Computers hum in the silence. No one moves, as if I’ve caught them selling drugs or laundering money. I’m not real fond of standing here, either.
So I meet their gazes, slowly, one at a time, acknowledging them. An I-see-you action that I learned in self-defense class. It works with drunks who’re acting up all the way across the room.
Once I’ve met everyone’s gaze, I say, “I was told I could find Andy Santiago here.”
In the back of the room, two women glance at each other. Another woman stands up. As she draws closer, I see that she’s a little older than the others.
“What do you want with Andy?” she asks.
“It’s personal,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says in a tone that says I don’t believe you.
“He’s not at his place,” I say, “and he’s not answering his cell. So a friend said to try here.”
Those women glance at one another again. Someone titters in the back.
“You think this is funny?” I ask in my driest voice. “I’m looking for someone. I was told you people could help. Can you?”
The woman glares in the direction of the titter. Then she looks back at me. Her makeup has faded on the right side of her face, as if she’s been resting her hand there, and the makeup came off.
“Can’t help,” she says. “He’s not part of this campaign any longer.”
“Really?” I ask. “Since when? Because he was still handing out your business cards a few days ago.”
Her too-red lips thin. “We parted ways this afternoon.”
He showed up in my bar this afternoon.
“Over what?” I ask.
“That’s personal,” she says.
“Huh,” I say. “Because he worked for you. So that should be business.”
One of the young men in front of me leans back in his chair. His mouth twists sideways. I think maybe he’s trying to smile derisively. It’s not working.
“We don’t have any room for Log Cabin Republicans,” he says.
“Jordy,” the woman cautions.
He glares at her. “It’s true. That’s what Jeff—”
“We parted ways,” the woman says. “It turns out that Andy’s agenda was different from ours.”
I smile, and I know my smile works. “Log Cabin Republicans,” I say. “Is he a card-carrying member of that particular organization, or are you rocket scientists labeling him that because you just figured out that he’s gay?”
“He’s not gay,” one of the women from the back says.
“Stop,” the woman in charge says. “This is no one’s business but ours.”
The woman in the back stands up. “Andy’s not gay—”
“Yeah, right,” says the guy in front of me.
“But he believes in equality for everyone. He’s been pushing—”
“An agenda that’s not consistent with the Davis campaign,” the woman in charge says over her. “So we told him to take his services elsewhere.”
The woman in the back is looking at me. She’s maybe twenty-one, with long blond hair, and the kind of cute that’ll get her dismissed in politics.
I should know.
“Two weeks before the election?” I ask. “That’s bit odd, isn’t it?”
“You’re a reporter, aren’t you?” the woman in charge asks.
“Actually, no,” I say. “I used to do your job, though, a long time ago in a land far away.”
She looks me up and down, making it clear without saying a word that a woman like me could never have run a position of authority in a campaign. Funny, I used to get dismissed because I was little and cute. And now that I’m neither, I get dismissed for being the kind of person who’s too militant to ever be taken seriously.
“Well,” she says, “be that as it may, Andy’s not here, he’s not going to be here, he’s not ever coming back, and we have no idea how to reach him. So you have no reason to stay here.”
“And no reason to vote for Jeff Davis, either, apparently, considering how nice and cooperative his staff is.”
“It’s midnight,” she says. “What did you expect?”
“It’s midnight,” I say, “and someone’s concerned about Andy. I would have expected some compassion, and maybe a little help.”
No one responds. I look at each of their faces again, as if I’m memorizing them. A number of the staff won’t look at me this time. The young woman in the back, the only one who spoke to me, glances at the woman in charge.
She doesn’t see anything. She’s still glaring at me.
I want to say Thanks for nothing, but that sounds childish, even in my head. So I just turn around and leave. I hear someone lock the door behind me.
I know if I turn around, I’ll see a few faces pressed against the glass, watching me go.
Strangely, that sense I had, that jittery, not-quite-in-control sense is gone. And so is the underlying panic that I usually feel in a strange neighborhood. You’d think it would be worse here, but it’s not.
I get in the truck and sigh. I glance at the clock on the dash. Maybe I can get the wallet to someone who knows Andy Santiago at the hospital desk, but I think that’s a true maybe. The other maybe is whether or not I should go home—
A knock on the driver’s-side window startles me. I swallow a scream, then curse myself. I still haven’t learned how to scream for help. Eight self-defense classes, and screaming still doesn’t come naturally to me.
I turn and see the face of that young woman, the one who spoke out of turn, looking up at me. She had to reach up to hit the window with the knuckles of her right hand.
She’s not wearing a coat. Her arms are wrapped around her torso and she’s shifting from foot to foot as if she’s cold.
I lower the window and don’t say anything.
“Why do you need to find Andy?” she asks.
