“So talk to me.” Smiley’s accent was Eastern—New York, New Jersey—it all sounded the same to Gudger.
“It’s my wife’s kid,” explained Gudger. “He’s cooked up some crazy theory about his sister—you know, the girl. A couple of days ago he hitched a ride up to Asheville and got the governor’s cop in on it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No. I just found out a few minutes ago.”
“How much does he know for real?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t get it out of him.”
“How much does the cop know?”
“Don’t know that either,” said Gudger. “But today I came home and she was on my front porch, talking to the kid.”
“The cop’s a she?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, Gudger. Your stepkid rats you out to the governor’s cop? What the hell kind of family are you running over there?”
“I don’t know,” Gudger said miserably. “I had no idea the boy was this smart.”
“Yeah? Well, I had no idea you were this stupid.” Smiley’s voice could have etched glass.
Again, the sour taste of whiskey roiled in the back of Gudger’s throat. He stood there, watching out the window for Amy, suddenly as twitchy as Chase covered in hot sauce. Finally, Smiley spoke.
“This cop got a name?”
“Crow. Mary Crow,” Gudger answered quickly, a small tendril of relief inching toward him. Smiley was now focusing on Mary Crow instead of him.
“Mary Crow.” Smiley repeated the name, as if he were making notes on something. Gudger waited, tapping his foot, eager to offer up what other information Smiley wanted. After several moments, he spoke again.
“I gotta tell you, Gudger. This is way off my grid. I gotta call my boss.”
Gudger felt a great rippling in his bowels. Smiley was bad enough; he didn’t even want to think about his boss. He clutched the phone harder. “Who’s that?”
“Doesn’t matter, but he’ll probably send somebody to see you. And sooner than later, probably.”
“But when? Tonight? Tomorrow? What are they going to do?”
Smiley growled. “I don’t know, you stupid jackass. But odds are real good you aren’t gonna like it.”
Seventeen
Sam awoke with a start. She’d been in a terrifying, coma-like sleep, aware of only a thick darkness that pressed down upon her like a coffin. This is what death must be like, a voice told her. No angels, no tunnel of light, nothing but an impenetrable emptiness that went on forever. It would just be her, all alone with no light and no sound—only her own consciousness, screaming for release, until eons hence, it, too, would flicker and die, joining the black void that surrounded it. The notion terrified her so that she screamed and pulled herself back from some unseen precipice. She sat up in bed, gasping and dizzy, grateful for the anemic fluorescent light that buzzed from the ceiling.
“I’m alive,” she whispered, trembling—amazed that her lungs were still pulling in air, that her mouth still formed words. She wondered, for a moment, how her mind could have concocted a dream of such horror, then she remembered the Turk and his tea. He must have put something in it, to make her dream such a thing, she decided. A drug to subdue her, or maybe just frighten her into submission. Whatever it was, she wasn’t drinking it again. She didn’t care if he pinched her shoulder until she died. She’d swallowed her last cup of Yusuf’s tea.
She looked around the room. She was still in the second one—the silent one without Ivan’s bloodstains on the wall. A tray of food sat on the bureau, next to her bed. A cheese sandwich, covered in plastic wrap, an apple. As she stared at it, her stomach gave a loud growl; she realized she had no idea how long she’d been asleep. Hours? Days? She couldn’t tell—no light seeped from around the window, and the florescent flickered all the time.
She reached for the tray and unwrapped the sandwich. Though the bread was stale and the cheese gummy, it still tasted wonderful. She wolfed it down, wishing she had another. She ate the apple, then suddenly, her stomach began to cramp. Throwing off her blanket, she hurried to the bathroom. As she sat down on the toilet, she saw that someone had left a cardboard box on the back of the toilet. Inside, she found a toothbrush and toothpaste, a small bar of soap, and a box of sanitary napkins.
“Are you kidding me?” She opened the box and pulled out one of the thick, cumbersome pads. She’d used them only once, for her first period, when she was twelve years old. Every month since she’d inserted tampons, preferring them to the bulky alternative.
