by R. A. McGee
Sarah rolled Gold Teeth off of Raiders Jersey. Her hands fished in his back pocket with no luck. “He doesn’t have a wallet.”
“Check his right front pocket.”
She rolled the man flat on his back and produced a rubber-banded wad of money, holding it up to Porter.
“That’s more like it,” he said.
The two men were still motionless, unaware that a pretty girl had been rifling through their pants.
Porter put the money in his pocket and held the license in his left hand. He pointed the gun at the men again, reminding a few of the brave ones milling about to sit down. Walking toward the group, Porter stood close enough to be easily heard.
“So here’s the thing. This is all their fault. You all need to realize that. If they would have been cool, I would have been cool. Haven’t I been cool?” Porter said.
A murmur rolled through the small group.
“Good. Glad you agree. This girl back there, she’s my friend. She’s gonna call me three times a day, every day until I end up pissing and shitting on myself in an old people’s home. When they wake up, I want you to tell your boys she’s calling me. If she tells me that any of you touch her, threaten her, or even look at her cross, I’ll come back here. And if you think what happened to those clowns was bad, wait till you see what I do when I’m mad. Understand?”
Another murmur.
Porter held up the driver’s license. “I know where he lives.”
Porter stole a peek behind him and then walked back to Sarah. “Let’s go.”
She followed him on his walk up the street and across it to the tiny rental car. Porter walked sideways, keeping an eye on the stoop the entire time. No one advanced toward him.
Porter leaned in, started the car, and walked around to open the door for the girl. She sat without a word.
Porter’s concealed carry license was issued in Florida and reciprocated in thirty-six states. California was not one of them. Porter couldn’t take the chance on being caught with an unlicensed pistol, not in the Golden State. Let alone the fact that the Glock was almost certainly stolen.
Standing over a storm drain, he thumbed the magazine release button, ejected the remaining rounds, and broke the gun down into pieces. Looking left and right, he wiped the pieces with his shirt and then dropped them into the storm drain.
Squeezing behind the wheel, Porter put the car into drive. He pulled out of the neighborhood and took the first right he came to, into the busy city evening.
Chapter 4
The drive was quiet, with Porter trying to orient himself to the roads. Eventually, Sarah broke the silence.
“Those guys back there. There ones you beat up? I see them every day. They’re never going to leave me alone, you know that, right?”
“I know,” Porter said. “That was all a big show. They don’t care if you call me on the phone or not. Everybody thinks they’re tough. Those guys won’t be afraid.”
“I appreciate you trying to help me, but you made things worse,” she said.
“Why? Just don’t go back. Simple as that.”
“I have to.”
“Why? Find another corner to work. There are plenty in the city.”
“I live there, idiot. I wasn’t working.”
“Oh. So you’re Jamie’s new girlfriend?” Porter said.
“I’m his sister.”
Porter was silent for several minutes, mulling over what Sarah had just told him. “You hungry? You look hungry.”
Sarah eyed him.
“My treat.”
“Okay,” she said.
Porter pulled into the parking lot of a diner.
“Not this one. The cook spits in the food,” she said and directed him to a smaller place down the road.
The food was good and Porter welcomed the respite from the cramped rental.
“I have to admit, I didn’t expect you to be Jamie’s sister,” Porter said.
“Why? Everyone has family.”
“I know. It’s just he goes to that snobby-ass school across the bridge. I didn’t expect, you know…”
“What, me walking the streets? I got news for you—what was your name?”
“Porter,” he said, reaching across the table to shake her hand.
“Porter. I got news for you. I’m the reason he’s even in that school. Who do you think pays for the expenses the scholarship doesn’t pick up? I do. Who do you think gives him money so he can have fun with his rich little friends? I do. So don’t look down your nose at me,” Sarah said.
“I’m not. Just saying I was surprised, is all.”
Porter watched the girl for a few moments.
Sarah stirred cream into her coffee. “Why you looking for Jamie?”
“He owes me money,” Porter said.
“Please. You happen to be outside, following me right when I leave the house. Never mind you know exactly who lives in there. Don’t treat me like I’m stupid. I know you aren’t a cop, but I don’t know why you want to talk to my brother.”
“You knew I was following you?”
“You aren’t as slick as you think. When people walk behind you on the street, they go their own pace. You were going exactly my pace. No one would do that unless they wanted to stay behind a person,” Sarah said.
“I’m getting sloppy,” Porter admitted.
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
Porter took a large bite of his patty melt, buying himself time to word things properly. “You know about the issues at the school?”
“What issues?” Sarah said.
“His girlfriend.”
“Which one? He usually has a few at a time.”
“Evanna Blanchard,” Porter said.
“Never met that one. I think she was new,” Sarah said.
“Yeah. Well, she hasn’t been around for a while and people are trying to find Jamie to see if he knows where she may have gone,” Porter said.
