by Roxie Noir
“Garden,” I say, and point at the other one. “Grocery store.”
My mom beams.
After dinner, around nine, we’re drinking my dad’s homemade blackberry wine in tiny hand-blown glasses when my phone rings, and I pull it from the pocket of my jeans.
“Luna,” my dad says, frowning underneath his long gray hair.
It’s Batali. She never calls me about anything but work. Of course.
“I have to take this,” I say, making a face. “Sorry.”
My parents both sigh. Cedar looks entertained.
“She’s lying, she’s gonna go look at Facebook,” Skye says.
I roll my eyes and walk away.
“Rivers,” I say.
“There’s been a very serious crime,” she says, sounding like a policeman in a murder mystery.
“What happened?” I ask.
Batali actually sighs, and I frown. Outward displays of emotion aren’t her thing.
“Someone set fire to two cars on Palms Road, right where it goes under highway one,” she says.
I blink in surprise. That is a serious crime.
“Was anyone hurt?” I ask, my heart speeding up.
“No. How soon can you be at the scene?” she asks.
I look back at my family. Both my parents are looking at me. I feel bad, but there’s been a serious crime.
“Thirty minutes,” I say, and hang up.
The whole underpass smells wretched, like burnt plastic, rubber, and weird chemicals. The fire is out, obviously, and the firemen are packing up their hoses when I get there. Both burnt cars are soaking wet, though.
Getting evidence is going to be a clusterfuck.
Batali’s already there, arms crossed, just surveying the scene, and I walk up to her. This is the first arson I’ve worked as a detective, so I’m glad she’s there.
She walks me up to both cars, careful not to touch anything, and points to the inside.
“See that?” she says, gesturing with the beam of a flashlight.
I nod.
“Looks like the point of ignition was the front seat of the vehicle,” she says. “The cab is pretty much charcoal at this point, and the trunk is pretty well toasted as well.”
“Meaning the engine didn’t catch fire first,” I say.
She nods.
“Meaning this probably wasn’t an accidental fire,” I go on.
“There’s an excellent chance we’re investigating an arson,” Batali says, and points her flashlight at the roof of the car. “The burn pattern here also suggests that someone splashed an accelerant up here. Probably gasoline, that’s the easiest.”
I write down everything. I ask Batali questions, I investigate oddities, and I go over both cars with a fine-toothed comb.
It’s terrible, but I’m excited.
A double arson is by far the biggest case that’s come my way in the last month and a half. Mostly, I’ve been investigating who knocked over a mailbox or stole a twelve-pack of beer from a convenience store.
But finally, something to sink my teeth into. Something I can prove myself with. If I solve this, maybe Sergeant Pushton will stop looking at me like he regrets my promotion.
And as an extra special bonus, it’ll distract me from wondering why the hell Stone kissed me and walked away the other night.
I’m so wrapped up in my work that it’s almost two hours before I realize Chad is there, directing traffic away from the scene. I only realize it because I walk out from under the overpass, trying to see whether the flames were large enough to leave soot on the outside.
“The fire was on the inside,” he calls. “You get lost that easy?”
I don’t bother answering and just look up at the bridge over the road. There’s a little soot, as expected, but nothing to indicate that the fire was bigger than we already thought.
“I’m surprised you stuck around after the firemen left,” he says, waving a car away. “I bet if you’d asked, you could have gotten them to take their shirts off.”
I still don’t answer, and shine my flashlight up at the overpass. It’s always got a couple graffiti tags on it, but there’s something odd.
Most of the spray paint is under the soot, at least as far as I can tell — it’s past midnight, so it’s dark. But way over, almost at the end of the bridge, there’s one symbol in orange that looks like it’s on top of the soot. A dollar sign, inside a circle, inside a triangle. I photograph it.
I’ve seen it before, and I stand there, trying to sort through everything in my brain so I can remember where I saw it. As I’m thinking I look down.
There’s a spray paint can on the ground. I pick it up with one glove and put it in an evidence bag.
“Try not to break a nail and cry,” Chad calls. I look at him for the first time since I walked over here, because that’s just nonsense. I don’t have nails long enough to break. I never have. He’s just shouting shit in the hopes that something pisses me off.
I glance at the symbol on the overpass one more time, and it hits me: the same thing was on Eddie’s gate. I don’t think I’d ever seen it before that.
“Rivers, are you crying?” Chad calls, continuing his stream of dumb bullshit, because I’m obviously not.
“Direct traffic and let the grownups do their jobs,” I call back, walking back toward the scene.
I spend the next morning interviewing the cars’ owners, but it doesn’t turn anything up. They were both visiting friends in the nearby neighborhood, perfectly normal, nice people who are bewildered that their cars were torched. They don’t even know each other.
I’m disappointed, but I remind myself that this is how it goes. You follow leads until something turns up.
The afternoon I spend at my desk, my feet still dangling in my sort-of-fixed chair, going through photos of graffiti until it feels like my eyes might start bleeding. I’m looking through every vandalism photo from the central coast for the past year, looking for that weird symbol, while Batali calls gas stations and asks for surveillance footage, so we can see if anyone filled gas canisters in the area.
