Abby sipped the pint and held her slim right hand out level above the bar.
Steady as a rock.
She turned back to the case file and flipped through it to see where the cars were impounded. Tara Beckley’s CRV and the cargo van rented by Carlos Ramirez had both been hauled off by an outfit with the exquisite name of Savage Sam’s Salvage.
Abby called. The phone was answered almost immediately with one curt word: “Sam.”
Savage Sam? Abby almost asked, but she managed to hold that one back and explained who she was and why she was calling.
“Ayuh, I got ’em both, the van and the Honda,” Sam acknowledged without much interest. “Both of ’em beat to shit, but the Honda took it worse. Those are little SUVs, but they’re stout, so it must’ve taken a pretty good pop.”
Abby thought of the photos of the bloodstained pavement and of Tara Beckley in her hospital bed, body running on tubes and machines, eyes wide open and staring at Abby.
“Yes,” she said. “It did take a good pop. I’ll need to see the vehicles, but I’m also interested in what you might have found in the car.”
“I don’t steal shit out of cars, honey.”
That was an interesting reaction.
“My name is Abby, not honey, and I didn’t mean to imply that you stole anything,” she said. “It’s just that I’m looking for a phone that seems to have gone missing and that might still be in the car.”
There was a long pause before he said, “I can check it again, maybe.”
First the adamant claim that he didn’t steal things out of cars, now the willingness to check it again. Perhaps Savage Sam was uptight for a reason. Abby had a hunch that he was going to discover the phone—and maybe a few other valuables. She suspected this wasn’t the first time he’d swept through a wrecked car in his impound lot.
“I’d appreciate that,” Abby said. “Because that phone is going to be pretty important to the case, and we’ve got one dead and one in a coma. You know what that’ll lead to—trial, lawyers, cops, all that happy crap.”
She said it casually but made sure to emphasize the police and lawyers. It did not seem to be lost on Savage Sam, who said in a more agreeable tone of voice, “It’s possible I overlooked somethin’.”
Abby smiled. “Can happen to anyone. If you don’t mind checking, that would be great. And I can keep the cops out of your hair. If they come by, they’ll waste more of your time than I will, you know?”
“I’ll check it, sure,” Savage Sam said, now seeming positively enthusiastic about the prospect.
“Just give me a call back if you find anything.”
Five minutes, she thought when she hung up. That was how long it would take Savage Sam to call back with news of the discovery of a cell phone. He probably already had it in his desk drawer, waiting on a buyer from Craigslist or eBay.
She was wrong—it took nine minutes.
“It turns out there was one in there,” Savage Sam informed her with a level of shock more appropriate for the discovery of a live iguana in one’s toilet. “Jammed down by the gas pedal and wedged just between it and the floor mat. Crazy—I never would’ve seen it unless I’d been looking for it.”
Abby grinned. “I bet. Well, I’m sure glad you checked again for me.”
“Yeah, happy to help.”
“You’re positive there was just one?” Abby said.
“Positive. What do you want me to do with it?”
“I can pick it up today, or I can have the police do it?”
“Why don’t you grab it,” Sam said. “I don’t need to get in the middle of things.”
Abby wondered just how much swag this guy sold. “I can be there just before five, if that works for you?”
“That works.”
Abby paid the tab. Three beers—when had the third one snuck in there? Oh, well, she was still legal. One for the spine, one for the shooting hand, and one for the memories she’d rather not let into her head while she was behind the wheel. Clarity could be a bitch sometimes.
5
She won’t quit,” Shannon Beckley insists.
Her face is hovering just inches from Tara’s, but she’s squinting like someone peering through a microscope, searching for something. Her voice carries conviction, but her eyes lack it. Her eyes think the search might be hopeless.
“Trust me,” Shannon says.
I always trust you, Tara answers, but no sound comes out. Why isn’t there a sound? Strange. She starts to speak again but Shannon interrupts. Not unusual with Shannon.
