Fire and Rain

by Katy Munger

  "I'm not going to bullshit you, Casey," he said, as always without a trace of alcohol in his voice. That man could drink any town drunk under the table and never show it. "I know you're at the heart of this, but I don't really care. All I care about is that the girl's home safe with her family and the world is minus three scumbags."

  "I would never shoot anyone in cold blood,” I said, not liking the implication. "Surely you can't…"

  "I don't think you had anything to do with the murders at Lake Lure. But whoever did it, did you a favor. Because your friend Rats? His death has been avenged. Got it? We traced the bullets that killed him to one of the guns on the three dead scumbags and I think it needs to end there. I don't want you chasing after anyone else. I think this time the good guys won and we both need to stop there."

  I nodded. “Rats was a good guy," I tried to explain. "Maybe not very educated. Maybe not very polished. But in his heart of hearts? He loved a lot of people and he took care of the people who loved him back. He did not deserve to die that way."

  "No, he didn't," Bill agreed. He was quiet for a moment, looking at me. His face was just a little bit sad. "You know that we found out about the bodies at Lake Lure and made the connection to Rats because of your friend Shep, right? "

  "So now he’s my friend Shep?" I asked.

  "Looks that way to me," Bill said. "Because he did you a very big favor. And that's why I'm going home now. If it were anyone else but Shep, I would not hesitate to do what I really want to do tonight. I know you’ve heard by now that my marriage is over."

  I nodded. "I heard."

  "You and me?” he said. “Our timing has always been terrible. But you do need a good guy or you’re going to go off the rails one time too many and not be able to find your way back.”

  I looked away, remembering what Burly had said to me the last time I had seen him. That I was too stubborn for my own good. That I took too many risks. That I was determined to kill myself one way or another. That it got in the way of everything for the people who loved me.

  “You know what I think?” Bill asked.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I admitted.

  “I think that Shep’s the guy for you. You did not ask for my advice, but there you have it."

  “Why?”

  “Because he seems to be the only one who can love you without being terrified for your safety when you’re out there on your own.”

  His words brought me close to tears. There had been such a long parade of worthless, shiftless, unworthy men who had marched through my life. But Bill and Shep? Not to mention Burly? They really were all good guys, and they had loved me, and I had pretty much screwed it up with every single one of them. But then it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I had turned a corner. That I had finally figured out I deserved better than what I’d been aiming for when I headed straight for the superficial charmers.

  For some reason, I thought of Leon Baptiste, the pimp Rats had warned me against, back when I was young and naive and more than a little desperate. It had been decades ago when Rats told me I deserved better. Maybe it was time I heeded his warning.

  "Don't cry on me now," Bill told me. "I know I have that effect on women when I turn them down."

  I rolled my eyes. "Seriously?" I asked him. "Seriously?"

  He smiled, then bent over and kissed the top of my head. “Twenty three skidoo, kiddo,” he said and was gone.

  I stared into my drink and knew that I had nothing to complain about. What had happened in that cabin in the mountains would never be known, nor would any part of my actions in it become official record. Bill was giving me a gift. Now he was trying to give me another. I also knew that people often do not occupy the role in our lives that we want them to, and I was old enough now to understand that just to have good people in your life, in whatever capacity, was enough. I needed to appreciate what I had.

  "Want another?" The bartender was standing in front of me, eyeing my empty glass. "There’s a man at the end of the bar who wants to buy you a drink."

  I did not even bother to see what the man looked like. "No, I think I'm done," I said. I stood up. "Discretion is the better part of valor."

  I have no idea why I added that last part. But it sounded good—and I like to think that the bartender watched me with admiration as I walked out and left the old Casey behind.

  ●

  A week later, Robert Tinajero called and invited me out to his house. "I want to talk to you," he said. "My wife is down in Florida for a few days and I'd like to talk alone. Candy will be here, but she's been working on some project in her bedroom for the last few days so we should be able to talk in private."