Finally, she puts down her phone and looks over at my screen.
“In ancient times, purple dye came only from a certain kind of sea snail and was very hard to get,” she says, looking at a purple graffiti tag on my computer screen. “That’s why it was reserved for royalty.”
“Okay,” I say, assuming that this is going somewhere.
“Fingerprints from that can you found came back,” she says. “Stone Williams. The mechanic from Big Eddie’s.”
I blink, slightly taken aback.
“Really?” I say.
Batali nods. I’m already typing his name into the police records database.
“His prints were also on the paint cans at Big Eddie’s,” Batali says. “I’d prefer for you to do the interview. You seemed to establish a rapport when you spoke with him at the scene.”
That’s one way of putting it, I think. My heart thuds in my chest like someone stomping on a wooden floor.
“Sure, no problem,” I say, trying to sound casual.
I could ask her to do it, but she’s a damn good detective. I’d be confessing within five minutes, and in another five, I’d probably be asking her why he kissed me and then ran away, wanting to know what is wrong with me.
I have a feeling Batali doesn’t really do relationship advice. Best if I interview Stone.
“Thank you, Rivers,” Batali says, and then sits at her own desk.
I wonder if she really thinks Stone was involved. I know I’m not supposed to make guesses without evidence, but he doesn’t seem the vandalism type.
You might think that because he’s hot and you made out with him in a parking lot, I remind myself.
I take a couple of deep breaths, doing my best to act like I’m not suddenly more nervous than a cat near a vacuum cleaner.
The records search doesn’t turn up anything, which isn’t unusual. Plenty of people don’t have criminal records. But I ru
n him through a few more databases — legal records, state employee records, military records — and the only thing those turn up is his fingerprints, taken by our own office on Saturday.
That’s a little weird. Most people have some kind of paper trail. When you work for any level of government, for example — state, local, federal, even the school system — you get fingerprinted. There’s a record of stuff you do, and even though for most people it’s a tedious, boring record, it’s something.
The part of my brain, the one that tells me when stuff is wrong, the part that I shoved into a trunk? That part is talking to me again, pointing out the weird way he tugged on his sleeves when I first talked to him. The way he deflected questions about himself. The way he seems to only go to bars that aren’t in Tortuga.
The way he walked off after kissing me with no explanation whatsoever.
There was lots of kissing, not just peck, I think.
His tongue in my mouth, his hand on my back, gripping me like I had something he needed.
His rock-hard erection, pressed against me. That was a dead giveaway.
Fucking quit it, Rivers, I tell myself.
Googling Stone doesn’t turn up much, either. There are a couple of people with his name, but by the time I untangle him from the others — a dentist in Nova Scotia, a retiree in Yorkshire, a minor-league baseball player in South Carolina, a sixty-something lawyer in Montana — there’s not much there, either.
Actually, there are two somethings. A mention in the local paper as Eddie’s new mechanic, and a thank-you from the Boys’ and Girls’ Club of San Luis Obispo for his $20 donation. Both in the past six months, with nothing at all before that.
This is getting downright mysterious, and suspicion is starting to bubble through my brain.
Well, really, just one big, glaring suspicion.
He’s on the run, I think, staring at my computer screen.
He testified against the mafia, and now he has to hide out here so they don’t get him.
That, or he murdered someone, faked his own death, and started a new life for himself.
It’s all wildly unlikely. I haven’t been a detective all that long, but if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the solution to a mystery is mundane ninety-nine percent of the time.
There’s other possibilities. Maybe he just doesn’t use the internet much. Maybe he’s just got a boring life. It could be anything.
But knowing that doesn’t make the feeling that Stone is definitely, definitely hiding something go away.
9
Stone
I’m elbow-deep in a Volkswagen when a police car drives into Eddie’s and stops right in the middle of the driveway. I glance up at the two uniformed officers getting out, and even as my palms get a little sweaty, I grit my teeth with annoyance.
Just like cops, I think. They think they’re so important they can just park in the middle of the lot and block anyone else trying to come in here. Like other people barely exist.
It’s fine. They’re probably just here with follow-up questions about the vandalism and break-in. Not my problem.
I pull on the broken timing belt and finally get it free, then toss it on the floor next to me. This isn’t looking good: it snapped while the car was driving, and wrecked probably half the engine. I’m not even sure it’ll be worth it to fix on a seven-year-old car.
“Stone,” Eddie calls.
I pop my head around the side of the hood, one hand still in the engine. Both the cops are looking at me with that smug look that only cops seem to have.
“Yes?” I say, even as I get uneasy. It’s never good when cops have that expression on their faces.
“Mind coming down to the station with us?” one asks.
It’s not a real question. That’s never a real question.
“Hold on,” I say, and pull my head back behind the hood of the car where they can’t see me.
I take both hands out of the engine and wipe them slowly on a rag, staring at the car’s engine but not seeing it. I don’t know what they want, but I’m not stupid. I know it’s not good.
