by N. M. Brown
The material felt strange against his sweating face and smelled faintly chemical. As he tried to move his limbs, the police officer felt his energy drain away, leaving him face down in an unnatural position. In the dreamy haze of the paralytic agent, Charlie was vaguely aware of a figure walking towards him. He tried to turn his face around to get a clearer view, perhaps see a face, but by then, the paralysis was complete. All that he could see was a pair of work pants, the bottom half of a Hawaiian shirt, and the dull grey metal of a gun.
‘Hey there, Snoopy,’ a voice said quietly. ‘I think you were sniffing around because you wanted a ride on my bus. Well, okay, let's get on and see where it’s heading.’
Chapter Thirteen
The inside of the car felt sweltering to Vicki as she closed the door. The car turned off the dusty track and onto a real road. It had taken a moment for the groaning air conditioning to kick in. During this time, Vicki’s eyes had remained fastened on the reflection of the ramshackle house fading away in the wing mirror. However, once they had turned off, it was lost from sight… much like the owner.
‘So, where do you want to eat?’ Leighton asked as he pulled on his seat belt.
‘Huh?’ Vicki shifted from being lost in the past.
‘I asked, where you wanted to go for lunch.’
‘Well,’ Vicki pretended she was thinking, ‘how about we visit the Palm Café?’
‘Is that where Laurie worked?’
‘Hey,’ Vicki said with a smile, ‘somebody’s back in detective mode. Yeah, it’s where she worked. It’s just off the main drag, back in Barstow.’
Following Vicki’s directions, Leighton drove the car along a business loop of Route 15 and pulled into a small parking lot covered with a patchwork of tarmac. The midday heat was heavy and unrelenting as the young woman and older man left the coolness of the car to cross the hot grey expanse. Vicki struggled to shake off the strange numbness of the sense of loss she felt.
Inside the Palm Café, Vicki and Leighton found a seat next to the window, but thankfully out of the scorching sunlight. They ordered a couple of burritos – vegetable for Vicki; chicken for Leighton – and two iced teas. The two members of staff who were mopping the red tiled floor and serving the food respectively, were cheerful, and the place was bright and airy, but the view from their table was of little more than the Nu-Way car wash and, beyond that, Soutar’s Ford Dealership.
‘So,’ Vicki said, ‘we must stop meeting like this.’
‘Yeah.’ Leighton glanced around. ‘We could write a travel guide to the fast food joints of North America.’
‘Somebody would buy it,’ Vicki said, then added, ‘possibly. Next time I’ll take you to Thai Garden in Oceanside. Best take out fried tofu in the state.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Leighton chuckled.
‘Your loss,’ Vicki said with a shrug.
‘Is the town what you expected?’ Leighton asked as he undid the cuff buttons of his pale blue shirt.
‘I suppose it is… kind of. A bit hotter and dustier.’
‘Well, once you head inland from the coast, this is what you get. Have you only ever lived by the water down in Oceanside?’
‘Yeah, but not always at the beach. We used to live in a house over on the west side, in Parkland Heights.’
Vicki saw by the slight arching of one of Leighton’s eyebrows he knew of the exclusive area and the ridiculous price of the homes located there.
‘Yeah, I know. My father is a cosmetic dentist, and my mother is a maxillofacial surgeon, so they pulled in the big bucks.’
‘How come you moved from there?’ Leighton asked.
‘After the divorce, my father moved into the beach house for a time, and I spent most of my time down there. That suited me; I always preferred that place to my mother’s palace. Anyway, eventually, when my father moved to San Francisco, my mother sold the big house.’
‘It must have been hard, leaving your home, and coping with divorce.’
‘I guess. To be honest, I never really thought of the place in Parkland Heights as home. It was too clinical and so large it felt almost empty. Even the gardens up there all have high walls, like prisons. You never see or hear any of the neighbours. Living there was like being a prisoner in a big empty palace. It probably sounds really messed up, but when I was looking at Laurie’s little place back there, I was thinking how it seemed more like a real home.’
