Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  Reagan was beginning to understand the depth of that statement. The water in the shower ceased and she heard Spoon step out onto the tiled floor.

  Jules nodded toward the bathroom. “He’s cute. Who did that to his face?”

  Reagan looked down at her ring finger, then remembered she’d taken the diamond off before she passed out from the Seroquel. Part of her wanted to snatch the ring from the nightstand and show it to her mother. But part of her realized that she didn’t know this woman sitting in front of her; she didn’t feel comfortable sharing such an intimate part of her life with a virtual stranger. But was she? They’d spent eighteen years together.

  So many conflicting thought patterns. So many choices and reasons and misunderstandings. The truth was a single grain of sand in a towering dune.

  “What are you doing here, Mom?”

  “I wanted to come home and see you.”

  Her mother’s eyes were still wet with tears, and the left one spasmed, for a second. A jolt of fear shuddered Reagan. There was something disingenuous in her mother’s glance.

  “But why are you here, right now?” Reagan said, pointing a finger into the bedspread to enunciate. “And how did you know how to find me? How did you know Spoon and I were at this particular motel this morning?”

  Jules pursed her lips. Her chest was heaving, and her words came out labored and slow. “Your dad stole a lot of money. Your uncle Tyson only wants what’s his. That’s all it is. Nothing more, just what’s owed to him.”

  Reagan scooted across the bed, away from her mom. Her mouth fell open. “That’s why you’re here? For the money?”

  “It’s over two hundred thousand dollars. He wants it back. Listen to me: I’m the carrot. You don’t want the stick. You have to understand how much this kills me inside to have to be the one to tell you all of this, and everything I had to go through to be able to see you again. They’re right down the hall, waiting at the stairs. Let me go back to them and tell them what they want to hear and then all this can be over. We can be like a normal family again.”

  Reagan pressed her fingertips into her temples, trying to relieve some of the tension and make sense of the world. Maybe there was no sense to find, but she surely wasn’t going to get it from the woman sitting across the bed from her. “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you again.”

  “Be reasonable, honey. People should make amends for stealing, right? Tyson is family.”

  Reagan slipped off the edge of the bed. “I’m family.”

  Spoon walked out of the bathroom, half-dressed and running a towel through his hair. “What’s going on out here?”

  “Mom was leaving,” Reagan said, lifting her finger to point at the door.

  “He says you know where the money is,” Jules said. “Please, if you tell me where to find it, I can protect you. It’s best for everyone if this is settled.”

  Spoon stepped closer to Reagan. “She said she’s keen for you to leave. The door’s right over there.”

  Jules slid her purse over her shoulder. She peered into Reagan’s eyes, searching for something, maybe the right phrase to justify all this betrayal. Whatever she intended to say, Reagan didn’t want to hear it.

  After a few seconds, Jules stood and left the room.

  “What was that all about?” Spoon said as the door shut.

  Reagan lunged across the room and grabbed her socks and the hiking boots. “Baby, we have to go, now. We have to go, go, go.”

  ***

  7:35 am

  While standing next to Tyson at the edge of the stairs, Dalton watched his aunt Jules exit the motel room and dab her eyes with a little tissue. She walked to them, her head low.

  “Damnit,” Tyson muttered as they retreated a few steps down the stairs.

  “I tried,” she said through a mist of tears and snot. “I explained everything to her but she doesn’t want to listen.”

  Jules grabbed Tyson’s shirt, but he brushed her hands aside.

  “Okay, woman, we tried this your way, and it didn’t work,” Tyson said. “I told you, your daughter doesn’t listen to reason.”

  She stepped closer, now visibly shaking. “No, please, T. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but please don’t do this.”

  What had he done for her? Dalton had no idea.

  “He broke into my store, Jules. Broke in and took all the money I had to pay off a stupid sports bet. You think I’m swimming in so much cash I can write that off on my taxes? It’s almost a quarter-million dollars.”

