A Plunder by Pilgrims

by Scott William Carter

  "Thanks," Gage said, "I'll do that."

  It was more like twenty miles to Kooby than ten, but the pawn shop was still there, at the top of the forested range that separated the coast from the Willamette Valley. The blocky mud-colored building was squeezed between a single-pump gas station and a string of manufactured homes that looked like hastily stacked playing cards. The words PAWN SHOP were written in black paint on the upper floor windows of the three-story building, windows cracked and streaked with mud. When he parked in front of the building, he saw that below the flat roofline were the words KOOBY HOTEL, barely visible in a slightly darker brown, where the now departed letters had protected the paint from years of sun exposure. His was the only vehicle there.

  A fat, dark-skinned man slouched in a rocker next to the glass door, chewing a blade of grass. His hair, slicked straight back, was as dark as crow feathers, and his skin was gnarled and reddish brown like the stump of a sequoia. The rocking chair barely held his girth, his dirty overalls straining against the sides. His red plaid shirt was unbuttoned all the way down to the navel, revealing a wrinkled but hairless chest.

  Gage parked right in front and got out of the van. The air, appreciably cooler than on the coast, nipped at his cheeks. In the shadows of the building, frost glazed the gravel. "You the owner?" he said.

  The man went on chewing his straw for so long that Gage almost spoke again.

  "Who's asking?" he piped up finally. His voice sounded like water gurgling through a pipe.

  Gage shut the door and limped over to him, careful where he planted his cane on the gravel. He held the manila folder under his arm. "Name's Garrison," he said. "I'm looking for information about a girl."

  The man stared fixatedly at Gage's cane instead of his face. His eyes were grayish black, like the charcoal remains of a long dead fire. "We don't got no hookers here," he said.

  "No," Gage said, "it's not like that. It's about the girl who died on the beach."

  The straw stopped moving and the man gazed at him as if seeing him for the first time.

  "What girl?" he said.

  "The one who washed up on the beach in Barnacle Bluffs last week. It's been all over the newspapers."

  "I don't got time to read newspapers."

  "I can see that. She had a tattoo on her ankle. Somebody said maybe you did it."

  He squinted at Gage suspiciously. "Who said that?"

  "Just somebody."

  "Who?"

  "What does it matter? Can I show you a picture to see if you know her?"

  The man was silent. An RV pulling a fishing boat rumbled past on the highway, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  "I don't know," the man said.

  "It would sure be a help."

  The man shrugged. "I guess it don't hurt none to look. I haven't done no tattoos in a over a year, though. Don't know what the person who sent you here was thinkin'."

  Gage opened the folder and pulled out the picture of the girl. "I appreciate your time," he said, then added: "Mister . . . ?"

  "Call me Otis," the man said.

  Gage handed him the glossy print. Otis looked at it for only a moment, squinting at it through the corner of one eye, then handed it back.

  "Yeah, I remember her," he said.

  The answer came so quickly that Gage assumed he'd said didn't. He nodded, slipping the photo back into the folder, then stopped when he realized what Otis had actually said.

  "You do?" he said.

  "Yeah. Don't remember her name or nothin'. It was a year back maybe. Yeah, it was February, right after President's Day, cause I remember thinking how the traffic was not nearly as good as the week before. She was a bit heavier than in that photo. Think she wanted some butterflies on her leg."

  "How about dolphins around her ankle?"

  The man nodded. "Yeah, like I said. Dolphins."

  Gage took out the photo of the girl's tattoos and held it so Otis could see it.

  "Yep, that's my work," he said, nodding. "Pretty nice, huh? Shame I had to give it up cause of my 'thritis."

  "You don't happen to know her name?"

  Otis shook his head. "Nah. She didn't talk all that much."

  "Do you keep release forms?"

  He looked confused. "Release what?"

  "Some tattoo shops have people sign a release form consenting to the tattoo before they do it."

  "Oh." He scratched his chin. "No, nothing like that."

  "Was she with anybody?"

  "No. That's why I remembered her. I remembered thinking she was kinda young to be by herself."

