Gone The Next

by Ben Rehder

  I honestly thought about it for a moment.

  “Sometimes, yeah,” I said. “More than I would’ve guessed, but not enough to freak me out or anything. Sometimes, you know, I just crave a cold beer. Or three. But if I had to quit eating Mexican food, I’d miss that, too. Maybe more than beer.”

  Blaylock slowly sat forward in his chair and dropped my file, closed, on his desk. “Here’s the deal, son. Ninety-five percent of the people I deal with are shitbags who think the world is their personal litter box. I can’t do them any good, and they don’t want me to. Most of ’em are locked up again within a year, and all I can say is good riddance. Then I see guys like you who make a stupid mistake and get caught up in the system. You probably have a decent life ahead of you, but you don’t need me to tell you that, and it really doesn’t matter what I think anyway. So I’ll just say this: Follow the rules and you can put all this behind you. If you need any help, I’ll do what I can. I really will. But if you fuck up just one time, it’s like tipping over a row of dominoes. Then it’s out of your control, and mine, too. You follow me?”

  After the meeting, I swung by a Jack-In-The-Box, then sat outside Wally Crouch’s place for a few hours, just in case. He stayed put.

  I got home just as the ten o’clock news was coming on. Howard Turner had been located in a motel in Yuma City, Arizona, there on business. Police had verified his alibi. He had been nowhere near Texas, and the cops had no reason to believe he was involved.

  So Tracy Turner was still missing, and that fact created a void in my chest that I hadn’t felt in years.

  4

  Mia knocked on my apartment door at nine fifteen the next morning looking absolutely stunning. Black skirt that reached mid-thigh. A snug green top that gave a peek of cleavage. Medium heels. Hair loose and wavy and full of body. Not slutty, but sexy. Like she could be working as a receptionist at an advertising agency or a laid-back software company. Even her perfume was divine. It reminded me that I’d been contemplating making a particular proposition to her, but now was not the time. It could wait.

  I was in jeans but still shirtless, so I waved her in and asked if she wanted coffee.

  “Better not,” she said. “It makes me pee all the time.”

  “Hey, good to know,” I said, heading into my bedroom. “Gimme a sec. Make yourself comfortable.”

  “I’m not sure that’s possible,” she called out. I assumed she was referring to the piles of dirty laundry on the couch. A few seconds later, she said, “Jesus, Roy, what is that smell?”

  Oops. I’d been meaning to take the garbage out. “The one like a bouquet of springtime flowers?”

  “No, the one like a dead animal.”

  I slipped a T-shirt over my head, then looked around for my tennis shoes. “Oh, that’s just my aunt in the guest bedroom. She came for a visit, and, well, I know it’s sad, but she’s in a better place now.”

  When I walked back into the living room, Mia was standing beside the bookcase, holding a picture frame in her hands. Laura. In a bikini. A shot from our honeymoon, eleven years ago.

  She looked at me. “You’re fucking pathetic, you know that?”

  “Don’t mince words.”

  She shook her head.

  “I found it in some old stuff. I wasn’t going to leave it there.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  You had to be clever about it. The subject couldn’t think the incident was staged. That was the key.

  Mia backed her 1968 Mustang into a space at the front of the complex, near the exit. I parked the Caravan in a spot near the corner of Wally Crouch’s building, where I could see both his car and Mia’s. The plan was to sit for an hour or so and wait for Crouch to emerge. In the previous three days, he hadn’t left his apartment before ten o’clock. If he hadn’t left his apartment by 10:30 or so, Mia would reposition her car closer to his apartment and actually knock on his door, which would be risky. He might get suspicious.

  It didn’t come to that. At nine-fifty, Crouch came waddling out to his Toyota. He climbed in and started it up.

  I was sitting on the bench seat in the rear of the van, behind the tinted glass. I grabbed my cell phone — we had a line already open between us — and said, “The cow is leaving the barn.”

  A second later, I heard Mia’s reply: “You are such a dork.”