  “I know, but Reagan didn’t take it. She had nothing to do with this.”

  “Not directly, but she knows where it is,” Tyson said. “She knows and she’s going to tell us.”

  “That’s your niece. Please don’t hurt her. Promise me you won’t hurt her and you’ll find a way to settle this without violence.”

  “I promise,” Tyson said, but he flashed a sideways glance at Dalton. Dalton knew exactly what it meant. He’d made it clear in the car Dalton wasn’t to kill Reagan, but that look had said he could mess up the bitch if he had to. Just nothing she wouldn’t walk away from.

  She pulled her hands back into her chest. “I shouldn’t have come back. I made everything worse. Maybe give me another chance? I’ll wait a few minutes and talk to her again.”

  “I don’t think so. Go back to your hotel and wait for me,” Tyson said. “I’ll call you later.”

  A grimace contorted her face. Her mouth opened and closed several times as if she were trying to find the next right thing to say. Instead, she looked like a fish on the deck of a boat, slowly dying and trying to suck non-existent water through her gills.

  Dalton felt her eyes boring into him, begging, and he tried to look anywhere but at her. He’d never seen Aunt Jules like this before, so weak and pathetic. He’d never known her well enough to say if he respected her before, but he sure didn’t now. What a disappointment.

  As she nodded her defeat and started to skulk down the stairs, the motel room door burst open. The limey and the bitch flew outside, with no idea of the surprise in store for them.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  7:38 am

  Reagan threw open the motel room door as a blast of morning sunlight momentarily blinded her. Spoon joined soon after, clicking his crutches against the concrete of the outdoor hallway.

  She looked left and right with no sign of Tyson or Dalton, only her mom descending one of the sets of stairs.

  “There,” she said, pointing to the opposite stairway.

  She ran, bulky boots clomping against the concrete, making the outer railing shake.

  Spoon grunted, trying to keep up with her. He bent his bad leg and hopped at a half-fast pace.

  They reached the stairs and she looked back, catching two heads appearing where her mom had descended and disappeared. She wanted to sprint and take the stairs two at a time, an impossibility with Spoon struggling to keep up.

  At the bottom of the first flight of stairs, the shouts echoed above her.

  “We have to go, baby. I know it hurts, but we have to get to the car, right now.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. A collection of sweat had pooled above his eyebrows.

  When they reached the ground level, the sounds of shuffling footsteps materialized on their same staircase. They couldn’t afford to lose any ground. She put a hand under Spoon’s armpit to help him move faster.

  They crossed the parking lot as Dalton and Tyson lumbered down the final set of stairs. Tyson’s snake-skin boots tapped and clicked against the metal grating. She met his eyes, for an instant, and that split second of glancing drove fear into her heart. Not from any kind of menace in his eyes, rather the practiced look of disappointment. She detected it instantly.

  But he and Dalton weren’t running after them. They seemed to be taking their time. Why would they do that?

  With no time to ponder motives, she helped Spoon hurry across the street as their pursuers finally reached the parking lot. She fumble
d in her purse to grab the keys to the car. By the time they rounded the gas station, she had them out and ready to go.

  Spoon huffed and puffed but skipped fast enough to keep up with her.

  “Almost there.” She unlocked the car, waited a few seconds for Spoon to catch up, and they both got in as Tyson and Dalton crossed the street.

  She turned the key and slammed the gas, the poor aging Honda’s tires squealing as it roared out from behind the dumpster.

  Her cousin and uncle skidded in the street, turned around, and dashed to the blue truck.

  “Are we seriously going to try to outrun them? On city streets? Reagan, where are we going?”

  “We have to get to Boulder,” she said. “I know where the money is. Not a safe deposit box. Not at a bank. We have to get downtown to the farmer’s market. The whole time, right there in the note, telling me where I had to go, but I didn’t see it until last night.”