  "That's fine," I said. "I need to discuss something with Candy anyway."

  I’d had to pull the plug, so to speak, on my battered old bathtub Porsche and it had been towed away from the parking lot of the motel in Asheville to an ignominious death in a mountainside junkyard. But my joyless rental car was at least reliable and I reached the Tinajero’s home on time. The house in the middle of nowhere now seemed quieter, neater, and more lived-in than it ever had before. It was as if contentment had re-entered the home.

  He met me at the front door wearing a black tee shirt and blue jeans. He wasn't Firewalker Coombs again, but he also wasn't the nerdy rehabilitation counselor named Robert Tinajero, either. He was someone in between.

  "I need to get something out of the shed," he told me. "Give me a minute and I'll be right back in."

  I thought of all the outer buildings I had noticed on their property. “Is that where you keep your bike?” I asked him. “Isn’t that taking a big risk?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. But it’s pretty much the only risk I have left in my life at this point.” He flashed me a grin. “Wait here, okay? Promise me you won’t leave.”

  "No problem," I told him. As he strode across the yard, I went in search of Candy and found her in a back bedroom in front of a computer, scrutinizing lingerie online.

  "Choosing something frilly to wear during your next kidnapping?" I asked dryly.

  She looked up from the computer, startled to see me. "I'm starting a new business," she said defensively. "I think I've had enough of dancing. I’m going to start a line of lingerie. I’m going to call it ‘Eye Candy.’”

  “Not ‘Little Women?’” I asked.

  “Not enough market. I’ll have sizes for everyone, don’t get me wrong. But I’m setting my sights on a much bigger market. Big women are a dime a dozen in these parts and it seems to me like America just keeps getting fatter.” She looked at me like I ought to know. “If I can make fat women look good and feel good about themselves, I’m going to be a billionaire.”

  "I don't blame you for changing your life,” I told her gently. “You won't get any argument from me."

  “I hate dancing,” she said suddenly. “I hate the men looking at me and grabbing at me. I hate giving them a peek of my pink just to get some grubby cash. Roxy? She likes it. It makes her feel good. It doesn’t make me feel good. Not at all.”

  And that was when I knew, with certainty, who had sent the Tinajero sisters all those threatening letters.

  “You wrote those letters, didn’t you?” I asked, thinking of the vicious threats that had started this entire case. “That’s how the writer knew where you would be. You couldn’t face telling Roxy you wanted out, so you sent those letters hoping your parents would make you stop dancing.”

  She would not meet my eyes. “I didn’t want to look like I didn’t care about Robert Jr.” she said. “Because I do.”

  “Oh, honey,” I told her. “It’s got nothing to do with how much you love your brother. It’s got to do with how much you like yourself. You’ll find another way to help Robert Jr. I know you will.”

  “Yes, I will,” she said defiantly. “You just watch me. All those years shaking my booty? I know what men like. My lingerie is going to sell like hot cakes.”

  “I know it will.” I could sense something differe
nt in Candy, as if the extreme sweetness she had worn for so long had eroded away, exposing someone with a vein of healthy anger underneath. Which reminded me. "Where is Roxy?" I asked.

  "Visiting Rodney in the rehab center. I guess him almost dying caused her to reconsider breaking up with him. As if he doesn't have enough to deal with."

  "He ended up that way trying to save your life," I pointed out.

  "I know that. And I feel guilty enough about it without you reminding me.”

  "I know how you can pay him back," I suggested.

  She shot me a glance that made it plain I was the last person on earth she intended to listen to. I gave her my opinion anyway.

  "Set his sister free," I said. “Put on your little big girl pants and let Frieda know that the two of you will only ever be friends. Stop giving her hope and stop using her whenever you need to know someone loves you. Let her go, so she can find someone who will love her back the way she wants to be loved.”

  I thought she might argue with me, but Candy nodded her head. "I know," she said. "She just makes it so easy to…"

  "…take advantage of her?" I suggested.

