Cracked

by Barbra Leslie

  “Hey, Dave,” Darren said, once we were all tucked in to a couple of slices. “Tell us everything you know about Lola and her sister.”

  “And our sister,” I added.

  “After that, can I have a swim?” Dave said. He bit the point of his second slice. “You guys are pretty cool.”

  “After that, you can swim all night if you want,” I said.

  “In your underwear,” Darren added.

  * * *

  That night, I slept like the dead. No dreams, either. And when I woke up, I didn’t want crack. Immediately. I wanted coffee, Advil and Marta’s churros, but crack didn’t occur to me for, oh, about twenty minutes.

  Progress.

  I lay in the semi-darkness, squinting at bright sunlight breaking through a gap in the heavy drapes. I wondered where the twins were, if they had slept last night, how scared they were. I closed my eyes and tried to pray, but my soul didn’t feel clean enough. I could hear Lola’s arm breaking.

  Darren and Dave were both still sound asleep in the next bed, Darren’s arms and legs hanging off the bed, with Dave sprawled across most of it. I wished I had a camera, and a reason to blackmail my brother.

  The night before, Darren and I agreed that one of us would have to call the house in the morning. There might be news about the boys. Besides, no doubt half the police in Southern California would be looking for us, and Darren hadn’t checked in with Skipper and Laurence since yesterday morning. We didn’t know what story Lola would tell the police, the truth or not. Or whether she would have even gone to the police. She might have gotten out of Dodge and gone to some underground crackhead doctor and had her arm and nose set. Her type tends not to like the authorities. In my experience.

  I hoped Lucky’s didn’t have security cameras somewhere. It seemed highly unlikely, given the shady nature of some of the goings on there, so I decided not to dwell. But ballistics would show what kind of gun had killed the bartender, and I didn’t know how long it might take Rosen to crack and tell Miller that he had loaned Darren his trusty sidearm.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I said quietly as I got into the shower. Everything had happened so fast in the last couple of days, and I, at least, had acted on nothing but pure gut instinct. Which was about to get both Darren and me thrown into jail for the rest of our natural lives.

  But we did have more information, courtesy of our new best friend Dave, than we had the day before.

  The motel might not have been much, but the shower was killer. I forgot about everything for a few minutes and let hot water run over my head. There was even shampoo and conditioner. I was almost content, for five full minutes.

  Which lasted until I came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around myself and one in a turban on my head, and saw Darren standing at the desk, looking down at it in horror.

  “The gun,” he said. “The fucking gun. It’s gone.”

  13

  Darren shook Dave awake. “Hey, fuckhead! Wake the fuck up! Where is it?”

  Poor Dave took a second to wake up, even with a crazed former gunman yelling in his face. I couldn’t imagine him getting to work on time with a normal alarm clock.

  “Where is it?” he said, sitting up. “Where’s what, dude?”

  “The gun, Dave, the fucking gun!” Darren was shouting. The clock said it was eight a.m.

  “Darren. Be quiet,” I hissed. Someone in the next room yelling about a gun at eight in the morning tends to alarm the tourists.

  “Where did you put it last,” Dave said. “Look there.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I may have had a touch of the old hysteria.

  Darren, however, didn’t see the humor in the situation. He was rummaging around on the floor, amongst the empty pizza boxes and soda cans that the boys had thoughtlessly left strewn everywhere. Having a sore foot, I had declared myself exempt from clean-up duty. It was there, I was sure. Dave wouldn’t have taken it – if he had, why hadn’t he shot us in our sleep and made off in the Fiat? Or brandished it threateningly if he was a bad guy?

  I helped Darren search, and after a toddle to the bathroom in his boxers – which had seen better days, I could not help noticing – so did Dave. We looked under both beds, even using a helpful little penlight Darren had on his keychain. We looked in the two wastebaskets, and in the pizza boxes, and Dave even shook the soda cans, as if David Blaine had come in during the night and hidden the gun there. We stripped both beds and piled the bedding up in a corner. Darren even looked in the toilet tank.

  “What is this,” I said. “The Godfather?”

