by Greg Aunapu
The banker met her in the lobby with a check. He was the same generous man who had supplied the $30,000 to flush out the Glasser twins just weeks after Amy's disappearance. But it was also his responsibility to make sure the funds were properly allocated. "We can't give him any more than this, though," he told her as she slipped the check into her purse.
"I know," Sue said. "It's such a Catch-22 situation. If we give him money, we don't know if the information is legitimate or if he's just stringing us along. But if we don't give him the cash he needs, we may never find Amy. I've been struggling with it. But he knows we're not cash cows, and this is only $125. So it makes me think he's for real. If he gets us a photo of Amy, then really, he's holding all the cards. I'd sell the shirt on my back."
A friend drove Sue out to the Fina station and she got there a bit early. Branch was already there, bike parked in a line of shade under the roof overhang. For a biker, Branch was very good about making his appointments. So far he had usually called within agreed-upon parameters, and he always appeared where he said he would be, whether or not it was to his immediate benefit.
Sue held up the check, made out to cash. "Before I give this to you, you have to promise me something," she said.
He rolled his eyes and blew out an exasperated breath. He might have been a puppy dog during their earlier conversation, but a couple of drinks had hardened his personality in the interim. "What now?" he asked, his hazy blue eyes shifting into the distance.
"I know you won't tell me exactly where Amy is, but give me something. A territory. And I want you to tell Rex everything, under attorney-client privilege. Tell him exactly where she is, and with whom. Because if something happens to you before you get there, we're left with nothing. Someone's got to know. I've kept up my part of the bargain, and now I'm giving you money. It's not too much to ask."
His annoyed gaze lighted on her. A lot of heavy-duty guys would have pissed their pants had Branch, the Pagan executioner, looked at them this way, or dodged and run before going this far. But Sue felt nothing anymore. No fear. No bravery. No nervousness. Just purpose. She would attempt to manipulate the devil himself if it served to retrieve Amy.
"She's in Oklahoma," Branch sputtered. "A large town. The bike'll take a few days to fix. There's one small court thing we have to deal with on the seventh, and then I'm out of here."
Sue handed him the check. "It's a good investment, Mrs. Billig," he said. "I'm down to zero. Had to sell Tina for a credit card yesterday."
"What?" Sue said. "You sold the girl for a credit card?”
Paul shrugged and spit onto the pavement in the path of a man who was walking up to the front doors of the convenience store. The large redneck farmer snapped his head to look at the culprit, his eyes registering the monster in front of him. Then he put his head down and hurried forward. Paul let out an ugly chuckle. "Bought her for a credit card, sold her for one. That's how it works. I've sold 'em for a drink," he said. His eyes shifted appreciatively toward a mountain of Budweiser stacked in the store window.
Sue caught the glance. "Promise me you'll use the money for the bike"'
Paul scratched his crotch. "Yeah, yeah. It's for the bike. I ain't using it for anything else."
Sue figured she was on a roll. "And you'll call me from the road?"
"I'll call you when I'm two days away from the destination. I'll check into a motel, and you can fly out and meet me there. Maybe you can bring Rex for company. I'll go get her, and I'll bring her back to you at the motel."
"Oh, Paul. Please, please . . ." She sighed, and tears sprang into her eyes. She reached out and grabbed his hand, callused as his soul. "Tell me it's really going to happen!"
"Have I lied to you yet?" he countered.
Sue shook her head, feeling impotent as ever. "That's the problem. I really wouldn't know, would I?"
"I got no reason to lie," Paul said. "The legal stuff was important, but half the guys I know are living on fake IDs, so it's not the biggest deal in the world. If I was trying to con you, I'd be squeezing out a lot more than $125!"
Somehow, Sue believed this modern day pirate for whom lies were a living. She analyzed her feelings, knowing that even without proof, she would have given him much more money. As far as it went, she trusted him. She patted his hand. "You take care," she said, and admonished him like she was his mother: "And drive carefully!"
Sue and Rex met for lunch at a Grove restaurant the next day. He told her he would come with her to Oklahoma and prod Paul to leave directly from the courthouse if necessary. Per Sue's instructions, he would try to get Branch to confide in him as to Amy's whereabouts, as well.
