by Tami Hoag
Half a dozen Hispanic guys were hanging around one of the picnic tables. One of them had brought along a portable radio that was playing Mexican polka music as the men chatted and laughed. After a few initial glances, they paid no mind to John.
He checked his watch and hunkered down a little deeper into the upturned collar of his coat. Four forty-seven. Guys were starting to wander out of the mouth of Silva’s Garage. He could hear his old man’s voice from across the parking lot—not the words, but the tone of it—and then the laughter of several men.
John willed him not to look his way, as if that would do any good. He was in no mood to take shit from his father. Just the possibility got his blood up. His brain raced ahead, running the worst possible scenario: Mack spotting him, making a beeline across the parking lot, laughing out loud, telling everyone in earshot that he’d seen it coming, that his loser kid had lost his job. He would go on saying that John was such a loser, he even failed at being a pizza deliveryman. And now here he was, come begging for the shit jobs usually tossed to fucking wetbacks.
As he listened in his mind to his father’s hate-filled racist diatribe, John could feel the pressure building inside his head until he couldn’t hear at all, until his vision flushed red. He could see himself running at the old man. He could feel the tension in his upper arm as he drew his fist back and the release as he let it fly like a stone being hurled from a catapult. He could feel the sweet pain sing up his forearm all the way to his shoulder as his knuckles crushed the old man’s nose.
He knew once he started, once the gate was thrown open on his hatred, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He would keep punching and punching and punching until someone pulled him off. And he would sincerely hope that wouldn’t happen until the son of a bitch was drowning in his own blood.
His heart was pumping now. His vision was narrowing, telescoping in on the man across the parking lot. His fists clenched hard in the pockets of his coat.
If he didn’t break this train of thought now, it was going to be too late. That truth cut through the hot haze in his brain like a knife.
He wasn’t sure he cared.
He wasn’t sure it wouldn’t be worth it.
And then a car door slammed and a small child’s voice shattered the pounding of his pulse inside his head.
“Papi! Papi!”
A dark-haired little girl of five or six dashed away from an old Toyota toward the picnic tables, her face bright with joy as she ran toward her smiling father.
John slipped off the tailgate and walked around the front of his truck. This edge of the parking area was bordered by a wooded lot nobody ever bothered clearing out except for a trail that cut through, a shortcut to the nearest neighborhood. Three steps in and he would disappear.
Still watching the parking lot, he stepped in among the trees. He watched as his father got into his truck, backed up, and turned around. The Avalanche paused for a moment, Mack Villante looking in the direction of John’s truck. John held his breath, then let it out as his father drove forward, headed across the road, more concerned with getting a drink than wondering about his own son.
John watched him go, thinking that he had to scrape something together. He had to get a job and save enough money that he could get the hell out of Shelby Mills, out of his father’s house. He didn’t feel as if he had a future, but he sure as hell didn’t want to keep living in his past.
Something rustled in the brush behind him, and he spun around, crouching low, arms up, hands out in front of him, ready to defend or attack as need be. He scanned his surroundings left to right and back and saw no one. Then the brush moved again at ten o’clock, down low, and he dropped his gaze.
A dog lay in the brush maybe fifteen feet away, watching him intently, some kind of German shepherd cross by the look of it, with a thick dark coat and bright eyes.
John squatted down, eyes on the dog, hand outstretched. The dog lowered its head and flattened its ears. Leaves rustled behind it, as if it must have been wagging its tail.
“I won’t hurt you,” John said quietly.
The dog whined and cried but stayed where it was. John took a step toward it, and the dog came up in a crouch and stepped backward. It was young, or starved, or both. Lean and ribby, tucked up in the flanks. In need of care but not wanting to trust anyone who might give it.
I know how you feel, John thought, but he made no move to reach out again. What the hell would he do with a dog? His old man would never have it at the house. John knew that from hard experience. He had tried a couple of times to have a pet when he was a kid. He wouldn’t let himself remember what had happened to them. He could only recall the emotions attached to those memories: heartbreak, grief, hatred.
He turned his back on the dog and walked back out to the parking lot.
A truck from Mercer-Nolan Landscape Design had pulled into the area near the picnic tables. A thick-bodied man in his fifties got out wearing jeans and a uniform shirt and heavy work boots. The Hispanic guys gathered around him.
“I need some strong backs for heavy lifting,” he was saying as John hustled up to the group. The man holding the little girl on his hip translated into Spanish for the others.
The Mercer-Nolan guy eyed John. His name was embroidered over his shirt pocket: Bill Kenny. “Can you lift, soldier?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Six forty-five in the A.M. We pick up here or you can get yourself to Mercer-Nolan if you know where it is.”
“Yes, sir,” John said. “Thank you, sir.”
“Thank you for your service,” Bill Kenny said, extending a hand.
John hesitated a second, then pulled his hand out of his coat pocket and reached out.
