The man in the corner sees Michael watching him and freezes.
Michael instinctively scratches his neck.
The man nods and moves away.
To the foreman, Michael says, “Can you tell us anything important? Did you tell any of the other guys anything you haven’t told us?”
He chews on a slice of pizza and squints at Michael, his hand still on his throat. His eyes grow large and he recoils a little.
Craig looks at the foreman and back at Michael. “What?” he says.
“Nothing,” says the foreman but averts his eyes from Michael. Talking directly to Craig he says, “I got nothing else to say. We appreciate the pizza, but I got nothin’ more to tell you about that missing truck.”
Back in the car, Craig says, “He’s hiding something.”
“I don’t think so,” says Michael.
“So what do you think?”
“That this trail is damn cold.”
“But Roy said it’s big money. If we solve it, we split the reward with him.”
Michael laughs.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s usually an eighty-twenty split.”
“So what? He’s my brother-in-law. He’s being generous. You look after your own.”
“Eighty for the boots,” he says and then seeing the blank look in Craig’s eyes adds, “The investigator gets eighty percent, the office twenty. Sometimes fifteen. At worse twenty-five. I give fifteen.”
“Well,” he says a little sheepishly, “It’s all still good. You’re old. This is my first case.”
“You have any others?”
“I’m supposed to go to Idaho. Write up a report on some fire.”
Michael smirks. “But your car broke down.”
“Yeah, threw a rod. When do you think we’ll be back in Vegas? I’d like to get it.”
“You don’t like hanging out with me?”
For an answer, Craig rolls down his window and lets the cigarette smoke flow out.
At the motel room, Michael gets Craig’s complete files and goes over the Ross Shipping GPS more carefully.
Craig watches TV and complains. “This is a crap motel. There’s gotta be a better place we can stay.”
“I’m sure there is,” Michael says pouring three fingers of whiskey over ice. “Welcome to my world.”
“I’m going to find a gym.” Craig turns off the TV. “You wanna come?”
Michael raises his drink to his lips and drains the glass. “I’m good,” he says and pours another.
Craig grabs a room key and leaves.
Michael reads the files and soon finds what he is looking for; Isaac Lowe’s employment contract.
It’s typical, no surprises, which is the surprise. Isaac Lowe was a truck driver. He got paid by the mile. He got nothing, not even a tiny lunch stipend to wait around. Isaac Lowe was either a Zen spirit of acceptance, or something else was happening. Michael’s experience with truckers made him wonder at the foreman’s description of him as “normal” under the circumstances. Isaac was hung out to dry, spending half a week on his ass while shipper and transport company bickered over a three-hundred-dollar check.
He finds an email message from Lowe’s cell phone company. The phone’s last signal came about the same time as the last GPS check and from a tower in North Las Vegas. The phone had either run out of juice then, had its sim card removed, or was otherwise destroyed. Those were the only options to shut it down completely.
Another two fingers of bourbon and an L&M and he’s staring out the window. He stares into the afternoon streets looking for dancing women with plum skin and raging eyes. The hole in his chest is calling and he drinks it closed in sips.
“Hey, Mike. We’re not going to blow the whole day, are we?”
Michael rolls over and blinks. Craig McCallister is dressed in fresh clothes and sitting on the edge of his bed.
“What time is it?”
“Ten,” he says.
“It’ll wait until tomorrow.”
“Ten in the morning.”
No one slipped him a Mickey this time. But still his time slipped away. He tries to recall his dreams but tastes only ashes on his tongue.
“Sorry. Yeah. Right. I’ll get ready. Get me some coffee.”
In an hour, the two are eating pancakes in a diner in downtown Ely.
“You gotta quit your drinking,” says Craig.
“Really? You’re going to start that?”
“Clean living. How can you feel good living like you do?”
“I don’t have a ’roid contact, McCallister. I deal with what I have.”
“I don’t take steroids.”
“And I don’t drink.”
Craig stares at him, hurt in his eyes.
Michael sips his third cup of over-sweet coffee and contemplates the virtues of maple versus blueberry syrup.
“So he absolutely didn’t have to pull over at that rest stop,” Craig says, pulling himself together. “He came close to his max on the trip to Reno and back for the laser, but he had to stay overnight in Ely at a truck stop while those guys got their act together. He could probably have driven straight to Phoenix if he wanted to.”
Michael’s phone rings. He digs it out of his pocket and sees Carla’s number on the screen. He looks at his dining companion and weighs the two conversations before taking the call.
“Hi Carla,” he says.
Craig shovels an egg into his mouth.
“Michael I can’t deal with Tiffany.”
“I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”
“She’s like you.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It’s a terrible thing. She won’t listen to me. She does whatever she wants regardless of the consequences.”
Michael doesn’t think that description fits him at all, but he doesn’t feel obliged to argue.
“What’s happening, Carla?”
“She’s not going to school. She’s failing her classes. She’s hanging out with the wrong people and making a mess of her life.”
“Like me?” He can’t help himself.
“Like you,” she says without hesitation.
