by E. R. Brown
“It’s nearly six.” To my questioning look, she added, “Dad thinks I’m at Mom’s, and Mom’s not there, but Mrs. Warren next door is on duty. She’s Mom’s second set of eyeballs. I’d better get back. ”
Shivering, I hunted for clothes. My shirt was rolled into a makeshift pillow. In the car, a sock was half under a floor mat. Underpants puddled around the base of the stickshift.
On the drive to her mother’s, Rachel wrapped herself in the blanket and leaned against the passenger door, quiet and introspective, rubbing a knuckle over her lips. She’s tired, I thought, and worried about what the neighbour will tell her mother.
“Don’t sweat about the old bat next door, you’ll be on your own in a couple of weeks,” I reassured her.
She didn’t respond.
“Got plans for the day?”
“I’m tired.”
“I’ve got to get the convertible back, swap it for the truck, and get my clothes and stuff out of there.” I clapped my right hand on her leg. “This is it for me and the House.”
She pulled away. “It’s easy money, and he gives you wheels.” She turned her head to face me. “And, don’t you have a run to do?”
“No, I’m done. I’ll drop off the truck and tell him. I hope he’s cool with it, but if I have to I’ll just disappear. Stay in the tree house maybe, patch things up with Beth and move to town for school. He doesn’t know anything about me. He’ll never find me.”
“You’re afraid of him?” She frowned.
“No.” She didn’t need to know. And I wasn’t afraid of him, I was afraid of the rest of it, Bullard and his bikers. And the police, in a different way.
“Why don’t you just dump the truck and forget about a few clothes? If he can’t find you, what’s he going to do?”
It’s funny how I couldn’t even contemplate that. I couldn’t do it to Randle — despite everything, it wasn’t the right way to end things. Without Randle I’d still be hiding behind a counter pulling cappuccinos.
“It wouldn’t be fair. It’s ending badly, but —” I paused. “I’ll tell you later, but I don’t want to piss him off. I don’t want him looking for me — I mean yes, I could just walk away, but I don’t want that, I want it to end like friends, with a handshake.”
“Don’t turn. Drop me off here.”
Where the nosy old lady couldn’t see. I leaned over for a kiss, and she pulled back.
“My breath is gross.”
“Pick you up at Five Star?”
She shook her head. “I quit too. I was going to tell you,” she said and slid out. “Later.”
I felt a tingle down my neck as she strode, stiff and pensive, across the lawn to the squat little apartment building where her mother lived.
Chapter 21
I parked the Speedster in the garage beside the green pickup, and made a quick check into the second garage for Maddie’s car. There was no Beetle, which meant one less person to contend with. I doubted that Randle had let her in on his scheme, whatever it was, that included the Washington bikers and the big cheese from California, but excluded Bullard.
I found my skateboard, tossed in among a pile of lumber scraps in the second garage, beside an old realtor’s For Sale sign. For weeks I’d been asking about it, and there it was.
In the great room, the skunky reek of last night’s pot hung sour and bitter and unwashed glasses were on every flat surface, along with dishes with bits of cheese and shrimp and who knows what. Upstairs, Randle’s room was shut tight. With the sound of my own blood pounding in my ears, I got to work.
With swift, silent fingertips, I rolled my things in a tight bundle, stripped the bedsheets and folded my towels, stacking everything neatly. Later in the morning he’d rise and look in the room, and I wanted everything to look normal, like my family woes were over and I’d gone back home, grateful for his hospitality. Not like I was running out, never to be seen again. I thought of writing a thank-you note, but that would be uncharacteristically sucky.
I scoured the space for anything that could give me away — a scrap of paper with a phone number or email address, a letter, a receipt, anything. When I was certain the room was clean, I headed for the garage.
I was on tiptoes, trying to squeaklessly descend the steps from the kitchen to the garage when Randle spotted me. He was on his knees beside the Speedster, bare-legged under an ivory housecoat, inspecting a mud-spattered wheel well. His eyes were a roadmap of red veins and his hair flowed, untied, down his back.
