by Faye, Amy
“Uh. I guess, second question, it’s like, an apartment? This guy’s apartment. He’s the boss.”
“And he lives in an apartment? I guess loan sharking doesn’t pay as well as it used to,” I joke. Technically, I wouldn’t know how well loans paid out before. But I have a general idea that people wouldn’t do it if it didn’t pay quite a lot. Maybe it’s in a central location, though, I don’t know.
“And as to what to say… I don’t know? They’ll want some kind of assurance that I can pay them.”
“But you can’t, Billy.”
“I don’t like it when you call me that.”
“Fine, I won’t call you that again. But you have to admit, it’s not much of a plan. You want me to lie to the face of some loan shark types, or they’ll break your knees?” I grip the steering wheel, driving off into the dark night. It’s not close by, this place, and I’m in for a long night’s drive. If I’m home by morning, I’ll be lucky. “Hell, if I’m not convincing enough, what’s to stop these guys breaking my knees? I don’t have the luxury of being able to take six months off work, man.”
“Oh, you’ll be fine. I know you will. Don’t worry about it. Please. You have to try, at least, you have to promise that you’ll try, right?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t going to try, but I can’t promise anything, alright? I’m just going to do my best, and that’s all I can offer you at this point.”
“Yeah. No, I get that. You’re really helping me out, you know? You’re a solid guy.”
“Yeah,” I say sourly. The drive continues into the dark. The night is long, and there’s a lot going into it. But I’m hopped up on coffee, and the minute that I feel the energy flagging, I’m going to stop for more.
I turn the radio on, and it’s playing old country music from the sixties. That’s fine. Not necessarily my style, but I can get by on it if I have to. There’s a certain comfort to it. A familiarity.
I feel my head starting to shift from unbearable pain of exhaustion to my eyes getting heavy, pulled off the interstate, and pulled into the first place that looked like I could get a drive-through coffee.
“You want anything, Bill? I can at least float you a couple dollars for a drink, right?”
“Yeah, could I get, uh, a large Dr. Pepper maybe?”
“Hey, man, whatever floats your boat.”
I order the coffee and the Dr. Pepper. They’re not taking cash at the window, but I wasn’t going to pay cash in the first place. The one thing I know for sure is, I was never going to bring a bunch of cash to go off to the middle of nowhere with Bill Ashley. He might get some funny ideas.
When I get the cups, I hand the larger one over to Bill, and balance the smaller, hotter one on my thigh as we drive back into the dark.
“So, uh…”
I look over at Bill, surprised that he spoke. Maybe I imagined it, even.
“What’s up, Bill?”
“How’s Kate doing? You treating her alright?”
“Alright enough, I figure. Why are you so worried? You suddenly decide that maybe you’re not going to be such a scumbag after all?”
“Now come on, man. Don’t be like that.”
“Fuck that ‘don’t be like that’ shit, Bill. You don’t just leave your daughter with some stranger. Poker buddy, whatever. First time I ever saw that girl and you’re telling her to come live with me? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Well, I mean… I didn’t have the money, okay? It’s like you said. I’m no squelcher.”
“But you are,” I said. I tried to keep the annoyance from reaching my voice, but I could more than feel it building inside me. “You keep walking into shit with no plan for how you’re going to get out of it, and then when you get trapped inside, you think, oh, poor me. Poor Bill. You ever stop to think about Katie and what she’s got to deal with, you selfish son of a bitch?”
He got quiet. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“I’m not saying you’re a bad guy to the bone, and you’ll never get better, right? You could improve a whole lot, and surprise the hell out of me. All I’m saying is that you’ve got to get your head straightened out, because as it stands you’re heading down the wrong road, and I ain’t going to lie to you and say that I care that you’re going to get hurt by it, but she’s going to get hurt by it, too.”
“No, no, I get that,” Bill answers, but he’s all quiet.
“And besides, I already told you, she’s fine. You just saw her.”
“So you haven’t heard anything from, you know, from these guys?”
“Not hide nor hair.”
He seems to relax a little bit. What kind of people is he dealing with that they would go after some unrelated guy’s house, try to take a woman from this guy’s house, because her father owes a debt?
That’s not really loan shark territory. It’s not even mobster territory, unless you killed one of their guys, or something.
“So you want to tell me how, precisely, you got yourself into this?”
“I was playing the tables, right?”
I look at him out of the side of my eyes. “You’ve got a problem, man. You need to get away from that shit.”
“No, you don’t understand, okay? I needed money. I needed to pay you back, I’ve got other guys on my back, and I needed the money.”
“So you sell a kidney, or something. Don’t go back to the table. You’re not a born winner, Bill. You just aren’t.”
“I got a system.”
“Okay, so your system went sideways, and you owed the house a bunch of money?”
“No, it went great. Apparently too great,” he says. “They wanted me to give back the money, plus a blow-off fee, or they’re going to break my fingers.”
“What, you don’t even have a little bit of money?”
“I told you, man, I have other guys on my back. Not all of them are as solid as you.”
