by Jeff Gunhus
Only in the last month had things taken a turn. The blank spots in his memory more noticeable. The inability to remember making him lash out in anger that Allison knew was just fear taking hold of a proud man.
“Hello?” came a voice at the door. It was Maria, the woman who was supposed to have been watching him when Allison couldn’t be there.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
She met Maria in the hallway. A retired nurse in her sixties, she was a stern, no-nonsense woman, a trait Allison thought would be a perfect fit for her dad. But not if she left him unattended.
“Where the hell were you?” Allison said, not bothering to hide the accusation in her voice. “I told you that he can’t be alone.”
“What happened? Is he all right?” Maria asked, her face drained of color. She looked past Allison, trying to see into the room behind her.
“Yes, because I happened to come by when I did. He was outside in his boxers, going God-knows-where. He cut his foot.”
“Oh God. Is it bad?” Maria looked panicked. She made a move to walk past her into the house but Allison slid over to block her path. The nurse took a step back, her expression pinched, as if readying herself to deal with the obstacle in front of her.
“So? Where were you?”
Maria’s panic was gone, replaced by cool condescension. She pulled a white pharmacy bag from her purse. “You said you were going to get his meds, but you never did. He was completely out.”
Allison felt a pang of guilt. She had promised to bring the meds by. Heart and blood pressure. Maria was just covering for her. “Why didn’t you take him with you?” Allison asked.
“He dug his heels in,” Maria said. “Refused to come. You know how he is.”
At least the woman wasn’t incompetent, which was Allison’s larger fear. The agency could send someone new but that would take time. Maria would have to do.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Allison said. “It just scared me.”
“It’s all right,” she said, putting a hand on Allison’s arm. “We want the same thing here.”
Allison appreciated the gesture, especially since she was about to segue into asking for an enormous favor. “Listen, I have a work thing that’s come up. I need to go out of town.”
Maria’s eyes lit up, as if she were excited by the news. But the expression quickly passed and she shook her head with disapproval. “For how long? You just got back.”
“A day. Two at the most,” Allison said.
Maria looked past her into the room where her dad now sat on his couch. “He misses you so much when you’re gone. He needs you, you know.”
Allison nodded, wondering at how guilt could feel like a physical thing, a pressure building inside of her. Maria was right. There weren’t that many good days left for her dad, but she needed to do her job too. She knew the in-home care agency could provide the care, but her dad seemed most comfortable with Maria. She was the only nurse he ever asked about. “Only a day or two.”
Allison had been prepared to strong-arm the woman into staying, but Maria didn’t argue. Maybe she was worried the incident would be reported to the agency. Whatever the reason, Allison was happy to have someone covering for her.
Allison went to her bedroom. She kept half her wardrobe there and she threw a few pieces of clothing into a bag. By the time she was ready to leave, Maria and her dad were sitting next to one another in front of the TV, looking more like an old married couple than nurse and patient.
“I’m leaving, Dad,” she said. “A work thing.”
“Maria here told me about the nice-looking fella in the car,” her dad said. “Have fun working. That’s not what we used to call it.”
She started to protest but decided to leave it alone. It was nice to see him smile and have a little twinkle in his eye. She leaned down and gave him a kiss.
“I love you, Dad.”
“You too, Alleycat,” he replied. “Don’t worry, me and Nurse Ratched here have things covered.”
Maria gave him an affectionate jab to his arm. “I told you not to call me that, Pat,” she said.
Her dad reached out and patted her knee, chuckling.
Allison caught the exchange and wondered how she could have missed the signs. When Maria came in the door, she wasn’t afraid for her job, she was afraid for her dad. And now seeing them together, Allison realized that somehow in the last few months, the relationship between the two had blurred from nurse and patient into that of mutual companionship. Maria’s expression when Allison told her she was going to be gone for a day or two made more sense now. She wanted Allison to stay because she knew it was what her dad wanted, but like a teenager left alone for the weekend, Maria was excited to have the house to themselves too.
As she left the room, she glanced back and saw Maria slide closer to her dad on the couch. Allison smiled and walked out the door.
24
They rode in silence for the first half hour. Allison appreciated that Mike didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with small talk but was willing to just let the quiet stretch out between them. When her phone rang, it caused them both to jump. She answered the call.
“I have her name,” came Jordi’s voice over the phone.
“That’s great,” Allison said.
“Even with the tattoo, it wasn’t easy,” he said. “The only photo record online was her high school picture, and that wasn’t a public database. I had to get into the school servers to access their archived records. And their systems were old. I mean, like going-into-a-crumbling-condemned-building old. But I Indiana Jones’ed it and got the info.”
“Awesome,” she said. “Can you send me over everything you’ve got?”
“Have I taught you nothing?” came Jordi’s reply. “You want this intel to stay secret or not? Assume anything on this phone is heard by a room full of old white guys. Hey, old white guys listening right now, fuck you! Hear me, you twats?”
