A Desperate Place for Dying

by Scott William Carter

  It was chaos. And he didn't like it.

  In the morning, after some buttered toast and a couple cups of coffee, he dropped Zoe off at the high school a half hour early, much to her chagrin, then headed straight for the outskirts of town in the colorless morning light. Traffic was sparse, but that wouldn't last long on a Friday, even in winter. He had no intention of being at his place at nine in the morning. The FBI could wait for him all day, for all he cared.

  At the edge of town, he turned east into the hills, his van grumbling up the narrow road, pine trees crowding both sides. He passed one gravel driveway disappearing into the trees after another, turned at the distinctive rooster mail box that had been there a year earlier, when last he visited, and bumped through low-hanging oak branches and over a weedy, deeply rutted road until he reached the clearing. A bright blue manufactured house was dwarfed by the huge silver outbuilding next to it. The late 80's F-150 was idling out front, white clouds pluming from the exhaust pipe. Quinn emerged from the house, black coffee thermos in hand.

  Gage parked and rolled down the window. Quinn, rumpled as always in his plaid shirt and well-worn jeans, frowned but didn't come down to greet him. His cheeks, like crumpled sandpaper, had a shock of pink in them. His thinning silver hair was flat and damp.

  "Got a favor to ask," Gage said.

  Quinn nodded. "Sure. Why else would you come up here? Unless it's to threaten me, which I seem to recall you doing last time."

  "I was acting on a faulty assumption."

  "Oh, that your idea of an apology? Because I'm still waiting for that one."

  "I'm here about Zoe," Gage said.

  "Okay."

  "I'm worried about her. I need to tell you some things so I don't worry so much."

  "Uh huh. What, she got a boyfriend you don't like?"

  "Yes. But that's not it."

  "Gage, I got to get myself to work. So unless—"

  "The man who killed my wife is town," Gage said flatly.

  Quinn stared, not saying a word. For a man with such a tired, beaten-down-by-life demeanor, he had a surprisingly intense stare. Gage was conscious of the morning dew dripping on the leaves around them, most of the noise drowned out by the idling truck. He noted the moss growing on the mob of lawn ornaments crowding their garden. He heard a door close inside the house. It seemed far away.

  "Anthony Bruzzi?" Quinn asked.

  "You've done your homework."

  "Out on parole, I take it?" And when Gage nodded, he said, "He threaten you?"

  "Let's say he's made his presence very known."

  "But has he threatened you?"

  "Technically?"

  Quinn sighed. "Gage—"

  "This is someone who knows exactly how to toe the line, Chief. He wants me scared before he does whatever he's going to do to me."

  "So what, you want police protection?"

  Gage snorted. "Like I said, it's Zoe I'm worried about. I can't always be there to watch her."

  "Right. Because if what I heard is true, you're spending all your time snooping around Angela Wellman's crime scene."

  "Ah, Brisbane tell you that?" Gage said. "I'll have to make sure I send him a Christmas card this year."

  "You find out anything?"

  Gage could hear the plaintive note in Quinn's voice; it obviously pained him to have to ask this question. Ordinarily, Gage would have enjoyed the moment, let the silence stretch and the tension build, but he was here for a reason that wouldn't be served by playing any petty games. He wasn't sure how much he needed to give something back to Quinn in return. The last thing he needed was for the police to screw up what little progress he'd made.

  "Nothing solid," Gage said.

  "Like what?"

  "I'm just pursuing a few leads."

  "We could pursue them with you," Quinn said.

  "Like I said, it's not solid yet."

  Quinn shook his head. "Gage, you have a lot of nerve. First, this Wellman was in town because of you, so somehow this whole mess is your fault. Then you come here asking me to babysit your teenager, but you won't give me even one shred of information. I got the FBI, the national press, and the governor's office breathing down my neck on this one. Why the hell should I help you?"