On Monday, June 8, true to his word, Paul called to tell Sue he was leaving right after a breakfast of steak and eggs, and said, "I've filled Rex in on everything. I'll call you as soon as I check into a hotel."
Sue couldn't believe the words. "You've told Rex everything?" she insisted.
"Everything," he repeated. "See you in about a week."
Sue dialed Rex immediately. "Can't talk now," he said. "Meet me for lunch?"
They met at the Greenhouse restaurant in the Grove.
"Paul said he told you where Amy is?" Sue said the moment she sat down.
His voice was not as chipper as she had hoped. "He told me Tulsa, Sue. Says a guy named 'Dishrag Harry' has her. Full name is Harry Kramer. But said he didn't have an address. He knows who has her, though, and where to find him."
Sue's appetite disappeared. "That isn't much," she said. "Just some other scumbag biker name. We're no further than we were before."
"Kramer's a Pagan," Rex replied. "Has sandy hair and a tattoo of a Pagan god on one arm. Works in a downtown gas station in Tulsa. That's a lot of info to drag out of Paul in one day. Get Shepard to run Kramer's name and see if he's got a record here or in Oklahoma, and maybe we'll get some more information on him. Branch said it would take him a week to make the trip. We'll fly out Saturday, so we're already there when Paul arrives. When he calls back to Miami, Ned can tell him the hotel we're staying at. We'll save a day!”
Even though days, weeks, and months had passed without hearing Amy's voice, saving that extra day seemed like a brilliant idea. She couldn't even wait that long. "Oh God," Sue said. "I wish Paul had given you this guy's address. What if something happens to him along the way?"
"Branch has ridden a million miles," Rex observed. "He'll make it a thousand more."
Time is the strangest of human perceptions, always doing the opposite of what we wish. The next five days dragged mercilessly as Sue bought fresh sheets and a bedspread for Amy's room. She dusted and cleaned the entire house for the umpteenth time. Ned tried to get her to relax.
"No, sweetheart," Sue said. "I want everything to be perfect when Amy comes home. The exact opposite of wherever she's been. It'll be like starting life over again. We'll be a family again, instead of a group of relatives living together."
Ned smiled and hugged his wife. Someone had asked him recently how you stayed married for so long. "It's easy," he had replied. "You just don't leave." But it was much more than that, wasn't it? How couldn't you love this feisty bundle of energy? Always looking at the most optimistic side of everything. So sure she was on her way to find her daughter that she bought her new sheets and shampooed Amy's dog!
He wished he could be so positive. It would be wonderful to feel that way, for even a second. A moment of joy would mean so much. He wished he could go to Tulsa, too, but he had to stay and keep the gallery open. It was the only thing buttering the toast and paying the bills in some semblance of a timely manner. And someone had to be here to take the phone calls that still kept coming—and to wait for Branch's phone call as well.
Rex Ryland's friendship continued to know no bounds. He shelled out the money for both plane tickets, despite having to purchase high-priced business fares. Sue even had to fight for those, as all scheduled flights were booked on Saturday.
She called the authorities in Tulsa ahead of tim
e and carefully wrote down the names of officers involved in biker investigations, the District Attorney's number, and even the name of a known biker hangout—the Anchor Bar.
By Saturday, plans included Rex, his wife Shannon, and their daughter Lee. Of course, luggage was lost, connecting flights were delayed, tickets didn't match up. It seemed like everything in the world was trying to keep them out of Tulsa. Good thing they were arriving early, Sue thought. If they were flying later in the week, when Branch was supposed to have Amy, and all this was keeping them away, she would have had a mental breakdown at the Dallas airport when Delta lost the Rylands' luggage. Sue arrived in Tulsa with Lee, expecting Rex and Shannon on the next flight.
The moment she hit the airport she ran to a bank of pay phones and called home. Ned informed her that there was still no word from Branch. They all checked into a downtown Holiday Inn, the last rooms in the place, because a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses were booked into the hotel. The "saved" walked around carrying stacks of the Watchtower in their arms and gazed at Sue and the Rylands with the condescending smiles reserved for the poor souls who wouldn't convert. Sue looked at the happy Witnesses. Of course, each person, no doubt, had weathered their own tragedies, but she couldn't help but wish that a week from now she could be as mindlessly blissful as they seemed to be.
