City Problems

by Steve Goble

  “Jeff …”

  “Screw this,” he said. He turned and ran toward the high school. For a big guy, he was fast. There was no chance I could catch him if I was so inclined, and I actually run pretty well.

  Shelly sighed. “Cops are certainly not popular around here.”

  “Nope. No, we are not. Let’s go drink.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tuesday, 6 p.m.

  WE HAD THE place mostly to ourselves, and Tuck had reluctantly put on some Kristofferson for me while Shelly and I sat in a secluded corner, beneath a mounted bass that had been caught in the pond I lived by. Not by me, though.

  Tuck had made many improvements to turn what had been a grimy dive into a decent little bar and grill with very respectable cheeseburgers, and the wide variety of music was one of them. No one ever seemed to want Kristofferson but me, though, and it was a sign of friendship that my metalhead buddy played it at all. Well, he did consider it an upgrade to the steady diet of Brooks and Dunn and Lady Antebellum many of his country-oriented customers preferred. As a poet himself, Tuck was willing to admit Kristofferson could turn a phrase.

  Shelly tried to be polite, but I could tell old-school outlaw country wasn’t her thing. And I will admit that Kristofferson’s voice is an acquired taste. Shelly was nursing a lager, while I was on my second IPA. Kris was singing about how loving her was easier than anything he’d ever do again. I wasn’t thinking about love, exactly, but Shelly had somehow gone from cute as hell to downright intoxicating, in my estimation. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was her eyes. Maybe I didn’t care. Anyway, wanting her was easier than it had been earlier.

  We’d talked a little bit about our pasts, how I became a cop because my dad and grandpa had been cops and I never considered any other option, and how she became a cop because she was a wee bit of an action junkie.

  After that, we got into detective fiction. “I like Ed McBain and Sue Grafton,” she said. “Always entertaining.”

  “Give John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee a try. Not the most realistic stuff in the world, I guess, except when it is. Always worth reading, though.”

  We both came down in favor of Raymond Chandler, and opposed to Agatha Christie. We split on Mickey Spillane. Once we got beyond crime fiction, we disagreed completely on Joseph Conrad.

  “Conrad? Oh God, no,” she said.

  “Read ‘Youth’ and get back to me,” I insisted.

  “Not happening.”

  After that, our talk had returned to the missing Megan Beemer, and how nothing we’d learned today had turned Shelly’s slender thread of a lead into anything stronger. The case had gone exactly nowhere. But several teens from here had gone to that party, and it was a connection worth exploring.

  Shelly shook her head. “The kids, all of them, seem evasive.”

  “Teens talking to cops always seem evasive.”

  I wanted it all to be coincidental. I wanted Shelly’s partner to call her and say he’d found Megan Beemer alive and well someplace very far away from here. I wanted this case to go away and leave me alone.

  I tried to shake off the tenuous connections. All we knew for sure was some kids from Mifflin County had been at the same party where Megan was last seen, and that she’d met someone from Hicksville. The fact of several Mifflin County license plates showing up in the lot could be explained by Soul Scraped performing at the warehouse. A lot of young people here followed the band, it seemed. I’d looked them up online while waiting for our beers. They had a following. I had no idea why.

  The Soul Scraped website was still showing on my phone screen as Tuck passed by. “Damn, man, I like those dudes.”

  “Are you serious? They sound like Les Pauls and Ludwigs crunched up in a blender.”

  “You have no taste, Ed.” Tuck pursed his lips, the way he does when a lecture is coming on. “These guys try to do something with their music, you know? They stretch themselves. I like the lyrics. They take chances. I even thought about having them play at this place some Saturday night, except they are all underaged.”

  I shook my head. “I will shoot you if those kids grow up and play in this bar, Tuck.” A man’s got to have standards, and I didn’t want to drive farther than Tuck’s to get a beer. A bar you can do a wobbly walk home from is a thing not easily discarded.

  “I can’t afford to run a business with just you as a customer, Ed, and I sure don’t want to listen to your country shit every night.”

