Gwen answers.
“Hey,” you say.
You had an answer ready for Rory, too. The trick is, whoever answers, don’t ask for the other. Just pretend that’s the one you were calling.
“Nick?” she says, changing ears it sounds like, maybe pulling the phone into a utility.
You place one hand on the edge of the phone booth cemented into the side of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, have to hold on tight to stand.
“You didn’t tell me about Rory,” you say.
At first she doesn’t say anything, and it lasts long enough that you think maybe she’s hung up. But then she’s back, closer to the receiver. “You mean you’ve already started?”
“What?” You close your eyes to hear better, to think.
“The case,” she says back, urgent almost. “You already started the case, right? That’s how you know?”
This makes you laugh a bit, smile longer than that.
“You’re married to Rory,” you say.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” she says back. “I don’t have to defend myself.”
“That’s my job, right?”
Because you’re not coming up with anything that clever for a few years now, you hang up.
Behind you—you don’t look, can just feel it—the Ford’s still watching you, the disposable camera on its dash now so you won’t forget it.
Soon, you say in your head, then crank the a/c in the office all the way up, press your face deep into the crack between the seat cushion and the backrest, your hands balled together under your chin.
What you fall asleep thinking about is what you’ve been catching yourself dwelling on more and more these last few weeks: Jimmy Bones’s eight ball rolling, rolling, the sound filling your chest, tightening the skin over your ribs until you have to look down. It’s a doctor. He’s cutting a short black line over the hot, live slug under your right nipple. He massages it out into his palm, holds it squirming up to the light, inspecting it through the jeweler’s lens he’s been wearing all along, but you’re not really looking at him anymore, are guiding him out of the way, even—out of harm’s way. The punk kids are walking out of the 7-11 again, their eyes flicking as one to your black and white cruiser, an unspoken agreement passing amongst them.
You shake your head no to them, that you’re just there for coffee, but it doesn’t matter. By the time they’re to the ice machine, they’re running, slipping around the corner in three easy steps, moving in their fluid, smiling way up Florida street, each of them balancing Big Gulps ahead of them, not spilling even a single drop.
You wake thirsty, to a voice. The payment slot in the door is talking to you. You stare at it until it makes sense: Thomas, Sherilita’s kid. He’s hunched over, holding the brass flap open with the backs of his fingers, a guitar slung around behind him, the most casual thing in the world.
It’s dark, you don’t know what time.
Thomas steps away from the door when you open it, stands there with his hands in his pockets.
“Thomas,” you say. It’s all you can manage.
“Like you’re not a walking commercial for the straight and narrow,” he says back, smiling his thin smile.
You don’t disagree, have to look down to be sure you’re even wearing pants. At the fence, brown bottles held close to their sternums, is the rest of the band, and their girlfriends, and their girlfriends’ little brothers and sisters, who know too much to be left behind.
You shake your head, study your feet.
“That time already?” you say.
“Always that time, my man,” Thomas says and the band pours through the chain link. You lead them to the middle of the B units, roll the door up, then go back for the extension cord.
“What day is it?” you say, handing Thomas the socket-end.
He plugs their amps into it, lifts his chin to you. “Good one, Mr. Bruiseman.”
“Nick,” you correct, but the bass player is already reaching down deep for a series of notes, the light of the yellow bulb bleeding down over him, his eyes closed against it. You’re not sure you were ever this young, really. This perfect.
You sit on a lawn chair one unit away from them, let your head move with the beat of their strange music until the lead guitarist starts looking down the line of storage units.
“Go,” you say.
They all do. To take a piss, supposedly. The kind you come back stoned from. The silence they leave is like being at the bottom of a dry well. In it you can hear a cricket picking its delicate way through the caliche, a moth brushing its wings on the single light bulb, the dust glittering down like dry fiberglass.
“That’s Dan Gates’s truck,” Thomas, suddenly standing beside you, says about the Ford.
It’s a question, an accusation.
“You know him?” you say back.
“His dad bought it for him, I mean”—he looks down to you—“I thought.”
“I’m borrowing it,” you tell him. “Moving some stuff. This is that kind of place, right? Where stuff needs moving?”
Thomas flashes his eyes from it to you, his lips pursed in what you know is doubt, but he doesn’t press it.
“It true?” he says instead. “That you can’t go back?”
“To Midland?”
He nods.
You shrug like the judge is explaining it to you all over again, the deal she’s making you thank her for: in trade for your shield and what you promise, swear, and guarantee are all the negatives, the city won’t prosecute, won’t put you away for six to nine months, will instead just let the statute quietly run out in five years. So long as you never show your face in Midland County again. Not even once. Not even half of once.
“Know what they say now, right?” Thomas says, watching the darkness for his bass player.
“About what?”
“You sleeping again, man?”
“Thought you were saying something, I guess.”
He smiles. “What they say since Big Springs got the big house.”
“You’re not old enough to say it like that.”