  “Danny,” he said. “You are not appreciating the seriousness of this situation.” He was sitting on the bed I had just slept in. Dave’s boxers weren’t the only thing in the room that had seen better days. The mattress, without its cover, looked like the Black Dahlia might have been cut in half there.

  “No, I am. I’m just hysterical,” I said calmly. “This is one of the ways in which it manifests itself.”

  “So what happened to the gun?” Dave said. “Someone must have come in while we were sleeping and took it.” He was pulling on his clothes.

  Darren and I exchanged a look. It seemed like a simple impossibility, but there was no other way around it. We had all seen the gun on the desk when we went to sleep, sometime around midnight, and eight hours later it was no longer in the room, or on any of our persons.

  “At least we all have our tongues,” I said brightly, and wished I hadn’t. Dave looked like he had been punched in the gut.

  “Oh God, I’m sorry, Dave. I’m so sorry,” I said. I sat down on the other bed where he’d sat down abruptly. “I’m just scared. Okay? I’m just scared.”

  “’S’okay,” Dave said. “Hey, Danny. Did you and Dom have a good time? You know… before it happened?” His eyes were bright and wet.

  “I gotta say, Dave, it was one of those great nights,” I said. “We laughed like fucking idiots. We had a ball.” Dave nodded.

  “That’s good,” he said. “I didn’t think he was doing shit again, but I’m glad at least he was having fun.” I nodded and rubbed Dave’s back.

  “We need to get out of here,” Darren said after a minute. “Somebody’s following us. Somebody is fucking with us.”

  “It’s possible that someone saw you running around the parking lot with a gun, and decided to break in here and steal it during the night.” I said. “There are lots of shady characters out there who would love to have a gun that wasn’t registered to them.”

  “That’s true,” Dave said helpfully.

  “Let’s get breakfast,” I said. “I think they have an omelette bar here. What could happen to us at an omelette bar?” The boys nodded. It was irrefutable logic.

  We walked quietly through the motel to the dining room, and I thought about the twins. I knew they were still alive – there was no way they weren’t; I couldn’t think of a single endgame that would involve anyone wanting to kill Ginger’s kids. And I just felt that they were alive. I knew it. But they would be a handful, two pre-teen boys, especially two pre-teen boys who were being taken from their home by someone other than family, immediately after the brutal death of their mother.

  More and more, I thought that Fred and Lola’s sister, this Jeanette woman, had done it all. There was something that didn’t feel right about it, but the pieces fell into place. But the idea of sweet, gentle Fred having anything to do with killing my sister sent a wave of bleak sadness over me. It felt like I wouldn’t be able to breathe much longer.

  Just get the boys away from him, I kept thinking. Get those boys away from Fred and Jeanette, if they have them, and after that, you can smoke crack until your heart explodes.

  The thought was comforting.

  The only other people in the breakfast room were two overweight couples with fanny packs, and an elderly lady, who held onto her table as though there was about to be a 7.6 earthquake any second. Dave opted for only cheese in his omelette, while Darren and I had the works: b
roccoli, onions, jalapenos, whatever mystery meat was going, plus three different kinds of cheese. The appetite, she was back. If I didn’t get back to my old workout/fighting schedule, I was going to start looking like one of those tourists from Kansas. In a blonde wig.

  “Why are you bothering with that thing,” Darren said. “Nobody here knows you.”

  “Obviously someone does,” I said, draining my second cup of coffee. “Unless we weren’t the only people who had guns stolen last night. Maybe we should file a report!”

  Darren ignored me, and declared that he was going to the lobby to call Fred and Ginger’s place. He wanted to get a word in with Rosen. He pulled out his wallet and passed a handful of twenties to me.

  “Go shopping,” he said. “Get yourself a change of clothes. And for Dave too,” he added.

  “Sweet,” Dave said. “Thanks, man.” Darren paused a second, and threw another few twenties down. “Look nice, okay?” We agreed to meet at the pool in an hour, hour and a half tops, and ascertain our next move. Darren even used the word “ascertain.” Which concerned me.