  “You prefer ‘Turd Blossom,’ is that it?”

  Tuck shook his head, and the beads clattered. “Ain’t heard that one, but I like the juxtaposition. Very zen.” He wandered off.

  Shelly grinned. She had been poking around on her phone while Tuck and I talked. “I told you those boys had talent. My partner has had no luck in Columbus, by the way, and nothing from his buddy in Ambletown.” She sighed. “I am starting to hate this case.”

  “Me, too.”

  I was feeling unsettled, and trying to fend off memories of New York, and a dead girl in the Bronx. I told myself we had no real reason to believe Megan Beemer had come to harm. It was just as likely she had run off with a guy. Or a girl, for that matter. But Shelly’s brows had furrowed every time I mentioned that possibility, and it was clear she didn’t believe it. Nothing they had learned about Megan Beemer in Columbus made her a likely runaway candidate, she said.

  I waved at Tuck for another brew, and hoped to hell that if something bad had happened to Megan, it had happened in someone else’s damned county. I had seen my share of young tragedy, and had spent too many nights in cold sweats, dreaming of being some odd mixture of total failure and avenging demon. I did not want to be either.

  Tuck placed a new glass before me, and I drained about half of it in a swallow. Shelly gave me a hard look. “Last one,” I said, doubting it was true. “Promise.”

  “I drive us back to the S.O. and my car,” she said. Her face said she would not take no, or fuck that, for an answer.

  “Deal,” I said. I paused dramatically. “Do you have to drive to Columbus tonight?”

  She looked at me, shrugged, grinned. “Yeah. I was afraid of this. Look. One, I am not easy, OK? I take my time.”

  “Not a carpe diem, love the one you’re with kind of girl, huh?”

  “No. Also, two, I play for the other team.”

  “Michigan fan?”

  She laughed. “No. Hell, no. O-H!”

  “I-O!”

  We clinked glasses, drank, and locked eyes over our beers. Her eyes were perfect, but the expression in them was not promising.

  “I’m a lesbian, Ed.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “I’ll get over it. Is there a lucky girl?”

  “There is, expecting me home tonight.”

  “Well, then, no hard feelings. Drinks are on me.”

  “I buy next time.”

  “Deal.”

  Tuck added the bill to my already outrageous tab, and we headed out to the truck to the sounds of Kristofferson musing about how he’d let Bobby McGee slip away somewhere near Salinas, Lord. If Kris had been there physically, I’d have flipped him off for mocking me. Tuck had shut down Kris and cranked up AC/DC before we even got in the Ford. The band was on a highway to hell. Shelly and I were bound for Ambletown.

  Shelly drove, and had no trouble handling the truck. We talked, mostly just repeating ourselves about the case because I had pretty much made things awkward. We decided that I would continue poking around, and would hit Chalmers High School up near Nora the next day, and she would stay in Columbus unless I came up with something solid. Back at the sheriff’s office, she got into her silver Mazda and headed toward I-71.

  I headed back toward my pond-side trailer off Big Black Dog Road. I was feeling surly, and the Steve Earle disc I was playing was not helping matters. His songs were surly, too. I shut off the music.

  I rumbled down the dirt l
ane that led through the trees and on to my trailer. The towering oaks and maples still had enough leaves on them to blot out most of the sky, so the stuff showing in my headlights was all I could see and the roar and rattle of the truck was all I could hear. The rest of the universe might as well have not even existed. I was just drunk enough to wonder if it really did. Maybe this was all a cosmic joke, and young, pretty girls just sometimes vanished, and gorgeous women preferred other women to me, and it was all just part of the joke.

  Yuk yuk yuk.

  I pulled into the clearing, parked, stepped away from the road, took a leak, and stared up at the stars. It really is dark out here, I thought. Kind of a mirror for what was in my head. It was dark in there, too.