  I watched as she stepped from her Mustang and raised the hood. The car was almost as eye-catching as she was. It was a fastback model that her dad had passed down to her a few years ago, mostly because he wasn’t driving it much anymore. Same kind of car that Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt, with that famous chase, except Mia’s was red, and her dad had insisted on some after-market safety improvements. But a girl like her driving around in a car like that? It was like something out of a Van Halen video.

  Now Mia was bending over the engine, holding her hair back with one hand, her skirt riding up, showing a country mile of gorgeous thigh, and I knew right then that Crouch was dead meat. No warm-blooded heterosexual male in America could resist a damsel in distress who looked like that.

  And here came Crouch, rounding the corner in his Tercel. I ducked as he passed the front of the van, then I raised back up and saw him slowing as he approached the Mustang. I lifted my handheld video camera and started recording.

  I couldn’t help smiling. Crouch had stopped and was leaning toward the passenger window, saying something to Mia. I could imagine the conversation.

  You need some help?

  Mia turned and looked at him. Oh, God, yes. My battery is dead. You know anything about cars?

  You got jumper cables?

  Mia gestured toward the Mustang. Actually, I have a new battery in my trunk. I went to get it last night, but I don’t know how to put it in. I bought a wrench, too, but I can’t remember which thingy goes where.

  Right on cue, Crouch pulled into a parking spot beside her. I zoomed in a tad as he came around to Mia’s car and proceeded toward the trunk. I noticed that she touched his arm — sort of a thank-you-so-much gesture — as he went by. You are so sweet to stop and help. He was grinning like a kid who’d found a twenty on the street.

  Then Crouch bent over and came out of the trunk with a car battery weighing nearly forty pounds. His maximum was supposed to be ten. Searing pain? Nope. He hoisted the battery like it was made of Styrofoam.

  Gotcha, you fat bastard.

  “Damn, you are good,” Heidi said an hour later, after we’d watched the recording twice.

  “Thank you. Women often forget that I’m more than just a hot slab of beef.”

  The two of us were in a small conference room down the hall from her office. Heidi was sitting across from me, wearing a blue blouse, her blond hair cut in a pageboy. Cute as a button. Petite. Happily married, despite our occasional flirtations and innuendos. I’d seen the way her face glowed whenever she talked about her husband Jim, and I understood that, when it came down to it, our relationship was as inconsequential to her as that of a customer and a convenience-store clerk.

  She pointed at the video screen. “That was all a set-up, right? The hottie in the Mustang?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes you have to get creative.”

  “Who is she?” Heidi asked. “Girlfriend?”

  “Local prostitute.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Such a bullshitter. Hold on. I’ll go get the other file.”

  She came back a minute later, holding a manila folder not unlike the one with my name on it in Harvey Blaylock’s office. She handed it to me. I expected manila folders in a bureaucrat’s office, but this was the private sector. I tended to tease her about it.

  I said, “You know, they have these things called computer nowadays.”

  “Don’t start with that again. We’re getting there. Supposedly just days from pulling the trigger. Sadly, that means we will no longer be able to rendezvous like this.”

  “Sad is right.”

  Her office had be
en making the transition to a totally digital system, which meant thousands, or maybe millions, of documents had to be scanned and organized. From then forward, everything was to be electronic.

  I made a show of blowing imaginary dust off the folder, and then I opened it.

  Heidi said, “His name is Brian Pierce. Twenty-six years old. He’s a dishwasher at a Mexican food joint near Lakeway.”

  Right up front was Pierce’s photo, most likely from his driver’s license. His hair was white-blond, sheared to a half-inch crew cut. Narrow jaw, not much of a chin. Small, wide-set blue eyes. Acne scars on his cheeks. Buck teeth. There was something about his bone structure that suggested Pierce hadn’t gotten his fair share of chromosomes. The expression on his face — somewhere between a frown and a confused grimace — indicated he wasn’t comfortable in front of the camera.

  “This guy won’t be modeling for GQ anytime soon,” I said.

  “Be nice.”