“Trust me,” Shannon repeats, “this girl…will…not…quit.” Shannon’s green eyes are searing; her auburn hair is falling across her face, and her expression is as severe as any boot-camp drill sergeant’s. Tara can smell Shannon’s Aveda moisturizer, with its hint of juniper, and feel her breath warm on her cheek. She’s that close, and yet Shannon’s eyes suggest that she feels far away, unable to see whatever she’s looking at. That’s confusing, because she’s looking at Tara.
Good for her if she will not quit, Tara tells her sister, and again there is no sound, but that concern is replaced by confusion. Hang on—who will not quit? And what is it that she’s not going to quit?
Shannon is always forceful, but her face and words carry heightened intensity as she makes these stark but meaningless assertions about the girl who will not quit.
Not her eyes, though, Tara thinks. Her eyes are not nearly so sure about things.
Shannon leans away then, and the light that floods into Tara’s face is harsh and white. At first she can’t see anything because of that brightness, but then it dulls, as if someone has dialed back a dimmer switch, and she sees her mother. Her mother is crying. Rick is rubbing her shoulders. Good old Rick. Always the man with a hand for the shoulder and a comforting word. Usually the words don’t mean much, silly platitudes, bits of recycled wisdom. But Tara’s mother needs a steady diet of encouragement. The supportive touches and comforting words do the job she used to let the pills do.
But what is today’s crisis? Tara watches her mother cry and watches Rick rub her back with a slow, circular motion that feels nearly hypnotic, and she tries to determine what the problem is, why everyone is so scared, so sad.
Oh, yeah—someone won’t quit, that’s the problem.
Tara’s mouth is dry and her head aches and she is very tired. Too tired to deal with her mother’s anxiety yet again. Let Rick deal with it. And Shannon. Shannon is here, ready to take charge, as always. Why is Shannon here? She’s in her last year of law school at Stanford, and Shannon doesn’t miss classes. Ever. But here she is…
Where is here? Where am I?
She knows this should matter, and yet it doesn’t seem to. Between Rick’s soothing and Shannon’s shouting, it will all work out. Tara isn’t needed for this one. She’s too tired for this one.
What is this one?
The girl who won’t quit. That girl is the problem. Who exactly she is and what exactly she is up to, Tara doesn’t know, but the girl who won’t quit is clearly causing the trouble here. Tara is too tired to join them all in their concern, though. The whole scene exhausts her and makes her strangely angry. Whoever the girl is, she needs to back the hell off and leave everyone alone. Look at them. Just look at their faces. See those tears, that fatigue, that sorrow? Back off, bitch. Back off and leave them alone.
Just go away.
Tara decides she will sleep again. Maybe while she sleeps, this relentless problem girl will finally abandon her confusing quest.
All Tara understands with certainty is that it will be better for everyone when that girl finally quits.
6
Savage Sam might’ve been sixty or a hundred. Either one seemed reasonable. He stood well over six feet, even with his stooped stance, and that natural forward lean paired with his unusually long arms gave the impression that he could have untied his boots without changing posture.
“I might not have been completely clear about the pho
ne when we talked,” he said when he greeted Abby at the front gate. He was carrying a shoe box.
“You don’t have it?”
“Oh, no, I think I’ve got it.”
Abby frowned. “I don’t follow. Either you have it or you don’t.”
“Not necessarily,” the old man said, and then he took the lid off the shoe box. Inside were at least a dozen cell phones as well as a heap of chargers and three GPS navigators.
“Now, before you get to thinkin’ somethin’ that isn’t true,” Sam cautioned, “I want you to know that I always hang on to them for thirty days before I sell them. A firm policy. Otherwise it’d be stealing.”
“The state law is thirty days?”
Savage Sam blinked and squinted. He had bifocals tucked into the pocket of his flannel shirt but chose to squint instead, as if the glasses were a prop or he’d forgotten he had them. Or perhaps he’d swiped them out of a car and was intending to sell them later.