  I wished to hell Shelly had been up for a bit of distraction. I could hear Kristofferson in my head, growling “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

  I zipped up, mad at myself, and headed inside and flipped on the light. It was cramped in the trailer, of course. I have a living room area with a sofa that pulls out to a bed, although I seldom bothered. There’s a shower and bathroom area toward the back and a kitchen area that sort of separates the two. Most of the space that isn’t taken up by furniture was taken up by stacks of books. Twain and Conrad, and enough cheesy crime novels to open my own bookstore. I thought for the millionth time about quitting the sheriff’s office and opening a bookstore. You don’t make a lot of money with a bookstore, because almost no one fucking reads anymore, but you don’t often get shot at or called a jack-booted thug. Or a government thug, or whatever the hell Brian Cotton had called us. Seducing lesbians probably wasn’t any easier for booksellers than for cops, though, so there probably was no point in switching careers just yet.

  The trailer wasn’t much, but it was isolated and I could fish for bluegill or bass for my weekend breakfasts, and could play my battered Martin guitar and sing without anyone to complain about the noise. Jim and Olive Langstrom liked the idea of having a cop living on their property, and I liked the cheap rent and the feeling of leaving the rest of the world behind when I was there. It was a good deal.

  Most of the time, anyway. This night, the trailer felt more like a cocoon, a place to hide away, transform, and emerge later as something else. Something that wanted to smack people around, pound faces, and demand to know what the hell had happened to Megan Beemer.

  I reached into the cabinet above the tiny stove. I took down the bottle of Knob Creek, the unopened bottle that had been up there for three years, and put it on the pullout table. I had emptied a similar bottle just like it on that last hellish night in the Bronx, the night we’d found a pretty girl nailed naked to a goddamned wall, surrounded by graffiti written in her own goddamned blood. I’d driven west that night, leaving NYPD behind and sipping bourbon from that bottle the whole way. I’d woken up in Ohio, parked near a creek forty feet from what passed as a road and wondering how the hell I’d gotten there. I was astounded I had not killed anyone on that nightmare drive, and astounded that I didn’t seem to care that I could have killed myself, too.

  I stared at the bottle I’d taken from the cabinet. It was untapped, virginal. I’d bought this bottle not to drink, but to serve as a reminder, and a test of strength. Every day I didn’t open it, I won and the darkness lost. The bottle had served that purpose for three years.

  Now, here it was, sitting on my pullout table next to a shot glass that I did not remember grabbing, with me hovering over it. I could taste it already, even though the seal was still on the bottle. I sat next to it, gazed at it, trembled a bit.

  Goddamn it, I thought. Goddamn it.

  I turned away and grabbed the Martin. My dad had given me the guitar when I was in high school, and showed me a few chords. It usually relaxed me. I stepped outside into the dark and sat on the steps. I strummed “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” singing softly, until it occurred to me that Megan Beemer had blue eyes.

  Fuck.

  I started checking out Megan Beemer on Instagram. She had a little brown dog, named Candy, and she kissed it right on the mouth. She liked to dance with another girl, named Molly. She just couldn’t deal with all the folks who wanted brown people to stop trying to come to our country, and to hell with anyone who mocked “the alphabet people,” aka LGBTQ humans.

  A good kid. I hoped to hell we would find her alive.

  My phone buzzed. Linda’s name was on the screen. I snatched the phone as though it were a lifeline.

  “Hello,” I said. “You are up late.”

  “Yeah, a bit,” she said. “I am on Big Black Dog Road, actually, wondering if I should drive down your lane.”

  I laughed. “Are you psychic?”

  She laughed, too. It was a good laugh. “Maybe, a little. I am mostly observant, and a tad buzzed, and reminiscing, and horny. It was good seeing you today.”

  “Come on down,” I said.

  “Two minutes,” she said before hanging up.

  I took the guitar inside, turned on a light outside the trailer, and stepped outside to wait for her in the breeze. The wind carried scents of fresh-cut grass, the pond, and the remnants of burnt leaves. I could hear crickets, and the occasional barred owl. The stars were diamonds mounted on black velvet. It all looked and felt better than it had a few moments before.