“Pokey, slam, joint, pen, cooler, can, klink, what? Gray-bar hotel? Stony lonesome? Federal Correctional Institute? How old do I need to be?”
“What do they say now, Thomas?” you ask, covering your eyes with your right hand.
“That, from Midland, y’know, we’re already like half the way to prison.” He laughs without smiling. “That being in Stanton, you’re half in jail already”
“We talking about you or me, here?” you say.
He stares out at the darkness, shakes his head no, not him, then lets his thumb idle down over the strings of his guitar.
You nod like he’s as right as he thinks he is, and would like to freeze him right there if you could, so he’ll never have to know anything else.
Soon enough he’s back in the storage unit, concentrating on a progression the other guitarist keeps missing, can’t begin to find, his fingers moving through syrup now, after break. No, not syrup: resin. You watch for as long as you can then grind your empty bottle into the caliche, stand. Study the plastic chrome wells of the Ford’s headlights some more.
“Okay then,” you say, and walk out to it, running your hand over its passenger side flank in appreciation, cupping your palm over the rounded end of the bedrail just to see if you can.
Slowly, by degrees and by eighths of degrees, you register that you’re not alone.
Standing on the dark side of the truck is a woman, her hair down, her hands lost in the pockets of a crinkly skirt.
She’s looking at the square of light angling out of the storage unit.
Sherilita.
“He’s good,” she says, turning to you all at once so you can’t lie, her voice desperate, insistent. “Right?”
You nod, let go of the bed rail. “What are you doing?”
“You got your truck back,” she says.
You smile, had forgotten she knew.
“Yours and
Gwen’s,” she adds, like she maybe wants to spit after the name, and it cues up Gwen, saying how she didn’t park at the water station, thank you very much.
Bad history, evidently. From after your time.
“So this place like you remember it?” Sherilita asks.
“What else could it be?”
In the same way she knows the truck is yours, she knows who holds the title to it now. She knows the Town Car that was here yesterday, too, and exactly where it did and didn’t park. She probably even knows this situation you’re in, being paid to stalk a woman who’s paying you to protect her from a stalker.
You nod to her, look down at your foot on the rear tire for a moment. “It’s the same,” you say. “We’re all just older.”
The silhouette of her head rocks back a bit, with what you don’t exactly know, then, her son falling into the melody of a song she probably taught him, she says, “It’s all exactly the same, Nick. Don’t you see?”
“If I’m the same, how could I?”
She stares at you across the bed of the truck. “How long are you staying?”
“Running out of sandwiches?”
She laughs through her teeth some, and it’s better that way, to never say anything real.
Ten minutes later, you’re walking up to the Town & Country, three hundred dollars cash in your pocket, a set of Ford keys spinning around and around on your index finger.
Because this is Martin County, not Midland, you don’t even look twice at the black and white in the parking lot. But then its lights flash right beside you, the switch turned off again before it’s even all the way on.
You look behind, for somebody else the cop could want, but there’s just you.
The passenger side door swings open.
You swallow, lean down.
The cop behind the wheel is younger than you—one of those ones in training for the DPS, it looks like—his haircut military, stomach hard. A pair of binoculars in his hand, each lens as big around as a coaster.
“You used to be on the force, right?” he says.
“I wearing a sign or something?” you say, touching your chest to see.
“Look.” He offers you the binoculars, pointing with his chin out his window.
You take the binoculars, stand with them.
“Past the second pylon,” he says.
Until you figure out what pylon means, this doesn’t help any. It’s the concrete columns holding the interstate up, though. You track over to the second, then past it to the military surplus fenced in by the service road.
“What?” You press the binoculars harder to your face.
“Don’t see him?” the cop says.
Right up at the tip of one of the rockets or missiles angled up over the fence is a boy. He’s sitting on the nose of the thing, his legs trailing down into the night.
You lower the binoculars, look again. He’s still there. “Who is he?”
The cop shakes his head. “I get any closer, poof, he’s gone.”
“Sorry,” you say.
The cop—officer—nods.
“You remember the Lawler kid, right?” he says.
The Lawler kid was Dane Wilson’s little brother, dead in a stock tank thirty years ago. He was called Lawler because he had a different dad than Dane.
“You’re not old enough to,” you tell the officer.
“Toby told me about him all the time,” he says, and like that he falls into place: Toby Garrett’s baby brother, his mouth brown from pudding, socks on his feet all the time because he was scared of grass.
“Where is he now?” you say.
“Toby?”
The officer shrugs, half of his face pulled up like saying where Toby is would take a while, if he could even explain it. That maybe it’s more a state of mind than any kind of real place.
You understand, wave his efforts away.
“They still down there?” he says, tilting his head south to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage.
“Them?” you say, trying to make it sound innocent.
He rolls the dial back on his personal binoculars. “They’re pretty good, from what I can hear.”
You tap his roof twice in farewell.