“What do you mean, ‘where she may have gone’? Did she leave town or something?”
“Evanna disappeared about a week ago. No one has seen her since. I want to talk to your brother about it.”
“You want to see if he killed her,” Sarah said.
“That too.”
Sarah Duncan laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Porter said.
“Let me fill you in on something. Neither one of us has any real memory of our mother. I think I can picture her face, but I’m a little older than him. We don’t remember her—being around, singing to us, none of that shit. We had a father. He loved booze more than he loved anything about us, unless you include my ass and his fist against Jamie’s face. Before we were teenagers, he went on a bender one night, walked out the door, and we never saw him again.
“After that, there was a never-ending string of foster homes and social workers. Some were good people. Most weren’t. They kept the two of us together as long as they could, but eventually, they split us up.”
“Sounds rough,” Porter said.
“It was rough. There were a couple of years there where I lost track of him. I know they were as hard for him as they were for me. Eventually, I figured out a way to make money and used some of it to find him. I tried to get his foster family to let me see him, but they wouldn’t. Said I was trash and I had no place in his life. I snuck back that night, through the window and into Jamie’s room. He left with me and never went back.”
“A couple of teenagers on their own?” Porter said.
“When you live in a certain part of town, you can pay rent when you’re fifteen with no problem. The landlords don’t care, they just want their money. We told his foster family he was safe and wasn’t coming back. They never reported him missing so they could keep getting the stipend from the state every month. The state sent people out t
o the foster family’s house once in a while, but it was easy to explain things away. Jamie went to school and I made him study and keep his grades up. I funded our life.”
Porter dabbed a fry into the ketchup and mayo mixture on his plate. His food didn’t seem as appealing as it had a few minutes before.
“When Jamie got into college, it was the best day of our lives. Both of us. I didn’t care that he went off and basically forgot about me. That he tried to pretend to his Richie Rich friends he didn’t come from nothing. None of that bothered me. I got my brother somewhere, and now he could be something in this life.
“Honestly? I don’t have a clue where Jamie is. Even if I did, if you think I would ever tell you where he is, or try to help you do something that could land him in jail, you’re absolutely out of your mind.” Sarah fell silent, aggressively stirring her coffee.
Porter sipped his water, measuring the girl in front of him. She loved her brother, there could be no doubt. She wasn’t going to tell him anything.
“Loyalty is an admirable trait,” Porter said.
“He’s my family. What else can I do?”
“What about Evanna’s family? They’re worried. If Jamie knows anything at all, it would be better for me to find him than the cops. Trust me,” Porter said.
Sarah said nothing and sipped at her coffee. She put it down, content to stir it more. “You still paying for dinner?”
Porter nodded and called the waitress over, who brought the check. Porter paid with the money Sarah had taken off the man with the jersey, leaving the elderly waitress a nice tip.
He peeled off two hundreds and handed the rest of the wad to Sarah. She wouldn’t touch it, so he sat it on the chipped diner table in front of her.
“Is this for… are you hiring me?”
“Hire you? Hell no. No offense intended—you’re very pretty. But paying for sex isn’t in my wheelhouse. This is just a little something in case you need to move out. On account of the neighborhood being so bad.”
She reached out and picked up the solid wad of money. Turning it over, she looked Porter in the eyes. “No strings attached?”
“None.”
“Thanks.” The thin girl got up and looked at Porter for a moment, then turned on her heel, leaving the diner, stepping onto the street, and walking away. Porter waited nearly a minute, then went out the side door of the building and got into the rental car.
He had been less than truthful with the girl on two counts. First, when she had noticed him following her, he hadn’t been slipping or getting sloppy with his tailing game. He simply hadn’t cared whether she knew he was there or not. Once the two knuckleheads from the stoop had appeared, there’d been even less reason to be stealthy.
The second half-truth he had told Sarah was about the money. While he didn’t intend to buy her services, there were strings on the money. Strings which, Porter hoped, he could follow all the way to her brother Jamie.
Porter kept the headlights on the rental off until Sarah was out of sight around the corner and then exited the parking lot, getting onto the road. He hung back, letting the girl get two blocks ahead of him, allowing what little traffic there was on the road to pass him and obscure his car.
The girl walked fast and with a purpose. The was no looking into cars or waving at potential customers. She took the main drag until she came to a large side street, then turned left and moved along.
Porter stopped at the light, far enough back that she would only be able to see the front of his car, while he could see all the way down the sidewalk.
The light from the day was gone, but the streetlights on the main road, as well as storefront lights, kept the girl illuminated. From time to time she would turn around to look behind her, but her haste made it a cursory movement. She was looking, but she wasn’t seeing.
Sarah crossed the busy road and turned down a side street. Porter stopped at the corner even though the light was green, riling the driver of the car behind him. Porter didn’t care. He needed to see if she ducked her head into one of those buildings. If he passed the road he would lose sight of her for too long while he turned around.
