“You sure about that?”
She slapped me.
* * *
Within the first couple of months of dating, I asked Lisa to move in with me. She refused. She said she liked her independence. She said she loved her little apartment with the white walls and gold crown molding. She said that if we moved in together it would ruin the magic.
By magic she meant sex. It kept us together, like a drug we had to get a fix of every few days. We often fought, but somehow we always ended up in the sack either at her place or mine. Sometimes it was rough. Sometimes it was soft. But it was always good.
Our problem was that I wanted to take care of her and she didn’t need any taking care of. When I told her she should quit the Mons and get a respectable job, flatware flew across my apartment.
“What is it about men that you need to dominate us?” she cried. “I was fine before you showed up, and I’m fine now.”
“I hate you working late nights around all those creeps.”
“That wasn’t a problem when you were hanging out there every night.”
“I was working.”
“And what do you think I do there?”
I was jealous. I worried she’d meet someone else. And she did. Jack the fucking Knife. And now here she was.
She never let me get close. I wanted all of her, body and soul, but all she ever gave was body. All I could do was wonder if it was different with Jack. She’d been with him at least eight months, living in this tin can. She looked thin, dark circles under her eyes, haggard. Maybe she was on drugs.
* * *
I raised my hand to belt her one but stopped short. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. I wasn’t going to be drawn into our usual game of love and pain. I was a new man.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, her lip trembling. “I love Jack. I’m not leaving without him, Wes.”
“For all we know, he might be sitting in a cozy suite at some hotel in Orlando or Atlanta.”
“He’s not like that,” she lamented, and pointed to the door. “He walked out that door three days ago and hasn’t come back. He won’t answer his phone.”
“You go to the cops?”
“No . . . I—”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.” She lowered her eyes. “I was scared. I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
“An affair?”
“No!” She gave me a poisonous look. “He said he was meeting a friend. I don’t know. Some of those guys he hangs out with are bad news.”
“Drugs?”
“No, not him, but his friends. They’re lowlifes. Carnies. You can’t trust them.”
“You think they did something to him?”
She turned away. Tears escaped her eyes. “I just thought it’d be better not to involve the police. Not yet.”
“Okay,” I said, and placed my hand on her shoulder. “Take it easy.”
She shrugged my hand off and wiped her tears with the back of her wrists. “Can you help me?”
A strong feeder band from Lloyd swept in, rattling the aluminum roof of the trailer and bringing a wave of hard rain.
“We need to leave,” I said.
“Not without Jack.”
“We’re not going to find him if we stay here.”
She didn’t move.
“Fine,” I said. “Did he take anything when he left?”
“His knives.”
“What?”
“He took his set of knives.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s a set of custom Laguiole knives. They’re worth a small fortune.”
“Why would he take them?”
“I don’t know!” she cried. “We were working on an act. He was in touch with a producer, someone who’d been in Hollywood and was looking for innovative acts. Things were looking really good for us. But then he started getting these phone calls. Last week he said someone was following him.”
The racket of the rain on the roof died down.
“The man’s a con, Lisa. I swear, you fall for these guys—”
“Don’t—don’t you talk down to me. I love Jack and he loves me. Get over it, Wes. You don’t wanna help me, fine.” She grabbed her purse and shoved past me to the front door. “You should’ve just said so before you came down here.” She ran out.
I went after her. “Hold up.”
She stood by my car with her back to me. The night was suddenly dead still.
“I came all the way down here . . . I’ll help you look for him. But the hurricane . . .” I pressed the unlock button on my key. The car beeped. Lisa lowered her head and ambled to the car.
Another feeder band swept across the Fairfax. The gust dragged a plastic trash can across the dirt road to the far end of the trailer. It came to rest next to a large round target, the kind you see at the circus with straps and a star and the outline of a woman painted on it. Part of Jack’s William Tell routine.
I turned away from the rain and made my way to the car. I drove to the entrance to the trailer park and stopped. I knew we were not going to find Jack. I had to get us out of here, back to Tampa. Or at least find shelter. I had a quarter tank of gas.