“So you pissed off the owners of some casino. What is this, the forties? Casino owners will mostly just throw you out if you piss ‘em off that bad.”
“Yeah,” he says. “At casinos, you’re right.”
I don’t have any more words for this man. We drive quietly as the miles tick by, the only noise coming from the sound of the road on the tires.
“There,” he says suddenly. He points. “Left turn ahead.”
Three hundred yards out is a left turn. It’s not the only one for miles, but it’s no different than any of the others, either. I don’t know how he can pick it out, but I don’t say that. He has a way, and I just don’t know what to look for.
I ease the car around the corner, and slowly, the area starts to become more crowded. Very slowly.
“There,” he says, pointing. It’s not an apartment complex, as far as I can tell; more like a no-tell motel. But whatever. All I have to do is talk to some guys, right?
I pull up in front, shut off the headlights, turn the car off, and pocket the keys. Then I get out. It’s so cold that I feel like it’s going to pull my nuts right off.
“Let’s make this quick,” I announce. He knocks on the door. A second later it opens, and a handful of guys are sitting around a small round table on the opposite wall. They’ve pushed the bed away from the wall to make room. In the middle of the table is a Sorry! Board game, unfolded and clearly in the middle of the game.
“Come on inside, you’re going to freeze your ass off out there.”
I step inside, careful to keep close to the wall. I don’t know if I trust these guys. I could take any one of them on without worrying about it. Two, maybe, if I were lucky. But there are six, and no amount of luck is going to make up that difference.
“Hey, guys, this is, uh, the guy I was telling you about.”
“This is him?”
“This is him,” Bill says. I don’t like this. I turn and take a step towards the door, and run face-first into a big, balled up fist.
Sixteen
Kate
I stay up
late as a rule. When you can sleep in, you can stay up late because you’re not as tired. Then you sleep in later, and you stay up later. So staying up all night isn’t unusual for me.
But last night was.
Last night was the first time that I can remember in my entire life when I was waiting for someone to come home, and it was the first time in my life that the person I was waiting for didn’t show up.
Then again, Luke said that he’d see me in the morning. It’s not as if he doesn’t know that I wake up late. It’s not as if he doesn’t know how late I sleep, so maybe he meant that he’d see me in the afternoon, or even the evening. Maybe he was using it to mean ‘see you tomorrow,’ rather than ‘home by dawn.’
“Where are you?” I say it to the open air. I look outside, as if that is going to answer. There’s nothing out there. There never was going to be; he parks inside, and I know it. But I can’t help thinking that if he had come home, it would have woken me.
Nobody answers. The house is silent, except for the sound of my heart thumping in my ears, like it always seems to.
“Great,” I huff. “Now I’m talking to myself.”
The ground is cold. I ought to have left the heat on overnight, if I didn’t think that Luke was going to be back, but I did. I had assumed he would turn it on, if the house were chilly. Evidently, that hadn’t happened.
I pad out into the hall, my nipples making uncomfortable peaks in my thin tee-shirt, and tap the thermostat on the wall until it says that it gives, and it’ll turn up the temperature after all. Somewhere in the bowels of the house, I hear the boiler turn on, and hot air starts venting through the house.
That done, there are other things on the agenda. One in particular. Or, put another way, a mystery to solve. Where could he possibly be? Why would he call and tell me that he’d be home if he wasn’t? If he was home, why is it that every sign seems to suggest that he never made it?
I don’t know what to think, and I want nothing less than to try to figure out what I’m supposed to be thinking. There’s a lot that I don’t understand, but one of the biggest is what’s supposed to be going on today.
“Luke?”
I check the place where I left my notebook on the dresser. It’s been undisturbed. I didn’t think to check it sooner, with the cold. Part of me wanted to believe that I would have noticed if it were disturbed. Another part of me didn’t believe that for a second; certainly, not enough to put myself in a position that I would go into the conversation with Luke after he’d read it all, without knowing.
But there was no indication that anyone had picked it up, and even less of an indication that anyone had turned through all the other pages, filled with what might have been my innermost thoughts.
At least, that was what it was supposed to contain. After I wrote the note for Luke, though, I realized that everything else I’d written had barely managed to scratch the surface of my thoughts and feelings.
“Luke?” No answer a second time. Either he was playing some kind of prank on me, a prank that I didn’t appreciate, or he wasn’t here. I slipped on a pair of socks before I continued my exploration, too. The hardwood floors were frigid against my feet, and I couldn’t keep going without something to protect my skin against it.
The first place to check was the most obvious. His bedroom was empty. The bed hadn’t been slept in; if he had ever been in the room at all, then he’d only stood in the doorway and looked in on an empty bed before he left.
I thought I heard a noise downstairs. I wanted to believe it was a person, but even I couldn’t fool myself that well. It was the sound of the house settling, or the pipes in the walls, or any number of things. But it wasn’t someone’s footsteps.
Even still, I had to go explore down there at some point, and if it had to be done, then I’d rather do it sooner than later. Another noise. It’s repeating, slowly but surely.
