes?”
“It was in here a few days ago, but there would have been someone else driving it. A woman.” I took the Suburban clipping from my jacket pocket, unfolded it, and showed it to the man.
The man shrugged. “We get many people, mostly from around here, but some passing through too, so I don’t know. She is very pretty, though. This woman, she is your wife?”
“No, she’s not, but yes, she is pretty. Do you recognize her at all?”
He shook his head. “No. I am so sorry. I do not.”
“Or the car? I bet you don’t get that many cars like that one.”
“Oh, it is a nice car,” he said again. “You don’t see many like that around here. Most people, they drive pickups or four-times-four. That car, it is no good in snow, right?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never driven it in the winter. So did you see the car here last week?”
“What day was it?” I handed him the receipt I’d found in the car. He glanced at it. “This was Thursday. See?” He pointed to the numbers at the top of the receipt indicating the date. That would have been the day before Martin Benson was killed. It would have meant Trixie had driven up here probably just for the day, maybe driven back the morning of the day Benson had his throat slit.
“Thursday, I do not work, also Wednesday,” the attendant said. “That is my weekend, but then, on the real weekend, I work both of those days, the Saturday and the Sunday. I am here from eight in the morning until eight at night. It is a long day. At least I do not get robbed, not like my cousin, who runs a gas station in the city. He’s a surgeon.”
“Who would have been here on Thursday?”
“Well, Hector, he would have been here. He is here most days of the Monday to Friday. He is over there, in the car-wash bays, getting the change out of the machines. He might have noticed something. He is always looking for, you know, what he calls it, the snatch.”
“Yes, well,” I said. “If he’s always looking for that, then yes, he might have noticed this woman.”
The man beamed, glad to be helpful. “I have to stay here, but you go find him.”
Hector, a tall, fat, bearded man who looked like he’d be more at home on a pirate ship than maintaining a car-wash bay, had opened a locked panel on the self-serve car-wash controls and was dumping quarters into a plastic pail. Before he noticed I was there, I saw him grab a small handful of quarters and slip them into his pants pocket.
“Excuse me, Hector?”
I nearly gave him a heart attack. He whirled around, saw me, put his hand to his mouth and coughed nervously. “What?”
“Are you Hector?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess. Sure. What can I do for you?” He turned so that I couldn’t see his pocket bulging with coins.
“The fellow at the cash register said you might be able to help.”
Hector rolled his eyes, as if his fellow employee was always fobbing things off on him. “Yeah, what is it?”
“I’m trying to find someone who was in here for gas recently.”
“Oh yeah?” Hector, taking a few steps in my direction, had figured by now that maybe I didn’t care about his skimming a few quarters off the top. He’d come close enough to the front of the bay to see the pumps, and I pointed to Trixie’s car.
“She would have been driving that vehicle,” I said. “On Thursday. I have a picture.” I handed him the clipping.
Hector held on to the paper as if it allowed him to touch Trixie directly. “Whoa, no wonder you’re looking for her,” he said, leering. Then he wiped the expression from his face and said, “She’s not your wife, is she?”
“No.”
He smiled and relaxed. “I didn’t want you to think I’d be speaking disrespectfully of your lady or something. But since she’s not your wife, I gotta tell ya, that’s a fine piece of ass.”
There was a bit of a whiff coming off Hector, and I suspected his involvement with members of the opposite sex was limited to discussing them as lecherously as possible, with other men.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “That’s for sure. Nice-looking lady. Why do you think I’m looking for her?”
Hector grinned. “I hear ya. She was driving that car?”
“That’s right.”
“So, like, how come you’re driving it now?”
“Long story,” I said, but decided I could give it a smutty twist to keep Hector interested. “Let’s just say she was happy to provide a few services for the chance to borrow it from me for a while.”
Hector snorted. He pointed to a rusty pickup beyond the kiosk. “I don’t suppose she’d like to borrow that for a weekend?” He laughed, then added, “Fuck, she could keep it!”
Now we were both a couple of dirty guys having a good laugh.
“So, do you remember seeing her?” I asked, trying to keep things on track.
“Sure, I remember. Don’t see a lot of girls like that around here, you know? Be hard to forget her. Black leather coat, these black high-heeled boots. Instant boner material, you know what I’m talking about?” He looked at me to see if I really did know what he was talking about. I nodded. “She pulled in, pumped the gas herself. I’d of been more than happy to do the pumping myself, if you get my drift.” Another grin.
I forced another smile onto my face. “You talk to her at all, notice anything? She have anyone in the car with her?”
“Didn’t see no one. And I didn’t talk to her, neither. She just filled up, was all. I like a girl pumps her own gas.”
“How about when she left? Which way did she drive out?” If she’d been heading back to Oakwood at this point, she’d have probably gone left, or west. If she’d turned right, and gone east, it was anybody’s guess where she’d gone.
Hector thought back. “Actually, she just pulled out and parked across the street and I think she went into that store over there.” He pointed to a children’s clo
thing store with a sign over the window that said Terri’s. First, Sammi’s, then Terri’s. The town had a y shortage.
“Did you see her leave after that, notice which way she went?”
Hector shrugged. “It’s not like I hung around to see where she’d go. I’m not like some sort of perv or something.”
“No,” I said. “Who’d ever think such a thing?”
I thanked Hector, moved my car so it wasn’t blocking the pumps, and found a parking spot on the main street. I walked back down to Terri’s, surveyed the display window featuring clothes and brightly colored, chunky-looking plastic toys for youngsters. A bell tinkled as I opened the door to go inside, and I browsed the tables until a woman in her mid-thirties with reddish-blonde hair approached.
“May I help you?” Her voice was soft, almost whispery.
“Hi,” I said. I’d never done much of the clothes shopping for Sarah and Paul-didn’t even do that much for myself, not without a lot of arm twisting. And my kids certainly weren’t of an age anymore where anything in this store would fit them. “Uh, a friend of mine, he and his wife have just had a baby, and I was thinking I should get them a little something.”
“We have infant clothing at the back of the store. Did they have a girl or a boy?”
“Uh, they had…” Come on, you dumb bastard. Just pick one. “A boy.”
She led me to the back of the shop. “I think this is the place someone recommended to me,” I said. “I have a friend who shops here for her daughter, I think.”
The woman cocked her head. She smiled playfully. “You don’t sound too sure. Are you not sure whether she has a daughter, or are you not sure whether it’s her daughter, or not sure that she shops here?”
“Where little kids are concerned,” I said, “the only thing I’m really sure about is that I don’t want any more. Our kids are pretty grown up now, and while the little years were wonderful, they’re the sort of thing you only want to do once, right?”
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