“Two o’clock, I said, not eight.” He picked up a rolled-up newspaper and pushed himself to standing with a wheeze and a grunt. “What’d you do, go off-roading?”
“Puddles, I guess. I was going to take it to a car wash, but the convertible top, you know?”
He bent to pick at the bodywork and a flake of something dried and brown fluttered to the floor.
“How about I hand-wash it this afternoon?”
His downturned lips rippled in grudging acceptance, and his gaze shifted to the roll of clothing under my arm. Time to change the subject. “Going for a run this morning? Weather’s perfect,” I suggested.
“Too late. Sunset, maybe. Truck keys are on the front tire.” He waved the newspaper at the truck. “River Road in Delta.” He named an address.
“Delta? South of Vancouver?”
“You know another one?” He sighed, clearly fed up with me and suspicious of what I’d been up to.
“But I had plans.” I wanted to scream — Delta was two, maybe three hours of driving, and the same again to return. Rachel was right. I should park the truck and walk away.
“Just get the job done. It’s already loaded, the hard work’s been done for you.” He pulled his hair into a ponytail and slipped it through an elastic. “Good worker, that Chinese chick of yours. No tits, but cute.”
I’m sure I was gaping. I had no idea what to say.
“Rachel something? Love the tats and metalwork, that urban-Asian thing. You were dead to the world yesterday, so she subbed. If you trust her, I trust her, right?” He smiled — it was almost a smirk — clearly enjoying my reaction.
“Right.” I blurted, flustered, as I frantically tried to adjust my exit plans to this new reality.
He crossed his arms and leaned toward me with a confident nod. “In this business you’ve got to know who you’re dealing with.” He turned, and threw the next line over his shoulder. “That’s why I brought you in, because I trust your mother. Now get out of here.”
I geared up to speed on Highway 1 westbound, then changed my mind and headed back to Heritage Properties.
I understood what he meant, and the threat. He knew my mother, he knew Rachel. He knew everything about me. Whatever escape plans I thought I’d had, forget them. I worked for House of Dreams until he decided otherwise, in which case he had my replacement ready to go. A cute one who could suddenly afford a new tattoo.
Pop’s house shook when I slammed the front door. “Anybody home? Beth? Bree?”
There was a thump and the sound of running and Bree launched herself at me, enveloping me in a full-contact bear hug. I hugged her in return. It felt like she’d grown since I left. If I needed help with a biker, she was one to call on. Yes, Beth was back in Wallace, she said, but no, she wasn’t home, she was out shopping. Not working at the greenhouse.
I sat Bree down and told her I was going into hiding, real hiding this time, with no telltale power cord and no lights at night. I might be in the tree house, or not, she wouldn’t know and was definitely not going to go up and check.
She got up and paced, her arms cocooned against her chest. I knew that posture and I did my best to bring her down, to calm the panic. I’d put the rest of the details in a note to Beth instead.
In the note I told Beth that she’d be glad to hear I was getting out of the business, and that she should go stay with her agent Eleanor for a while, taking Bree with her. It would only take a day or two to know whether there’d be any problem, but lying lo
w was a good idea. I sealed it in an envelope and handed it to Bree, hinting that she and Beth might even be able to help me move into an apartment near my new school. She seemed more confused than ever, but accepted the note and left me to shower and pack.
My pocket money was just about tapped out, and desperately short if I had to disappear for a week or more. Everything in the tree house had been removed and laundered into credit unions and trust companies in careful, low-profile increments. The only way to make some quick cash was to hit up the bank of Lucas.
The truck was crammed with garbage bags of weed, loosely tied and sloppily packed in true Maureen-of-the-chai-lattes fashion. With a cooking scale that dated back to Pop’s housekeeper I opened the fattest bag and weighed out a couple of generous baggies of dope. Then I opened a few more bags and shifted handfuls from one to the other to average out the shortage. I packed a duffel with clothes and hugged Bree goodbye, then drove up to the tree house and tossed it inside. I kept my skateboard — without a truck I’d be back on the little wheels soon.