  “What’s his story?”

  “A week ago yesterday, he slipped on a wet floor and injured his wrist when he broke his fall. Supposedly. Nobody saw it happen. They heard glass break, but he could’ve tossed a stack of plates in the air.”

  “Which wrist is it?”

  “Right.”

  “Is he right handed?”

  “Yep.”

  “Seen a doctor?”

  “Of course, but you know what that’s worth. Even the legitimate docs can be fooled.”

  I nodded, continuing to scan the file. “Thomas Springs Road,” I said, noting the street address.

  “You know where that is?” she asked. “Out in the boonies, between Oak Hill and Bee Cave.”

  “Yeah, I know the area. My grandparents used to live on Thomas Springs.”

  “You had grandparents?” she said. “I figured you were hatched.”

  5

  I went back to my apartment and took a two-hour nap. When I woke, I had a voicemail waiting.

  Ballard, it’s Spence. Just a heads-up that Wade Gruley is getting out tomorrow. Call me if you have any questions.

  Duly noted.

  Then I sat at my computer and began to do some research on Brian Pierce. In my line of work, Google is your friend.

  Say, for example, a subject claims to have a foot injury. Say also that he’s on a men’s softball team, and you’d like to attend the next game, in case he decides he is miraculously healed and can run the bases after all. So you Google his name, sort through the results, and there you go. A complete schedule for the Austin Assassins. Just show up with your camera and hope the guy does something stupid.

  Google Maps can also be helpful. When the subject lives out in the country — as did Brian Pierce — satellite shots of the property can tell you all sorts of things. The position of the house and any outbuildings. Is there a pool or a creek on the property? How about livestock, or farm and ranch equipment? Sounds irrelevant, but think about it. If a man is faking an injury, and he’s sitting around the house all day, bored to tears, and he owns a horse, what’s he going to do? Eventually, on a nice day, he’s going to get cabin fever. He’ll ride that horse, mow the back forty, or take a swim.

  Maybe that’s a bad example, because Pierce didn’t own a horse. Or, if he did, I didn’t see any evidence of it. What he did own was twenty acres of heavily wooded Hill Country land west of Austin, a good thirty-minute commute to downtown. The land had been deeded to him five years earlier, when he was twenty-one, so I was guessing it was an inheritance. Didn’t matter. I didn’t need to know.

  The house was in the center of the property, ringed by cedar and oak trees. To the left of Pierce’s property was a home on seven acres. To the right, a home on ten acres. Behind him, to the northwest, was nothing but raw land, with no buildings or paved roads for at least a solid mile. That chunk of land, I knew, was part of a nature conservancy. Four or five thousand acres of pristine beauty, free of man’s clumsy footprint. Or, from a different viewpoint, filled with rocks, thorny things, and rattlesnakes.

  Obviously, working a case in a sparsely populated area can be a challenge. The big question is: Where do you set up? How can you keep tabs on the subject without being obvious? Thomas Springs is a narrow two-lane blacktop with no shoulders. If you pull off the road, onto the grassy right-of-way, you look like you’ve broken down, and that’s the furthest thing from being discreet. You can’t park in a neighbor’s driveway, even if the house is half a mile off the road, because eventually someone’s going to wonder what you’re doing there.

  In this case, fortunately, there was a possible solution. About one hundred yards southwest of Pierce’s driveway, on the other side of the road, was an old clapboard church with a caliche parking lot. I’d even set foot in that church on a couple of occasions, way back when, because my grandparents had been parishioners there.

  I slapped together a couple of ham sandwiches, stuck them in an ice chest with three bottles of Gatorade, and headed out.

  My grandfather, who’d been a professor at the University of Texas, had the foresight to buy fifty-seven acres off Thomas Springs Road in 1954. The tract included one of the highest points in Travis County, and at the top of that hill stood a home like a bomb shelter. Rock walls, concrete ceiling, a flat roof of tar and gravel. Back then, many of the locals lived in crude shacks tucked in the woods. Goat herders. Cedar choppers. Rednecks whose forebears had run whiskey during Prohibition.