Bill Kenny frowned at the sight of his swollen, bruised knuckles and battered flesh.
He gave John a hard look. “You been fighting, son?”
“No, sir.”
“The hell. I know a busted-up fist when I see one.”
John stuffed his hand back in his pocket and hunched his shoulders. “Just hitting a bag, sir.”
“You don’t have sense enough to wear gloves?”
“Didn’t have any.”
Kenny clearly didn’t believe him. John said nothing more. The frustration was like a busted-up fist in the center of his chest, pounding and pounding. What the hell difference did it make to this jerk if he wanted to knock his knuckles on a bag or a brick wall?
“I won’t have troublemakers,” Kenny warned.
“No, sir,” John said. “I’m not. I swear, sir.”
Kenny gave him a long look, then turned to the Hispanic guy who had translated and told him the same thing about pickup in the morning, saying he would take three of the six men. He pointed to the ones he wanted.
As he spoke, a Liddell County Sheriff’s Office cruiser pulled into the parking area and rolled slowly toward them. The Hispanic guys exchanged nervous glances. John kept his head down, his gaze narrowed on the cop car as it came to a stop and the deputy climbed out. Tim Carver.
“Is there a problem, Deputy?” Bill Kenny asked with a bit of an edge in his voice, unappreciative of the interruption and the implied threat of authority. Crew bosses had been picking up day laborers, legal and not, in this parking lot for years. It was just the way things were done. Nobody messed with the system.
“Not at all,” Carver said, thumbs hooked in his belt as he walked up. “I just need to have a word with Mr. Villante here.”
“For what?” Kenny asked.
Carver smiled. “For none of your business, sir.”
Kenny scowled. “Is he wanted for something?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“No, sir,” John said emphatically.
“I just have a couple of questions for him,” Carver said. “John and I went to school together. This man here was the best tight end in three cou
nties. Hands like butter and legs like a Kentucky Thoroughbred.”
Bill Kenny looked suspicious of the story. He jammed his hands on his waist. “Tell me now if he’s going to jail. I just hired him for tomorrow. If you’re gonna take him, I’ll replace him right now.”
John’s heart thumped in his chest. He didn’t dare look at Tim Carver, or Bill Kenny, for that matter.
“No need for that,” Carver said. “I’m not going to interfere in you hiring a veteran, Mr. Kenny. Especially when your alternative is probably not in possession of the proper credentials, right? You hire John, here. Made in the U.S. of A. And as I recall, he’ll work like a damn mule.”
He looked at John and tipped his head away from the group. “Let’s just step over here for a minute, John. I need to ask you something.”
He put his hand on John’s shoulder as they turned and walked toward the truck. John moved to the side, deftly stepping away from the contact.
Carver got a peevish expression. “What ever happened to the concept of the comfort of the human touch?” he asked.
John chose not to answer. He turned and faced Carver, hands jammed down in his pockets, his right shoulder pressed against the side of his truck, as if he needed it for an anchor.
“I spoke with Tony Tarantino,” Carver said. “He told me they had to let you go.”
John said nothing.
His old teammate shook his head. “I told you coming back here was a bad idea, John.”
“You tracked me out here to say I told you so?”
“No.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
He shrugged. “This is where men come when they got nowhere else to go, job-wise. I give you credit for trying.”
John didn’t want his pat on the back, literally or figuratively. His head was hurting now, a huge sense of pressure pushing outward, as if his skull had suddenly become too small for his brain. It pressed against the backs of his eyes and the base of his neck.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Do you know a girl named April Johnson?”
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
He said it as if he already knew the answer was something other than what John had said. John tried to think. Was that the name of some girl they’d gone to school with? He didn’t have a social life. It wasn’t like he had a long list of girlfriends, or friends of any sort, for that matter.
“She’s a waitress at the Grindstone.”
John shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“No,” Carver said. “I’m telling you. She’s a waitress at the Grindstone. I’m told you go there fairly often.”
“Who told you that?”
“Do you?”
“I go there sometimes.” The coffee was strong and the pie was good, and it was a cheap place to eat when he was sick of the food he snuck at Anthony’s.
“April,” Carver said. “She’s about nineteen, dark hair, cute figure, pretty enough. You don’t remember her?”
“Why?”
“Where’d you go last night after work?”
“Home.”
“Alone?”
“Why?”
“Mrs. Tarantino fired you last night,” Carver said. “I have to think you might have been a little angry. Or a lot angry.”
“You can tell me what this is about,” John said, “or we’re done talking.”
“You shouldn’t take an attitude with me, John. I’m gonna be the closest thing you’ve got to a friend here. The detective in charge of this case wants me to bring you in for a talk.”
“What case?”
“April Johnson was assaulted last night cutting through these very woods after work. Somebody beat the ever-living shit out of her and raped her.”
Heat flashed through John from the top of his head, down his arms, down his legs. “You’re calling me a rapist?”