Allison held the phone away from her ear and Jordi’s voice blasted from the speaker. Mike raised an eyebrow but she ignored him.
“Jordi, how many cups of coffee have you had today?”
“Not nearly enough,” he replied. “I set you up with a Darknet alias and I’ll send the info that way. First initial, last name for user. And the password is the thing I said to you this morning that made you mad.”
Allison thought that through, realizing it wouldn’t make any sense for him to give her the password on a call that he thought was monitored. The thing I said to you this morning that made you mad. She didn’t know what that was. “You always say a lot of things that make me mad,” she said.
“Try ‘em all, love,” Jordi said. “It’ll be fun.”
Click.
Allison held out her phone, wondering if she’d dropped the call. She had four bars. Jordi had just hung up on her.
“Interesting friend,” Mike said.
“You have no idea,” Allison replied. “But he came up with the girl’s name. He’s sending over the details via email.”
“So the old white guys won’t listen?” Mike asked.
“You have a habit of eavesdropping,” Allison said. “It’s not polite.”
“Do you know what you call a polite reporter?” Mike waited a beat. “Unemployed.”
Allison groaned but gave him a smile. She navigated around a slow-moving truck and pushed her speed up to eighty. They had a lot of road to eat up and getting around the Beltway before the afternoon traffic started could mean an hour of saved time. Besides, she couldn’t help thinking they were racing against the killer going to the same destination. She knew it was a stretch, but her intuition was telling her they weren’t the only ones on their way to West Virginia that night.
“How long has your dad…” Mike’s voice trailed off and she heard the hesitation in it, the underlying question whether the topic was off-limits or not. When Allison didn’t answer right away, he followed up quickly with, “Sorry, if you don’t want–�
�”
“No, it’s fine,” she said, surprising herself. Maybe it was the way he’d helped her dad into the house, or the way he’d spoken to him so easily, careful not to make her dad feel self-conscious, but she felt her guard lower just a little.
“Alzheimer’s, I’m assuming,” he said.
She nodded. There were other forms of dementia, but Alzheimer’s was the most common, so it was a safe guess. And it suited her father. He would have been horrified to have something exotic, something people raised a fuss about. No, he preferred a run-of-the-mill degenerative neural disease. Old-timers, as he liked to call it.
“It’s just been in the last year. Really since my mom passed away.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize…”
“No, it’s fine,” she said. “It was a long illness. She was ready. My dad thought he was too, but he…you know…”
“You can never really be ready,” Mike said.
“Married for nearly forty years,” she said. “Had my brother and I late. They really lived a great life together. Endured a lot together too.”
“Your brother?” Mike asked.
Allison shook her head. She had never revealed to anyone that Arnie Milhouse had been the one to kill her brother Edgar in the convenience store shooting all those years ago. It would have just complicated matters. Questions would have been raised why an agent with such a direct personal connection to the suspect was allowed near the case. Arnie had known at the very end. He’d known that she’d hunted him down like a dog. That she’d outsmarted him and, in his last breaths, that she’d out-fought him. She had meted out justice for her family and sent Arnie to his grave.
She wasn’t about to share any of that with a man she’d just met, let alone a reporter.
“My brother died when he was a teenager,” she said, staying with what was in the public record. “Shot at a convenience store hold-up in Baltimore.”
Mike took a deep breath, obviously feeling guilty for dredging up all the memories of dead relatives.
“I had no idea. I’m really sorry to pry.”
“At least you didn’t ask about my dog. Just last week, it…” Allison allowed her voice to trail off.
“Why? Did it…” He stopped himself, catching her wry look. He shook his head. “C’mon, I already feel terrible and you’re going to do that to me?”
She laughed, enjoying seeing the uber-confident reporter back on his heels a little. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”
“You have an odd sense of humor.”
“I’ve been told,” she said, laughing. She turned off the Beltway and headed north on I-270. They still had four or five hours of driving ahead of them. At least it was starting to feel like it wasn’t going to be a completely unpleasant experience.
“So it’s just you and your dad then?” Mike asked.
She nodded. “At first I thought he was just disoriented after my mom died. It’s not uncommon for a surviving spouse to have difficulty adjusting. Especially after being a caretaker for a long period of time. He hid it well too. If I’d paid better attention, the diagnosis could have been made six months earlier.”
“Would it have made a difference? In treatment or how it progressed?”
“Maybe not,” she said. “Probably not,” she admitted.
“But you still feel guilty about it.”
It was a statement, not a question. She didn’t correct him. She did feel guilty. She felt guilty at that moment for being on the way to West Virginia instead of sitting next to her dad on their couch watching reruns of Jeopardy! Guilty for not picking his brain for every story about his life before the memories deteriorated away with the rest of him.
“I felt that same way with my mom,” Mike said. “Also Alzheimer’s. It’s a slow, painful descent into the dark.”