Part of me wants to believe that it’s a cat, or a dog, or something like that. But there aren’t any pets here. Nothing to be walking around, trying to find trouble to get into when the master is away. If there is something, it doesn’t belong here. It just found its way in. That’s not house cat territory.
There’s a louder noise this time, nothing like the ones before. It’s sharp and loud and clearly identifiable as something hitting the ground, hard enough that it almost certainly left a mark.
“Luke?”
My heart pounds in my chest. Maybe it was just something balanced precariously, and fell now by coincidence. It’s not unheard of. Every horror movie plot seems to have something like that happen, for example. So I don’t have to start freaking out yet.
That said, I can get a head-start on it now, and I don’t miss the opportunity.
My hands ball up into fists, as if they’d do something about an intruder. I cock my fist back and hope that I’ll be able to see whoever it is before they see me. That way, I can wallop them upside the head and run as fast as possible in the other direction.
I round the corner. My heart is beating so hard that it hurts. My chest feels like it’s about to burst. I see the tiniest flicker of movement and start throwing the punch before I even have time to register what I’m looking at.
The man gives out a cry. “Ah! That hurt!”
The adrenaline doesn’t go away all at once, even as the tension does. Still, I stay on guard. I always have to, with my Dad, and when he’s someplace that he’s not supposed to be, I have to be doubly on my guard.
“Where’s Luke?”
“What, he didn’t call you?”
I pull my phone out of my pocket. No missed calls. No calls from anyone, except the one from last night, which I guess was from Luke’s phone.
“No, no calls.”
“Well, then I don’t know where he is. Come on, Katie, let’s get you out of here.”
His hand claps around my arm and he pulls me with him. I follow. It’s not like I’m in a position to argue. I’m not even in a position to understand what’s going on, and until I get an explanation for what he’s doing here, I’m going to assume that there’s probably a perfectly rational explanation for it.
“Dad?”
He frowns to himself as he messes with the keys in a car that I know doesn’t belong to him.
The garage door opens behind the car, just as it kicks to life and growls under us. This is Luke’s car. I can’t imagine that he thinks that I won’t recognize it.
“What?”
He doesn’t wait for me to get my explanation before he starts driving, though. He eases the car out onto the street and starts working his way toward the interstate.
“Why do you have Luke’s car?”
“He gave it to me,” Dad lies. I can always see it when he’s lying. Maybe there’s someone out there who he can convince. Maybe that’s why he believes that he can just lie with impunity. Or maybe it’s something hard-wired into him.
“Dad?”
“What now?”
“Tell me the truth. How did you get the car?”
“I told you. He gave it to me.”
I look at him. He’ll lie, but he’s not good at sticking to a lie. Dad’s more likely to switch up the lie, at some point, if he sees an alternative. He gave it to me, he lent it to me, I borrowed it, he sent me out just to come pick you up…
I can think of a dozen different explanations he could have given me, if he wanted to. But he doesn’t. He sticks with that story.
“What happened last night?”
“What do you mean?”
“He called me while you two were driving.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. So what happened after that?”
“After that?”
“Yeah. The twelve hours between then and now.”
“Oh, uh…” I can watch the cogs turning in his head as he thinks it all through. “I don’t know. We got separated.”
I don’t know what he did, but I know it wasn’t good.
And I know that I’m going to have to get it out of him one way or another because it’s probably important that I mitigate the damage as much as possible.
Seventeen
Luke
I wake up. The fact that I don’t remember falling asleep was an interesting twist; the fact that I don’t remember much of anything at all, except that I was out with Bill Ashley, because he said he needed my help.
There must have been something between then and now, because some half-remembered faces are staring at me, like they’ve been waiting for me to eventually awaken.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I say. My voice is groggy, and my speech slurred. “What seems to be the trouble?”
The guy in front stands up and walks off. He leaves behind his friend, who just smiles at me. I’m starting to get tired of people refusing to explain things to me, at this point.
“I’m gonna get mad at someone soon,” I growl. He doesn’t seem to be particularly worried about that. In fact, he doesn’t seem worried about much of anything at all.
My arms strain to reach behind me. That’s probably got something to do with the lack of worry in his eyes. No matter how mad I get, it’s not going to count for very much if it only comes to impotent rage. That seems like what I’m aiming at, at this point. Better to conserve my strength, then.
“You want to explain why I’m here, my man?”
He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head in a mocking gesture, but he never opens his mouth. There’s all the time in the world for someone to just tell me what the hell I’m sitting in this chair for, tied up and waiting for something to start. But he apparently isn’t interested in that.
A minute later, my other friend steps back inside, and then a third man steps past him, looking down at me impassively. He takes a moment to weigh me and my chances at doing anything.
“You’re awake,” he says. “That’s good.”
“It wasn’t a restful nap,” I tell him. “I’m still exhausted.”
I don’t know how long it’s been, but the sun is still up, and after driving the whole night through, I’m sure that I haven’t slept near enough.