  "What kind of car was she driving?"

  "She wasn't. She was hitchin'. When she left, I saw her out front. I went into the back of the store, and when I went out there later, she was gone."

  "And you don't remember anything else?"

  He shook his head. "Sorry."

  "All right," Gage said, "I appreciate your time. I might call on you again if I have other questions."

  "You can't call on me cause I ain't got no phone."

  "Well, I don't have one either, " Gage said. "It's just a colloquial expression."

  "A what?"

  "Never mind."

  Otis went back to chewing his straw, looking thoughtful, as if this was a turn of phrase that would take the rest of the afternoon to ponder. Gage ambled to his van. He was putting the key in the ignition when Otis waved at him. Gage assumed he was waving goodbye and waved back, but Otis shook his head and pointed at the van.

  Gage rolled down the window. "Yeah?"

  "I do remember somethin'," Otis said.

  "What's that?"

  "I asked her why she like dolphins. She said they were smart. And I said, oh yeah, as smart as humans? And she said smarter. Dolphins don't hurt nothin' on purpose. Then she said they was the first thing she wanted to paint when she got to the coast. And I said, oh yeah, you a painter then? And she nodded. Then I said, well, you know they got no dolphins in Oregon. It's too cold. And she was real disappointed about that so I says, you want me to draw you some orcas instead? But she still wanted the dolphins."

  "You just remembered all that just now?"

  Otis shrugged. "Wasn't like I been waiting around here my whole life just for you to ask me about it, you know? I got a busy life. Stuff like that just kind of blurs together."

  "I suppose so," Gage said.

  * * * * *

  The sun was dipping beneath the ocean by the time he got back to Barnacle Bluffs. The swath of fiery orange along the horizon was like a crack in a potter's kiln. It was too late today to make use of what he'd learned, but that was all right. Gage's spirits were considerably buoyed, and he actually found himself tapping the wheel and humming—at least, until he realized what he was doing and felt mildly annoyed at himself. There was still a nameless girl in the county morgue, after all.

  But there was something about having a lead, any lead, that was immensely satisfying. What had he learned? She'd come from the east about a year earlier. She'd been heavier. She'd been by herself and she'd hitchhiked. It wasn't much, but it did flesh out the picture of her a little, and that was a step in the right direction. He hadn't felt satisfied about anything in a long time.

  It was like welcoming back an old relative, one he'd sworn would never grace his doorstep again, and yet now he couldn't remember why he'd wanted them out of his house in the first place.

  Still, in addition to the satisfaction there was another feeling—a yawning loneliness that made the idea of returning to his empty house depressing. Instead, he made a pit stop just south of town.

  Half the shops in The Horseshoe Mall—consisting of a dozen little ma and pa stores in a dilapidated, U-shaped building—were already closed. Few, Gage knew, even kept regular hours. When Gage entered Books and Oddities, the stacks were dark, the only fluorescent light the one over the front counter where Alex was closing up his till. The shop smelled of musty books and dust, barely five hundred square feet of retail space and every square inch
packed with merchandise.

  Most of the pine shelving was filled with books—a mix of dog-eared paperbacks and hardbacks in Mylar covers—but there were also the usual tourist trinkets to be found in all the coastal stores: Oregon magnates, ocean scene postcards, shiny agates, and even a few Barnacle Bluffs t-shirts.

  "I'm looking for some Nancy Drew," Gage said. "Got any?"

  Without fully turning away from the open cash register, Alex glanced at him over the tops of his reading glasses, silver-rimmed ones attached to a red cord. His thick gray mustache completely dwarfed his upper lip. "I suppose you've got some moldy Reader's Digest Condensed Books you'd like to offer in trade?" he said.

  "Oh, much better. I've got a set of Encyclopedia Britannica's from 1968."

  His friend grunted. Short as a stump, bald except for a ring of silver hair, and dressed in wrinkled tan slacks and a plaid button-up shirt loaded with a half dozen ballpoint pens, Alex Cortez had the frumpy, tired appearance more appropriate to the bookseller he'd become than the FBI agent he once was. Already on the heavy side, his paunch had gotten considerably bigger in the three years he'd lived in Barnacle Bluffs.