  "Look, you don't have to lay it on any thicker. I will have that talk.”

  "Feel free to call if you need any advice on what to say. I have to break hearts all the time.”

  “I just bet you do,” a voice said from behind me. Robert Tinajero was standing in the doorway, his hands held behind his back, concealing something from me. He nodded his head and I followed him out of the room, Candy already back to being hard at work behind me.

  He led me to a den at the back of the house with wide windows that looked out over empty, desolate fields. But there was something calming in the view now and I thought, perhaps, that this was the happiest room in the house. At least I wasn’t in danger of being swallowed by chintz. We sat across from each other in two unremarkable blue armchairs and I waited for him to begin.

  "I have a present for you,” he said, handing over a mound of black leather. I held my breath as I unfolded it to find a weathered leather jacket, then turned it over to see the emblem of a phoenix rising above a wall of flames on the back. It was just my size.

  "Whose was this?” I asked, overwhelmed by too many emotions to count.

  "You don't need to know. Someone I should have saved, but didn’t."

  "Robert Junior's mother?" I guessed.

  He nodded. "You remind me of her a little, before I lost her to drugs. I’ve kept her jacket a long time, remembering her the way she was with me. But now it’s time to let it go. And I think you’ve earned it. I think you understand, more than most people, how much it takes to rise above. To start over again. To keep struggling to the sky even when life brings you down.”

  Tears came to my eyes. To receive a present from someone who understood me meant more than I could say. He was someone who had really gotten me. And he was someone who knew how bittersweet the knowledge of things that would never be could become, at least if you thought about them too much.

  "I don't know what to say,” I said. It was the most amazing gift anyone had ever given me. It meant all the more because it came from someone who got me, but did not judge. I knew then why Robert Tinajero was such a good counselor, why so many lost and broken people came to him and were healed. He truly saw the good in people and the beauty in being flawed.

  "Thank you for not telling the world who I am," he said quietly.

  "You do a lot of good in the world, Robert Tinajero," I said. "May you live to be one hundred and ten years old. At least."

  He laughed. "I don't think I really want to live that long. As much as I appreciate every day I have."

  “Are you going to tell Candy and Roxy the truth about Roxy’s parents?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t do it until my wife agrees and she’s not ready to hear the idea yet. Trust me on that one. I know my Lavonia well.”

  “Where’d you get the last name anyway?” I asked him. “Tinajero? Neither one of you looks Mexican to me. I should have realized it might be a cover.”

  He shrugged his apology. “You can’t tell that kind of thing about a person just by looking these days, anyway. My wife and I chose it together down in Florida a year after we met. We knew if we were going to make it, we needed a clean slate. And I knew that I needed to disappear even more. So we both had our last names changed legally. We used two different state court systems to make the records harder to find. Tinajero is the last name of a family that owns a traveling circus in Mexico. We thought it might throw people off.”

  “It worked. No one but me and your friend Cody Sherrill know who you really are. I plan to keep it that way.”

  He nodded his gratitude. “Cody will, too. He’s my friend. He’s proved that more than once. But I’d steer clear of him just the same if I was you.” His eyes twinkled.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve decided he’s not my type.”

  That was when I got my goodbye kiss after all. And it was definitely Firewalker Coombs who kissed me goodbye that day, not Robert Tinajero.

  I thought about that kiss all the way home, memorizing it, because I knew that I would likely never see him again. And that was okay. He was a man who made very deliberate moral choices, who saw the world for what it was and knew his place in it. He’d found his own peace and a way to make it better. I would never want to disturb that balance. Besides, I was lucky. For one brief, shining moment, I had seen Firewalker Coombs walk through the flames. And what a magnificent sight it had been.

  ●

  The Tiny Dancers would never again return to Raleigh, North Carolina, leaving a whole lot of men left with no other option except to ogle your garden-variety, silicone-enhanced dancing dolls. Bless their hearts. I tried not to weep for the death of their fantasies.

  It wasn’t very hard.

