Running from the Dead

by Mike Knowles

  “I heard Tom came to see you yesterday.”

  Jones stopped his father beside an empty bench and clicked the brakes with the toe of his boot. He heard his father exhale as he sat down beside him on the bench.

  “You and me are lucky to have him.”

  Jones didn’t hear a breath this time. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you think about how Tom lives his life, he is family.”

  Jones heard another breath; in his head, it sounded like it came out in a huff. “Listen, Pop, I tried to stay out of things between you two when I was growing up. I like to think it’s because I knew there was no way to make you see that you were wrong. I gave up on changing you and tried instead to keep the peace. I was wrong. You have no idea how lucky we are that Tom didn’t decide to walk out on us. It sure as hell would have been easier for him than staying. And while you might have been happy if he had left us, I can tell you that you wouldn’t have felt that way forever. I’ve seen what the lost do. They carve a deep wound that never scars. You might have hated him, but you would have felt it eventually and then you wouldn’t be able to stop feeling it.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jones caught the movement of his father’s head as it began to drift back. He slipped the crook of his elbow around the old man’s head and eased it back to where it had been.

  “I was wrong and I don’t have any more time to spend keeping the peace.”

  His father said nothing.

  “Listen, I want to talk to you. I might not be around for a while.”

  Jones gave the words time to sink in.

  “I got into some trouble, and I’m not going to be able to find my way out of it. It wasn’t bad luck, Pop. I earned the trouble. I earned every inch of it.”

  Jones didn’t hear a sound from the man sitting next to him.

  “It’s hard to understand. I know.”

  Jones heard a short breath that might have been an attempt at a laugh.

  “Tom is going to take care of you when I can’t. I haven’t talked to him about it, but I know he will. I wanted to tell you myself because you should hear it from me, not anyone else. I also wanted to tell you that you need to get past whatever bullshit you have with Tom because he is going to be all you have and he deserves better than he has ever gotten from you.”

  Jones watched his father watching nothing and tried not to read anything into it. He got off the bench and unlocked the wheels. “Why don’t we see if we can sneak a little dessert before dinner.”

  26

  Jones stayed with his father until the staff told him he had to go. He smiled at the nurse to let her know he was on his way out and waited for her to leave. He put on his coat and stopped at the side of the bed. Jones took his father’s hand and felt his cool skin slowly begin to warm in his grip. He said, “Bye, Pop. Remember what we talked about,” and then he walked out the door.

  In the Jeep, Jones dialled Irene before he put his foot on the accelerator. She answered with a voice that was more pleasant than anything he was used to. “Hello?”

  “It’s Sam Jones.” His name was the real test, and Jones waited to see how she would react.

  “Mr. Jones, I can’t thank you enough.”

  “He called?”

  “He did. He called and we talked. We really talked.”

  “I’m happy to hear that,” Jones said.

  “My father really liked you.”

  Jones glanced at his nose in the mirror. “Not at first.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Listen, you have my number. Call me if you need anything.”

  “I will,” Irene said. She blurted out, “Mr. Jones,” in an effort to catch him before he hung up.

  “I’m still here.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  Jones pulled to a stop at a red light and thought about the question. “I don’t follow.”

  “Do you think he’s a bad person?”

  The light changed and Jones was slow to accelerate.

  “I mean,” Irene said, “he did some terrible things. There were the banks, but there were other things. Things he won’t talk about—at least, not with me.”

  “What do you think?” Jones said.

  Irene sighed. “Some days, I think he is the worst person in the world. Other days, I think he is an old man with a past everyone has forgotten about except me.”

  Jones thought about it for a block. “I met a man trying to be better than he was. I don’t know if he will ever put down the baggage he’s lugging, but he might get better at carrying it if he gets some help.”

  “What if I’m never ready?”

  “You chased him when he ran.”

  Irene thought about it. “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, and my father told me to tell you to call him if you needed any more help with your parking tickets. What does that mean?”

  “Inside joke,” Jones said.

  Irene didn’t sound convinced, but she said, “Okay,” before she thanked him again and hung up the phone.

  Jones had barely slept the night before, and this night had barely started. He felt exhaustion wash over him as though it had been waiting in the back seat for a quiet moment to grab him by the throat. Jones yawned and turned up the air conditioning in an attempt to force his body to rally. Three yawns later, Jones admitted to himself that he needed more than cold air—he needed sleep. Jones found a movie theatre close by and killed some time sleeping through the last half of a deserted showing of a big budget rom-com that couldn’t shake the stench of the rotting tomato it had earned. When the house lights came up, he woke feeling less groggy but nowhere close to rested. He headed to Brew to find something more effective than a nap.