  His dark complexion, the deep bags under his eyes, and his heavy jowls gave him an austere look.

  "Been a while," he said.

  "Yeah," Gage said. "Sorry about that."

  "Uh huh. Don't see hide nor hair of you for three weeks. Then I get a call asking for whatever dirt I can dig up about our police chief."

  "Which I really appreciate," Gage said.

  "I bet. So what have you found out so far about the girl?"

  Gage filled his friend in on what little he'd discovered. While Alex listened, he finished closing out the till, then took a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a white rag and cleaned a stack of paperbacks resting on the glass counter.

  Watching the way he meticulously cleaned the sticker residue off a paperback picturing a particularly bosomy female on the front, Gage had to smile. After all, this was a guy who'd been in gunfights with teenage crack heads, testified against Russian mobsters, and pulled all-night stakeouts in subzero weather. Still, it didn't surprise Gage at all when Alex opened the store. He'd said for years that he'd open a bookstore when he retired. No, the only thing that surprised Gage was that Alex had opened the store in Oregon rather than his native Arizona. Alex had claimed that they'd moved to Barnacle Bluffs because Eve adored the town, but Gage suspected Alex was trying to keep a close eye on him.

  When Gage finished relating his encounter in Kooby, Alex said, "Well, it's a start, I guess."

  "How about the FBI?" Gage said. "They got any ideas?"

  "Wow, you're expecting some serious results, my friend. It's been less than two days. You know, I am mostly retired, Garrison. It's not like I have the FBI on my Twitter account or something."

  "You have a Twitter account?"

  Alex loaded his stack of books onto a cart and pushed it around the counter, the wheels squeaking. "Nah," he said. "I don't even know what a Twitter account is. Be right back. Got to shelve these before closing up."

  "You want the lights on in the stacks?"

  Alex chuckled. "Nah. I'd be able to shelve these even if it was pitch black. Know the store that well." He disappeared around a corner. "So," he said, his voice floating over the stacks, "is your knee up for a lot of ambling about?"

  "Why, am I going to have to do a lot of ambling?"

  "Well, if you're investigating the girl's death, you are."

  "I'm not investigating anything. Not officially anyway."

  There was the sound of a book sliding onto a woodened shelf, and then Alex answered. "Right."

  "Seriously. I'm not."

  "You take lying to yourself to profound lengths, my friend. I don't suppose you've ever gotten around to seeing a therapist like I told you, have you?"

  "Why would I need one?" Gage said. "I thought that's why you moved to Barnacle Bluffs—to lead my therapy sessions."

  "Hardly," Alex said. "I moved to Barnacle Bluffs because Eve wanted to live here, and I figured screwing up three marriages was more than enough."

  "You've done all right," Gage said. "At least none of them died."

  It was a blunt thing to say, and it surprised Gage. Where had that come from? There were the sounds of books sliding into place and the squeaking of the cart's wheels. It was a few minutes before Alex finished the shelving, and when he wheeled around the corner, he looked at Gage with concern.

  Gage felt the old familiar anger creep up on him. It was always there, lurking around the corner, his old friend.

  "Don't do that," he said.

  "What?" Alex said.

  "The pity thing. I've told you before, I don't need it."

  "I've also told you to stop blaming yourself."

  "If I don't, who will?"

  "Jesus," Alex said, "it's been five years."

  "To you, maybe. To me it might as well have been yesterday."

  Alex shook his head. "Yeah, that's the problem."

  Gage, saying nothing, watched his friend push the cart around the front counter. The tightness in the chest, the heat on his face, the clenched fists—these were the signs, and Gage knew that if he did say something, it was liable to get out of hand in a hurry. What did anybody else know about his pain? Five, ten, twenty years, what did it matter? When an Iranian circus strongman takes a baseball bat to your knee, busting it up so bad most of the doctors tell you you'll be lucky if you walk again, and then drowns the love of your life in your own bathtub while you're lying on the floor in agonizing pain, unable to stop him, it does a pretty good job at stymieing your progress through the five fucking stages of grief. Even blasting the asshole's brains out with his Beretta hadn't been cathartic; if anything, it took away the one thing other than himself where he could focus his blame.

