by Mason Cross
“Already?” I took a drink of coffee. It was very hot and very strong.
“Don’t get your hopes up, he wasn’t a lot of help. He told me nobody new had moved into town and made clear that he would absolutely know if that was the case. I think he wanted me to apologize for bothering him.”
“Quarter looks like a better bet anyway,” I said. “Maybe he’s done us a favor.”
I had done some more research online last night. We could make a detour to take in Corinth on the way to Quarter, particularly since it would mean we could go to Iron City as well. Corinth was in the east of the state, a hundred and fifty miles or so north of the Mexican border as the crow flies, more by road. It had been a thriving copper mining town in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before going into a long, gradual decline. The mine had closed in the early 1980s, and the town itself had been entirely deserted for more than twenty years.
We still didn’t know what Carol’s husband was running from, or whether Carol even knew what it was, but last night’s uninvited guest had confirmed it was something with potentially deadly consequences.
“It’s a long way to go on a hunch,” she said, her eyes studying me carefully.
“Yes, it is.”
I thought about the trip. How long it would take to drive, where we would take breaks, where we would sleep tonight. If things panned out, we would be away for more than one night.
“You sure you have time for this?” I asked again. “It could take us days to find her. Weeks, even.”
She looked at me reprovingly. I got the message: stop trying to talk her out of it. “Beauty of my job,” she said. “You can do it anywhere.”
“You’re not one of those artists who needs a room of one’s own, then?”
She shook her head. “Twenty years of deadlines pretty much beats that out of you. Besides, I’m ahead of schedule on this one.”
She piled the last of her eggs onto the last slice of toast and pushed it neatly and efficiently into her mouth. She picked up her phone and tapped on it, her eyes focused on the screen as she chewed and swallowed. “You know, there’s a flight out of Vegas to Phoenix in a couple of hours. We could rent a car at the other end, save a few hours.”
I pretended to consider that for a moment, then glanced back in the direction of the front of the house where my car was parked, like I didn’t want the hassle of coming back here to retrieve my car.
“Let’s stick with driving. Once you factor in getting to the airport, delays, security, baggage, we’re not going to save any time.”
She looked back up at me, her thumb still poised over the screen of her phone. She had that appraising look on her face again. Like she had a list of questions about me and I had just added another one.
20
PHOENIX, ARIZONA WEDNESDAY, 08:37
An insect-like purr of metallic clicks echoed through the cabin as the plane rolled to a stop on the runway. Trenton Gage stayed in his seat as the other passengers stood up and started unloading their cabin baggage from the overhead lockers. He never understood why they did that. It always took ten minutes or so between the seatbelt lights switching off and the doors opening, but still people got up and unloaded and waited tensely like runners on the starting blocks, in the hope of getting off the plane thirty seconds earlier.
There was another reason for his habit of sitting out the initial rush, though he knew it was unlikely to be a concern on this occasion. It’s easier to tell if you’re being followed when you’re the last one off the plane.
Ten minutes later, the doors opened and the lightly harassed passengers began to file out. Gage waited until the aisle had cleared and got up, taking his bag from the locker. He passed through security with no problems. That reminded him that the first order of business had to be securing a weapon.
He had never been to Phoenix before. It was hot, though not as hot as Vegas had been. He took the Valley Metro Rail system for the short trip from the airport into the city. He walked a few blocks east until the crowds became less dense. The expensive chain stores and restaurants started to disappear and he saw more liquor stores and pawn shops and small hardware stores. The right kind of neighborhood.
He passed by the first couple of pawnbrokers, disregarding them because the windows were too clean and the displays too well ordered. The third one looked more promising. It had a red and white sign that had probably been painted in the 90s, and was now faded and peeling. The sign advertised Guns, Loans, Jewelry. The window displayed a seemingly random assortment of junk: DVD players, a baby carriage, a cheap electric guitar. Some of the goods were obscured by faded flyers taped from the inside proclaiming the best deals in town. The door was glass, two-paneled. The bottom panel had been kicked in and boarded up. He pushed the door inward and a little bell chimed.
The display window had been an accurate advertisement for the interior. Items were piled up in almost every inch of floor space, leaving a passage from the door to the register that was barely a foot wide. Even narrower ancillary routes led off into the maze of the store. There was no air conditioning. Instead, a cheap plastic fan pointed at the guy sitting behind the register. He was in his fifties, wore a blue vest and had long, dirty hair that had started off brown but was now mostly gray. He looked up as Gage entered.
Gage stared at him, and then made a point of surveying the piles of junk with a suspicious look. He walked purposefully toward the register. The man behind it was already stiffening defensively as Gage reached a hand into his pocket. The initial look and the approach did most of the heavy lifting, he knew. The cop demeanor was something you had to actively suppress when necessary. It wasn’t a problem to do the opposite and play it up.
He took out the leather wallet with the badge and ID and held it up. Not showing it too close or for too long, but not attempting to hide anything. It was an LAPD badge. Or at least, it was good enough to pass as one. But in Gage’s experience, people who owned places like this usually weren’t inclined to be picky about jurisdiction.
