Running from the Dead

by Mike Knowles

  “You look pretty yet?”

  Jones looked over and saw Willy still playing with the stereo. “I don’t think anyone will ask me to prom anytime soon, but I won’t scare any kids, so it should be fine.”

  “You think that cop will think that it’s fine?”

  “I think he already has his mind made up about me. What I look like won’t change that.”

  “Spoken like a man who has nothing figured out. If I had known you were going to be this clueless, I would have said you got hit by the bike.”

  “That would sound better if it wasn’t coming from a man who can’t work a radio.”

  “There are too many goddamn stations on this thing,” Willy said. “For Christ’s sake, you have a channel for every fucking decade. Every car I ever owned just had AM and FM. There was none of this satellite bullshit. We had a rock station, a jazz station, country, and couple for whatever the kids were into. AM had sports, weather, and music no one listened to.”

  “Which was your station?”

  William sat back in the seat and smiled. “Jazz. Not that smooth garbage. Real Jazz. The stuff on the radio wasn’t always good, but if you were patient, Miles would come.”

  Jones hit one of the presets and put the Jeep in gear.

  Willy nodded his approval. “It’s not Miles,” he said. “But I’m a patient man.”

  Jones stopped just before the road and scrolled through his phone. He jabbed at a button on the steering wheel and drove out of the parking lot as Miles in Berlin slowly filled the cab with sound.

  “Show-off,” Willy said.

  Jones smiled.

  Willy gave Miles a few minutes of quiet respect before he said, “You set that nose pretty well.”

  Jones grinned. “I could do it with one hand tied behind my back.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Willy said.

  “I had a lot of practice.”

  “Medical school?”

  “Army,” Jones said.

  “Medic.”

  “No. The army just taught me how to tape things together until someone with better training showed up.”

  “Where did you serve?”

  “All over,” Jones said.

  “See anything interesting?”

  “A lot of broken things,” Jones said.

  Jones’ ringtone interrupted Miles’ solo. Ordinarily, Jones would have been upset, but the call ended a conversation he didn’t want to have.

  Jones glanced at the phone. “I gotta take this,” he said.

  “Is it Irene?”

  Jones shook his head. “Do me a favour: let me handle this call myself.”

  “I’ll only step in if you start drowning again.”

  “I mean it.”

  Willy lifted two palms in submission. “Alright. It’s your show. I’ll just watch from the front row.” The old man dipped a hand to his right and sent the seat back into a forty-five-degree angle.

  Jones answered the phone. “Hello?”

  “I was just about to hang up on you, tiger.”

  “I didn’t think you’d call again.”

  “Why?” Lauren’s voice came out loud from the car speakers. Jones adjusted the volume and glanced at Willy, but the old bank robber was looking out the window.

  “Maybe I was just afraid you wouldn’t.”

  Lauren laughed. “Because you wouldn’t be able to save me?”

  “I want to help you,” Jones said.

  “Nope. Nuh-uh. You said you wanted to save me because you couldn’t save someone else. Who couldn’t you save?”

  Lauren’s teenage voice was flirty, and the words spilled out of her mouth. She was on something.

  “Just someone I knew.”

  She took a breath as though she were underwater and coming up for air and said, “Oh, no. That’s not how the game works. If you want me to tell you about my life then you have to do the same.”

  “His name was Adam.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Someone took him.”

  “Who?”

  “A man.”

  “Did the man hurt Adam?”

  “Yeah. He hurt him.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m going to hang up.”

  Jones waited. Lauren didn’t hang up.

  “You’re no fun, tiger.”

  “This isn’t fun, kid.”

  Lauren changed the subject. “I found another one of your posters. I stopped to look at it, and Tony thought I wanted a cat.”

  “Who’s Tony?”

  “He’s my boyfriend.”

  “You guys serious?”

  Lauren laughed. “Yeah. He loves me. We’re going to move away together.”

  “Where to?”

  “I want to go to California. I’ve always dreamed of going Hollywood.”

  “Norah said you were a singer.”

  “She said that?” Lauren went quiet and for a second Jones thought the call had dropped. “I don’t sing much anymore.”

  “What do you do?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t sing anymore, so what do you do instead?”

  “I work a lot.” The energy in her voice had drained away.

  “What kind of work?”

  “I work for Tony.”

  Jones looked over at Willy and saw the old con looking back at him.

  “I thought he was your boyfriend.”

  “He is.”

  “What kind of work does Tony do?”

  Lauren didn’t answer and Jones knew pressing her would be a mistake.

  “He loves me,” Lauren said.

  The words interested Willy, and he brought the seat out of its lean. Jones could tell that he wanted to say something, but he didn’t want Lauren to know that there was someone else on the line. He put a hand up and Willy reluctantly nodded.

  “You mean Tony?”

