by Roxie Noir
She left her panties behind. I haven’t touched them. They’re just lying on the floor of my living room like a dead bat.
Good thing I never have company.
I’ve thought about going out and getting laid, but even that doesn’t appeal to me. The effort it would take just to hump some drunk woman missionary-style in a motel bed wouldn’t be worth it.
The Syndicate is burning cars in my town, and I’m a fucking wreck over some girl. Over a goddamn cop. I may as well just chop my own balls off and throw them into the ocean.
Just come for me already, I think. Let me at least take a couple of those fuckers out.
I pour myself another finger of Jim Beam and flip the channel to some infomercial for a frying pan that’s nonstick or some shit. I don’t care. I drink my whiskey and then fall asleep on the uneven futon.
Another day goes by. At 3:55 I lower the lift and take the keys of the car I’ve been working on back into the office, nodding at Eddie, and hang the keys on a hook in the lockbox. Then I fill out my time card.
“Stone,” Eddie says suddenly.
I look up. He’s behind the desk, leaning back in an old chair that used to be white, studying my face. I get the feeling that he’s been studying me this whole time.
“Yes?” I say.
“Is everything all right?”
I fill out 4 p.m. on the “out” line, then initial it. It’s a low-tech office.
“Everything is fine,” I say, and try to smile at him.
Shit, I think. He’s noticed I’ve been off, and now I’m going to get fired.
“You haven’t been yourself lately is all,” he says.
My stomach lurches. This job is the one normal thing I’ve got going right now, the only thing that’s made me feel like a person and not like some kind of animal. I can’t lose it. I can’t.
“Sorry, Eddie,” I say. “I know I’ve been working a little slow lately, I’ll try —”
“No, no,” he says, waving one hand in the air. “Your work is fine, Stone. You just seem down is all.”
I’m not about to explain this all to Eddie, but I know I have to say something, so I take a deep breath.
“I’m going through a rough patch in my personal life,” I say.
I think a character said that on a TV show I was watching last night.
Eddie nods sagely, his short gray pony tail bobbing slightly. He was doing something on the computer, so he’s got reading glasses on, and he looks at me over the rim.
“When I was about your age, I wasn’t doing shit with my life,” he says. “I worked every so often, but mostly I was hitchhiking around the country, getting by doing odd jobs here and there, letting the road take me wherever she wanted. That kind of bullshit.”
I blink, frowning. I can’t imagine that Eddie at all, because the Eddie I know is straight-laced and hard working.
“You look surprised,” he says dryly.
“A little,” I say, leaning back against the wall.
“Anyway, I was over the moon for this girl who lived in Boston. Charlotte. Man, I thought she hung the sun and stars and everything else. We were supposed to meet up in Denver, at this place our friend knew about,” Eddie says. “Then I found out that my father had died.”
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically.
“So I came back here to be the good son for once,” he goes on. “Only to find out that he’d been lying to everyone for years. Up to his eyeballs in debt that my mother didn’t know anything about, no savings whatsoever, and here’s the kicker: he had another family.”
I raise both eyebrows in surprise, because that wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Holy shit,” I say.
Eddie nods. I have no idea where this story is going, but it’s kind of interesting.
“My exact reaction,” he says. “I had to stay here a while, get everything ironed out. Meanwhile, I hear that Charlotte’s taken up with someone else, got too impatient to wait for me. Father’s dead, mother’s destitute, I got half-siblings I don’t know, and my girl’s moved on.”
I stay quiet, waiting for something else even more awful to happen in the story.
“Anyway, at the funeral, this old guy — some friend of my dad’s — comes up, claps me on the shoulder, and says, ‘Son, it’s never as bad as it seems.’”
Eddie holds both hands palms up, leaning back in the chair.
“He was right,” he says. “It felt pretty bad for a while, but I got through it and figured everything out. You will too.”
“Thanks,” I say.
There’s a brief pause in the conversation, and I think, was that the point of the story? I like Eddie, but he has a tendency to tell long, rambling anecdotes with no real ending.
“Come on, say it,” Eddie says. “It’s never as bad as it seems.”
I guess that was it, I think.
“It’s never as bad as it seems,” I say.
It’s pretty fucking bad, I think.
“There you go,” Eddie says, then looks at me over his reading glasses again. “And Stone, I know you’re still new, but you’re a hell of a mechanic. You need help, you can come to me.”
I look at Eddie for a moment before the offer sinks in. I can’t remember the last time someone just said they’d help me without expecting something in return. Hell, it might be never.
Threats about what’ll happen to me if I don’t follow through with something? Warnings about my future? Those have been a dime a dozen my whole life.
Offering help out of the blue is so new it’s strange and foreign.
I swallow, then nod, hoping I don’t look too surprised.
“Thanks, Eddie,” I say.
“Any time,” he says. “Good luck, son.”
That night, I go to the grocery store on my way home, then actually make food. My right hand still looks pretty rough, and it’s a little stiff, but it could be a lot worse.