I took a right toward the interstate.
“Where we going?”
“75.”
“Can’t we drive around a bit?”
“You think he’ll be walking around in this weather?”
“Let’s just take a quick drive. Ten minutes. That’s all.”
I glanced at her. She knew I would do what she asked. I took a left and we crisscrossed Gibsonton in a grid pattern through the narrow streets of this sad run-down town. The roads were deserted, shitty little houses boarded up with plywood. The feeder band passed and the night was suddenly calm again.
I kept asking myself why I’d fallen for her of all people. But I knew better. There was never any logic to love, lust, infatuation—they were all a mystery. They drove people to do crazy things. I was no exception.
Maybe I’d been lonely.
But I was lonely now—had been since the day she left. There was something about her. And when I learned she’d hooked up with Jack the knife thrower, it hit me in the gut. Bad. I knew I would never see her again if I didn’t do something. And then she called. But what she wanted was him. She was willing to risk our lives in the storm to find Jack.
Just as my temper was about to snap, I saw the lights. Blue and red cut the darkness like a disco. Cops. They were camped at the intersection of Riverview Drive and 41. The railroad tracks. On the north side was a wooden shack like an old-time station, an abandoned depot covered in vines and graffiti. It was a circus: three police cruisers, an ambulance, the crime scene van, and two unmarked Grand Marquis.
“Must be the president,” I joked. But I knew better.
Lisa covered her mouth with her hand. “J-Jack . . .”
“You don’t know that.”
“Pull over.”
I did what she asked, eased the car to the side of the road where a uniformed officer stood directing the nonexistent traffic.
Lisa lowered her window. “What’s going on?”
“Gotta move on,” the officer said, and waved for us to pass.
“Is 41 clear to Tampa?” I asked.
He leaned in. “What do I look like, Bay News 9?”
I inched forward to the tracks and stole a quick glance at the abandoned depot. Detective Morano was standing to the side in a blue plastic poncho, hood pulled back.
I pulled over on the gravel.
Lisa looked at me. “What’re you doing?”
“I know that cop,” I said. “I’ll ask him about Jack.”
“I’m coming with—”
“No!” I placed my hand on her thigh. “No. Let me go. He’ll be more at ease if I go alone.”
She looked down at my hand. I pulled it away and stepped out of the car, made my way around the back of the car and across the tracks to where Murano was standing, tapping
the screen of his phone.
“You updating your Facebook status?”
He glanced up and smiled uneasily. “Yo, Riley. What the . . . Last I heard, you were putting in hours as a bouncer at some hipster bar in Ybor.”
“I’m a PI.”
He put his phone in his pocket and offered his hand. “The hell are you doing here anyway?”
I shook his hand with my left. “Came to give a friend a ride.” I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. “What’s the best way to Tampa?”
“You’re better off finding a shelter.” He nodded to the east. “Collins Elementary on Summerfield. You got maybe half an hour before it starts coming hard.”
“What happened here?”
“Body. Or what’s left of it. Guy was cut up into little pieces a couple days ago.”
A cop poked his head out of the depot. “Detective, we’re ready for you.”
“You got an ID on the stiff?”
Murano shook his head. “Gotta go to work.”
As I made my way back to the car, another feeder band swept in and almost blew me over. The rain pelted me like hail. When I finally got in the car, it was empty. Lisa Moon was gone.
* * *
Lisa had a tendency to disappear. She was, as they say, mercurial. We’d have a pleasant date, maybe drinks at a bar or a late-night dinner at the Mermaid Tavern or Esther’s Cafe. You’d think everything was roses. But when I drove her back to her place she wouldn’t invite me up, or she’d insist on taking an Uber home. I wouldn’t see her for weeks after that. Then she’d magically reappear acting as if we’d been hanging together the day before. Until she met Jack.