“It’s awful close to thirty days, even if it isn’t exactly that,” he said. “They might’ve changed it.”
Abby didn’t think they’d changed the law regarding the presumption that whatever was in a wrecked car belonged to the car’s owner, but she wasn’t interested in debating the point. “That many people leave their phones?” she asked, peering into the bulging box. “Most people these days would rather cut off their hands than walk away from their phones.”
“A lot of times it’s probably an old phone or a backup or something. People give phones to their parents or grandparents, and the old-timers have no use for them, so they just pitch them into the glove compartment and forget about them. And you’d be surprised how many I find that are still in the boxes they came in.”
It made some sense. She stared at the contents of the shoe box.
“You don’t know which one came from the Honda, then?”
“Well…no. I mean, I just picked it up and threw it in there. Didn’t think about it. Now, I recall it was one of the nicer ones. Probably an iPhone.” His wizened thumb jammed into the box and shifted an iPhone forward, then another, and then a third. “But I don’t know exactly which one. And with you saying there’s police involved, and a man’s been killed and all…it would probably be easier if you sorted it out.”
He offered the box. Abby took it, contents shifting, and put the lid back on. If she just got them charged up and called numbers for Oltamu and Tara Beckley, the winner would ring.
“I’ve been here forty years and my brother’s had a pawnshop for thirty-nine,” Savage Sam said. “It works pretty well, you know?”
“I’d imagine so,” Abby said, thinking that keeping crime in the family often did.
“I guess we were always the pack-rat kind. Hell, even the sign required a bit of scavenging.”
He gestured above them, and the sign was indeed a sight to behold—a massive, old-fashioned neon marquee that would have been appropriate for a drive-in movie theater. Savage Sam’s Salvage was lit up like the Fourth of July, even though the property didn’t seem to consist of much more than an old man and a tow truck.
“It is an impressive sign,” Abby acknowledged. “Mind if I ask about the name? Savage Sam?”
Sam leaned back, which brought him nearly to an upright posture, and grinned. For an instant Abby had a glimpse of what he must’ve looked like as a kid, one of those hell-raisers who charmed teachers and parents and then set the town on fire when the adults turned their backs.
“They misspelled it,” he said, and laughed. “Was supposed to read Sam’s Salvage. Simple. But then the sign came, two pieces, one said Sam’s, the other said Savage. They forgot the L! I was pissed at first. Because the sign wasn’t cheap. So I called the guy who sold it to me and gave him hell, asking what kind of idiot could screw up a sign with only two damned words. Dumb as he was, I guess I should’ve been grateful he got Sam’s right. Anyhow, he sent me a replacement sign that had the mysterious missing L, but he didn’t ask for the other one back. Shit, why should he? So I had the three of ’em, and I got to looking them over and I thought, Why waste it?”
Now Abby was laughing too. “So you just hung them all up?”
“Sure. I thought it was kind of catchy. By then, I was starting to like it. You know how there are always those kids with nicknames and you never had one? Or did you have one?”
Abby had earned plenty of nicknames on the speedway, some more kind than others. Even the kinder ones, like Danica, had usually been offered with a sneer.
“I’m just Abby,” she told Sam, though she was remembering the Wiscasset Speedway; she’d become the first woman to win there. Someone had spray-painted White Trash Rocket on the driver’s door before the race.
“Well, I’d always been just plain old Sam Jones, no nickname coming out of that, but then that idiot screwed up the sign and I’ve been Savage Sam about ever since.” He laughed again. “But, hell, no reason to waste it. Like I said, my family’s always been pack rats.”
He seemed so happy staring at the old misspelled sign that Abby almost hated to interrupt his reverie. But she did. “The phone was in the Honda, right? Not the van?”
Sam blinked, jogged out of the past and into the present. “Yup, the Honda. I’m telling you, I never could’ve seen it down there if you hadn’t asked me to look. You don’t know which phone it is?”