Sarah walked down to the middle of the block, then crossed the smaller street, slipping into the front door of a rundown building with the word ‘Imperial’ in half-busted neon lights running down the front of the building.
Just as Porter started to move, the man behind him laid on the horn, so Porter slammed the rental into park and sat through the rest of the green light. The man behind him pulled his car even with Porter’s at the red light.
The man continued screaming until he saw Porter’s size. Porter rolled down his window. The man kept his up.
“I thought you were saying something,” Porter said to the window next to him.
The balding man gripped his steering wheel and looked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact.
Porter stared at the side of the man’s head. The man stared straight ahead. The light turned green and the man chirped the tires on his sedan, outpacing Porter and driving off into the night. Porter pulled straight ahead, then parallel parked his car into a spot right off the street, which was the side of the Imperial building.
Unfolding himself from the car, Porter left it unlocked, praying it wouldn’t be there when he got back. He pushed his arms over his head, hoping to stretch the pain out of his cramped hips, then walked around the corner and into the lobby of the Imperial.
There was a dirty brown carpet on the floor, with a path worn through it down to the concrete. The walls were a mishmash of peeling wallpaper and matte paint tinged yellow from decades of nicotine staining. Dingy, lumpy couches ringed the open area. Leaning on a counter in the back was a man in a wife-beater, belly visible from underneath the front of his shirt.
“You looking for something?”
“Yeah. A guy,” Porter said.
“Hey, mister, we don’t allow that type of thing here. We aren’t for rent by the hour. We’re a classy joint.”
“Obviously,” Porter said looking around. He kept his hands to himself and touched nothing.
“What? It’s the Imperial,” the fat man said, as if it made perfect sense.
“Looking for a young kid. I think he’s holed up here,” Porter said. “Name of Jamie.” He produced his smartphone and showed the man a picture.
There was a glimmer of recognition. “Never seen him before.”
Porter reached into his pocket and fished out one of the hundred-dollar bills he’d kept from the wad he gave Sarah. He slid it across the counter to the man. “How about now?”
The man took the money, folded it up, and slid it into his pants pocket. “I still never seen him.”
“Word?” Porter pulled the other hundred out and slapped it against the man’s hairy chest.
The fat man folded the money up and put it into his pocket. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“What’s your name?” Porter said.
“Frank.”
“Of course it is. Listen, Frank, all I want to do it talk to this kid. That’s it. Nothing else. You tell me what room he’s in, we’ll have a quick chat, and then I’ll be on my way. Work with me a little,” Porter said.
Frank reached into the ashtray on the counter, pulled out the stubby remains of a cigar, and lit it, blowing the smoke in Porter’s face. Then he placed his arms on the counter, leaning over toward Porter.
“If you think you can buy me off with two measly Benjamins and have me violate the confidentiality of one of our guests, you must not know Frank Rizzo very well.”
Porter looked away from the counter and turned a three-sixty, quickly taking in the room. Seeing no cameras, he turned back to Frank. “I thought this was a no-smoking building?”
Frank scrunched his face up. “Smoking? What’s that got to do with—”
Porter darted his hands between
the fat man’s arms and chopped outward. His supports gone, Frank fell face first onto the counter with a hollow thud. His head bounced up and Porter quickly grabbed the back of it, knocking it against the counter once more.
Frank slid down and out of sight behind the counter.
Porter stepped behind the counter and scrounged underneath until he found the ledger that every place like this had. It was too expensive to buy computers, and even if they had computers, they were always broken. Careful not to step on Frank, he straddled his feet across the man’s large body and flipped through the book.
Porter saw that the occupant of room five had paid cash daily for the last week. The last name on the room was Brother.
Chapter 5
Porter searched the counter and underneath for an extra key to the room, but couldn’t find one. Frank didn’t have much of a system in place, so Porter gave up.
He reached into Frank Rizzo’s pants and took his two hundred-dollar bills back.
Walking through the small doorway to the right of the counter, Porter entered a long hallway. There was a carpet with a pseudo-psychedelic pattern, the remnant of a renovation in the seventies. Porter walked past rooms one and three on the left, two and four on the right, then came to room five on the left side of the hallway.
Porter didn’t approach the door, not right off. He waited for a while, leaning against the wall outside.
Listening through the thin wall, he heard a heated conversation between two people, a deep voice and a higher voice. He couldn’t make out every word, despite his best efforts.
“… not going back there…”
“… town. This money…”
“… anything wrong. Why should…”
“… gonna find you…”
This was a good bet to be Jamie’s room. Porter wished he had the room key, to make things easy on himself. Regardless, he had his own master key.
Squaring up on the door, Porter took a visual measurement of the height of the worn metal doorknob, then counted to three in his head. He took a step back and smashed his foot into the door with such force that the knob, deadbolt, and thin chain across the front all gave way.