* * *
The wind and rain persisted. There was no sign of Lisa near the abandoned depot or up and down Riverview Drive. I worked my way toward the dense Brazilian pepper bushes and combed the area, but the ground was muddy from the rain and my feet sank deep in the muck. There was no trail or tracks anywhere. All I could think of was that she ran back toward the Fairfax.
I drove back east on Riverview Drive, told myself to forget Lisa Moon, head back to 75, find shelter. There was not a soul on the road. It was just the punishing rain and wind. As I drove past the Fairfax the weather turned like a switch—calm and dry. I stopped the car and backed up into the Fairfax, parked by the trailer. We’d left the door unlocked. But she wasn’t there.
I didn’t get it. She didn’t deserve to live like this, in this mess, in this moldy, dilapidated can. She was better than this. She was better than Jack. I offered her a good life, even risked my own to come here and save her, and she ran away from me. Again.
I turned to the door and threw a punch at the wall. My fist went through the paneling like it was made of paper. I looked at my hand. The thin fresh scar that ran down from the ball of my thumb bled a few drops. I stormed back outside. The air was dead. The night had a dark, translucent quality. Gibsonton didn’t look like Gibsonton. It looked fake, like a Hollywood set—a place made to look like Gibsonton.
I got in my car, started the engine, and tuned the radio to one of those all-news AM stations to get an update on the hurricane.
The monster storm was upon us. The cone was narrow and making landfall just north of Bradenton on a northeasterly direction. It was coming for Gibsonton.
I was out of time.
The wind picked up as I crisscrossed Gibsonton at random looking for Lisa. Road signs trembled, trees and bushes danced back and forth, debris dragged across the road, the rain fell in torrents, washing across the road in waves, then dying down, only to start again.
I passed the Fairfax for the fifth time and pulled up to the VFW building across the street. Certainly not a proper shelter, but it had to be better than staying in my car. I hurried to the front but the door was locked. I went around the back. Locked.
A transformer blew with a big fireball at the end of the block. Then everything went dark. That’s when I saw the kid running across the field and into a small warehouse in the back of the property.
I dashed after him, pulled at the steel door. Three midgets, small people—whatever you call them—an older woman with long gray hair, a man with long pork-chop sideburns, and a younger one, blond, who was busy drying his hair with a towel. They stood around a large wooden crate with a lantern in the center.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had nowhere else to go. I saw . . . I saw one of you run in here . . . and . . .” Behind them was a mountain of parts for a mechanical ride—flying elephants, cheap Dumbo imitations—and a trailer with a colorful sign for fried Twinkies. The walls were block and mortar, steel roof. “Seems like a safe place. I hope it’s okay.”
“It’ll hold,” the woman said. “You didn’t happen to see Ricky or Jacques out there, did ya?”
I shook my head. The small person with the sideburns rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I’m telling you, Gail, they must’ve gone with her.”
“The girl ain’t got no car, Kyle.” The woman moved a small plastic chair up to the crate and sat. “We best just hope they didn’t abscond and done left us here.”
The younger small person with the blond hair nodded. He tossed the towel on the crate and climbed into one of the fiberglass elephant rides.
Kyle fiddled with a small transistor radio. Static. Voices, static. A seventies song. Motown. Then a voice came across loud and clear, rattling off statistics and the cost of previous hurricanes—Harvey, Katrina, Andrew.
“Whatever the storm does,” Gail said, “bet you we don’t see a dime of relief money.”
“It’s all a shell game,” Kyle said.
“Look here.” The woman leaned forward on her chair and squinted at me. “How come I ain’t seen you around Gibsonton?”
“I’m from Tampa,” I said. “I came down to help a friend, but I guess she found another ride.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Welcome to the club.”
“They kept sayin’ the storm was headed to Sarasota,” Gail put in. “Then it shifted at the last moment.”
“But Gibsonton was always on the cone,” Kyle said. “We just thought we’d be spared ’cause we always are.”
“Not always,” the woman sighed.