  Alex took some glass cleaner from below and squirted the countertop next to the cash register, then used some paper towels to wipe the area clean. It left the scent of ammonia in the air.

  "Look," he said, "I just want to say one last thing."

  "Maybe you've said too much already," Gage said.

  "Hear me out before you blow a gasket, all right? You may not think you're investigating this girl, but I think you already are and just haven't figured it out yet. And I think Janet would want you to."

  Gage shook his head. "Janet hated what I did for a living."

  "No, she hated that you might get killed while doing it. That's not the same thing. And I still think she'd want you to do this."

  "Bullshit."

  "Did she ever ask you to quit?"

  "What?"

  "In all the years you were together, did Janet once ever ask you to quit?"

  Gage thought about it. Janet had been a elegant creature, a woman of refined tastes who'd spent her life shuffling around museums, but she'd hated his chosen line of work with a passion. If he came home late, if he came home bloodied or bruised, it was enough to send her into a rage. She'd broken a few vases—a couple quite rare—while aiming for his head. There was no doubt she would have preferred he was an investment banker, a college professor, or some other career that didn't involve ducking bullets and fists. But ask him to quit?

  "No," he admitted.

  "Yeah, I thought so," Alex said. "You know why?"

  "I'm sure you're going to tell me."

  "Because she knew you loved it, that's why. She knew it was what you were. She couldn't ask you to stop being what you were. The last five years, you haven't been yourself. You stop fooling yourself and be honest about what you're doing with this dead girl, you'll be yourself again."

  "Thank you for those peals of metaphysical wisdom, Deepak Chopra."

  Alex shook his head. "Laugh all you want. Both of us know it's true."

  "You know, I really did just stop by to say hello."

  "No, I think you stopped by because you wanted someone to give you permission to do this."

  "Uh huh. And what about you, Special Agent Alex Cor
tez? Aren't you avoiding doing what you are?"

  Alex looked around his cramped little shop. Through his thick lenses, his eyes glinted with amusement. "Nope," he said. "I spent thirty years doing what I wasn't supposed to be doing. This is actually me. I just do some consulting for the FBI on the side to help make ends meet. Health insurance is a bitch."

  Gage would have come back with a witty rejoinder, but then the bells over the front door rang. Turning, he saw a white-haired old lady with severe curvature of the spine struggling to carry a box full of what looked like old Regency romance paperbacks into the store. Gage took the box from her and, to her effusive thanks, lifted it onto the counter. The box stank of mildew and cigarette smoke. Smiling, Gage looked at his friend, but Alex was holding up a finger in warning.

  "Not a word," he said.

  * * * * *

  While he'd been inside the store, the sky had melted to black. On the drive to his place, fog blanketed the highway, moisture beading the windshield. His brain felt foggy too. Seeing Alex had lifted his spirits, but now that he was on his own the brooding melancholy returned. Inertia had carried him through the day, but now that energy was spent and he was like a rock rolling to a standstill. Why was he doing this again? She was just some girl. Nobody had come looking for her. If he stopped this ridiculous foray back into his old ways, who would care?

  There was something lurking in the gray world of his past, a terrible turmoil awaiting around the next corner or the next bend. He knew that if he continued on this road, he risked plunging himself back into all that madness. After Janet was killed, there were whole weeks that passed that he had no memory of—he'd been a walking coma, living in a world of fog and shadows. He didn't want to go there again. He didn't know if he could go there again, if anything could trigger that kind of strange delusion, but he didn't want to find out.

  She was just a dead girl on a beach. It was an awful thing, but it wasn't his responsibility. He was a stubborn man once he'd set himself on a path, but he could talk himself out of it. Maybe, for once, he should.