  Dave and I took our time over coffee, not saying much. He was quite restful company. Not overburdened with the need for witty repartee. Trusting. Docile. Willing to go with the flow.

  He made me want to get a dog.

  We wandered into the bright desert sunshine, and walked the short block to the strip. There was a plethora of tacky tourist crap side by side with pricey, funky boutiques. Darren and I spent fifteen minutes or so window shopping, before he lingered for long minutes in front of a shop that sold novelty t-shirts.

  “He, uh, said I could get a new shirt, right?” Dave said, carefully not looking at me.

  “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Take your pick. Beavis and Butthead? Lynyrd Skynyrd?”

  “That one,” Dave said. It was plain white. Nothing on it.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okie dokie.” We went in, and Dave rifled through the rack until he found a medium. It swam on him, but he asked the cashier to put his old one in a bag. He wore the new t-shirt proudly out of the store.

  “You’re a man of contradictions, Dave,” I said.

  “Trying to blend,” he said. I stopped in another store a block away and quickly outfitted myself with some new underwear, a white sleeveless sundress and a pair of white Keds. Comfort was the order of the day, and I was so over the flip-flops I’d stolen from Ginger’s place.

  “We better get back for the meeting,” Dave said, looking at the ratty Timex he wore.

  The meeting. I smiled. “Right you are.” On the way back to the motel, I bought a blue bathing suit, just a basic one-piece. I wanted to swim, and I had a smidge more modesty than Dave about jumping into a public pool in my underwear. Walking back, I thought I understood the phrase “retail therapy” for the first time. I felt close to Ginger, walking these streets. She was watching over me. I could feel it. She would help us find the boys.

  That, or it was just wishful thinking, helped along by drug withdrawal and grief.

  Darren was by the pool, chatting up a female bartender who had set up outside for the afternoon.

  “My compatriots,” he said, in greeting. “Melissa, I would like to introduce my sister, Gretchen, and her husband, Doug.” He stared Dave down, daring him not to get it.

  “Hi!” Dave said, sticking out his hand and speaking loudly. “Doug. Doug… Douglas.”

  “My husband just had a couple of mimosas,” I said to Melissa, shaking her hand. “It’s part of his charm. The Doug Douglas thing, for example.” Melissa laughed uproariously. She didn’t get out much, I was pretty certain. That, or Darren had charmed her halfway out of her panties already. Come to think of it, I was sure it was the latter. “Hey. Bro,” I said to Darren, poking him hard in the back with my fingernail. “I talked to Mom this morning, and I have to fill you in.” I looked at Dave and Melissa, who didn’t look like they had a clue between them. “Will you guys excuse us for two secs?”

  Melissa and Dave were cool, and Darren walked twenty feet away. I didn’t have to say anything.

  “What,” he said. “I was bored.” He was chewing a toothpick. He looked anything but bored. He looked like I’m sure I looked when I was about to do crack, or some other behaviour to distract myself from what was really happening.

  “What’s happening at the house?” I said.

  “I told Rosen that we’d headed up to Oakland following a couple of leads,” Darren said. He waved at Melissa. He even winked. I rolled my eyes so hard my head hurt.

  “Oakland?” I said. “Leads?” I said.

  “Keep the police off our trail for now,” he said. “If they’re looking.”

  “Anybody find Fred? The boys?”

  “Nobody is telling Rosen anything,” he said. “The cops are there, but Miller is conspicuously absent. And French of course is in the hospital.”

  “What? I only hit her once,” I said. Darren looked at me.

  “Didn’t I tell you last night?” he said. “Somebody broke into her house later in the evening and shot her. She’s in intensive care.” I went dizzy for a second. I wanted badly to call Miller. He was probably busy trying to find whoever shot his partner, but as far as I was concerned, the likelihood that it wasn’t related to Ginger and the boys was slim to none.

  “Any messages on the mirror?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Darren answered.

  “We need to head back up there,” I said. “I need to talk to Miller and tell him about Lola and her sister, or whoever she is.”

  “And how are you going to say that you came by that information?” Darren said, looking intently at me. “By breaking her arm and her nose while I shot someone?”