  I wondered if having Linda stop by was a mistake. She likely would say she’d noticed something off in my voice or behavior when I visited the school. She probably would ask me what I was thinking. She probably wanted to fix me.

  I didn’t have the patience for that. I just wanted someone to help me make it through the night. Kristofferson would understand.

  I saw her headlights, and they grew and grew until they lit up the mulleins and cattails surrounding the pond. She shut off the VW engine, and climbed out. My porch light showed she was wearing a white Jerry Garcia T-shirt, faded jeans, and tennis shoes. She said not a word. She just walked right up to me, wrapped her arms around me, and jammed her tongue into my mouth. She’d been drinking red wine.

  “Well,” I said a few seconds later. “Hello.”

  I followed her inside. Damn, she looked good.

  She went straight to the fridge and pulled out a couple of IPAs. “I should have known you would have no wine,” she said.

  “Sorry. I could taste some on you, though. You been to Tuck’s?”

  She smiled. “Of course.”

  Mystery solved. Tuck had told Linda about my swing and a miss with Shelly, and Linda was sweeping in to learn all the gory details.

  She knew where the bottle opener was, and a moment later we were standing face-to-face, drinking.

  “So,” I said, “what brings a gorgeous redheaded hippie girl like you to a cramped little hillbilly trailer like this?”

  She smiled, green eyes shining. “I came to borrow some books. Honestly? A couple of things.” She put down her beer and snuggled up for another deep kiss. “One, you looked pretty doggone good today, and I remembered a lot of very, very good things.”

  “Me, too.” I put down my empty bottle.

  “Two, I knew you would make a pass at Miss Cutie Detective and crash and burn big-time.”

  “Yeah?” I kissed her, and dropped a hand to her ass. “Being psychic again?”

  “No crystal ball required,” she said. “Just the kind of observation skills you detectives are supposed to have. Sherlock would be chastising you about now.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “That lady cop was checking me out today way more intently than you were, mister detective. Hell, if you had turned me down tonight, I was gonna call her.”

  “Oh, really? I have her number.”

  “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t totally want video of that.” She pulled my face into hers, and our mouths and tongues wrestled. I stopped worrying about whether this was a good idea or not.

  “So,” she said, once we’d surrendered to the need to breathe, “I propose one damned good night. No worries, no expectations on the morrow, no guilt
, and no long, probing talks. Let’s just have fun.”

  She locked her mouth on mine for a good twenty seconds, then dropped to her knees and began undoing my belt.

  “I think I can manage that,” I said.

  “You’d better,” she said.

  Wednesday, 3:07 a.m.

  Linda slept beside me. I tilted my phone so the light would not disturb her.

  I was checking Facebook and Instagram, hoping to see a new post from Megan Beemer. “Hi, everyone, it’s me, just checking in. Lost my phone, so that’s why I haven’t been on here for a couple days, lol. I am home now, though! Missed ya!”

  There was no such post.

  A half hour later, I checked again. Same result.

  I resisted checking another Facebook account, for another girl. I knew there would be no fresh posts there.

  Wednesday, 7:45 a.m.

  The sun was barely peeking through the trees when the aroma of coffee woke me. Linda was singing softly, dancing slowly, already showered and dressed.

  I hugged her from behind. “That was fun.”

  “It was kind of what you needed.”

  “Yeah, but how did you know?”

  “It’s kind of what you always need,” she said. “And, frankly, it was pretty much what I needed, too.” She turned, kissed me well and deeply, then handed me a mug of coffee. “I gotta go teach kids to appreciate Jane Austen.”

  “Have a beautiful day,” I said. “Keep your eyes and ears open about that missing girl for me, OK?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I knew this case would get to you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Yes.” I saw no need to mention that, despite Linda’s best efforts at wearing me out, I’d dreamed about that damned case in New York. The Briana Marston case. The case that almost broke me.

  “Call me if you need to,” Linda said. “Any time.”

  “I will.” I kissed her, and patted her on the rear as she left. I turned to head to the shower.