by Gale Massey
Jamie crouched in front of him. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was at school. He touched me, the faggot, so I punched him. As hard as I could. He went down; I think he cracked his head when he hit the floor. They said I broke his nose.”
“What do you mean he touched you? Where did he touch you?”
“Not like that, stupid. He grabbed my shoulder, told me to calm down. You know I hate that shit.”
Jack returned with ice folded up in a rag and handed it to Toby. “The coach is in the hospital with a fractured nose and cheekbone.”
Toby took the rag and touched it to his forehead. “How do you know that?”
“I got takeout from the diner this morning. Some kids from the team were looking for you. They’re pissed because the principal canceled tonight’s game. You better stay low a few days. Let this thing blow over.”
“What kids?”
“That tall kid who plays guard and the short one with the big head.”
“Fuck.” Toby stared at his hands. “They’re worse than Loyal.”
Jamie sat next to him. “You got to fix this, all right? Apologize to the coach. Go to that mentoring program. You got to graduate.”
Toby saw Jamie’s keys sitting near the cash register and thought about the highway. He’d rather drive head-on into a pylon or off a bridge than endure another minute of this bullshit town.
Jack bent down behind the counter looking for something. “Right. How can he fix it? He assaulted a man who ended up in the hospital. Apologies don’t make that right.”
Toby jumped to his feet. “Shut up! You don’t get a say in this. You’re just some creep messing with my sister!”
Jack held his hands up. “Take it easy, man. I’m just saying what’s true.”
Toby knocked Jamie on her ass and grabbed her keys.
She hit the linoleum floor but scrambled after him. “Toby, stop. Give those back.”
“So what if I don’t graduate?” He pushed her back down before she could get her balance. “I hate this fucking place.”
He ran to the truck and pulled out before Jamie could stop him. As he drove off, she stood in the middle of the road screaming his name until he turned off Main and she disappeared from his rearview mirror.
CHAPTER
20
BY THE TIME Jamie got to her feet, there was nothing she could do except watch the taillights of the truck disappear as it rounded the corner. Jack had just stood there behind the counter, hadn’t even followed them outside. When she went back in the store he was closing his cell phone.
“Shit, Jack. Who did you call?”
“Loyal.”
“You shouldn’t have done that. Why didn’t you ask me first?”
“Thought he should know. It’s his truck.” He pocketed the phone. “Doesn’t matter; he didn’t answer anyway.”
“You leave him a message?”
“Told him to call me. Don’t worry. Toby just needs to cool off. How far can he go anyway?”
“I don’t know. The tank’s a quarter full.”
Jack was right though. There wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. No aunts, uncles, no cousins. The farthest from Blind River she’d ever been was the casino, but Toby had never been farther than that one failed bus ride. He loved water, though, and had always wanted to see the beach. “He might go east, toward the ocean.”
“We’ll have to wait then. See if he calls,” Jack said.
“He doesn’t have a cell phone.”
“Well, what then?” He lifted his hands. “You want me to call the cops?”
“No. They’d just throw him back in jail for auto theft, and Loyal is so pissed off right now he might press charges.” There wasn’t much she could do except let him cool off and decide to come back on his own.
“Exactly. Look, that boy’s a mess. He’s always been a mess. And the rest of us have work to do.” He put his glasses on and opened a ledger.
He could be such a tool. She was back to footing it around town and there were only five stops left to complete the collections on the route, but they were scattered around the edge of the county. Jack’s Toyota sat out behind the back door. “If you’re going to work for a few hours, can I use your car?”
He looked up, confused.
“Your car?” she said. “The one out back just sitting there?”
“I guess,” he said. “But be quick about it. I’ve got to be home in time for dinner.”
She couldn’t ignore the edge in his voice and the snarky reminder of his wife. “Never mind,” she said, and grabbed her backpack.
It was drizzling outside. For the first time she wondered what she was doing with Jack, if she wasn’t making just another stupid mistake. The secrecy had made it thrilling at first but it wasn’t a secret anymore, and it was way past thrilling.
A car rolled up behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder. Jack rolled down the window and put his head out. “Get in, Jamie.”
She kept walking.
“Come on, Jamie. Stop acting like a kid and get in.”
He was a dick but she needed wheels. She got in the car. They drove silently back to the store. He left the car running and got out. “Go drive the route. I have to be here till five anyway.”
She waited until he closed the door before climbing to the driver’s side.
She drove along the river with the windows cracked, the heater warming her feet. The air smelled clean outside of town, and she caught glimpses of the narrow river beyond stands of old pines lining the road. She loved the cold air, the sharp scent of pine, but more than anything she loved the sound of the wheels on the pavement and the odd and unexpected comfort of solitude.
Her first stop was a convenience store with a small arcade in the back near the coolers. A bony-faced boy in red overalls played a pinball machine in the corner, too absorbed to look up. She collected the money from a coin pusher and another pinball machine. She had to wait for him to stop playing before she could get to the last cashbox.
She stared at him for a solid minute before he let the ball drop and looked up. “I’m a pinball wizard. Who are you?” he asked.