Allison snuck a look over at him and saw that he was staring out the passenger window.
“My mom called the disease her shadow,” Mike continued. “She said she felt her memories in the back of her mind, lingering, as if she could stare into the shadow long enough and her eyes would adjust to the dim light and she’d be able to see them again.” He touched the window with the tips of his fingers, tracing shapes there. “The real cruelty came in the moments of false hope, those rare times when a light switch goes on and chases the shadows back and everything is clear for a minute or two. But the light burns itself out quick enough. The shadows return. And then, one day, more sudden than you think, you’re on the bottom and there’s nothing but shadows forever. The same eyes that once lit up when you walked into a room just stare back at you with no recognition at all. And it breaks your goddamn heart.” His voice cracked with emotion at the end.
Allison discreetly reached up and wiped away a tear from each of her eyes, hoping Mike didn’t catch the movement. His words went right to the center of her fear of what was coming with her father. And her guilt for not being with him.
“Sorry,” Mike said. “I didn’t mean to go there. It wasn’t that long ago and seeing your dad…”
“No, that’s fine,” Allison said. “I appreciate you being open like that.”
An awkward silence came next, filling the car like a living thing. Allison tried to think of a direction to take the conversation, but nothing seemed quite right. His fidgeting hands showed he was struggling too.
“Radio?” Allison offered.
“Perfect,” Mike chimed in, a little too loudly.
Allison turned on the radio and flipped through the stations. That started a conversation about the merits of rock versus hip-hop, which led to stories about past concerts they had both gone to. That led them to college and old stories there, then high school and hometowns and stories about how they were raised, how they grew up.
The miles and hours clicked past. In the back of her mind, Allison recognized the conversation she was having was the same one that she had on every first date she’d ever been on. The difference was that she was enjoying herself and the person sitting beside her was actually articulate and interesting.
Allison realized that if this had been a first date instead of a car ride on the way to go catch a killer, she’d have to say it was going extremely well.
25
Harris pulled into the gas station just outside of Harlow, West Virginia, around ten o’clock. He rolled over the rubber hoses that snaked across the cracked concrete, causing a tire bell to sound. The place was deserted. Seemed the good people of Harlow had sense enough to get their gas and their lottery scratch cards at a more reasonable hour.
The terrain for the last two hours had turned mountainous. Even so, he made quick progress on I-70. Engineers from the 1960s and 70s hadn’t been handcuffed by bureaucratic blowhards in the EPA so they’d just blown chunks out of the mountains wherever they wanted to give travelers a convenient ride. Nowadays, Harris figured, the interstate probably would have needed to be elevated so it didn’t disturb the migratory patterns of the black bear, or not built at all so that some rare mushroom could be saved from extinction.
Harris looked to the dingy, cinderblock building behind the pumps for any sign of life. The left side of the place was two stories tall with a service bay for mechanical work, covered by a rollback door that looked to be more rust than metal. Faded banners hung stretched across it, one for Marlboro Reds and the other proclaiming a big sale on Bud Light. Judging by the age of the signs and the rust, it appeared the mechanical needs of the hamlet of Harlow were being served elsewhere and had been for quite a while.
The single story box attached to the side of the service bay was lit up from inside although Harris saw no movement inside. He could see that one wall was lined by a refrigerated case with beer and sodas, and that the little floor space there was inside was given over to display racks of grease, fat and sugar packaged in bright paper. And people wondered why America was getting so damn fat.
The slot where credit cards were accepted at the gas terminal had a little piece of paper taped to it: “Broke.
Come inside.” Harris wondered if the note referred to the gas station owner or just the slider for the credit cards. Didn’t matter to him, he planned on paying with cash anyway. He had a few cards that were theoretically not traceable back to him, but he hadn’t survived as long as he had without a certain amount of paranoia. As he walked to the building to find someone to pay, he heard a motor coming up the road behind him.
A pickup turned the corner, souped-up with extra suspension and big, knobby tires. Harris watched as headlights turned toward him, bouncing as the vehicle hit the potholes where the asphalt met the gas station’s concrete slab. Country music blared out from the windows. The truck pulled into the pump in front of Harris’s car, a dead deer sticking out the back of the bed. It was a big six-pointer, not a monster, but probably big enough to hang on someone’s wall.
The truck door swung open and, out of habit more than anything else, Harris sized up the man who came out. He was in his late twenties, six foot and maybe two hundred pounds, hard to tell with the coveralls and the hunting jacket. The man’s thick neck and posture marked him a jock that spent time in the gym. Harris noticed how he paused behind his door when he first got out, using it as a shield, while his eyes darted to the tree line outside the halo of light from the station, searching for threats. Harris recognized the behavior. He looked to the back window of the pickup and saw the USMC sticker there. Ex-military. Maybe a tour or two. Enough to still make him look for something moving in the shadows that might kill him.