“Dude,” Lucas boomed out a little too heartily. “Let me pull you a macchiato.”
“A macchiato? You’ve been training?” I asked, as Lucas ran the double shot, monitoring the machine’s pressure with new attentiveness.
“You be the judge.” Lucas marked it with foamed milk and slid the cup across the counter.
“Sweet and rich. You even got a rosette in the demitasse.” I nodded my appreciation. “A cup to be proud of.”
Lucas nearly inflated. I raised a palm for the ceremonial high-five.
“Truth, Luke, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
He nodded. “I don’t have you to cover anymore. I had to go for it.”
I looked to the right and to the left and reached inside my shirt. “And as a reward, I have something for you.”
He flushed pink and grabbed the weed, slipping it under the counter in a swift motion.
I explained that the deal we’d had going — occasional baggies of pot that had fallen off a truck somewhere — was over, and this was the last of it, the swan song for the sweet weed. It was his if he could come up with cash on the spot. There was an ATM up the street, I pointed out, or maybe he could finesse a manager’s loan of whatever was in the till.
Lucas was as helpful as ever and within ten minutes I was on my way.
I drove without stopping until I was into the more remote of the city suburbs, well out of Devils territory. At a twelve-pump gas bar, I filled the tank, picked up a map, and bought a new prepaid cellphone, a tiny, cheap thing that I hoped would work, and enough calling cards to last a month.
I spread the map across the truck seat and traced the route to River Road. It skirted the south bank of the Fraser River just as it opens to the Pacific. When I crossed the river, if anyone saw my old cellphone — the company phone — fly out the window and drop into the slow-moving current, what could they do about it?
The map guided me through numbered streets, block after block of low, flat houses on enormous lots, tracking westward a dozen miles north of the ruler-straight 49th parallel. Randle’s business never seemed to stray far from the American border. Dipping and curving with the road, I found myself at sea level, in a mushroom patch of identical industrial and shipping hubs. A storage yard of Audis blurred past, white cling-wrap tight around their body panels, and the road narrowed to two lanes, hugging the riverbank, where moored fishing boats and wood-chip barges swung slowly in the current.
Judging from the street numbers, the address was nearly in sight.
I pulled over and flipped the new phone open and dialled Rachel. She was remote and guarded, but I put the whole relationship thing out of my mind and got to the point. I gave her my new phone number and told her to keep it in her head, not to put it in a speed-dial or write it down.
“Are you all right? You sound strange.”
Across the street, a few digits from the number I sought, yellow machinery trundled back and forth among piles of gravel, rocks, soil, and other landscape supplies.
“It’s a strange day. Yesterday you did a job for my ex-boss. Don’t say his name on the phone.”
Yes, she’d been planning to tell me.
“And he paid so much that you were able to quit your shitty job.”
She’d had enough of creepy men asking her for porn. Fine, I said, but she had to get a new phone number, just like I had. She’d need a city number soon enough, so do it today. She refused.
“My ex-boss has your phone number,” I explained. “You don’t want that.”
Further along River Road, a billboard announcing the RIVERRUN INDUSTRIAL PARK, OPENING NEXT SPRING, fronted a cleared flatland where a crew was raising a flat concrete panel.
“What if I want to do another delivery for him? You know what he pays.”
“He found you by going through my phone’s call log. If you don’t change your phone, he’ll find me again by going through yours. Don’t think he’s not going to be looking.”
As she dismissed my paranoia, saying he’d never get her phone in his hands in the first place, I realized that Bree and Beth would have to change their numbers as well.
“Where did he pick you up? Not from your home.” Yes, he’d picked her up at her mom’s. “How about you stay with your dad tonight? Tomorrow’s Monday, phone the university and see if you can move into your dorm early. Tell them there’s a family emergency.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Tate. Just ’cause we — ’cause of last night, you don’t own me. We’re not a couple.”