  Good point. “No!” I said. “Dave! We can tell him that Dave told me everything! I went looking for Dave after Dom was killed.”

  “Could work,” Darren said. “But Dave… he needs to be coached.” We looked over at him, both of us wondering what stories he was telling the lovely Melissa about his life as Doug Douglas. I sighed.

  “Got anything better to do on the drive back?” I asked.

  * * *

  We decided to give ourselves twenty minutes for a quick dip. As we were about to have Dave lie for us, we agreed to spend a little time keeping him on side, and a swim was all he’d asked for after we effectively kidnapped him the day before. We’d checked out of the hotel, but I changed into my new bathing suit in the bar restroom, and tried to ignore my pale legs. And the fact that I kind of definitely needed to shave. Whatever. I did laps, Dave did cannonballs into the deep end, and Darren continued to flirt with Melissa.

  I watched how much he was drinking, and realized I would be the one driving back up to Orange County. Me, the sober one. Who knew.

  Dave and I rousted Darren from his barstool perch, bade our farewells to Melissa, and headed for the car. We were all quiet – Darren was recovering from murdering someone yesterday, I assumed, as well as worrying about the twins and having enjoyed a nice spell of daytime drinking. I just wanted crack. I had pushed myself in the pool, trying to forget everything. Dave looked around the parking lot warily as we approached the Fiat.

  There was a vanload of tourists unloading luggage twenty feet away. Four or five little kids were throwing a Frisbee at a scrawny hound who was barking furiously, ecstatic. It was a beautiful, perfect day.

  “You okay there, Dave?” He was even walking differently, as though he thought he was being filmed and wanted to make a good impression.

  He nodded. “Think we can put the top up though?” he asked. “I think I got too much sun.” He did look a bit red, and we had a drive ahead of us.

  “Probably not a bad idea anyway,” Darren said. “Less visible.” He and Dave wrestled with the Fiat’s canvas roof, which turned out to have a large tear along the top.

  “I see you performed a full inspection before purchasing, Darren,” I said.

  “I was in a bit of a rush,” he said. “I’ve never bought a car while ille
gally carrying a firearm before. I might have neglected some of the due diligence on this one.”

  Dave settled himself into the miniscule backseat and we buckled in.

  “So we go back to the house and call Miller?” I said.

  Darren nodded. “I really don’t think Lola would have told anyone,” he started to say, when I heard a noise from the backseat that was unsettlingly familiar. I had heard it the day before just before Lowell the bartender’s head exploded. I turned my head with my eyes half closed, expecting not to still be alive by the time I could look.

  A gun. Sticking through the back of the headrest into Darren’s neck. The sound was the safety being released.

  “Drive, Danny,” Dave said. His voice, the cadence, it was all different. Simple-minded Dave was long gone. “We have somewhere we need to be.”

  And without another word from anyone, I pulled us out of the Days Inn parking lot, and we headed north.

  14

  We cruised out of Palm Springs, all of us silent for a bit. I was glad to be sober, because I knew I needed my faculties about me. Darren was sitting with his shades on, his face absolutely still. He was slouched down, his legs spread, every inch the rock star.

  You’d never know he had a gun held to the back of his neck.

  I looked at Dave in the rear view, trying to meet his eyes. He looked out the front windshield and ignored me. The hand holding the gun was steady. Gone was the simple-minded slacker who hung out at a sleazy tavern and supposedly, at least, worked at a pawn shop. The way he held his body was different, more self-assured and strong. In the space of a few minutes, he no longer looked like you could push him over with your pinky finger. Everything about him was different. I kept thinking of the movie Primal Fear, with Richard Gere and Edward Norton, where you think Norton is a hillbilly simpleton, until he morphs into his real self. A ruthless killer. Dave even looked a bit like Edward Norton.

  I wished I had called Miller last night after all, and told him where we were. I didn’t have to tell him about the bartender. Miller was a straight arrow and he would probably have had to turn us in for any crimes, but dying in the desert before finding the twins and avenging Ginger’s murder didn’t sound like my cup of tea either.