Michael has noticed that the more time and distance between his ex-wife and himself, the more Carla places the fault with him for their divorce, never missing an opportunity to cast him as the villain when it was she who left him for greener pastures.
“Tiffany has no respect for me or herself,” Carla tells him.
“How’s Peter?”
“Peter’s great. He’s zipping ahead in pre-law. He’ll intern for Warren next year. He takes after me. Tiffany, that’s the problem.”
“Did you get the money I sent you?”
“What? Oh that. Yeah, I got it. Don’t change the subject. Tiffany is a terror.”
“How’s the new house?”
“Can you please pay attention? God, you’re as bad as she is.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to talk to her.”
Michael laughs.
“What so funny?”
“You think I have any sway over Tiffany? Who do you think I am?”
“I think you’re her goddam father, that’s who. Tell her to mind me.”
“And you think that’ll do it?”
“She is hanging around bad people. I think she’s doing drugs. I know she’s failing school and she dresses like a prostitute.”
“Every teenage girl dresses like a prostitute,” Michael says. “It’s a requirement.”
“With leather and spikes?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“You’re worthless.” The line goes dead. Michael puts his phone back in his pocket and goes for blueberry.
McCallister stares into his plate of eggs like he’s scrying the future in their yolks.
“Sorry about that,” Michael says.
“Sounds like you got family trouble.”
“Ex-family.”
�
��Divorced?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry man. Family is important.”
“If you say so.”
“You don’t think it is?”
“I did my part.”
“Your kids are raised?”
“I passed on my DNA.”
Craig’s cheeks pinch up like he’s going to spit.
Michael ignores him and eats his pancakes wondering how good they’d taste if he quit smoking.
Craig says, “Kids need a father.”
“If it’s the right kind of father, maybe. The best thing I can do for them is leave them alone. They don’t need my problems. They’ll get their own.”
“Then you could have benefited from them.”
Michael tries the maple syrup next, with more butter. He rolls the concoction around his tongue, against his teeth and palate, savoring the sweetness.
Craig waves his fork and says, “It’s about belonging to something greater than yourself. It’s a comfort knowing someone’s there for you.”
“Like someone has my back?”
“Exactly.”
“You make it sound like a gang.”
Craig scratches his tan bald head and nods. “Yeah, sure. Why not? I read somewhere that kids join gangs to replace families they lost. You leaving your kids could send them the wrong way. By the sound of it, Tiffany is already headed there. Did I hear something about drugs?”
Michael narrows his eyes. Craig has overstepped the line by using his daughter’s name. Michael’s cold stare should make this clear, but he doesn’t get his point across.
Craig, says, “I had a friend who did a lot of drugs in high school—pot, mushrooms, LSD. Stuff like that. Years later he’s still having flashbacks—hallucinations and terrors he planted in his brain twenty years before.”
“It’s not about drugs,” Michael says. “My ex wants me to intervene with our daughter to get her to connect more with her.”
“So intervene. Family is where it’s at. It’s about people, see? Groups. Churches are like families. They look out for each other and together do the Good Work. Together. That’s the key. Being part of a group is being part of something bigger than yourself. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And if you’re doing God’s will, it’s a thousand-fold blessings.”
Michael peels back the foil on a single serving strawberry jam tub and scrapes it out with a butter knife. He spreads it on a pancake and tastes it approvingly. He considers Craig McCallister: all pith and no substance. He would laugh at him for lecturing him about losing family if the sweet pancake wasn’t so good.
“You need family,” says Craig. “You need something. You need to belong. Find your tribe. Make peace with God. Until you do, you’re a lost man.”
Chapter Seven
“Isaac Lowe has a wife and a daughter in Appaloosa, Texas—closer to Albuquerque than Austin. He’s been married eight years to a middle-school secretary named Maria. Their daughter is seven and named Gabriela.” Craig reads the names like they hold secret significance.
Michael brings the car up to eighty-five miles-per-hour and switches on the cruise control.
They’re on their way to Reno.
“I think there’s a good chance that Mr. Lowe is in on the theft,” says Craig. “There was some funny business a while back.”
Craig describes the previous hijacking in enthusiastic detail.
Michael tunes him out and lets his mind wander across the stark, lifeless landscape.
He thinks of his daughter and remembers her as a baby and a toddler. He’d been out of her life so long, seen her so infrequently in the last eight years, that the girl his ex-wife describes to him might as well have been that girl in Alturas.
He flinches at the recollection.
Alturas, California. It’s been years since he’s thought about that night. He’s driven it from his memory like a beast from the door. Even now as the image returns he sees himself in the third person, a character in a distant drama.
Her name was Esmerelda. Why does he remember that now? She was in that low-rent beer bar on Spruce Street. Wrong side of the freeway. The town on the wrong side of civilization. He knew what she was by the way she clung to him, complimented him, flashed him her bra when her third button miraculously came undone. Dark eyes. Pupils lost in the irises in the dim light of the bar. Workmen rolled in like tumbleweeds stinking of sweat and drinking beer from cans. Esmerelda took him to her table and he bought her a beer in a glass and she was thrilled.