  "Well," Gage said, "maybe because it's your job. Maybe because I pay my taxes and I expect a little something in return. Maybe because you swore an oath to protect and to serve."

  "I don't need any lectures from you on what my job is, damn it."

  "So you'll have a patrol car shadow her?"

  "You've got to be joking!"

  The door opened—not all the way, just a crack—and Quinn's wife poked her head out, smooth gray hair framing a long narrow face. She was pretty, in an austere way. She made Gage think of a photo that had been left out too long in the sun, all the color draining away. She blinked rapidly, like a mole popping out of its den into the light.

  "Is everything all right?"

  Quinn turned to her, his whole demeanor softening. "It's all right, Ginger," he said softly.

  "You were yelling."

  "Everything's all right. Just go back inside. You know how the light affects your headaches."

  "I don't like it when you yell."

  "I'm fine. Everything's fine."

  She shot Gage one fearful glance, then retreated into the house. Quinn stared after her as if waiting for her to return, then shifted his attention back to Gage. Whatever residual gentleness was there quickly drained away. He stepped abruptly off the porch, heading for the truck.

  "I got to get to the station," he said.

  Gage watched him. Quinn circled around to the driver side and opened the door, then hesitated. He sighed.

  "I'll do my best to keep an eye on her," he said.

  "I appreciate it," Gage said.

  "No promises. Got my hands full with the Wellman case. But he does anything real threatening, anything that changes the status quo, you call it in, got it?"

  "Got it," Gage said.

  There must have been something in Gage's tone he didn't like, because Quinn smirked. He shook his head. "How long has he been in town?"

  "A couple days."

  "And you just now come to see me. Why?"

  Gage thought about it. An image of Carmen rose up in his mind, staring at him intently in the candlelight, lecturing him that if he wanted people in his life, he needed to show it. "Because I care."

  "What?"

  "Never mind."

  *****

  For the next two hours, Gage questioned every clerk at every gas station and convenience store about whether they remembered seeing a small man wearing glasses and driving a white van on Wednesday, or perhaps earlier in the week. None could say for sure whether someone fitting that description had been there or not. A number of them had security cameras in the stores or outside, and he worked his charm—using a cover story that he was trying to track down an abducted child, and this man was a suspect—to get them to let him fast forward through the tapes in a back office. Once, his charm had also required a twenty dollar donation to a long-haired kid's college fund, but it was a small price to pay.

  He could have told them the truth, he supposed—Angela's murder was the talk of the town—but he didn't want to answer the inevitable questions the truth would raise.

  The air remained cool and moist, the sky an oddly translucent silver, like wet aluminum. There were days like that on the Oregon Coast, days where the morning just blended into dusk with nothing really in between. He was beginning to think the whole thing had been a waste of time when he finally got something—talking to a bag boy outside of Jaybee's Grocery. After swinging in there to pick up a ham sandwich, he just happened to be walking inside at the same time the gangly blond with a diamond nose stud was pushing a line of carts back to the store.

  "Oh, yeah, I remember him," the kid said.

  "You do?"

  "Yeah."

  Clicking along beside him with his cane, Gage walked with him to
the cart rack inside the store. An old woman with carrot-colored hair, stick thin and hunched at the shoulders, was struggling with one of the carts, and the kid helped her. His diamond sparkled under the rows of bright fluorescent lights. Jingle Bells played faintly overhead.

  "I was sitting in my car reading a Stephen King book," the kid said, when the old woman was gone. "One of the older ones. Pet Cemetery, I think. I had the window down. He was getting out of his van and he saw me reading. Maybe he wouldn't have said nothing if I wasn't wearing my uniform. I don't know. Anyway, he asked if I'd ever read the Bible. I wanted to say something snarky but I was on my break, you know, so I just smiled and said, sure, at Sunday school all the time growing up. And he said I should read it again. If I did, I wouldn't be needing to read any of those types of books. He pointed at it like I was holding a pile of crap." The kid glanced around nervously. "Sorry—I shouldn't be talking like that in here."