‘Well,’ Leighton smiled, ‘the other side of the tracks always looks more appealing than the one you’re on.’
‘I know, and I like the beach house best of all – that’s where I got to be a regular kid. But, it’s still on loan from my mother.’
‘She charges you?’ Leighton’s eyes widened.
‘Not exactly. Despite spending most of her time in New York, she wanted to keep the beach house for her retirement. She couldn’t stand the idea of renting it out to strangers who would – and I quote “contaminate the place”. So she told me I could live there rent free and maintain the place, but only on the basis I change none of the décor and use the alarm system on a daily basis.’
‘Seems very practical.’ Leighton smiled sympathetically.
‘That’s my mother for you.’
The conversation was halted by the arrival of a waitress carrying a tray to their table.
When the food had been placed before them, Vicki and Leighton ate in comfortable silence. To any onlooker, they might have appeared to be a father and daughter who had not seen each other for a while and were breaking the ice with some fast food.
After they finished their meal, Leighton excused himself to use the bathroom but stopped on the way to speak to a senior waitress who was setting up a table for a kid’s party. As he moved away from the table, Vicki reached into her bag and removed a neat tablet computer, which she switched on, and began typing furiously.
When Leighton returned, he found Vicki frowning intently at the small screen.
‘You brought a computer?’
‘No.’ Vicki carried on typing intensely.
‘You found a computer?’
‘No, it’s not mine; it belongs to Laurie.'
‘Where did it come from?’ Leighton frowned.
‘Her bedside table.’
‘You broke into her house?’ Leighton shook his head in disbelief but remained standing.
‘Not exactly, she always keeps a key under her doormat. I didn’t break anything.’
‘But you entered the property and removed that item?’
‘Yep,’ Vicki said as she typed.
‘You realise you’ve committed a crime, and if your friend is in any kind of trouble, you’ve contaminated a crime scene?’
‘You told me there was no crime, therefore it couldn’t be a crime scene.’
Leighton ran a hand through his hair and sighed. ‘This was what you wanted all along?’ he asked.
‘Yep.’ Vicki continued typing.
‘So why involve me at all? Why drag me one hundred and fifty miles away from home when you could have shown up, broken in, and stole the laptop yourself?’
‘I needed you as a witness to prove I’m not a thief. Plus, you said that you’d help.’
Sitting down, Leighton pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. ‘Look, Vicki, regardless of your intentions, I don’t think you can claim innocence on this one. I can’t vouch for you.’
‘Well, I had no other way of finding this.’
She turned the computer around so Leighton could see the screen. The display featured a booking confirmation for a bus company called Route King. Details for a passenger called Miss L. Taylor had been entered, and a flashing line of text at the bottom of the screen stated “Transaction complete”.
Leighton tugged a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his jacket pocket and peered at the computer.
‘Leighton, these are the last pages Laurie accessed before she disappeared, so that proves she made a booking.’
‘That’s clearly e
vident, but as I said,’ Leighton sat back, removing his glasses, ‘Laurie may have never boarded the bus.’
‘That’s also true.’ Vicki allowed this concession. ‘But the other thing that keeps me awake is the fact this bus company may not actually exist.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They don’t exist – not in yellow pages, not online, and not according to any of the bus depots I checked.’
‘You checked?’
‘I’ve searched; they don’t exist anywhere on any record.’
‘Look, this is madness,’ Leighton sighed as he raised a hand to request a cheque from a waitress. ‘I think I’ll head back to Oceanside. We’re done here.’
‘Madness?’ Vicki’s eyes widened in frustration. ‘How can you not see this?’
‘Listen, so far, what we have is a girl whose friend didn’t show up to meet her. How many times do you think that happens every day?’ Leighton checked himself for raising his voice and dropped his volume. ‘Then, that same friend feels embarrassed and decides, rather than deal with the fallout, they’ll just slip off the radar for a few weeks.’