Fight, then run, I think.
Every muscle in my body is screaming that one word, fight, but I clench my fists in the rag, take a deep breath, and force it down. They’ve got guns and I’ve got a wrench set. I know who loses here.
Still behind the hood, I roll the sleeves of my coveralls down to my wrists. Even though anything incriminating that was on my arms is pretty much covered up now, cops never need more reasons to be suspicious.
Citizen, I remind myself. The muscles in my jaw flex. You’re a citizen.
“Is there a problem?” I ask, walking around the car. They’re still watching me, still looking smug. I’m nearly twitching with anger, but I think I’m hiding it.
“Just wanted to ask you a few more questions,” the one on the right says.
“Am I under arrest?” I ask.
“No,” says the other cop, but I can tell he means not if you come willingly.
I look at Eddie. Eddie shrugs. I hold my hands out, palms up.
“Let me wash my hands first,” I say, and walk to the shop’s bathroom before they can respond.
Even if they’ve got the upper hand right now, I don’t have to be their bitch.
They don’t handcuff me to the table in the interview room, at least. I lean back in the uncomfortable chair, arms folded, and stare at the one-way mirror in the wall. I know they’re watching.
After the deal went down and I got released from prison, I spent four months moving from hotel to hotel near the Atlanta airport. One of the conditions of my release was that I see a shrink three times a week, and I had nothing else to do but wait, so I went.
I actually still miss Dr. Gibson sometimes. He was an older black man who wore bow ties and cardigans, and spoke with the kind of slow, patient southern accent you see in movies. But he’d also spent ten years in prison. His entire twenties, down the drain.
He got me, is what I’m saying. He warned me about all this shit, that adjusting would be hard, even harder for me than for people released under regular circumstances. He told me I’d backslide, that I’d like criminals better than regular people, that despite knowing what I need to do, it would be hard.
Dr. Gibson didn’t warn me about hot detectives, but no one’s perfect.
He did teach me the trick about counting backward by threes, which is what I’m doing now. Even though I want to flip this table into the mirror and see what fucking questions they ask then, I start at two hundred and four. Two hundred and one. One ninety eight.
I hear voices outside the door. One ninety five. They’re muffled, but it sounds like Luna. The last person I want to see right now.
One ninety two. That’s not true.
She’s the last person I should see.
“—after the staff meeting tomorrow, sure,” she’s saying as she pushes the door open.
In one hand she’s got a thick manila folder, and in the other she’s holding two plastic water bottles. Then she finally turns to me and the door shuts behind her.
We look at each other. I can’t read her face at all, but I think of her against her car for what has to be the millionth time, and my breath catches in my throat. The door shuts.
Fuck, I want to do that again, right now. I want to pull her onto this table. I want to undo the buttons on her professional shirt with my teeth.
I hate that I want that.
“Thanks for coming in,” she says, and puts a bottle of water in front of me.
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” I say.
I regret it almost immediately. She flicks an annoyed look at me, and besides, I’m supposed to be a hardworking mechanic with no record. Not the kind of guy who pisses off cops for no reason.
Luna slides into the chair opposite me and opens the manila folder, taking out a couple of photos. She pushes one across to me, her face still carefully blank.
For one split second, I think of her h
ips moving against mine, and swallow hard.
“There was a double arson on the Palms Road underpass last night,” she starts. “A late-model Nissan and an older Chevy both got torched.”
A fist tightens around my chest. Static fills my ears. It’s them. It’s step two.
They know, I think. They know you’re here, somewhere, and they’re going to keep this up until they find you or you give up.
“Stone,” Luna says, giving me a hard look, her eyes narrowed.
I realize she’s still talking. I raise my eyebrows.
“You recognize either of these?” she asks, pushing photos of the cars in front of me.
I shrug. They’re burnt to hell, and I don’t have Eddie’s photographic memory for cars.
“No,” I say.
“Have you been down Palms Road lately?” she asks.
I stare at her and try to remember where I’ve been. My heart is still pounding, my mind swirling as I try to figure out what to do next. If I should do something.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Where were you last night, around eight-thirty?” she asks.
I was down in San Luis Obispo, helping a guy test the new super-strong shock absorbers in his truck and not asking why he needed them, but I can’t tell her that.
“Home, watching TV,” I answer.
She pushes another photo in front of me, this one of the graffiti on the overpass.
There it is, that dollar sign in a circle. Just like I knew there would be.
“You recognize that?” she asks.
I pretend to examine the photo for longer than I need to, like it’s a secret code that’ll lead me to treasure.
“It’s graffiti,” I shrug.
“That symbol was also on Eddie’s garage,” she points out.
I know, I think.
“Don’t vandals usually tag the same thing over and over?” I ask. I’m trying to sound nonchalant, and I lean back in my chair.
I still don’t know why I’m here, and I’m not about to volunteer anything to a police officer, hot detective or not.
“There are only two instances of this one, actually,” she says, and looks at me again. “You’re sure you don’t know anything about this.”