  “Okay, let’s not get straight onto the highway. They’ll see us. We need to try to double-back and lose them before we get on the open road.”

  “What do I do?” she said as she buckled her seatbelt.

  “Take a left up there,” he said, pointing at a neighborhood street.

  She slowed to turn, and as she did, the blue truck appeared in her rearview. “Crap. They’re behind us.”

  “It’s fine, we’re going to have to make a few turns. We can ditch them if we do this right.”

  “Okay, okay, I got this.” She twisted through the neighborhood, trying to make the turns as sharp and sudden as possible. The smell of burning tires drifted in through the vents.

  She nearly ran over a man walking his dog when she clipped a curb. She tried to shout an apology, but was already four houses away by the time her hand found the button to roll down the window.

  “Easy,” Spoon said. “No good if we crash.”

  Houses whipped by in a blur of earth-toned colors. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  He let out a nervous titter. “Let’s take it a little slower, please.”

  Up ahead, a street pointed back to the main road, and since the truck hadn’t made an appearance for several turns, she decided they were now safe to rejoin the road and connect with the highway.

  They slipped onto Highway 36 toward Boulder, and she checked the rearview every few seconds. Energy pulsed through her, making her heart thump and her vision feel laser-sharp. While the pills from last night had dulled her senses to some small degree, she was still racing. Ready set go. Possibilities, options, revelations all came to her faster than she could catalog them.

  “Do you want to fill me in now?” Spoon said.

  “There’s a farmer’s market in downtown Boulder, in a parking lot between a little park and some buildings. It’s before you get to Pearl Street.”

  “Pearl Street. Why does that name sound familiar?”

  She slammed the gas to pass a slow-moving delivery truck. “That’s the outdoor mall. Just past that is a post office, and there’s a row of outdoor lockers that have been there forever. In the letter, he mentioned the farmer’s market, but it got blurred by some rain and I didn’t understand what it meant.”

  “But you’ve sorted it now?”

  “When I was in high school, sometimes we’d bike from Denver to Boulder, and we’d leave our bike gear in those lockers and walk through the farmer’s market. It hit me last night. That’s what he was talking about in the letter: the lockers. It’s got to be there.”

  “Why did your grandad tell me that your dad had a safety deposit box?”

  She shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe Dad told him that because he knew grandpa would blab to people. My grandpa also has memory problems, so who knows?”

  She checked the rearview again and spotted the shiny chrome grill of the blue truck as they crested the hill descending into Boulder Valley. She licked her lips and started tapping her foot against the floor.

  “Where is the farmer’s market?” Spoon said.

  “Downtown, which is a few miles off the highway. We’ll have to lose them on the city streets.”

  After the hill, they entered the city proper within two minutes. She took the first exit in Boulder, onto Table Mesa Drive. Next came a right at the bottom and then an immediate left on a side street, cutting between a diner and a gas station. In the rearview, no sign of pursuers. Tension lifted from her neck, which had been aching all morning. The pain was a remnant of the trail.

  She piloted the Honda through several turns in the Boulder neighborhoods as a precaution, but the blue truck didn’t seem to be following anymore.

  “We should call the police,” Spoon said. “We’re in heaps of danger here. At some stage, we have to admit that this is too much for us.”

  “No, not yet. Find the money, then we’ll deal with that.”

  When they arrived at the edge of Boulder’s tiny downtown, the farmer’s market was in full-swing, hundreds of people milling about the small laneway between a tree-lined park on one side, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art on the other. Booths stocked with organic produce lined the spaces usually reserved for parking along the slim street.

  She searched Arapahoe Street past the farmer’s market to find a place to park. Close to the edge of downtown, about four blocks away, a small burger joint sat at the next intersection. The restaurant faced the street corner at an angle, and behind that was a small lot, with enough room for four of five cars. Technically, she wasn’t allowed to leave her car there, but they didn’t have time to drive around downtown looking for a spot. Parking was usually impossible to find on a Saturday, anyway.