Before you’re even to the door, he’s watching the military surplus again.
What you buy inside is a tall coffee and two burritos, their foil baked into a shell by the hot lights.
“One of the new ones, in back,” you tell the girl real casual, about the burritos. Like you’re a regular.
She gives you the two front burritos, doesn’t bat an eye. “Anything else?” she asks, then sags at the hundred you slide over. She has to get manager approval to open the other register for change. Mostly fives and ones.
Fine by you. Better not to be flashing a roll of hundreds all over town. If three bills can count as a roll.
You eat at one of the tables by the plate glass, angled in your seat to watch the boarded-up Dairy Queen—the new Sonic right beside it, smooth and plastic. Nobody’s at either of them. It’s midnight, Thursday. Your second burrito tastes one day older than the first, and the first was probably there a week ago, in the freezer a month before that. You close your eyes to swallow. When you open them back, the black and white—David Garrett, Toby’s baby brother—is gone. The girl behind the counter, she’s just watching you, waiting for you to do something. Her and everybody else.
It’s late, though.
You toast her farewell with your styrofoam cup—thanks, whatever—and she lowers her eyes, says it on the way out: “That your real name?”
You stop, look back.
“Bruiseman,” she says.
“You’re only eighteen,” you tell her. It’s supposed to mean that no matter how hard you try, there’s no way you’re remembering her too. Not after the yearbook parade you’re already been staggering through this week.
You let the door close again, stand by the rack of Auto Traders. “It’s real,” you say, “yeah. Why?”
“Because it sounds made up.”
“I mean, why—how do you know my name?”
She shrugs again. “Fin was asking about you.”
“Fin?” you say. “And that’s a real name?”
“I know.” She rolls her eyes. “But he’s cool.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just—he understands stuff different.”
“No,” you say, closing your eyes to slow down to her speed. “He was asking about me?”
“Listen, he probably—I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Does he have another name?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“But he knew mine,” you say.
“I think you stole his job.”
“At the storage unit?”
She adds, “He wanted to be more central, I think.”
You just stare at her now.
“He’s an artist,” she says in explanation, lifting the bottom of her shirt an inch or two, pulling the waist of her jeans down with the other hand.
On the ridge of her pelvis, the skin pale and tight, is a butterfly tattoo.
“Fin,” you say.
“He’s good. You should see his legs. That’s where he started out.”
You track down the rows of candy, try to figure out who could be even less desirable for a live-in security job than a cop already fired once for corruption.
You look back up to the clerk when you get it. “He’s…from Big Springs.” It’s the polite way to say Big Springs Federal Correction.
The poke, the clink, the big house.
She says, “Like you’re mister perfect?”
You lift your cup to her again in thanks, bow out of the Town & Country, walk back to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, the job you were barely more qualified for than an ex-con. You probably should have saved your burrito receipt. It’s an expense, part of the case.
“Fin,” you say to yourself, just to hear it out loud. By default, he has to be the one Gwen�
��s scared of.
Except it’s more complicated than that. You’re not a licensed PI—aren’t even sure how to apply for a license—but still, you know enough to know that the woman in the dark sunglasses never tells you the whole story.
For that you have to go to the husband nervous that his schoolteacher wife is messing around on him.
Add that to her fear, and bam, it all lays itself out: Gwen, bored with Rory, with Stanton, with all of it, hooked up with one of her convict students. It was only supposed to be for a week, maybe. When she could be the first woman he’d had in ten years. But then he got attached, made parole and moved to town, set up shop. Now she just wants him out of her life. Since he can ruin hers, though, maybe has some see-me-after-class notes in the margins of his English papers, it’s proving harder to do than she would have expected.
Enter Nicholas Bruiseman, St. Nick, private eye.
You unlock the chain-link gate, stand still for a moment to be sure Thomas and his band are gone. They are. The orange extension cord’s even coiled on the seat of the riding lawnmower, the empty unit on the B-side closed up, your lawn chair folded against the office door.
You shake your head, say to yourself that you should leave more often, then turn to bid the Ford goodnight, don’t actually see it until you’re in the office: the headlights that had been watching you all day, they’re not watching you anymore.
You step back outside, pull the door shut behind you.
The truck’s facing the other way now.
You touch the keys in your pocket, pull them up to be sure, then approach the truck, watching behind you more than you mean to.
It’s definitely been re-parked. How long were you at the Town & Country? Forty-five minutes?
The easy thing to think—what you want to have happened—is that Thomas and his band dropped the truck into neutral and pushed it around the parking lot some to screw with you.
Except, down along the bottom of the right tailpipe, there’s a line of water. From a blown head gasket.
Somebody with a key was here.
But why?
You stand, tracking up the silhouette of the old Motel sign, like somebody could be hiding up there, and then, across the street, the hose at the carwash starts hissing, the sudden pressure jerking the wand from its rack. It spasms from wall to wall.
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