“I don’t. I’ll have to charge them and call them, I guess. That’ll take a while.”
“Keep ’em all overnight, then. Just bring the rest back.”
We wouldn’t want those falling into the wrong hands before they hit the pawnshop, would we? Abby thought. “You’re good with that?” she said. “You want to take an inventory of them or anything? A photo?”
It seemed like there should be some record of the transfer of evidence between two people who were not police, but the question apparently struck Savage Sam as an odd one. He thought it over and said, “You got a card or something?”
“Um…yeah.” Abby fumbled through her purse and withdrew a business card. It had Hank Bauer’s name on it; Abby had declined cards of her own on at least a half a dozen occasions because any formality suggested that this job might last for more than a few weeks. Never mind that she’d already been at it a few months. The gig was temporary, and she’d be West Coast–bound again soon, or back to Europe, maybe, or possibly Tokyo. Sure. Any day now. And until then, she had Hank Bauer’s cards to hand over.
“You don’t want to write down what all I’m taking?” she asked.
“This’ll do.” Sam pocketed the card. “Either you’re gonna steal ’em or you’re not.” He shrugged.
With that official police business having been concluded with no police, no signatures, and the exchange of a shoe box, Abby decided to push ahead.
“You still have the cars?” she asked.
Savage Sam nodded. “Right out back. You want a look?”
“Please.”
Despite his odd posture and nearsighted squint, Sam moved quickly, stepping nimbly around the piles of junk—hubcaps, a massive bag of bottles, a stack of what appeared to be truck fenders covered by a tarp—and out to the cars.
Tara Beckley’s green Honda CRV was all too familiar to Abby from the photos; there was scarcely any part of the car left undamaged except for the driver’s seat. Tara would have been better off if she’d stayed behind the wheel. Abby leaned down and looked at the floor mat there—it was khaki-colored, clean, and dry. The phone would’ve surely stood out against it. There was no trace of blood on the fabric.
The same couldn’t be said for the backseat. She got only a glance at the crimson stains across the ripped upholstery before she felt dizzy, and she straightened up fast.
“He must’ve been driving to beat hell when he hit her,” Sam said conversationally, running his long, knobby-knuckled fingers over the crumpled metal. “See the frame damage you got here? That doesn’t happen at low speed. He must’ve been—”
“Where’s the van?” Abby cut in.
She hadn’t intended to be rude; she simply wanted an excuse to look away from the bloodstained Honda.
“Right over here,” Sam said without reproach. His interest in the Honda’s former occupants and their blood was minimal.
The van was a cargo hauler with a heavy bumper that was crushed back into the hood. Damaged, yes, but nothing significant compared to the Honda.
“Those vans are big, heavy bastards,” Sam said with admiration. “Wasn’t even carrying a load, but it probably goes four thousand pounds empty. And as tall as it is, shit, that little car didn’t have much of a chance. I heard he was using his phone or something. Ain’t surprising. You drive down the road any day of the week and pay attention, you’ll see how many of these jackasses are driving with their heads down, not giving a damn about anybody on the road but…what are you looking at?”
Abby was on her knees in the gravel, one hand braced on the van. “The tires.”
“They’re still worth selling,” Sam acknowledged. They’d probably be on their way to his brother’s pawnshop before long.
And he wasn’t wrong about the tires. They were certainly worth selling; the tread didn’t look worn. The daylight was dying, and in the shadows, Abby couldn’t find a wear-indicator bar on the tires, so she set the shoe box down and searched her purse for a coin. Sam’s gnarled fingers appeared in her face, a penny held between them.
“Thanks.” Abby rotated the penny so Abe Lincoln’s head was pointed down and inserted the coin between the tire’s tread grooves. Lincoln’s head sank below the black rubber and vanished up to the shoulders. Sam was right; the tires were nearly new.
Abby sat back on her heels and stared first at the van, then at the Honda.
“I might need to come back and take some pictures,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, when I return the phones?”
If She Wakes Page 4