  “Yeah. He calls me his baby girl. He’s always getting me things. New clothes, make-up. He always wants me to look nice when we go out.”

  “But you didn’t tell him about the posters.”

  “What?” Lauren suddenly sounded unsure of herself.

  “You said he thought you wanted a cat.”

  “Doesn’t mean I didn’t tell him the rest.”

  “Did you?”

  Another silence that Jones knew better than to break first.

  “He loves me.”

  “So I hear.”

  “You’re a jerk,” Lauren said. “You talk about wanting to save me, but then all you do is put down my boyfriend. You aren’t looking to save me. You just want to fuck me. All that bullshit about saving people is just a way to get close to me. You know what I think? I think you’re probably a stalker. We had a date once and now you’re trying to get into my head so you can get into my pants again. Wait until I tell Tony. He’s going to find you and mess you up. You are gonna be so sorry.”

  Jones had miscalculated the effect his probe about her boyfriend would have. The pin was out of the grenade and he was worried it would explode before he could get it back in. “Do you really believe that, Lauren? Do you really think I tracked Norah down and put up all those posters because I’m stalking you?”

  “Do you think a normal person would do all that for someone they never met?”

  Jones didn’t have an answer.

  “Y’know what? This was supposed to be fun, but now it’s just a drag. I gotta go.”

  Jones took one last shot at putting the pin back in the grenade. “Adam was murdered by a man named Kevin McGregor.”

  Lauren didn’t hang up.

  “He took Adam from his backyard on a Wednesday afternoon while his mother was on the phone. She
had no idea what happened to him.”

  The admission got everyone’s attention. Willy turned his head to the left and watched Jones with two cold blue eyes that betrayed the sharp mind wiles that were hiding just under the swagger.

  “Kevin had befriended Adam. He had been nice to him.” The word nice tasted like bile on his tongue. “Nice enough to make a seven-year-old think it was okay to walk off his lawn and get into the back of a van. Adam trusted Kevin because he thought they were friends.” Jones swallowed and cleared his throat. “But there was nothing that resembled a friend in the back of that van.”

  Jones took a breath and said, “Adam fought back. His house was just across the street. His mother was in the kitchen. Being so close to home gave him the courage to say no to a man more than twice his size. He kicked, he punched, and then—he screamed. Kevin put his hands around Adam’s throat to keep him quiet, but he wouldn’t stop screaming. Adam died twenty metres from the edge of his front lawn.” Jones inhaled slowly. “His mother didn’t know he was missing until almost an hour after he had died. By the time she realized he was gone, Kevin McGregor had already started entombing him.”

  “Entombing?” Lauren said the word slowly as though its meaning may reveal itself in the dissection of its sounds.

  “Kevin was scared. He hadn’t planned on killing Adam. He took his body home and brought it down into his basement. He wrapped Adam’s body in a tarp and wound tape around his neck, waist, and ankles. He put Adam’s body against the wall of his cold cellar and spent the night laying bricks until there was a wall hiding what Kevin McGregor did.”

  Jones and Willy heard a sniff amplified through the expensive speakers.

  “Adam’s mother spent years looking for her son, believing he was out there somewhere. She said good night to him every single night. That is the God’s honest truth. She was terrified that her son was somewhere without someone who cared enough to say those two simple words.”

  It was Jones’ turn to sniff.

  “Adam’s mother hired me to investigate the investigation. So many people had looked for her son over the years and no one could find a trace of him. She was sure that someone had missed something.”

  “They did,” Lauren said. “You found him.”

  Jones sighed. “I looked for Adam for six years.”

  “And you found him.” Lauren said it as though Jones should be proud of the accomplishment.

  “I was too late.”

  “That wasn’t your fault. You know that, right? He died before you even started looking.”

  “The thing about searching for people is they become real to you before you ever find them. Everything you learn about them and all of the things people tell you about them feed this belief you have deep down inside that you will find them. The people you search for are born in your mind. They exist and feel as real as memories. Living things that never really lived.”

  “What did you do to the man who hurt him?”

  Willy put a hand on Jones’ arm. Jones looked at the old man and mouthed the word, “Easy.” Jones had heard it too. There was fear in the question.

  “I was hired to find Adam,” Jones said. “That was what I did.”

  “But didn’t you want to, like, hurt him or something?”

  “Baby girl, it’s time to go to work.” The male voice had lost a lot of its distinction as it travelled through whatever barrier separated Lauren from Tony. But Jones could still mine a few details from what he heard. The voice wasn’t as deep as his own, but it possessed an air of authority. There was no anger in the command; it wasn’t necessary because Lauren responded right away with a voice stripped of her teens. “Coming, Daddy.”

  Jones shuddered at the word daddy in the manufactured little girl’s voice. “Will you call me again, Lauren?”