  The area west of Austin still had a rural feel to it — or parts of it did. But as I drove out Bee Cave Road, then waited for the light at Highway 71, I realized how much things had changed in the past decade. To my left was a strip center that included an HEB, a Starbucks, and a bunch of other chain shops. To my right was a retail shopping complex — massive in size — named the Hill Country Galleria. The developers called it a “lifestyle center,” as if that would disguise its true nature. It had a Dillard’s, a Barnes & Noble, a fourteen-screen movie theater. Yippee. Who needs trees and cattle when you can replace them with a Banana Republic? I suddenly felt guilty that I hadn’t driven out this way in so long. My grandparents’ old stomping grounds were being razed, paved, and homogenized.

  The one bit of solace came five minutes later, four miles down the road, when I turned right on Thomas Springs and saw many of the same old homes that had been there since I was a kid.

  Just out of curiosity, I drove the length of Thomas Springs Road — past the entrance to my grandparents’ old place, past Pierce’s driveway, with its No Trespassing sign on the locked gate, past the volunteer fire station, all the way down to Circle Drive, where I made a U and came back to the church, which hadn’t changed a bit. I pulled into the parking lot, backed into a patch of shade, and killed the engine.

  Sometimes I wonder about what happened next. Maybe it was fate.

  Normally, when you start surveillance on a subject, you’re prepared for the long haul. At least a day or two. Sometimes a week. Sometimes you have to cry uncle and give up. Hell, sometimes the subject really is injured, and the entire effort — watching him, and following him around — is a waste of time.

  But considering where Pierce’s house was located — and the privacy it afforded him — I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least see what I could see from the roadway. Take a quick walk along the shoulder and determine whether his house or even his yard was visible from the road. It was unlikely that would help me much, because it would be difficult to set up anywhere along the shoulder, but I wanted to know if it was even a possibility, in case Pierce didn’t leave his property for several days.

  So a quick wardrobe change was in order. I switched from jeans and a polo shirt to gym shorts and a ratty T-shirt. Put on some running shoes. Slipped an elastic iPod holder around my bicep. Now I looked like a guy out for a jog. The only giveaway would be the very small pair of binoculars I’d carry along.

  I left the Caravan where it was and walked along the edge of road as if I belonged there, past mailboxes and gravel driveways. At one point, a truck
drove past; the driver raised two fingers off the steering wheel, and I gave him a nod in return, hands on my hips, like I was catching my breath in the middle of my jog.

  I came to the near corner of Pierce’s acreage and it didn’t look promising. Thick cedar all along the property line formed a natural barrier. I kept going, and after about thirty yards, I caught a glimpse of blue — probably the siding on his house, well over a hundred yards away. I raised the binoculars and took a quick peek, but I couldn’t see much. I needed a bigger gap in the tree line. I kept walking, hoping there wasn’t a neighbor somewhere watching me through a window, wondering what I was doing. Maybe this was a stupid move.

  I was thinking about retreating to the van, but I’m glad I didn’t, because I took a few more steps and suddenly I had it. A small but very useful gap in the brush. A sliver of unobstructed view to Pierce’s house. I could even see a white truck parked in front.

  And movement.

  Someone was beside the truck, with the door open. There was no traffic coming from either direction, so I quickly raised the binoculars again and took a look. I saw the person leaning into the truck, as if he’d just come outside to grab something from the vehicle. When he emerged, I saw him in profile, and I was fairly sure it was Pierce. No bandage around his right wrist, but that didn’t mean anything.

  He closed the door to the truck and bounded up the porch steps to his house — and there, behind a screen door, like an apparition, was a little blond girl wearing denim shorts and a pink top.

  6

  The girl was scared at first, he could tell, but she didn’t cry. That was a good sign. If she’d been a crier, he wasn’t sure what he would’ve done about it. But she was quiet. Meek. Shy.

  “When am I going home?”

  Barely loud enough for him to hear.