  "It's okay, we're not in Sunday school," Gage said. "You remember anything else? Was there anybody else in the van?"

  "Yeah, that's the thing that really stood out. There was this really huge guy sitting in the passenger seat. I saw him when I went inside. You could probably have fit four of the Bible dude into that guy—he was like Andre the Giant. And he just stared at me the whole time. Like he wanted to eat me or something. Creeped me out."

  "What time was it?"

  "Around seven. No, eight. I took my break late on Wednesday."

  "Anything else?"

  The kid shrugged. "I don't know, man. Look, I gotta get back to work. I already took my break this morning."

  "Hold on a second. Does your store have security cameras?"

  "Yeah."

  "Outside?"

  "Sure. We use 'em when we have to press charges against shoplifters. Hard to lie with video."

  "You think I can talk to the manager about seeing it?"

  "Um. Sure, I guess. What, you some kind of cop or something?"

  "Private investigator."

  "Oh, cool. Like Columbo? Is that how you got that limp? Like in a fight or something?"

  "Or something."

  "Ah. Well, that's awesome. I'm saving to go to college—I want to go to law school eventually and put the bad guys away myself, like in Law and Order, so I'm real interested in what you do. You ever watch that show? Okay, I'm babbling a bunch. Hold on a second. I'll go grab my boss. This is so cool. A real P.I. I'm Andy, by the way."

  "Garrison Gage."

  The kid returned after a moment, but he said the manager was on a call with a supplier and didn't know when he'd be done. Gage said he'd wait. He tried to reward the kid with a twenty, but the kid said Jaybee's had a policy about not accepting tips. But maybe they could go out for coffee sometime and Gage could tell him some stories? It sounded like torture to Gage, but he took the kid's phone number and he said he'd see what he could do.

  It was fifteen minutes before the manager appeared, and another fifteen minutes before Gage could persuade the manager to allow him to view the security video. He told the manager that the man's sister had hired him to track him down—they'd lost contact in childhood when they'd gone into foster care. They just knew from friends that he'd been in town, but they didn't know where he lived or what he did. They were trying to get a license plate number to find him.

  Gage worked the man's sentimental side by saying it sure would be a great gift if he could find the man before Christmas. This seemed to seal the deal, getting Gage sequestered in a windowless, prison-like back room hunched over a tiny black-and-white monitor. A full color television mounted in the corner was tuned to CNN, the volume muted. Anderson Cooper, wearing an absurdly tight black t-shirt, was interviewing a bedraggled woman holding a baby in a diaper, a neighborhood ravaged by a tornado pictured behind them.

  Even with the manager poking his head in every few minutes, as if he was afraid Gage was going to steal some of the ball point pens in the Mickey Mouse mug gracing the corner of the rather spartan desk, Gage managed to fast forward through hours of video in very little time until he got to Wednesday evening. The screen had four quadrants, three inside the store and one outside, and Gage trained his attention on the outside camera, waiting for the white van to appear. There were several white vans, but all of them were adorned with business logos for local plumbers, roofers, or pest control specialists. Finally, at seven minutes to eight according to the digital time stamp in the corner, a plain white van drove into view.

  The way it appeared didn't allow him to see who was inside because of the camera angle. Even worse, a heavy woman with a brood of four children in tow started across the street just as the van turned up into the parking area, blocking the license plate. Most of the parking lot was out of sight, so he didn't get to see the driver's encounter with Andy.

  Fortunately, he did see the driver himself—at least Gage was fairly certain it was the driver—enter the store. Short, slender, dressed in a nicely-fitting gray suit. Black hair cut so short it could have been painted, with widow's peak balding. A flash of gold on his wrist. The monitor's resolution was too poor to make out anything but a pale, narrow face and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, but the man certainly walked with the air of a professor who believed he was smarter than everyone else.