Suddenly, she started to laugh. “They must want to keep my vagina clean of foreign objects.” Disgusted, she stuffed the pad back in the box. How strange to be in a place where being a virgin made you special. At school, it made you the butt of jokes, put you on the Loser List of girls who never got asked out. But how could she have helped it? She was new at her school, and her mother made her come straight home every day and keep Chase safe from the crackheads next door. She barely got a chance to glance at a boy, much less have sex with one.
As her gut gave an ominous rumble, she put her head in her hands and sighed. She’d had no idea how good she’d had it, back then. Right now she would give anything to be at that crappy little duplex, playing Clue with Chase, trying to convince him that their drugged-out neighbors were too stoned to break down their door.
“But that was then,” she told herself sternly, wiping her eyes. “This is now.” She flushed the toilet, then unwrapped the red toothbrush that lay in the box. As she brushed her teeth, she gazed in the mirror. Was this the same shattered glass she’d looked at earlier and decided she would kill herself with if things became unbearable?
Yes, she decided, staring at her kaleidoscopic reflection. It was. And I will. And I’ll take as many of these bastards with me as I can.
She finished cleaning her teeth and rinsed her mouth in the yellowish water. After that she returned to her room to see if she could get anything beyond a shopping channel on that dopey-looking TV. If she could get a weather report, she might be able to figure out where she was and how long she’d been here. She’d just clicked the set on when the pipes in the bathroom started banging.
Ignoring the noise, she twisted the dial of the ancient TV. Through a screen of thick snow, she heard only Spanish programming—an overheated soap opera, then a woman chattering on what sounded like a talk show. She twisted the dial around three times, then turned the set off. Silence resumed, broken only by the banging pipes. Sinking to the floor, she buried her head in hands. In the first room she’d at least been connected with people—the girls going back and forth, Ivan bringing her food and tales of his Russian boyfriends. Here she had nothing but horrific dreams and crappy plumbing.
As she sat there, longing to hear someone speak a language she understood, she grew angry at the noisy pipes. “Shut up!” she finally cried, getting to her feet and hurrying into the bathroom. Maybe if she flushed the toilet again it would be quiet. She reached over to pull the lever on the thing, when she realized that the clanging wasn’t coming from the toilet at all—it was coming from the pipe beneath the sink.
She knelt down, wondering if the U-trap was loose. Suddenly, the tapping grew much louder, taking on a new rhythm. Three taps, followed by a brief silence, followed by three more taps, followed by another silence. She sat back on her heels, her heart pounding. Was someone in the next bathroom? Were they trying to send her a message?
She reached for her toothbrush. Crouching beneath the sink again, she started tapping on the pipes herself—three shorts, three longs, then three short taps again. SOS in Morse code, a silly thing Chase had once taught her from one of his detective novels, in case they were ever on a sinking ship. She finished tapping her message, then listened. She heard nothing for so long that she decided she must have dreamed the whole thing, but then, just as she was getting to her f
eet, she heard her message coming back through the pipes—three shorts, three longs, then three shorts again.
Oh my God! she thought. There’s someone on the other side of that wall!
She tapped back, this time just three short ones. The tapper answered in kind, then Sam saw the U-trap beneath her sink begin to wiggle. She realized that her sink and the one next door must drain into a single pipe—if she could remove the collar that covered the hole where the pipe entered the wall, then she might be able to talk to whoever was tapping. Sam crawled beneath the sink, wiped some mildew away from the sink baffle, and pressed her mouth close to the wall. “Can you hear me?” she whispered, praying that she wasn’t blundering into a trap set by the Turk, or worse, that guy Boris.
At first she heard nothing. For a moment she thought it was a trap and the Turk would come barreling through the door to pour more tea down her throat. But then the tapping began again, this time rapid and urgent. When it stopped, Sam spoke again.
“Try to take off the collar that covers your sink pipe,” she whispered to whomever it was. “I’ll do the same.”