The three ate a very late dinner of overdone hamburgers and wilted French fries while the Rylands' daughter slept fitfully on the settee. The conversation was focused on Sue's consuming fear that something terrible would happen to Paul, and they would never hear from him again.
"If he doesn't call by tomorrow morning," Sue said, "let's find out where the bikers hang out and cruise the bars. Look for this Dishrag Harry. I can't stand it!"
"Calm down," Rex told her. It was a mantra that he repeated to her over and over again.
Sue looked at Lee, breathing deeply nearby, and could so easily picture Amy at that age. Could that innocent being in her memory have been transformed into an unwholesome biker chick and forced to live in some unfathomable horror? She knew there would be no sleep for her tonight. She'd only calm down the day Amy was home safe in bed.
By late morning of the next day, there was still no word from Paul. When Sue could stand it no longer, she said, "Come on, Rex, let's do something! Let's rent a car and drive around. Find the biker bars. You never know, we might see her. Stranger things have happened. I can't stand being cooped up in here!"
Sunday in Tulsa, bright arid light scorched the burned grass, and tree leaves barely rustled under a whisper of wind. It was an attractive city, though, built beside the wide Arkansas River, with forested parks along the riverbanks. Rex and Sue drove a nondescript Chevy over flat, empty, unfamiliar streets. It was a churchgoing town—a receptive environment for a Jehovah's Witness convention—with tidy congregations spilling out the doors of various churches. It was also a very western town, with men wearing cowboy hats and signs in diners advertising a breakfast of eggs, bacon, and grits for ninety-nine cents. The radio stations played mostly country-western songs. On others, fast-talking men preached about sin, salvation, and the terrors of Hell. Please send them money.
"We're a long way from Miami," Sue said.
A cacophony of mufflers erupted behind them, and a posse of bikers wearing black leather jackets, sporting chains, beards, wild hair, and wilder women clinging to their rear seats, blasted by on both the right and left sides of the car like a herd of rumbling buffalo splitting past a large rock in the prairie.
'Follow them," Sue said. "Let's see where they're going."
The bikers quickly outpaced them, but they followed the general direction and found a large park along the river with signs advertising a rock concert with hundreds of bikers flowing around the trees. An inland sea of bikers.
"This looks dangerous," Ryland admonished. "We can't go in there asking about Amy or Dishrag Harry!"
"Rex, if there's one thing I've learned, these people have mothers and sisters, too. Look at the way Paul has treated me. I'm not scared in the slightest. I'm going with or without you!"
Rex glared at her. "Well, I'm not letting you go alone. At least I'm used to these guys. They don't kill their lawyers."
They parked the car and joined the throngs of black-leathered bikers drinking beer, smoking joints, sporting guns sticking out of their boots and large knives in their pockets. Two Tulsa policemen sat in cruisers by the entrance, but they weren't getting out of their cars.
The music was loud, badly rehearsed covers of popular rock tunes. The bikers sang along with "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Satisfaction." All shapes and sizes of bikers. There were Outlaws, Pagans, and Rogues eyeing each other unsteadily, but knowing this place at this moment was neutral territory. Maybe they'd do business together. Make money, not war!
Susan walked brazenly up to a group of biker women sitting on the ground passing a joint and drinking beer. "Excuse me," she said in her sweetest voice. "My name is Susan and I'm looking for my daughter? Her name is Amy " She held out a worn picture.
A large biker with a huge beer belly rushed up. "Don't talk to my women!" he shouted.
"I'm just looking for my daughter," Sue said, holding out the picture.
The man swiped it away. "Any of these girls look like her? Now get out of here!"
Rex showed a photo around to the males. They looked at him like he was crazy for asking, said they'd never seen her, then turned back to their buddies and laughed.