Carver held his hands up. “I didn’t call you anything, John. I asked you where you were last night.”
Anger ran like a fire along his nerve endings. Anger and fear. This wasn’t the first time he’d been accused of something. He knew how this would go. He’d get hauled in to the sheriff’s office, someone would tip off a reporter. The next thing would be a media feeding frenzy, and then the public outcry.
No one would care that he was now a decorated war hero. To the people who had been here seven years ago, he would still be the boyfriend of a girl who had disappeared, never to be seen again.
There was a part of him that wanted to bolt forward and knock Tim Carver flat, then jump in his truck and get the hell out of Shelby Mills, out of Liddell County, out of Indiana.
A low growl rumbled beside him, distracting him, and he looked down and to his left. The young dog had crept out of the woods and come to stand near him. It stared at Tim Carver without blinking, hackles raised.
Carver looked at the dog, frowning. “You’d better have control over your dog.”
“It’s not my dog,” John said.
“Really? Then I’m calling Animal Control to come and get it. That thing looks mean.”
John took a step toward the dog and said, “Git!”
The dog scurried backward to the edge of the woods and stood there.
“I don’t know,” John said. “Seems like he’s maybe a good judge of character.”
“Ha-ha. Be glad they sent me,” Carver said. “Another deputy might have just hauled your ass in and shot that dog for a cur. I’m giving you an opportunity here, John.”
“An opportunity to what?”
“To get out in front of this thing.”
“There is no thing to get in front of,” John said. “I don’t know anything about that girl.”
He pulled his truck keys out of his coat pocket.
Carver’s eyes went straight to the damaged hand—the red, swollen knuckles, the lacerated flesh.
“What’d you do there, John? Go a few rounds with a tree trunk?”
“Something like that.”
“You gonna tell me I should see the other guy?”
“There was no other guy.”
“Sure looks to me like someone got a beating,” Carver said. “And I’ve got a girl lying in the hospital looks like she went the distance with Mike Tyson.”
“Then maybe you ought to go looking for him,” John said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, then you probably won’t mind if I have a look inside the cab of your truck.”
“I mind,” John said. “You want to look in my truck, you can get a warrant.”
“That attitude’s not gonna help you any, John.”
John went to the back of the truck and dropped the tailgate. As he backed away, the dog came up to investigate, sniffing, then jumped up into the bed of the pickup.
“I thought you said that wasn’t your dog,” Carver said.
John closed the tailgate. “He’s not, but if he’s willing to stick up for me, I’ll do the same for him.”
“You always were loyal.”
Which was more than he could have said for Tim Carver, who had routinely cheated on Dana Nolan their senior year of high school. But he didn’t say that. It was none of his business how Tim Carver defined loyalty.
“Am I free to go?” he asked.
Carver frowned. “I can’t say that you won’t be hearing from the detective on this case. He’s the same one working Casey Grant’s case. He thinks you’re a guy he should talk to.”
“Yeah? Where’d he get that idea?”
John pulled the door open and got into the truck. Carver came and stood beside the cab, looking in.
“I didn’t write the history book, John,” he said. “It is what it is. You can cooperate or not. I’m just giving you the
heads-up here. You’d do better for yourself if you didn’t make every single thing in your life so goddamn hard.”
“Yeah, well, I guess that’s just me,” John said. He pulled the truck’s door shut and started the engine.
“It always was,” Tim Carver said, shaking his head. “It always was.”
16
Are you sure you don’t want us to drop you off at the gym?” Dana’s mother asked. “Frankie’s teaching classes until nine; then she’ll bring you home.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Dana said as she watched her mother dig a lipstick out of her purse and apply it, looking at herself in the entry-hall mirror. “I’m not eight years old.”
“I don’t think you need a babysitter,” her mother said, looking at her via the mirror. “I thought you might not feel comfortable being home alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” Dana said. “You look nice.”
In her smart tailored navy-blue suit and pearl necklace, she looked conservative and professional, like she could have just as easily been the Mercer running for state office. She turned around and smiled.
“Thank you, sweetheart. You know how I hate these political dinners. I’d rather stay home with you. We could make popcorn and watch some old movies.”
“Lynda?” Roger’s voice boomed down the stairwell. “Where are my cuff links?”
“In the little jeweler’s envelope on your dresser! I got them fixed, remember?” she called back. She looked at Dana and rolled her eyes, as if to say Men!
“Got it! Thank you!”
She turned her attention back to Dana. “There’s baked ziti left over from last night in the refrigerator. Just reheat it in the microwave. And there’s salad. Please remember to eat.”
“I will.”
“And don’t forget to take your meds,” she said as the doorbell rang. “You’ll probably be in bed by the time we get home. These things drag on and on. I can’t wait for this election to be over.”
Dana stepped to the side, out of direct view, as her mother opened the door.