  As she slid into the spot and took the keys out of the ignition, Spoon said, “I think I should stay here.”

  “No, I need you.”

  He frowned and raised his bad knee. “I’m just going to slow you down. I’ll stay put and keep an eye out for Tyson.”

  “I don’t have my phone.”

  He leaned back, sighing at the roof of the car. “Right. Just hurry, then. Do what you have to do and I’ll stay ready.”

  Once again, she was going to have to go it alone. She couldn’t argue with his logic, but she yearned for him to be there with her, to help find the truth.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “You can do this.”

  She pulled his face close and kissed him on the cheek. “Love you.”

  He offered a thin smile. “Go. You have to hurry.”

  She left the car and dashed back on Arapahoe toward the farmer’s market, knees and hips and moose-hoof-shaped bruise on her stomach screaming at her to stop working her body so hard.

  ***

  8:20 am

  Not two minutes after Reagan had left Spoon, the blue Chevy Tahoe appeared in the side view mirror of the car.

  “Bloody hell. Where do these wankers keep coming from?”

  The big blue monstrosity turned into the same parking lot. Spoon tried to climb over to the driver’s seat, but he was too slow. The truck parked at an angle, blocking his exit.

  The passenger and driver doors opened, and Spoon stretched to grab his crutches from the backseat. He managed to collect both of them and stumble out into the parking lot, but Tyson and Dalton were standing on either side of him, smug grins on their faces.

  “You are the most resilient goddamn person I think I’ve ever met,” Tyson said.

  Spoon said nothing. He puffed out his chest and stood tall, even though Tyson was preparing to knock the stuffing out of him for the second time in two straight days. But Spoon could take a beating if it bought Reagan some time.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s not here,” Spoon said. “It’s just me. I’m out for a Saturday drive.”

  “Bullshit,” said Dalton. “We saw you two leave the motel. We put a GPS tracker on the Honda, you dipshit. She’s around here somewhere, and you’re going to tell me where she is, or I’m going to ram my fist down your motherfucking throat.”

  Spoon consciously tried n
ot to look at the farmer’s market, on the edge of his peripheral vision and a few blocks down the street. “What happened to your hand there, Dalton?”

  Dalton hid his bandage-covered hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Tyson turned in a circle, squinting at their surroundings. “There’s a Chase bank at 13th and Canyon. That’s where she is, isn’t she? Or maybe it’s the Wells Fargo up near Pearl. How did she figure out how to get into the safety deposit box? Does she have power of attorney?”

  “I have no idea what you’re running on about. If you’re after an ATM, there’s one at the servo across the street right there,” Spoon said, pointing to a gas station on the opposite corner.

  “Dalton,” Tyson said, “why don’t you stay here with him while I go find your cousin?”

  “No problem,” he said, flexing his fingers.

  Spoon took a step back. “I told you already, she’s not here.”

  Tyson sucked air through his teeth. “I like you, Australian. You got a big heart and bigger balls. Dalton, you take it easy on our friend here. He’s had a rough couple of days.”

  With that, Tyson spun on his heels and walked toward downtown.

  Spoon watched him go and had a think about his options. Cars whizzed by behind them on the street, but there was no one else in this parking lot behind the restaurant. The angles of the cars and the seclusion of the back parking lot meant that whatever was about to happen would be semi-private. Fight, instead of flight–since Spoon couldn’t exactly escape–seemed the best option. He spread his legs into a boxing stance, then dropped his crutches to the ground.

  “Just you and me,” Dalton said, glancing at the deserted lot. “Why do you two keep causing so much trouble? We just want what’s ours.”

  “Get fucked.”

  “If that’s the way you want to do it,” Dalton said as he narrowed the distance between them. “Looks like someone got a head start on me. Your face looks like shit.”

  “Still prettier than you,” Spoon said, raising his fists, pretending he was ready and willing to do this.