“Jamie. My uncle owns that machine and I need to get inside it.”
“Huh,” he said, and went to the register at the front of the store.
She opened the unit, collected the quarters, and locked it up. The boy stared out the large window overlooking the parking lot. She paused at the front door, and when he didn’t look up she asked if he worked there.
“I watch things for my mom. She’s in the back doing inventory,” he said, unwrapping a candy bar.
When she got back to the car, she wrote the store’s street number on the envelope and stashed it under the front seat where she found an old copy of Poker Max magazine that she guessed Jack had borrowed. She paged through it briefly. Out there in the big wide world there were dozens of tournaments, people winning buckets of money, trophies, even cars. She stuffed the magazine into her backpack and drove on.
When she got to her last stop, the clerk was watching TV and two security camera screens. He absent-mindedly chewed a thumbnail.
“I’m checking the equipment in the back,” she said, and dangled the keys where he could see them.
“Huh-uh. No.” He pried his eyes off the screen. “You can’t do that.”
She dangled the key ring in the air, surprised that someone finally questioned her. “No, it’s okay. I got the keys.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. That money goes missing and they’ll take it out of my check.”
“Call your boss, tell him Loyal’s niece is here to service the machines.”
The hot bar smelled of overcooked burritos. While she waited, she took one from the rack and browsed the magazine racks. She spit out the burrito. “You can’t sell this shit. It’s three days old.”
He picked up the wall phone, held the receiver to his chest, and dialed. “Hey,” he said. “You eat it, you pay for it.
”
Through the front windows she saw another car pull in the parking lot and realized she’d already seen it twice this morning. Goddamnit. The front door opened and he walked in, his collar turned up and hat pulled down over his brow. She threw the burrito in the garbage and circled around to the back of the store, then up the cold aisle back to the front. She threw a ten on the counter on her way out the door. “I’ll come back later.”
The clerk hung up the phone. “The owner said you’re okay.”
She was halfway out the door when she heard Garcia say, “Don’t you want your change?” He stood near the cash register and pointed to the TV. “You seen the news this morning?”
A girl’s face filled the screen. The pretty lips, the hair, and the highlights were unmistakable: the girl from Crowley’s Pub. The volume was off but the closed caption said she was in town looking for her father, TJ Bangor. The screen changed to a photograph of a man with a big square head, marble-size teeth, and a grin that seemed a lot like the dead man’s grimace. Garcia stared at Jamie as her stomach turned liquid. Her hands started to shake.
That little bit of burrito she’d swallowed threatened to come up fast. “I don’t watch the news,” she said, and pushed through the door.
CHAPTER
21
GARCIA FOLLOWED THE girl to the parking lot, watched as she pretended to ignore him and get into her car. Jamie Elders. Nineteen and going nowhere fast. There was nothing for a kid like her in Blind River and he guessed she probably knew it. A semi bore down the highway, its draft bending the grass in the field across the highway where a small black mare grazed behind a barbed-wire fence. Her tail and flanks twitched at the blast of air as the semi passed.
Jamie started the engine as he approached. He tapped on the window. “Let’s talk.”
She opened the window an inch and turned the radio down. “What’s left for us to talk about?”
“Plenty. Step out of the car.”
“Why?” She raised her chin in that typical insolent teenager way he hated.
“First thing you need to understand, when a cop asks you to get out of your vehicle, you do it.”
She turned off the engine and got out.
Another semi blasted up the highway and the mare pawed at the ground with her front legs. It was clear she wanted to run, but a lead tethered her to a fence post. It was distracting and bothered him. Who tethered a horse so close to the highway?
“Look,” he said, taking a notebook out of his jacket pocket, “I’ve known about your uncle for years. He’s got an operation, right?” He put his hand up and said, “Wait. Don’t answer that. Everybody downtown knows about it.” It was a guess but he would have put money on it. “He’s connected. Tight with the judge. Everybody looks the other way.” He opened the notebook, pretended to check his notes, wrote down the date for lack of anything better. He was sure she’d heard something from her mother or uncle that would help him find Bangor. He rubbed the spot between his eyebrows like he was frustrated and said, “Thing like that can change any minute. And changes? Well, you know how it is. Sometimes changes bring trouble.”
Her eyes danced sideways. He couldn’t tell if she followed his meaning. A girl like her could be thinking about anything—a boy, her next meal—and was unlikely to give up much on purpose.
“So, I’m wondering,” he continued, “maybe you could help me out.”
The wind pushed her hair across her forehead, and she pulled it behind her ear. “I’m just running errands. Doubt I can help much.”
Her tone revealed nothing, but she hunched up her shoulders and it dawned on him that she might be scared of her uncle. Maybe that was the crack he needed. A gentle tone might convince her to follow his lead.
“I know what you’re doing. I’ve been watching you all morning. I know these aren’t your gambling units and you’re not the one running things. Hell, by the looks of things, you’re probably not even getting paid.”
Her silence made him think he was on to something, but then she stepped away to wipe a smudge off the car window and the gesture caught him off guard. His ex-wife had hated smudges, was always wiping his fingerprints off windows, the fridge, the toaster oven. He took a deep breath and focused, made a mental note to run the plates on the car she was driving. He’d seen it around town.