  Gage tracked the man's movements inside the store. He picked up a couple bananas, a yogurt, a bag of Doritos, a can of shaving cream, and a package of razor blades. The razor blades made Gage sit up a bit straighter in his seat. On his way to the cash register, the man stopped at the book rack, shook his head at the magazines, then pulled a dark volume off the top of the spinner. He flipped through the contents, studied the back, then put it back on the spinner. Then he paid for his items —with cash, sadly—and was out of the store in minutes. A few minutes after that, the white van appeared.

  And bingo. For a second, Gage had a clear shot of the license plate.

  The image was still a bit fuzzy, but there was no mistaking the letters. Elated, he jotted it down in his notebook.

  As he was rising to leave, Gage glanced at the television in the corner and was startled to see Carmen. She was talking to one of CNN's regular field reporters, a pudgy black man, both of them standing in front of the Barnacle Cove. Two police cars were parked directly behind them. The text at the bottom of the screen read, God's Wrath cult kills woman on Oregon Coast.

  Even before he turned on the volume, he noted how comfortable Carmen looked in her gray trench coat, how gorgeous her blonde hair was, billowing lightly in the breeze, how suited her sharp cheek bones and bright green eyes were for the unforgiving lens of the camera. She belonged. If he hadn't known better, he would have thought she was the interviewer and not the interviewee.

  When he located the remote next to television, and unmuted it, he caught her in mid-sentence.

  ". . . a quiet little town, it's hard to know why it had to happen here," she was saying. "It's caught many of us by surprise. Like you said, John, she worked for Loren Sparrow, so obviously the God's Wrath cult was trying to send a message of some sort."

  "Our sources in the police department tell us she was here meeting an old friend—a Garrison Gage?" the reporter said. "Do you know anything about him?"

  The walls in the room pressed in on Gage. He felt an increasing tightness in his chest. His name had just been mentioned on national television. All the anonymity he'd worked so hard to cultivate the past six years was gone. There was an almost imperceptible hesitation from Carmen, lasting not more than a second, then she reacted with surprise that seemed genuine.

  "Really?" she said. "That's interesting. Yes, I do know a little about him. I met him during the Abby Heddle investigation last year—a young woman murdered here in town. He's a private investigator who worked in New York for years, then retired to Barnacle Bluffs a few years ago."

  "Ah," the reporter said, "so do you think Angela Wellman was trying to hire him for some reason? Perhaps because she thought her life was in danger?"

  "It's possib
le," Carmen said.

  "Tell me more about his involvement with this other murder. What was that case about?"

  As Gage watched, fuming silently, Carmen began divulging all the details of the Abby Heddle case. He didn't detect any hesitation from her now. Not only that, but when she was pressed for any more insight she had on Gage, she readily supplied information about his most famous cases in New York, as well as the murder of his wife. The manager popped his head into the office at that point, frowning, and Gage punched off the television before the man could connect the dots.

  He was too sullen to watch more anyway.

  * * * * *

  There was a woman with three children perusing the picture books at Books and Oddities, requiring Gage and Alex to talk in a whisper so as not to bring vile things into a world of literature when little ones were present, as per Alex's wishes, but Alex was more than happy to use his FBI access to look up the license plate number.

  "Well," Alex whispered, straightening his glasses as he peered at the screen, "I've got good news and bad news. The good news is we've found the van's owner. The bad news is that it belongs to First Star Rental Services, located at PDX."

  "At the Portland airport," Gage sighed. "Should have figured. But they'd have records. Can you give me the number?"

  Gage waited until the family bought their books—a couple Curious George hardbacks, and a bright yellow book about construction trucks—before he dialed the number. While it rang, he watched the mother helping the kids into their car seats in the minivan, the sun glaring on the front windshield. The drab grayness of the morning was finally gone. One of the kids, a girl with strawberry hair and pale freckled cheeks, was crying. What could she be crying about? Maybe she wanted to learn how to a shoot a gun and her mother, much wiser than Gage, had said no.