  Jones opened the door and saw no sign of Sheena behind the counter. He ordered a coffee and a sandwich and picked up a newspaper someone had left behind on his way to a vacant corner table. The coffee shop was busy, and Jones had to buy another sandwich and a few more coffees to keep his claim on the table. When he finished the paper, he noticed an old crate that had been refurbished and stocked with used paperbacks. Jones instinctively wrote off the novels as donations that wouldn’t be worth the fraction of a calorie that would be spent flipping the pages, but a glimpse of a name on an orange spine that barely had a crease told him he was wrong. Jones picked up John D. MacDonald’s Darker than Amber and killed a few hours reading about another PI’s troubles.

  When the staff at Brew started to close up, Jones drove around until he found a motel that would accept cash for a room. The place was small and dirty, but Jones had spent more time in worse surroundings. Jones lay down on top of the covers and put his phone down on his chest. Whoever was next door was playing music and they had the speaker turned up loud enough to vibrate the wall. Jones ignored the sound and closed his eyes; in a few seconds, he was asleep.

  The phone woke him an hour later. The number on the screen read private again.

  “Lauren?”

  “Did I wake you?” She found the question funny. She was high again, he was sure.

  “Where are you?”

  “Work. My next client is late, so I figured I’d call you because Tony is in no mood to talk. He hates it when people are late. He says its screws up the whole schedule. I can’t talk to him when he’s like this.”

  The words came at Jones fast and he had to concentrate to understand her.

  “I can talk to you, right?”

  “Sure,” Jones said. “Can I ask you something?”

  Lauren laughed. “Sure, tiger.”

  “What do you do?”

  “What?”

  “You work for Tony, I know that, and you schedule appointments with clients at one in the morning. I just want to know what line of work you’re in.”

  Lauren didn’t think anything was funny anymore. “You’re the detective. You tell me.�
� Her tone was sullen and made her sound every bit like the teenager she was.

  “I think you’re a call girl,” Jones said. He waited for Lauren, who was suddenly much less chatty, to say something.

  “Call girl.” She said the words with a bit of a snicker. “Call girl. No one has ever called me that before. How old are you?”

  “Forty-two.”

  Jones’ age brought some of the levity back into Lauren’s voice. “You’re old.”

  “Second time I heard that today.”

  “The name doesn’t even make sense,” Lauren said. “Nobody calls me.”

  Jones had been worried that the question would spook her, but she hadn’t denied it and it didn’t seem as though she was going to hang up on Jones for suggesting it. He pushed his luck a little more. “Who do they call?”

  “They? You mean the men I fuck for money?”

  Jones made a fist. Now he had stepped on a land mine, and he wasn’t sure how to get off it. He tried to slowly back away. “The guys you meet.”

  It was no good. “God, you can’t even say it can you? The guys I meet are men, and I meet them to fuck. Say it.”

  Jones saw that there was no getting out of it, so he doubled down. “Who do they call?”

  “Who? The men I fuck? Tell you what, tiger, I’ll answer your question if you say it.”

  Jones stared at the smoke-stained motel ceiling. In the dim light cast off by the parking lot, he could see a spot that had gone brown from water damage. He realized that the music next door had stopped, and now he could hear two people arguing. Lauren had picked up on his discomfort like a predator smells blood and she was attacking his weakness with something sharper than teeth.

  Jones had no other move to make, so he said it. “The men you fuck.” The words came out quiet and slow.

  Lauren giggled. The sound was full of the juvenile cruelty of a schoolyard bully. “Website,” she said. “Tony puts up an ad in the personal section. The part for people looking to hook up.”

  “Where do you meet up?”

  “This doesn’t feel much like a conversation. It’s more like an interview. I don’t want to talk about me anymore. It’s my turn to ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “What did you do to the man who killed Adam?”

  A car started in the parking lot and beams from the headlights easily penetrated the membrane-thin curtains and lit up the room. “I told you—”

  “I know what you told me. I want you to tell me the truth. I didn’t lie to you. Don’t lie to me.”

  Jones remembered Willy’s hand on his arm when Lauren had first asked about what he had done to Kevin. Willy had warned him to go easy. Jones sighed, knowing there was nothing easy about what he had done. “I killed him.”

  “You lied to me.” She didn’t sound surprised.

  “I’m sorry,” Jones said. He meant it.

  “You’re a murderer.” The word sounded strange in her teenage voice. She wasn’t scared or disgusted. She was interested. “You’re a murderer.”

  The car headlights moved on and the room was dark again. “Yes.”

  “How does it feel? To have killed someone.”

  Jones thought about it and admitted the truth. “I haven’t really thought about it much.”

  “Are you for real? I mean you killed someone. A person no longer exists because of you. Do you really expect me to believe that you don’t think about it?”

  Jones didn’t know what to say to the girl.

  She went quiet while she thought and then she quietly said, “Was it hard?”

  “No.”

  “Do you feel bad about it?”