In any case, the guy with the long hair didn’t take the time to read the details on the badge or the ID. His eyes were on Gage’s.
“Help you with anything, Officer?”
Gage replaced the wallet in his pocket. “I’m looking for a weapon that may have been used in the commission of a felony. I’m checking local establishments like yours to see if I can find it.”
The long-haired guy relaxed very slightly at the indication that this wasn’t about him specifically.
“Weapon ... You mean a gun?”
The guy was waiting for him to tell him what kind of gun. Gage played the odds. “A Colt .45.”
Longhair shook his head, looking sorry not to be of help. “I’m sorry, Officer. I don’t have any of those right now. Nobody’s sold me a gun of any kind this week, or last.”
Gage put his hands on the counter and leaned forward. “Well there’s some ambiguity over the description of the weapon. Could have been a Glock. And it could have come in some time ago.”
He looked a little unsure. A little more suspicious. He didn’t move to get out of his swivel chair.
“When would this have been?”
Gage stood back and scanned the wall above the man, looking for his pawnbroker’s license. He found it in a smeared, cracked frame, and started examining it. Longhair started getting nervous again.
“I mean, I could have a look for you,” he said quickly.
He disappeared into the back and came out with a cardboard box with assorted firearms in it. Gage didn’t think the storage method would pass muster with regulations. There were Glocks and Berettas. Mostly cheaper models; entry-level stuff. There was one nice piece: a Ruger LC9.
He picked it from the pile. Longhair tensed, but didn’t move to stop him.
Gage examined the weapon. It was light, compact. He racked the slide, ejected the magazine. It was clean, in good condition. He hoped he hadn’t picked one which actually had been used in the commissi
on of a felony, but it wasn’t like he would be holding on to it long. He could pick up ammunition elsewhere.
He nodded as though this was what he was looking for. “I’m going to need to take this with me.”
“I thought you said you were looking for a Colt?”
Gage said nothing. Slowly and deliberately, he placed the gun in his bag, holding eye contact with Longhair, waiting for him to object.
“I’m going to need to take this with me,” he repeated. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”
Longhair looked as though he was working up the nerve to have a problem with it, but then he decided against it and shook his head.
“Not a problem, I guess. Can I get a receipt or something? I paid two hundred for that gun.”
Bullshit, Gage thought. He had what he wanted now, he could turn around and walk out of here, and he was ninety-nine per cent sure that this guy would never trouble the Phoenix PD with a request for a receipt, or a description of the officer who had taken his gun. But it was worth being nice for a little peace of mind.
“I’m all out of receipts,” he said. “How about I give you fifty bucks for your trouble? Save the paperwork, huh?” He smiled and put his hands back on the counter. Close enough that he could reach out and grab the guy in the blink of an eye.
Longhair considered the offer and nodded slowly. Smart guy.
21
We mapped out the journey. South and east on US-93, then west on I-40 through Flagstaff, and then straight on down toward Fort Apache. A little over four hundred miles. A reasonably long trip, although nothing compared to how far I had already come. Sarah decided she wanted to take the wheel for the first stretch. I was happy to sit in the passenger side. I had had my fill of driving the previous day.
As we cleared the stop-start traffic through Vegas, I went back over Carol’s notebook, spending more time examining the doodles and drawings. It was a fascinating document, particularly for someone with knowledge of the person who had spent months or years writing and drawing in it.
“So you do this for a living,” Sarah said after we had been driving in silence for a while. She was wearing sunglasses, her eyes focused on the road ahead.
I closed the notebook and rested it on my lap. “Used to. I’ve been taking it easy for a while.”
“Freelance?”
“Yeah. Just like you.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Maybe a little more interesting than my freelancing.”
“Trust me, you can get too much ‘interesting.’”
“So who do you work for? Who contracts you? When you’re not working pro-bono, I mean.”
The truthful answer to that question was nobody, not anymore. I used to have a guy who lined up work for me. A friend, in fact, although I never thought of him in that way until he was no longer around.
“It varies,” I said. “Could be a situation like this: a missing person who somebody misses enough to look for. Sometimes I work with the police, if they’re looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found.”
She took her eyes off the road for a second to glance at my upper body, and I could tell she was thinking of the gun she knew was strapped there.
“And you know how to handle yourself when you find them.”
“Usually. So far, at least.”
We drove on for while, neither of us speaking. I closed the notebook again and stowed it in the shelf above the glove box. We were well into Arizona now, the landscape flat and dotted with clumps of brush. The road ahead shimmered in the baking heat, but the air conditioning nullified the effect in our little bubble. The sky was a deep azure, only a few long wispy clouds and the contrail of a passenger jet forty thousand feet above us. I saw a series of mesas dotting the landscape ahead of us, their summits impossibly flat, as though somebody had shaped them with a paring knife. We passed a sign that told us the nearest town was fifty miles away.
“I suppose this is kind of a mixture of your usual type of work,” Sarah said suddenly, and I realized she had been thinking about it the whole time. “I mean, we’re looking for a missing person. But there could be trouble, if whoever’s looking for Carol’s husband finds him first.”