Not as bad as it seems, I think, and eat my turkey sandwich.
I lied to Luna, but I think I’ve got a pretty good reason, and I can’t see a way around it.
I’d never hurt her. There’s a lot wrong with me, and I know it. I’m not a good person, I’m kind of an asshole, and I don’t have a lot of regard for the law or my own well-being.
But I’d rather cut off a toe than hurt Luna. Ten toes.
I take a sip of Jim Beam to wash down the sandwich. For the first time in days I don’t want to get near-blackout, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want a drink.
Eddie got his shit together, I think. People can change.
There’s mustard on my finger, and I lick it off.
Maybe I’m not stuck, I think. I don’t have to be who I was. Hell, I don’t even have my old name any more.
I eat the last bite slowly, then finish off the Jim Beam, staring into space. I think the answer is staring me in the face, and it’s been staring me in the face for a while.
Luna deserves better than me, that’s for damn sure.
But there’s no reason I can’t be better.
16
Luna
Thank God for this arson case.
Not that I like arson — I’m a cop, for fuck’s sake, I don’t like crime — but I’m glad for something to throw myself into. Even though both Raine and the internet basically told me I’ve got nothing to worry about, disease-wise, I can’t help it.
Not to mention the eternal question, what kind of person doesn’t tell a sex partner that they went to prison? The answer to that, of course, is the kind of person who goes to prison. It gets pretty circular.
The day after Disaster Sex, one of the crime scene techs finds a keychain under the front seat of a car. It’s pretty burned, but when we show it to the guy who owns the car, he doesn’t recognize it, and neither does his wife or either of his kids.
It’s not much, but it’s the first real lead we’ve got. The paint cans have other fingerprints, but they’re not coming up in any database searches, so that’s useless. B
esides, Stone’s prints are under the others, which just backs up his story. Pretty much any evidence — fingerprints, hairs, that sort of thing — that might have been left on the car are gone now.
Fire tends to do that.
No one saw anyone walking around that area with a gas canister on Sunday night. No one noticed anything suspicious until both cars were on fire. Batali and I have been looking at gas station footage from the preceding days, but there’s nothing useful there; besides, they could have gotten the gas anywhere, at any time.
Therefore, this keychain is really exciting. After a day of careful cleaning, we figure out that it’s a round medallion, with half the words burned off, some wavy shapes behind them:
unity
ge
e
ras
I stare at the thing for an hour, then go get more coffee. I’m leaning back in my shitty chair, staring at the ceiling, when it finally comes to me: Community College.
I sit up so fast that I break the pencil holding my chair in place, and my seat slowly sinks. Fuck it. I stand, search for all the community colleges in the area, and a few minutes later, I’ve got it:
Community
College
of the
Sierras
“Great,” Batali says when I show her. “Let’s go figure out how many of those were sold.”
The answer to that is a lot.
Friday I attend a police mixer in Emerald Bay. I usually avoid these things, but I’ve started feeling guilty about screaming at Stone and then just walking out.
Maybe he did get the tattoo in juvie. Maybe he isn’t lying to me, maybe he really has gotten tested since he got out. And he did use a condom without me even asking.
Besides, I finally had a huge realization: he doesn’t have a prison record. Either he did time in another country, or it’s been erased from the database somehow.
Or the tattoo is really from juvie, my brain whispers. Not that it’s the only factor here: I know an amateur tattoo when I see one, and I know they’re not generally given in very sterile environments.
I know I’m probably fine. The internet agreed with Raine that I’m almost definitely gonna be okay, but still. There are certain things you have to disclose to sex partners.
But if I ignore that part, we had a great time. Even if he vandalized his own garage to get me to come over, which I officially think is stupid and dangerous and secretly think is sort of hot. I don’t remember the last time a guy put that much creativity and effort into getting me to sleep with him.
At the mixer, I end up talking to a couple of other detectives from around the central coast and an FBI agent who’s stationed in Santa Barbara right now, and we sit at a table, swapping stories of the most gruesome cases we’ve solved, because that’s just where these conversations always go.
Mike, a thirty-something guy who’s starting to go bald, wins that conversation with a story about a combine tractor and a guy on meth.
“Unfair,” I say. “We don’t have much farming equipment on the coast, and shark attacks are never all that gruesome.”
“Someone got mauled by seals last year,” says Julie, a woman from San Rafael. “It wasn’t all that gory, though.”
“There was a bad car accident on the 101 maybe two months ago,” adds in Carmen, who’s from a town close to Santa Barbara. “Drag racing. We estimated the cars were doing almost one-twenty when they flew off the road. There were limbs scattered across the road.”
We all think about this for a moment. I take a sip of my beer. Gore stopped bothering me a long, long time ago.
“Mike’s is still worse,” I say. Everyone agrees.
“You guys had any arsons lately?” I ask.
They all shake their heads.
“We had a double auto arson almost a week ago, and it’s fucking impossible,” I say.