As Vicki stared at the floor in defeated silence, a waitress lifted the plates and a couple of twenties from the table.
‘Come on,’ Leighton said as he stood up. ‘I’ll drop you home.’
He walked to the door. Vicki, however, remained deliberately seated, as if bolted there.
‘No, you go ahead, I’ll take a bus.’ She flashed a bitter smile. ‘Should be safe enough on public transport out here, right?’
‘Look, don’t be childish,’ Leighton called. He remained standing by the doorway.
‘Childish!’ Vick’s eyes narrowed. ‘You want to see childish, detective, how about this?’
Vicki stood up, picked up the computer, and walked past Leighton. She stepped out of the diner into the hot sun, where, lifting the laptop above her head, she threw it forward, smashing it into plastic fragments on the sidewalk.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Leighton shouted as he tried to take Vicki by the arm, but she shook him off.
‘She’s not simply gone off somewhere; something bad has happened, Leighton,’ Vicki said, her eyes already glazed with barely suppressed tears. ‘Why the hell can’t you see that?’
‘I’m done here,’ Leighton said calmly, stepped off the sidewalk, and crossed the street to his car. ‘I did what you asked, Miss Reiner.’
‘Hey,’ Vicki shouted to his back. ‘You were done with this case before you even started,’ she added angrily. ‘God, if this is your attitude, Leighton, the force is better off with you being retired.’
Dismissing her with a wave of his hand, Leighton opened his car door and climbed inside.
He spun the car noisily around and pulled up next to her. Rolling down the window, he leant towards her. ‘Are you getting in?’
‘Go to hell!’ Vicki said, as she crouched on the ground and began sifting through the pieces of plastic and smashed circuits from the pavement.
Leighton looked at her for a moment – just long enough to ensure she had her purse over her shoulder – then, without another word, he drove off.
Chapter Fourteen
At 10.15am Monday morning, Bradley McGhee was one pissed-off man. That swaggering pain in the ass Anthony Morrelli should have shown up for work over three hours ago, only he hadn’t appeared. The tourists had bought their tickets in advance from the hotel reception, and then two dozen of them had arrived at the marina – cameras at the ready, and eager to get out on the water. Only there was no Anthony waiting there to greet them. The crowd, who were already pissed off at getting their designer slacks damp from the river water, grew restless.
Between him and Sandy – the boat pilot – Bradley had somehow got all the clients strapped in and seated, but the entire process had taken a good forty minutes longer than it should have.
Damn it, Anthony Morrelli could never have won any prizes for sincerity, but he knew how to fill up a boat with out-of-towners in under ten minutes – and that was a skill Bradley valued. Therefore, he would not follow his instinct and tell Anthony to stick a flare gun up his ass and pull the trigger; instead, he would simply remind him the working week had started and his presence at the marina was respectfully requested.
Once the tourists were out on the river, Bradley walked back along the marina to the long white trailer that served as an office. Sitting down in his massage chair, he picked up the grubby telephone and called Scotty’s Bar to see if his only boatman was enjoying an unplanned Monday of playing skittles with beer bottles. While the telephone in the bar rang, Bradley scratched at his crotch with his free hand.
A female voice answered the phone. ‘Hello, Scotty’s,’ she said brightly.
‘Who is this?’
‘Marianne, why?’
‘Honey, this is Bradley McGhee of BBM River Tours…’
‘Drop off some fliers, I’ll put them out front.’
‘Whoa, hang on there, darling. Kind as that offer is, I’m actually looking for one of your regulars.’
‘Oh, who?’
‘Anthony Morrelli. Is he up there today?’
‘He owe you some money?’
‘No, nothing like that. He works for me down here on the water – at least he’s supposed to, but he didn’t show up this morning.’
‘Anthony was in here Friday night, had a skin-full, as I recall, and stayed till closing time, but that was the last time I saw him.’
‘Okay.’ Bradley sighed. ‘You sure?’