Behind her a sign with a colorful illustration of a giant Twinkie on a stick separated her from the bulk of the machinery. The place smelled of oil or lubricant. Outside the wind was howling. The rattle of the steel roof and debris came and went with each gust. I took a step back, sat on the ground, and leaned against the wheel of a trailer. I didn’t want to think of Lisa Moon out there in this mess. It was my fault. It was a stupid idea. I shouldn’t have come.
The blond small person sitting in the elephant shrieked with laughter. The woman glanced back at him, then at me, and touched the side of her head. “Foley’s a little . . . you know . . .”
“Aren’t we all?”
She laughed. “You’re all right, Mister . . .”
“Riley. Wesley Riley.”
She nodded. “Funny how the storm brought us together.”
“You live down here full-time?”
“Born and raised,” she said. “Met my husband Ricky when he came down for the Lobster Boy trial. He’s a nephew of Harry Glenn Newman, world’s smallest man. I was testifyin’ against Christopher Wyant. I seen Mary talkin’ to him ’bout shootin’ Lobster Boy a couple weeks before he done it. Yeah, we’re showfolks to the bone, ran quite a business for a time. Nine rides, two concessions, and half a dozen full-time workers, ain’t that true, Kyle?”
Kyle stared at the ground and nodded, mumbled something about the financial crash of 2008.
“But we’re gettin’ back in the game. Tell’m, Kyle. Tell’m about the act.”
The wind grew loud and ominous like a train rushing overhead. We fell silent and looked up at the steel roof shaking and rattling under the pressure of the storm.
“Kyle!” Gail broke our trance. “Tell’m.”
Kyle’s eyes went wide. He swallowed hard. “We have this n
ew act with Jacques Couteau. A real famous performer. Maybe you heard of him. Anyway, he’s one hell of a talented knife thrower, and—”
“We been practicing all year,” Gail interrupted. “Jacques and his gal Liz La Lune. She’s a real pretty gal. Got real talent for show.”
“It’s built like a play,” Kyle said. “We’ve got a whole drama. Foley here tries to steal Liz from Jacques and they start this back-and-forth dance, kind of like a jealous lover. So Jacques and Foley hate each other, but it’s Liz who’s playing them against each other. Jacques keeps throwing knifes—”
“No need to bore him with the details,” Gail cut in again. “Point is, Liz and Foley keep runnin’ round and Jacques keeps throwin’ knives but keeps missin’. It’s tragic and funny at the same time.”
“We just signed with an outfit out of Chico, California,” Kyle said.
“I’m gonna be in the circus!” Foley chirped from his perch on the elephant.
The freight-train sound shook my bones like a jackhammer. Then stopped. We looked at each other.
Foley hopped out of the elephant. “Is it over?”
“It’s the eye,” I said.
“It’s over!” Foley sang. “Over. Over. Over!”
“No. It’s just the eye,” I said.
“You don’t know that.” Kyle was already at the door. Gail and Foley followed him out. Then me. We walked together to the middle of the field. The VFW post was standing but the roof had blown away. The whole field was littered with debris, a fallen oak. The plastic VFW sign had flown off and gotten snagged on the barbed-wire fence. There was no rain or wind, just this deep pressure. I yawned to pop my ears.
“Look!” Kyle pointed. Someone was running toward us. “Ricky!”
Ricky was tall and thin with long gray hair in a ponytail. He swooped up Gail and kissed her on the mouth.
“Did you find Jacques?” Kyle asked.
Ricky put Gail down and shook his head, then nodded toward the warehouse. “We better get inside before the storm comes around again.”
We locked ourselves in the warehouse. Foley climbed back onto his ride and rocked back and forth in his perch while humming a song I didn’t recognize. Gail wouldn’t let go of Ricky’s hand. They sat together and watched Kyle fiddle with the radio, but all he got was a station playing Mexican music. Then the train sound started again, faster and louder and harder. Felt like it was going to pull the roof and the lot of us out into the night sky.
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