“It’s a good idea to assume that in any case,” I said. “Always assume trouble.”
Sarah smirked as she remembered something. “Somebody once bought me one of those embroidered, framed homilies. You know the kind of thing? It said, ‘F.A.I.L. means First Attempt In Learning,’” her voice took on a high, mocking tone as she recited it. “They said I should hang it on the wall above my desk. You should make one with that instead: ‘Always assume trouble.’”
I smiled at the thought. The three words carefully sewn into a framed piece of hessian sacking. Maybe some daisies or butterflies adorning the border. A glass frame. My only problem was, I didn’t know where I would hang it.
Just before noon, Sarah’s phone buzzed as we passed into an area of cell phone coverage. She pulled over at the side of the road, leaving the engine running, and examined the screen. I guessed preserving the signal was more on her mind than safe driving practice. It wasn’t as though there was any traffic for a phone call to distract her from. She tapped the screen a couple of times and put it on speaker as she returned the call. As it rang, she told me she was calling the local journalist in Quarter she had mentioned. A woman named Diane Marshall.
The call was answered with a businesslike “hello,” and I listened with admiration as Sarah gave her an edited version of our story. Diane asked a few questions in return, before agreeing to make some enquiries on Sarah’s behalf. All things considered, I was starting to be very glad that circumstances had dictated Sarah come along.
When we were under way once more, Sarah started asking about me and Carol again. This time I turned it around and asked about her ex-husband.
She shrugged. “No mystery there, Blake. We were just wrong for each other and it took us way too damn long to figure that out,”
“What did he do?”
“He was a professional gambler.”
“What happened? A big loss?”
“No. Never, in fact. I was always worried he would lose everything. He told me not to worry, and you know what? He was right. Every time.”
“I see why you broke up.”
She grinned. “Eventually I just realized that he wasn’t going to give it up, and I wasn’t going to stop worrying about it. And then I talked to him and we both realized we had been making ourselves unhappy, trying to make this work.” She took her left hand off the wheel to show me her watch. I had noticed it earlier: a very nice Cartier. Probably three thousand dollars at least. “He got me this as a goodbye present. Engraved on the back: ‘Time flies.’”
“Sounds incredibly amicable.”
“It’s great. We still catch up for dinner every couple of months and we get on better than we ever did before. I can highly recommend divorce.” She took her gaze from the road to stare at me pointedly over her sunglasses. “So much better than leaving things unresolved.”
By one o’clock, enough time had elapsed since breakfast that we were both more than ready to eat again. We had been gaining elevation all day and the air was cooler, the landscape greener. Tall trees lined the wide divide between us and the westbound lanes of the highway. We pulled into a rest stop outside of Flagstaff. Sarah said she was fine to keep driving, and we were making good time, so we picked up cheeseburgers and sodas to consume on the go. Driving at the same time as eating didn’t seem to cause Sarah any problems, the road was straight and quiet and she kept one hand on the wheel while she took bites out of her cheeseburger.
“That guy last night. Why do you think he wants to find Carol’s husband so badly?”
My brow creased and immediately I realized I had fallen into a trap. Sarah was looking across at me, watching my reaction.
“I like how you pull a face every time I say the word ‘husband.’ How long were you together?”
I smiled. “I
guess your new career must pay well. There’s no way you quit journalism because you weren’t good at it.”
“People interest me. I like to find out about them. Better get used to it.”
I said nothing. Turned my head to look out of the window.
“So how long?” she repeated, polite but insistent.
I sighed and looked back at her.
“Are you watching the road?”
“The road’s fine. It’s still there, look.”
“Okay, we had a thing,” I admitted.
“Back in New York?”
I hesitated, then nodded. I wasn’t used to answering so many questions. Most people can be carefully maneuvered onto a different conversational track if necessary. Sarah Blackwell wasn’t most people.
“Why did she break up with you?”
“Who said she did?”
“I do.”
“I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. Work got in the way, you know how it is.”
She kept watching me for long enough that I started to get a little concerned I was getting more attention than the road. Eventually, she turned her eyes away from me.
I got the feeling it was going to be a long few days.
22
PHOENIX
Logan McKinney was proving more elusive than Gage had anticipated.
McKinney was still in Phoenix, as far as he could tell, and he had been working as a bouncer at a sports bar in Glendale. A visit to the establishment in question, however, had revealed that McKinney had already been fired, two days previously. Drinking on the job, lateness, unreliability. Gage was familiar with the type.
He finished speaking to McKinney’s boss and turned his attention to the barmaid who had been hovering a little too close to the conversation, busying herself with arranging glasses. He had been watching her out of the corner of his eye. She was in her mid-thirties, he would guess. Five-five, slim with a nice rack. Dark hair tied up in a ponytail. White t-shirt, black jeans. Something about her eyes told him she was the type who made poor decisions on impulse. He sat down at the bar and ordered a Scotch, straight up. When she brought it back, he placed a fifty-dollar bill on the bar, pushing it toward her with his index finger.