They didn’t stay there long. They weren’t noticed. It was that kind of bar.
He’d meant to sleep in his car that night and hadn’t arranged a room, but of course she had. The Shady Day Inn, Alturas, California. The name is still in his memory.
“The thing of it was. They didn’t take the truck. They didn’t strip it or anything. Not even the stereo was messed with,” says Craig. “Now, maybe the guys who snatched it didn’t know what to do with the truck but then again, maybe they did.”
The Shady Day Inn. Hourly rates. Room 115. He remembers the room number.
The Mercedes’ old air conditioning catches on his sweat and sends a chill across his skin.
It was frenzied and clumsy. He wasn’t in practice and a little drunk. Maybe she’d slipped something into his drink, speed or a hallucinogen. That, or he was in a place where reality automatically receded, fueled by hormones, loneliness, and desire.
He hadn’t seen the needle marks up her arms the first go round. He’d barely noticed her face, so eager was he to consummate. In the afterglow, he remembered making her promises to go again in a little while, to give her an orgasm. He could do it, he said. Promises to a whore. She cooed and curled up with him in the pillows until sleep slipped over them both.
He tried again later. He started slower and lasted longer. He recalls his inept attempt at tenderness, kissing her neck and breasts, seeing the tracks then. The line of bruised freckles up and down her arms looked like bloody footsteps on an alpine trail.
How old had she been? Twenty-one? Old enough to drink? Or sixteen, old enough to fake it? As old as his daughter is now?
Her breasts were small, youthful and firm. She had a scar at her waist that she tried to hide, a fresh red slash from childbirth that he never asked about.
The desert flies past his window. He feels faint. He isn’t breathing. He’s traveling over a mile a minute and he’s forgotten to breathe. He inhales and glances at Craig.
“He wouldn’t be the first guy to rob his own truck,” Craig says out the window.
Michael makes himself breathe.
When he’d climaxed again and poured out apologies to her for again failing to meet her needs, she’d laughed and told him not to worry. He was sweet, she’d said. She liked it, she said. It was hard for her to get off. She had a monkey on her back and that was where the fun was. Did he mind if she went ahead and shot up? Of course he didn’t. It relieved him of responsibility. Already the sordid scene was sour, the excitement of the one night stand become sleazy and untoward in the greasy afterglow of failed coitus.
He watched her heat the spoon over a Zippo, and in the flame, he saw dancing angels, bright and terrible. She drew the fluid up the needle and then stabbed it into her arm.
“Can you lend me a couple of bucks?” she asked him as the dream came over her. “A girl’s gotta keep on getting on.”
“Of course,” he said.
“You want some?”
“No thanks,” he said.
She fell backward on the bed. Naked and splayed, the tourniquet hanging limply around her bicep, her eyes rolled up in her head. He smelled the sex and touched her scar and then her breasts and then her slender neck. He felt her heart throbbing beneath his fingers, felt it pulsate, stutter, and stop.
He watched her chest and waited for her next breath to fill it. It did not come.
“Could have been a bunch of kids looking for parts to build knock off X-Boxes. I read about that somewhere,�
� said Craig. “They buy cases from Tijuana and then put minimum parts in and sell them on eBay under false names.”
Michael gasps. He’s dizzy. He’s not breathing again. He straightens the car. He forces himself to inhale, hold, and exhale. To breathe.
Craig runs with his theory like he is solving a four-year-old cold case.
Michael can’t escape Alturas.
Room 115 of the Shady Day Inn fell into horrible silence. Michael watched Esmerelda on the bed and with each moment in the silent room, a clamor rose in his head.
He grabbed his clothes and pulled his pants on. He caught himself in his fly. He bled. The pain was excruciating, but he held the scream.
“I’ll go get help,” he said to no one from the door. He remembers looking at her then, one foot outside on the sidewalk, the other on the dingy carpet. Caught in limbo. He stared at her chest, willing it to move, to draw air back into her still body. He tells himself now, as he did then, that he saw it rise, shallow but distinct. She was alive when he left her. This is something he tells himself, but he knows he is lying.
He did not go to the manager’s room for help. He did not call an ambulance, the police, or a priest. He got in his car and drove away.
Ninety miles east of Alturas, somewhere in the Nevada desert, he pulled to the side of the road and leaned his seat back to sleep. In the bundle of clothes, he’d grabbed from the room, wrapped in his shirt, he found Esmerelda’s panties.
He held them for a while, turning them over in his fingers, staring at them. In the lightless car, the pink cloth was rendered gray, the red hearts black as pitch. The lavender perfume, once intoxicating, was lifeless and funereal.
He carried her panties into the desert a half dozen paces from the car. With his bare hands, he dug a grave in the packed sand and dropped the last of her inside it. He covered the hole, stamped it flat, and swept it with brush. Only then, when the grave was filled and hidden, did he return to his car and sleep.
“Smart money is still on the driver, but it’s good to have alternative theories. Nothing was ever proved before, and there were some smart people looking at it then. You have to think outside of the box.”
“Is it killing someone if you don’t save them?” Michael says, his inner monologue spilling out his mouth.
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