  “You still want to save me, tiger?”

  “I want to help you, if I can,” Jones said.

  “What are you doing in there, baby girl?” The voice was closer and louder.

  “Lauren,” Jones said.

  “I’ll call you,” she said and then she hung up.

  * * *

  “Who hired you to look for her?” Willy asked without taking his eyes off the passenger window.

  “No one. She left a note on a bathroom door.” Jones said the words without taking his eyes off the road. “‘He’s going to kill me, and I think I want him to.’ She had no one to say the words to—not one soul. I figured that kid deserved more than a bathroom door.”

  A brief silence followed the last notes of “Stella By Starlight,” then Willy said, “What did you do to the man who killed that boy?”

  Jones didn’t answer.

  “People are funny,” Willy said. “Two people heard the same story at the same time, and at the end of the story they had the same question, but they’re not looking for the same thing.”

  “She wanted to know what I did to Adam’s killer,” Jones said.

  “That’s what she asked and that’s the answer I’m interested in, but that wasn’t what she wanted to know.”

  “She was wondering what I would do to Tony.”

  “Bingo. She’s smart enough to know that any way out for her leads straight through her pimp. She’s worried about what will happen to him. You know why, right?”

  “She was telling the truth,” Jones said. “She loves him.”

  “Bingo again. Like I said, people are funny. They should hate the ones who hurt them, but it hardly ever works out like that. I have some experience with this.” Willy took his eyes off the window and put them on Jones. “You know what you’re doing, right?”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  Willy looked at Jones for a long time. Jones didn’t turn his head.

  “So what’s next?”

  “I wait for her to call again,” Jones said.

  “While you dodge the police,” Willy said. “Why are they interested in you exactly?”

  “Parking tickets,” Jones said.

  Willy turned down the stereo a little bit and smiled over his shoulder at Jones. “That wasn’t a traffic cop. That was a murder cop.”

  Jones shrugged.

  “Do you know what I went away for?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know how I got caught?”

  Jones glanced at Willy. “No.”

  Willy smiled. “I robbed thirty-seven banks in my life.”

  Jones whistled.

  “Thirty-seven, but they nailed me only for the last two. I did ’em both on the same day. Thirty-six was as smooth as the thirty-five before it. Thirty-seven started off the same way, but on the way out of the bank a woman hit me as she was backing out of the handicap parking spot near the door. She didn’t check her blind spot.” Willy chuckled. “A couple minutes later, the cops showed up and found me lying on the ground with a broken femur and a shattered elbow. Two banks in one weekend was stupid. I told myself it was about the money, but, like most things, it’s never really about what we tell ourselves it’s about.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Jones said.

  “I’m not talking about you, kid. I hurt a lot of people because I wasn’t capable of being honest with myself. I wrecked my life and did a hell of a job messing up my kid’s life too. That girl on the phone is no different than I was. She is a wrecking ball in motion. You ever see one of those things?”

  “She’s not a wrecking ball. She’s a kid in trouble.”

  “She is both and you’re trying to catch her. You don’t catch a wrecking ball, kid. It hits you.”

  25

  Jones let Willy out at the curb in front of Pacific Heights and drove north. He knew better than to go anywhere near his place or the office. Scopes had given him another day, but he wasn’t about to take the cop at his word. Were the roles reversed, Jones would already be staking out Scopes’
house and waiting for him to come home. Jones checked his watch—he could still make visiting hours.

  Laverne smiled when she saw Jones sitting next to his father. “Back again so soon?”

  Jones turned his head away from his father and smiled at Laverne. “I was in the neighbourhood.”

  Laverne winced at the sight of him. “What happened to your face?”

  “Fist fight.”

  “Looks like you lost.”

  Jones held up his arm. “I was outnumbered.”

  Laverne frowned. “That is not funny. You are far too old to be getting in fist fights.”

  “Now that’s not funny,” Jones said.

  Laverne giggled and Jones smiled. Her laughter was infectious and Jones was glad that it was a sound his father heard often. She checked on his father and made a few notes on the clipboard stored in the sleeve attached to his bed. “Your father is a popular guy. Your brother was just here the other night.”

  “Did he stay long?”

  “The usual.”

  Jones nodded and thanked God for Tom. He had every reason to be distant, but he kept showing up. Twice a week for an hour at a time, like clockwork, Tom sat with his father, fed him, and then read him the day’s sports section. Jones loved his brother and he was grateful for the knowledge that his father’s care was something he would never have to worry about.

  When Laverne finished, Jones transferred his father to his wheelchair. He wheeled his father outside and paused on the sidewalk to button his coat. These days, his father always felt cold—years of soft food had tenderized his body. The once hard contractor’s muscles had vanished, and his skin hung like wet laundry on fragile bones that had never been so close to the sun.