“Double?” says Julie. “Damn, why’d you get all the excitement?”
And just like that, we’re going over my case for the next hour. Sometimes it’s hard to stop working.
As everyone disperses, I head to the bar to close my tab, and the FBI agent comes up to me.
“Luna, right?” she says.
“Yes,” I say, and frantically try to come up with her name. “Priscilla?”
“Patricia,” she says, smiling. “I like Priscilla, though. For some reason I get Paula a lot.”
“Sorry,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m not great with names.”
We step up to the bar, and she leans in slightly. She’s older than me, probably in her forties, but has the gravitas of someone who’s really good at her job. It makes me like her.
“I didn’t want to mention this back there, but arson combined with tagging is a classic hallmark of organized crime,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows.
“I wasn’t aware,” I say.
“Organized crime tends to happen in larger urban centers,” she says, shrugging. “It’s probably not the kind of thing that happens much here, so there’s no reason you’d look for it.”
I nod, and the bartender hands me my credit card and receipt.
“Was there anything else about the case that raised a red flag?” I ask.
“Not that you mentioned just now, but I’d be happy to look it over sometime,” she says.
She fishes in her pocket and hands me her card. I go through my purse and hand her mine.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll give you a call next week sometime and we can talk about it.”
“Sounds good,” Patricia says.
I walk out to my car congratulating myself on a networking job well done. I gave out my card and collected everyone else, so I think that was a networking success. Plus, now I have a couple more people to bounce ideas off of, and more contacts at police stations in case I decide the douchebaggery at Tortuga PD gets to be too much.
When I get to my car, I stop.
My car’s not the cleanest, and on the windshield, there’s that symbol. The one that was on Eddie’s and also the overpass.
It jars me for just a second, and then I realize: I just showed a bunch of cops pictures of this. We spent a while talking about whether it was the Illuminati or not.
This is a stupid joke.
I roll my eyes, gets in my car, and hit the windshield washers.
Saturday, my mom calls me and starts telling me it’s been too long since they saw me. I almost point out that it’s only been six days, but it’s useless to argue with her. I invite them over, even though I’m trying to sort through masses of people who have a Community College of the Sierras keychain.
“Luna, you work too much,” my mom says the moment she’s in the door. I make a face as I shut my laptop and gather the papers I had spread on the kitchen table.
“Mom, I’m fighting crime,” I say, walking into my living room and depositing the whole pile on a side table.
“There are other police,” she says. “Take a day off. Climb a mountain. Do yoga. Meditate.”
“I do need to go to the shooting range and brush up,” I tease.
My dad frowns at me slightly.
“Don’t taunt your mother,” he says, and I grin.
My mom puts an array of pickled veggies out on the table, but then the food keeps coming out of the basket she’s brought. There’s bruschetta, there’s caprese made with tomatoes and basil from their garden. There’s homemade yogurt dip.
I look at all the food on my kitchen table. I thought they were bringing light snacks, not enough for the cavalry.
“Do you just lie awake at night, thinking to yourself, I bet Luna can’t feed herself?” I tease.
My mom sighs.
“I know, I know,” she says. “Just be quiet and enjoy it.”
I get us mint iced tea, made with store bought tea bags, though I don’t advertise that fact. Then we sit there and my parents tell me all the latest gossip from home.
The short version is: sometimes cows get loose and cause havoc; someone’s
kid joined the military, which is even more shocking than me becoming a police officer; someone else is having her fifth child; there’s an ongoing, very contentious debate over vaccines.
“All of you were vaccinated out the wazoo,” my father says gravely. “My uncle Ernie had one leg shorter than the other because he got polio as a kid, and no thank you.”
“I just don’t understand those people,” my mom goes on. “Eating organic vegetables just isn’t the same as—”
There’s a knock on my door, and she trails off. I stand, frowning.
“Probably a package delivery,” I say, though I don’t remember ordering anything. “Be right back.”
My mom nods.
“Do you understand it, Gary?” she asks my dad as I walk away. I can’t help but smile, because I know my mom’s tactic. She’ll just keep going with this line of questioning until everyone says they agree with her.
I open my front door, expecting a box.
There, on the other side of my screen door, is goddamn Stone.
“Oh,” I say.
“Don’t close the door,” he says, and pulls something out of his pocket. He’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, both his full tattoo sleeves visible.
I cross my arms in front of myself and wait. I want to be mad. I want to tell him that he should just leave, because I’m not the kind of girl who’s going to put up with this kind of bullshit from a guy.
But I also feel kind of guilty, and I kind of feel like I might have overreacted. So I stand there while he unfolds a sheaf of papers, at least letting him say whatever he came here to say.
After a moment, he holds them up in front of my face, his fingers pinching the top. I lean forward, getting closer, and he presses them to the screen door.
Stone Williams, Medical Record No. 47485925
Dr. Nathan Elkhorn
The below records are intended only for the patient identified by name and number, and should not be released to any other party, as doing so is a violation of HIPAA regulations...