“He left his wallet at my place,” I say, which is trueish, “and he’s not answering his phone,” which is probably true as well.
“Oh,” she says. “I thought maybe…”
I wait.
Her face scrunches up and she takes a deep breath. “He’s okay, then?”
“I can’t reach him,” I say, as if that’s an answer. “That’s unusual for a man like him.”
She sighs a little. Bites her upper lip, glances over her shoulder.
“They walked him out,” she says. “Jordy and three other guys. And it didn’t look friendly.”
I don’t interrupt.
“I’m worried about him,” she says and her voice breaks. She seems to be telling the truth. She looks over her shoulder again. Then she adds, “I left my stuff in there. I—they’ll—would you walk me back?”
Is she kidding me? After she just told me that four men marched Santiago out of the building and he ended up raped and beaten? Do they think I’m that dumb? Or do they think she’s so appealing that she’s going to be bait I would fall for?
I have no idea where that thought came from, but as soon as it crossed my mind, it made me angry.
“No,” I say.
Her lower lip trembles. She frowns prettily, and I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Badass Bartender doesn’t really exist outside of the bar, apparently.
“Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll back up, park in front of your headquarters, and watch as you go in. If anything goes wrong—”
“Forget it,” she says, voice plumy with tears. “I can handle it myself.”
She stomps away, then pauses just for a moment as if marshaling courage. It’s that little movement that catches me. I wheel the truck around and park across the street.
She sees me, then turns her head away.
She goes inside the headquarters. Everyone watches
her, like they watched me. No one says anything.
They watch her walk to the back, grab her purse, a laptop bag, and a coat, and then the woman stops her near the door.
The girl isn’t bait. She’s genuinely scared. And I treated her badly.
I look around the neighborhood, then get out of the truck. I shove the keys in my pocket and walk to the door, keeping my eye on the girl and the woman. They’re arguing.
I pull the door open—apparently she left it unlocked—and say, “You fired her for talking to me?”
They all look at me now.
The girl’s face is pale. “I quit, actually.”
She can’t lie to save herself. That’s so different from me at that age. I was the queen of liars. That’s how I got and kept my job.
“And I’m leaving,” the girl says, pulling the laptop bag away from the other woman.
“The laptop is ours,” the woman says.
“The laptop is mine,” the girl says. “My personal laptop. I never ever used yours. I don’t like linked networks.”
“It has our work product on it,” the woman says.
I know where this conversation is going, and I don’t like it.
“So hire a lawyer,” I say to the woman. Then I extend my arm to the girl. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
Her look is both startled and grateful.
The Jordy kid stands up. He’s taller than me, younger than me, dumber than me. Even though he’s not drunk, I probably have fifty IQ points and a whole lotta living on him. And I can put him down with a shove to the chest.
Only he doesn’t know that.
“She’s not leaving,” he says.
“What’re you going to do?” I ask. “Hold her hostage?”
I waggle my fingers at the girl, and she runs toward me. I hold the door open, watching everyone, Jordy, the woman, the other workers still at their seats.
The other girl in the back, the one who had exchanged glances with the one heading to my truck, she’s gone too. I hope she went out a back exit, and isn’t just in the ladies’ room.
But she’s not my problem. I’m neither cop nor superhero.
“You people are something else,” I say, then follow the girl outside.
She’s standing on the sidewalk, shivering.
“Do you have a car?” I ask, thinking maybe the Prius is hers.
She shakes her head. “I took the bus.”
Worse than a Prius, then. A True Believer, who can’t afford a vehicle. True Believers go all Ninja Avenger when they lose their cherry and discover their candidate is an ass and a cad. (They’re all asses and cads, at minimum. Often they’re crooks and egomaniacs, too.)
If she has writing skills, she’s going to blog.
If she doesn’t, she’s going to cause other troubles, and the problem is that the woman inside that campaign headquarters knows it.
“I’ll drop you,” I say to the girl.
She glances at me, then at the people inside. I can almost read her thoughts. She’s having two of them. The first: They’re going to think that I’m connected to this woman. And the other comes from a much younger, much more vulnerable place: I’m not supposed to get in a car with strangers.
The girl takes a deep breath, then nods. We cross the street to my truck, and, using the remote access, I unlock the door. I’m getting into a car with a stranger, too, something I haven’t done in more than thirty years.
Not that my problems have ever come from strangers.
“I’m D,” I say after we’re both inside the truck. I don’t explain that “D” is short for “Blondie,” which was what the patrons used to call me before I got rid of the hair. Then they called me “Baldie,” and all I could hear over the noise of the jukebox was the hard “D,” so I took on the name.
“Laney,” she says, her voice still shaking. She’s glancing out the window as if she expects Jordy and his friends to follow us.
I start the truck and put it in gear in one swift movement. “I take it you like Andy.”