She got to her feet, desperate to find something to loosen the collar with. The medicine cabinet was empty; the shards of the broken mirror would only break further in attempting to loosen a screw. Beyond that, the bathroom offered only a toothbrush and the box of sanitary napkins. She hurried to the bedroom, checking the drawers of the bureau. They held nothing beyond sci-fi paperbacks, printed in an alphabet she couldn’t read. She looked under the bed, in the closet, but found nothing. She tried to pry off the TV’s antenna, but it was attached firmly to the back of the set. Desperate, she lifted her mattress and looked at the box springs that supported it. Though they were old and squeaked every time she turned over in bed, they were far too strong for her to break off.
“Damn!” she whispered. “There’s got to be something!”
She circled the room like a caged animal, searching for something she could make into a tool. There was nothing—the room had only a bed, a TV, and a single piece of furniture. Frustrated, she began to rub the place on her shoulder where the Turk had squeezed. As she moved her bra strap out of the way, she suddenly realized she’d had a tool all along! Quickly, she lifted her T-shirt and took off her bra. The little metal hooks that fastened the thing around her just might also loosen those screws!
Pulling her T-shirt back on, she ran to the bathroom, bra in hand. She ducked under the sink and listened for any sounds from the other side of the wall. No more tapping, but a scraping sound reached her ears, as if her companion was mirroring her efforts in the other bathroom.
She looked at the hooks of her bra—two, both tiny, both bent from many trips through the washing machine. She took the least bent one and began to work with it. At first the thing slipped off the screw every time she tried to turn it, but she figured out that if she leaned forward and applied pressure as she turned it, it would at least stay in place. With sweat trickling into her eyes, she kept pushing and trying to turn the stubborn screw. As the ends of her fingers grew numb with the effort, she decided it was hopeless, that she and whoever-it-was next door would never be able to see each other. Then, as she gave a final try, she felt the screw turn a fraction of an inch. She changed hands and worked on, pressing the bra hook into the screw until it slipped out, then beginning all over again. As her legs began to cramp, the first screw loosened to the point that she could grab it in her fingers. She unscrewed the first one. It dropped to the floor with a ping. She was halfway home.
Wiping the sweat from her forehead, she put the bra hook to work on the second. This one was rusted, even harder to turn than the first.
“No!” she whispered. “You aren’t stopping me now!” She took the other, more bent bra hook and scraped the rust from the base of the screw. When she had a small pile of brown filings on the bathroom floor, she started in on the screw. At first, she couldn’t budge it, then all at once, as if something had given way, the thing began to move. Desperately, she turned it, faster and faster. Then the second screw was falling to the floor, the collar of the sink pipe spinning away from the wall.
With a fervent prayer that she wasn’t going to find the Turk or that creep Boris leering at her from the other side of the wall, she crouched down and peered through the hole. At first she saw only the dark backside of more plumbing, but then she saw cracks of light as another fixture loosened. She heard a scrape, then the sharp ding of metal against metal, then she saw the person who’d done all the tapping—a pretty blond girl whose tear-streaked face reminded her of her own.
Eighteen
It took her an hour of slow sipping, but Mary finally finished her 74 Special. With her head spinning, she slid off her bar stool and stuffed a ten-dollar bill in Pharisee’s tip jar.
“You okay, sweetheart?” he asked, grinning.
“Uh-huh,” she said, her mouth still tingling from the spicy drink. “But I’m glad I didn’t sit on the fire escape.”
“Fire escape’s only for the wine and beer crowd.” Pharisee laughed. “All the 74 Special folks have to stay in here. We don’t want nobody splatted down on the sidewalk.”
“I guess not.” Mary wobbled slightly on her feet. “I’m going back to my office.”
“Come see me anytime. I know how hard lawyering can get.”
Mary laughed, thinking of her mission to enforce a law that wasn’t even on the books. “Pharisee, you have no idea.”