  Jones thought about it and then he thought about lying to Lauren. He told the truth. “For this one—no.”

  “Because he deserved it. He deserved it for what he did,” she said.

  Jones sat up and swung his foot off the bed. He was angry with himself for reading the girl so wrong. He had assumed that she wanted to protect her pimp, but that wasn’t what she was doing. She was working up the nerve to kill him, and Jones had just told her murder was as easy as it really was.

  “Kid, you are in an impossible situation, but killing Tony isn’t the answer. I can help you.”

  Lauren snorted. “I don’t want to kill Tony.”

  Jones leaned against the wall and let his head loll back until it hit the wall. The argument on the other side of the wall had become a screaming match, and the loud noises vibrated the drywall against his skull. Jones pushed off the wall and crossed the room in five steps. The distance did little to muffle the sounds of the people next door. Jones could make out the hard-edged consonants of curse words, and he stared at the wall thinking he would rather hear those instead of what he knew was coming.

  “I want to kill myself.”

  27

  “I lied too,” Lauren said. Her voice was quiet.

  Jones pressed the phone harder against his ear to hear her over the couple next door.

  “About what?”

  Lauren sniffed. “About Tony. He was my boyfriend, but we broke up. He doesn’t want to be with me anymore. He says I’m only good for one thing—making him money.”

  Jones walked into the bathroom and shut the thin door behind him. “That’s not true,” Jones said.

  Lauren sniffed and Jones heard her voice waver. “No? Tell me one thing I’m good at. Just one thing.”

  “Singing,” Jones said.

  The answer made Lauren angry. “That’s just something someone told you about me. You don’t know me at all.”

  “You’re right,” Jones said. “You’re right. I don’t know you, but you know something? I don’t think Tony does either, not if he said something like that to you.”

  “It was my fault. I broke his trust.”

  “Money or sex?”

  “Jesus! So, because I have sex for money it must be about money or sex?”

  “It has nothing to do with your job and everything to do with mine. In my experience, most problems are about one or the other. Sometimes it’s both.”

  Lauren quietly admitted, “It was about money. We had this plan. We were saving money so that we could move to California together. I was going to sing and Tony was going to manage me.”

  “What happened?”

  “We needed money to get to get out West, so I started looking for a job, but everything was minimum wage. It would take twenty years of flipping burgers to earn enough. We needed to make some real money.”

  “Let me guess, Tony got an idea.”

  “No,” she dragged out the word sarcastically. “I had the idea. Tony had a couple of girls working for him and they were making good money. Better money than McDonald’s was offering. I thought it would get us to California faster.”

  “What happened?”

  “Things were good at first. I only worked a couple times a week and I was making good money. Real money.”

  “And how was Tony with all of this?”

  “He was fine with it,” she said. “I had been doing some gigs around the city and Tony was managing me, so he just managed this too. He set up my appointments, got me there, and made sure I was safe.”

  “For a cut,” Jones said.

  “Managers don’t work for free.” Lauren said the word in a sing-songy way that made Jones think she was parroting something she had heard Tony say often.

  “What happened next?”

  “Things were going fine, and then I screwed it all up. As usual because that’s what I do. It’s what I always do.”

  “How did you screw things up?”

  “I got into some things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Popcorn mostly.”

  The answer was not what Jones had been expecting.

  Lauren laugh
ed at the sudden silence. “Drugs, tiger. Popcorn is drugs.”

  “What kind?”

  Lauren blew out a stream of air. The conversation was starting to bore her. “Fentanyl and heroin. And before you say it, yes, I know it’s dangerous.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Jones said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe,” Jones said. “Where did you get the popcorn?”

  Lauren spoke in a sigh that told Jones he was pushing his luck. “One of the other girls who works for Tony gave it to me one night. One thing led to another and after a couple of weeks, I was hooked. I tried to hide it from Tony, but I ran out of money pretty fast.”

  “The money for California,” Jones said.

  “All gone. I told you. I screwed everything up.”

  “How did Tony take the news?”

  Lauren quietly said, “Bad. He called me a junkie. He hates junkies. He said I ruined our dream. After that, he didn’t want to be with me anymore.”

  “Are you still using?”

  Lauren hesitated. “Yeah.” She waited another beat and then added, “Tony gets me what I need.”

  “Uh hunh.”

  “He says he wants to make sure I don’t do too much, and he wants to make sure that I don’t buy anything dirty.”

  “How do you afford it?” Jones asked the question though he already knew the answer.

  “I work.”

  “Still a couple of times a week?”

  “More.”

  “Why not just walk away?”

  “And go where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “With you?” Lauren put on a little girl’s voice that was stained with adult sexuality. “Are you going to be my big strong protector instead of Tony?”

  “I’m serious, kid. Why not just walk away?”

  “That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “No, you said you want to die.”