“He’s a lot of fun,” she says, “and he’s really smart, and he was right.”
A girl with a crush, it sounds like.
I check the mirrors and the door to the campaign headquarters. The remaining staff is arguing. I don’t see the other girl.
I pull out and start down the road. “How do you know Andy’s not gay?”
“I just do,” she says. “I mean, he doesn’t seem like it, and he wouldn’t be, and he’s really nice.”
I suppress a sigh, wondering how anyone can be as naïve as she is and still function. I remind myself, as I often do at the bar, that it’s not my job to educate people. At the bar, it’s my job to help them forget their idiocies for a while.
Right now, I don’t really have a job, except maybe to get this girl home.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“They’re not going to come for me, are they?” she asks.
I don’t ask who. I know who she means. “You got a roommate?”
She shakes her head.
“Deadbolts?”
She nods.
“Just don’t answer your door tonight,” I say, knowing it’s not a lot of comfort. But I’m not going to be responsible for this kid. “Call the cops if someone’s persistent.”
She makes a little involuntary sound of panic. I ignore it.
“Address?” I ask again.
She tells me. She lives all the way across town, near the university. Of course.
I wheel the truck in that direction, and wonder what I’m going to do with the information that the girl has given me. Call the cops? Tell Rick? Tell the hospital?
It’s really none of my business.
And I’m not the type who makes it my business. I tend bar, for god’s sake. Nothing is my business.
“Where were you when he left his wallet?” she asks.
I glance at her. I had said he left it at my place. Either she forgot that or she’s trying to figure out why Santiago would be with a woman like me.
We’re nowhere near the headquarters now, and something about being alone in the cab of this truck with this girl makes me decide on honesty.
“He came into my bar,” I say, my voice flat.
“Bar?” She frowns at me. “I thought—he says—he doesn’t drink.”
Maybe like Bancroft doesn’t drink. Because no nondrinker would order Jack. Although I had pushed him into it. And he hadn’t known what would hurt him.
Maybe someone he knew ordered Jack, and he parroted the order.
“He did,” I say. “And then he passed out—”
“He drank that much?” she asks.
I wheel onto the expressway. Not a lot of traffic this late at night, but the billboard is lit up from below. WANT TO GO BACK TO 1861?
“No,” I say, answering both questions. “He passed out from blood loss.”
“He got beat up in your bar?”
“He got beaten up and raped before he got to my bar.”
I let the words hang.
She’s shaking her head. “No. You can’t rape a…” And then she pauses and her breath catches. “No,” she says again, only this time, the tone is different. This no is a disbelieving no. She saw something, realized something, knew something.
“Where is he?” she asks.
“Mercy General,” I say. “We took him there.”
“If you know where he is, why did you come to campaign headquarters?” There’s anger in her voice now, as if it’s all my fault.
Why did I go to the headquarters? It was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I hadn’t meant to, but I’m not sure I should say that to this girl.
“I thought
maybe I’d find some of his friends there,” I lie. “I thought maybe I’d find someone who cared.”
She nods and goes silent. The expressway seems alien at this time of night, with the halogen streetlights leaving uneven pools of light across the smooth pavement. We’d gone several miles. We were due for another WANT TO GO BACK TO 1861? billboard real soon now.
“I care.” She says it so softly that I almost didn’t hear her over the hum of the tires. “Can we go see him?”
“It’s the middle of the night,” I say. “Do you know his family?”
She shakes her head. “Who do you think did this?”
“Who do you think did it?” I ask with more charge than I expect.
She turns away, thinking I can’t see her. But I can see her reflection in the passenger-side window. Her mouth has thinned, her eyes are narrow, and at first, I think she’s angry. Then I realize she’s holding back tears.
“If I go to the police,” she whispers, “I’m done.”
“You already quit,” I say, recognizing the irony as the words come out of my mouth. I’m pushing her to take action in a situation where I never would.
“No,” she says. “I’m done working in politics.”
“Maybe,” I say. But politics are different now than they were in my day. No one would believe a girl with a complaint thirty years ago, even if she had been bruised and battered and bleeding for days.
Now people would believe a girl, a sincere girl of the proper background, who saw something, knew something, accused something. And if she stood up, then maybe—
I smile at myself, mentally pat myself on the back and think, Hello, Girl Operator. I thought I’d trained her out of me, but she reappears like the undead, filled with naïveté, optimism, and hope.
“You want to keep working in politics more than you want to help a friend?” I ask.
“He’s not a friend,” she says too fast. “He’s…”
He was the hope of a friend. A boyfriend. Someone kind to her.
We’ve reached her neighborhood. I take the first exit off the expressway. Students sit outside well-lit bars, one hour before last call. My bar hasn’t been open to last call since Barack Obama got reelected, when the rednecks and the bigots were too scared and angry to go home.
Volume Ten Page 19