Holding on to the bannister of the staircase, she made her way down to her office and flopped down on the small sofa that sat beneath her west-facing windows. As she looked out at the mountains, Pharisee’s cocktail continued to soften the orange and fuchsia sunset, putting the troubles of her day far away. The drink really did dull the sharp edges of a broken heart, she decided. The danger was growing to like it too much—lingering in a 74 Special–induced haze when the next lover appeared on the horizon. With the sun casting the room in a rosy glow, her gaze wandered to the huge wall map of North Carolina, compliments of Ann Chandler. Three hundred miles to the east, Chandler was sitting in the statehouse, in Raleigh. Fifty miles west, in Hartsville, her friends Jerry and Ginger Cochran were expecting their first child. Somewhere, on a map much vaster than North Carolina, the lines of latitude and longitude would converge on the exact spot that Jonathan and Lily occupied. She’d always pictured them in South America, speaking Spanish, losing themselves in thick jungles where parrots squawked in the trees. But she had no real reason to think that—they could be anywhere—Canada, Europe, even Asia. They had steep mountains in Thailand and the natives were friendly enough not to turn Jonathan over to the cops.
“You bastard,” she whispered, Pharisee’s concoction loosening the tight lock she kept on her anger. “You could at least send me a message. You could at least let me know you’re all right.” All of a sudden little Chase Buchanan flashed across her mind and she thought that she and the boy were much alike—they’d both awakened one day to find the people they loved gone without a clue.
She stared at the map until her eyelids grew heavy. Lying back on the sofa, she was no longer in her office, but walking down a long highway that stretched through flat acres planted in corn and soybeans. Two figures plodded along ahead of her—one tall and angular, the other short, struggling to keep up the pace. At first she paid them no mind, then she realized that it was Jonathan and Lily. Jonathan! she called. Wait for me! They turned and stopped. She raced to catch up, but when she got within a few feet of them, Jonathan lifted his hand. Don’t come down this road, he warned her. You might get 74’ed.
Mary sat upright on the couch, her heart thudding. She looked around the room, fully expecting to see Jonathan. But instead she saw only her desk, a bicycle she’d bought but seldom rode, and the map of North Carolina. She licked her lips, her mouth dry and wanting water. The dream had seemed so real—Jonathan standing there, Lily beside him. She’d better start w
atching what she drank and not make it a habit of visiting the Sky Bar when Pharisee was on duty.
Trying to shake off her fuzziness, she got up from the sofa and headed for the bathroom. As she passed by the big state map, she paused, wondering if Jonathan had fooled everybody and was living somewhere in Carolina, deep in the mountains, or even on one of the islands that dotted the Atlantic coast. Starting at Currituck Sound, she slowly traced the coastline of the state—the outer banks that curved south to Beaufort, then narrowed to the tiny thread of land that was part national seashore, part small beach towns that hovered on the edge of the ocean—Surf City, Ocean City, Topsail Beach. She’d traced down to the city of Wilmington, when her heart stopped. Running directly through the middle of the town was State Route 74.
“It’s a road,” she whispered. “74’s a highway!”
She grabbed a red marker from her desk and began tracing the highway’s route. It crossed the entire southern part of the state, traversing both Campbell and Sligo Counties, going from the Atlantic coast to the Georgia Mountains, Wilmington to Murphy. Though it was one of those older highways eclipsed by the interstate system, if you lived in certain counties, 74 would be the fastest way out of town, if you wanted to escape a relationship.
“No wonder I didn’t put it together,” she said. “I always drive I-40.”
Suddenly, she started to laugh. What a fool she’d been! She’d been trying to make 74 a gay sex position when, all along, it had been a road. She stared at the map, stunned. But why had she, tipsy and dreaming from a drink, come up with this while Reverend Taylor had not?
“Because in Campbell County, 74 is Jackson Highway,” she whispered.
She sat down at her desk, her hands shaking. Her first impulse was to call Galloway, but it was late and she still wasn’t totally sober. She didn’t want to call him up slurring her words as she explained her theory about what getting 74’ed really meant. But first thing tomorrow morning she would go back and tell him all about it. Then they could look at Bryan Taylor’s murder with new eyes.
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