For hours, Sue strolled from group to group, studying the women's faces, knowing Amy would be older and might not look like herself anymore. But thousands of faces later—some bloated, scarred, scared, spaced out—there was certainly no match. She did find some women who would talk, but they looked at Amy's picture and shook their heads no.
"Well, can you at least tell me the names of some biker bars?" she asked. "I heard the Anchor was a good place."
"Yeah," said one, hair like a bird's nest, red eyes, and blue, broken veins across her nose. "There's a few. But the Keg is the best place. Everyone winds up at the Keg."
Tears flooded into Sue's eyes as the park cut across their rearview mirror. "Every biker in the state must be there," she said.
Bikers, bikers, everywhere . . .
But not a drop of Amy.
-9-
T hey waited at the hotel until Monday with no word from Branch. The Holiday Inn seemed like something out of a Fellini movie, with all the Jehovah's Witnesses walking around the lobby, spilling into the streets to attempt massive conversions.
Rex spent the day on the phone with his office, while Sue and Shannon drove around to gas stations all over downtown Tulsa looking for Dishrag Harry Kramer. Mechanics would look up from beneath a car they'd been banging on and fix her with a stare as vacant as a department store mannequin. "Harry Kramer? Dishrag Harry?" they'd repeat back in a strong accent, as if Sue was speaking a foreign language that they were attempting to translate. None had a Pagan god tattoo on their shoulder, either, that might identify them as the man she was looking for. "Yes, right," she'd say.
"I ain't never heard of anyone named Dishrag. There's a Harry over to the station 'cross the street…”
Of course that wasn't Harry Kramer, either. Sue thought the town sign should read, 'Tulsa, Oklahoma— Home of the Wild Goose Chase."
"It's just as I feared," Susan told Rex when they returned to the hotel to find out that Branch was still AWOL. "Something's happened to him. It's the way this search has gone from the very start. When someone writes a thesis on Murphy's Law, we're going to be their number one subject."
"It's a long ride, honey," Rex soothed her. "Keep your spirits up. Branch is too mean to have something happen to him."
"He might have gotten picked up by police, he might have been killed at a biker bar, or gotten into a drunken wreck," Sue said. "Why doesn't he call?"
"I have more bad news for you," Rex said. "I have to go back to Miami. Lots of emergencies to deal with. Another client got bust
ed."
Sue knew what was coming next. "I'm not going back," she answered. "I'm here, and I'm staying put until we find out what happened to Paul. He could be here right now, and we wouldn't know it!"
"Come back with me. Ned is going to kill me if I come back without you!"
"Don't tell him you're back. I won't if you won't."
Rex shook his head. "God, you're a tough cookie," he said. "Promise me you'll at least stay in the hotel."
"Are you kidding? I'm going to find that Keg bar and see if Paul's hanging out there, and show Amy's picture if he isn't."
They conferred for a while and finally agreed that if Paul hadn't called by Wednesday, Sue would call the Keg bar and tell the bartender she was the secretary for a lawyer in Miami. They were looking for Harry Kramer because he was a witness who could get Pompano Red off an assault charge. "Remember, though, the big gang out here is the Rogues," Rex told her. "They deal with the Pagans, but you never know. And I want you to contact the police. See how they can help you. We don't want you to turn up missing, too."
Rex and his family hugged Sue after packing their luggage in the rental car that evening.
"I promise I'll stay put until Wednesday," Sue said. "And then I'll contact the police. But don't breathe a word of this to Ned, because he'll go crazy with worry. He'll insist on coming, and he's the easiest-going guy in the world, but when we find Amy, I'm afraid he'll just go crazy and to beat the guy into pieces. You've been very dear friends, and are so good to me," she added.
Sue watched them leave, Lee waving sorrowfully in the rear seat. As hard as it was to see them depart, she knew it was just as hard for them go.
When Ned called her at ten that night, she made up the white lie to make him feel better. "The Rylands? They're doing fine," she said. In all the time they'd been married, before Amy disappeared, she'd never lied to him. But since then, she'd done it often so he wouldn't worry. Each white lie hung ever more heavily around her neck, like the dead albatross in "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," gradually growing heavier and more rotten. She knew it wasn't good for a relationship, no matter how noble the intentions.