That shut me up, but I had to keep pushing. “Whatever we are, we’re friends. Right?”
“Yeah.” She sounded tired and maybe fed up with me.
“Go to your dad’s. Please. I’ll meet you there later.”
To the right of the construction site, a potholed drive led to an open steel gate, slung with a rusted chain. The street number was scrawled on a scrap of wood nailed to a tree. Holding the dead phone, I wheeled across the street and into the drive. The phone rang in my hand.
“Tate? It’s me.” Beth. It felt like weeks since I’d heard her voice. Bree must have given her the new number. “Where are you?” she asked. “Bree sounded quite terrified.”
My teeth rattled as a wheel bottomed out in a culvert. The road opened to a gravelled parking lot strewn with carelessly parked semi-trailers.
“I’m all right, Mom.” How did that word slip out? I hadn’t called her Mom since I was six, and we were a happy little nuclear family of four. “It’s not that bad, really. Did you read the note I left for you?”
“Darling, I am sorry I overreacted. It’s not such a monstrous business, and you are my son. Will you come home tonight?” Her voice was almost pleading. “Just stop by for a moment.”
I threaded through the trailers and pulled up to a grey house with a long flat-roofed shed where a garage might normally be. A couple of pickups and a GMC Jimmy were parked in the shed. There was no sign identifying it as a business.
“I will.” I scanned for signs of life in the building. Tattered venetians were shut tight, and though the front door was open a crack, it was dim and gloomy inside.
“I’ll tell you, Tate, directly after we had words, I spoke with Georgina and let her know that I wouldn’t be returning to that work. It was hypocritical of me to say one thing and do another.”
Jeannie knew both Beth and Randle. She probably knew Georgina too. What had I been thinking? It was a small town.
A harsh scrape of metal on metal made me twist my head back to the gate, where a big-bellied guy in dirty black jeans was dragging it closed. Two others had appeared from somewhere, and were heading my way with that distinctive bow-legged biker walk.
“Sorry, Mom, I’ve got to go. Don’t worry, everything’s under control.”
For a fraction of a second, I thought of making a run for it, then I sighed and killed the engine. All three were armed with some kind of small machine gun, Uzis or something, I
don’t know from guns. I switched off the little phone and slipped it deep into my pants, right into the underwear where they’d have to be pervs to look for it, and crossed my hands on top of the steering wheel, way up in plain sight. No tricks. No excuses for one of them to use one of those things.
The driver’s door of the Jimmy opened and Ivan stretched out, all six-six of him. “Every time it’s you. Where the fuck is he, anyway?”
He, too, had a machine gun slung on a shoulder strap, a little square thing, like something from a cop show.
“Randle?”
“Fuck you think?”
He waved to the guards at the gate and unclipped a radio from his belt, the kind that families used on ski slopes to keep track of the kids.
“We good to go?”
The radio sputtered.
“Let’s move.”
He opened the passenger door and slid in beside me. Back in the Jimmy, the guy riding shotgun slid over to the driver’s seat and cranked the engine.
“What you waiting for?” he said.
“Nothing.” The shifter felt warm and sweaty. “Where to?”
The fat guy waited at the open gate and the other two ran for their trucks.
“Wherever he is at.”
I left the lot and turned back in the direction I had come from. In the rear view mirror, the convoy followed.
“I have no idea where Randle is.”
“Then let’s go looking.” Ivan grimaced at the thin seat. “This the best he can do, the money he has?”
“I don’t work for him anymore. This was my last delivery, it was a summer job.”
“Summer job. That is nice. You drive here and there for a little while and then bye-bye, back to school.” He checked the wing mirror. “He goes easy on you, Bullard. You know that? Because you’re a child. So don’t piss him off.”
I cleared my throat. “I really don’t know where Randle lives. He doesn’t tell me anything. He doesn’t tell anybody anything. Ask Skip.”