  The truth was, I was not unhappy to leave the land of strip clubs behind. I had seen the magic behind the curtain and it was way too cut-and-dried for me. However, I was not done with The Pink Pussycat yet. I had something I still needed to do, something for my friend Rats.

  That was why, a few weeks after Rats was buried, I slipped inside the club late one Sunday evening when all the world was asleep and only the crickets awake to watch me enter the darkened building. The hallway smelled of disinfectant. I knew it had been thoroughly cleaned by now, any signs of a crime scene erased, and the club prepared for some new buyer to come along. They’d probably renovate, and that was why I was there. I had to act before someone else found it.

  I'd never been able to get that image of Rats coming out of the women's bathroom out of my head. It kept returning to me, again and again, no matter how many days passed, no matter how many other, more distinctive, moments intervened. I could see him in my mind’s eye, just as clearly as the first time I had come to see the Tinajero sisters, the way Rats had looked up at me, a startled expression on his face, then plastered on a fake smile and hurried me down the hall. Then I thought of the rumors about the money laundering Rats had done for the Mob, the anger of the men who’d come to the club on the Saturday morning Candy was kidnapped—and it had all come together for me one night when I was soaking alone in the bathtub, wondering how much I should bill the Tinajeros. It was thinking about money that brought the realization to me. And that was why I was there again.

  Still, I hesitated in the hallway. If it was all wishful thinking, there’d be no harm done. But what if it wasn’t? Would I be strong enough to do the right thing?

  Something small and gray darted past, brushing against my foot. I stifled a scream. I had an issue with rodents, I admit it. I’d never been able to shake off the fact that they outnumber humans by the billions. I swept my flashlight beam across the hallway floor and saw either a large mouse or a small rat—I had no intention of getting close enough to verify which—disappear through a nearby door that had been left ajar. I inched closer. It was the Ladies Room.

  Definitely a rat, I thought to myself. Sammy Templeton h
ad just sent me a sign and I knew then that he was depending on me.

  Although the club was clearly deserted, I was afraid to turn on a light. I would work by the glow of my flashlight. I’d brought two screwdrivers with me and thanked my lucky stars when the Phillips head did the trick. I carefully unscrewed the metal paper towel container bolted onto the wall and lifted it free. It was the only place in the bathroom where Rats could have hidden something. It was either that or the ceiling, and if it was the ceiling? I did not think I could hoist my fat ass up there without bringing the whole building down. Which meant I had to be right.

  I was. The wall behind the paper towel holder turned out to be cheap drywall that had been installed over the original brick of the tobacco warehouse that the building had once been. I tore off the drywall, then took my Swiss army knife out and slipped it between the exposed rows of brick, searching for an open seam. The third brick wobbled and I pried it loose, before easily pulling out three more beside it. Behind the brick was an open square about the size of an old-fashioned breadbox. I pointed my flashlight into the opening, illuminating piles of cold hard cash. Stacks and stacks of what turned out to be $100 bills bundled in neat piles and wrapped with paper bands stretched upward into the darkness.

  I was exalted. It was as if Rats had spoken to me from the grave. Yes, my friend, I thought, I heard you and now here we are.

  Moving quickly, I transferred the money into my knapsack, replaced the bricks and the paper towel holder, and hightailed it out of the club. My heart was racing and I was a good half hour out of town before my pulse slowed to a normal rhythm.

  It was 4:00 AM by the time I found the house outside of Goldsboro where Sammy Templeton’s mother lived. Bobby D. had found the address for me. I sat in my car staring at it. It was a mill house with a couple of haphazard additions tacked on. Rats had grown up in that house. He used to tell me about how he’d even had his own room, though it was a little bigger than a shoebox. But it had been his. That was where he’d read the books that made him smarter than most of his family, the books that had sparked in him an ambition that would not be satisfied until he had his own franchise of gentlemen clubs sprawled across the nation. He hadn’t reached his dream before he met death—but at least he had given it a shot.