“Look, that guy on the news?” He pointed back at the store. “He seems to be missing and that’s not good news for anybody in Blind River.”
“Big guy like that can probably take care of himself. Maybe he’s just having some fun on the down-low.”
“On the down-low?” He tried to laugh but knew it sounded fake. Sometimes he was shocked by what kids knew these days, so he kept talking. “What do you know about all that?”
She shrugged. “Gay Awareness Day in high school, sir.”
“Uh-huh. Sounds like you got an answer for everything.” Now she was being a smartass and that meant she’d seen through the good-guy shtick. He’d never been good at getting through to girls her age. It was time to switch it up. He looked up at the sky and snapped his notebook shut. “The thing is, his family says he’s never disappeared before. It’s not like him and they’re worried. We found his car but no one has heard from him.”
“Like I said, I wasn’t there that night. I never even met the guy.”
“But you know a few of the people who were there. You might’ve heard something that seems unimportant to you but might be a lead for me.”
“That’s not exactly my crowd, you know? So nope, no one said a thing to me.”
A police cruiser came over the top of the hill and the little mare danced until her butt was aimed at the highway. “You probably know more than you think.”
She just stared at him.
“All right. Play it your way, but just so you know, I am going to have to start paying more attention to details.” He handed her a business card. “You think of anything, call me.”
The cop inside the cruiser squeaked his siren as a greeting. The mare jumped and threw her head back so that her lead rope was pulled too tight over her shoulder and she couldn’t move her head.
Jamie turned to face the wind, her hair flipping in her eyes. She pointed at the mare. “What’s wrong with that horse? Why doesn’t it just back up?”
The sudden curiosity made her seem so naïve. “Horses can’t naturally walk backward. They don’t know how until they’re taught.”
“So she’ll stay stuck?”
“Yep. Lots of that going around these days.” He turned toward his car. “Horses are pretty but they’re a pain in the ass. I almost bought one once and I’m glad I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked.
The truth was he had arranged to buy a horse as an anniversary present for his wife, but that wasn’t this kid’s business. He’d hoped a gift like that would prove something to his wife, but she’d left him that same day and he’d never even told her about the horse. All those days and weekends she’d claimed to be working at her friend’s barn, teaching riding lessons, had been spent falling in love with another man.
“Why didn’t you buy the horse?” the girl asked again.
She was such a kid, suddenly nosy, convinced she was immune to the world’s trouble. He shook his head. She was just a girl looking at a horse, a kid who deserved better than what she was getting but living in a world that offered her few choices. He was losing his edge again. This girl and that little mare were bringing up things he’d worked hard to forget.
Then she looked him in the eye with such intensity that he couldn’t read her and he realized she was reading him. She’d sensed an old wound and wanted to poke at it.
“Huh.” He laughed at himself and walked to his car. “I guess I wised up in the nick of time.”
CHAPTER
22
PHOEBE WIPED HER hands on her apron and opened the door to the pawnshop. Mack was near the back of the store polishing a large glass display case. The big Doberman got
up from her rug by the cash register to sniff Phoebe’s pockets for the strips of bacon she had come to expect in the middle of each afternoon.
The lunch shift had been a killer. An unexpected church group had taken up three tables and driven her crazy with coffee refills. The cop had sat at the counter pestering her with personal questions, stressing her out even more than the church ladies. He was starting to piss her off, acting like he knew something when there was no way he could know anything. Feeding Mack’s dog and browsing the familiar aisles had become a soothing part of the afternoon lull, but the dog was putting on weight and growing lazy and she worried Mack would blame her for that. She let the dog eat from her hands, feeling the softness of its muzzle, then watched as it flopped back onto the rug.
Mack scowled at a scratch on the glass case. He seemed prissy to her. The way he fussed over things, straightening a tray of watches, polishing a silver service, sweeping the front sidewalk every morning. Keeping everything in its place. It wasn’t manly to love all these household items, blenders and mixers, even if they were antiques. She could understand it if he were a woman. She could’ve made a life of these things, too: the neatly arranged shelves, the store’s musty odor. It was calming just to be in here. At night, when she couldn’t sleep, she would visualize the merchandise, name each brand, and try to remember exactly where it sat on the shelves. It helped some. But Mack knew what he’d paid for every single item and what its retail value was. She didn’t have a mind like that.
“Some watchdog,” Mack said as the Doberman rolled onto her side.
Phoebe began her usual loop around the store. The shelves were packed with stuff most people would consider junk, random china plates, teacups, jewelry, bits of collections he’d gathered over the last forty years. It seemed outrageous that one person could own so much. Eight years in prison, one year on the outside, and what did she have? A hot plate, a mini-fridge, a fold-out couch. A three-hundred-square-foot garage apartment, paid for by the Methodist Women’s Outreach Committee. She couldn’t afford new sneakers or a haircut; even her hair dryer was used. She stopped at the display case in the back where Mack kept the expensive items locked.