‘Hang on. Let me just check with Maria. She was on last night.’
There was a dull clatter as the phone was laid down, then Bradley could hear the clinking of glasses being stacked and the distant strains of “La Bamba”. After a few moments, the phone was picked back up.
‘Hello?’
‘Hey. Any luck?’ Bradley asked.
‘Okay, I couldn’t find Maria – she’s probably out back having a smoke – but I checked with Janine; she was on last night too. She told me Anthony wasn’t in at all yesterday or last night. You tried his house?’
‘Yeah,’ Bradley lied. ‘Thanks for your help.’
‘Okay, I’m sure he’ll turn up. Regulars always do.’
‘Listen, honey, if he does show up, and if he’s been on the sauce – can you please dump him into a cab and send him back down this way?’
‘Sure thing.’
Bradley hung up the phone and dragged a hand over his weathered face. In six years, Anthony had never taken as much as a sick day. Something was wrong here, but in his mind, Bradley assumed Anthony Morrelli had found a new job, or a woman with a hot body, or something else good enough to keep him away.
He reached into a drawer in his cheap desk and pulled out a sheet of A4 paper and a Sharpie pen. He yanked the cap off, the pen releasing a vinegar vapour. Then he wrote out four words in block letters: HELP WANTED ENQUIRE WITHIN.
Chapter Fifteen
As he negotiated a worn cassette tape into the player, Leighton sighed. Vicki’s bloody-minded fixation on her friend’s unlikely demise bordered on obsessive. As the twang of “Delta Blues” filled the car, Leighton set his eyes on the road ahead and tried to let the miles drift by. However, the emotional fallout from his departure was still bouncing around in his restless mind – drawing him back to his past like a bungee cord.
Leighton would have questioned why he had ever agreed to go along to Barstow in the first place, but he knew the answer to that. Nothing about the missing girl in any way interested him, but Vicki herself was quietly fascinating. Five decades earlier, when Leighton had been a child attending junior school, his teacher was a dark-haired, softly spoken woman who smelled of lavender. On some occasions, she would come to sit by Leighton and show him how to sketch, or read. In these moments, the small boy would feel a strange, tingling sensation, as if an aura of energy emanated from the woman. He would feel his skin fizz in response to her soft voice as she drew shapes for him to follow
, or guided his eyes along unfamiliar words. Now, all these years later, something about Vicki recreated that strange feeling – a simple sense of connection with another human being. It felt strangely right.
Despite this, she was still an absolute pain in the ass.
That fact did little to ease Leighton’s guilt at abandoning a girl in her twenties to make her own way home, especially up here along Route 15. An image of a stormy night filled his mind. The recollection was so real, he could feel the warm, thrumming rain battering down like bullets.
Leighton breathed out and gently pushed the thought away until some later time. That was what his grief counsellor had taught him to do. Trying to suddenly block out the thought didn’t work; he had to blow it away softly, otherwise it would bounce right back into his mind.
An impatient truck horn blasted him back into the moment. Leighton slowed down and allowed the heavy, rumbling vehicle to pass him.
‘Okay,’ he said to the air, considering how he might come up with a way to help Vicki.
Leighton decided to approach it from a new angle. He would assume Vicki was somehow correct in her suspicions, and consider what he would do if that was the case. It was, of course, an academic exercise. The girl was clearly blowing things out of proportion, but fully investigating her flawed beliefs would throw up a set of facts she would not be able to ignore. That way, at least he wouldn’t just be asking Vicki to ignore a situation. Instead, he’d provide her with evidence of an entirely different, and less dramatic, situation altogether, which would hopefully be more realistic.
Leighton needed to consider the starting point of the investigation. As he cruised along the highway, he decided he would speak to the ladies down at Oceanside dispatch. If this bus had shown up in the terminal as Vicki had claimed, they should be able to track its journey. A pre-booked bus would also have a passenger record, which meant they would discover if Laurie was even on the bus – something that seemed increasingly unlikely.