We go outside, to a bodega two doors down, and Nicki pays a dollar for a single cigarette from the loosey box and I grab a pack of matches.
We step outside and I light a match but the match blows out in the November wind funneling down the Manhattan canyon. I step closer to shield her from the wind that’s blowing her short, tousled hair across her face. She tosses her head to keep her hair out of her eyes and I realize this is the closest we’ve been, next to each other, with the exception of last night’s brief moment. I am close enough to take her in my arms and for an instant I imagine that some part of her would welcome it. Isn’t it pretty to think so? She takes my hands in hers and cups them around the match, letting the flame grow. Her hands are soft and warm. She leans closer still and lowers her head, the tip of her cigarette in the flame, and she lights it and inhales. She turns away from me and exhales a tiny tornado of white smoke that whips away in the stiff wind.
“I don’t smoke,” she says.
“I don’t care,” I say. We stand there like that, me shielding her from the wind. I can feel her warmth and our eyes meet for a moment when she inhales again, the tip of her cigarette glowing orange.
And then the match blows out and I toss it away and step back from her. She takes another drag, then she looks at me funny. “You said the bar—where you talked to this man—you said it smelled like cigarette smoke.”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t smoke in a bar in California. I mean, not even back then, right?”
“That’s right,” I realize, as the smoke from Nicki’s cigarette sparks something in my mind. “It wasn’t smoke in the bar that I remember…it was the smell of it on someone…on him.”
“He smelled like cigarette smoke?”
“Yeah,” I say, remembering now. “He reeked of it.”
And then more comes, a rush of pictures and smells and sounds that gather themselves into a single memory.
“We went outside,” I say. “We went outside because he couldn’t smoke in the bar. We went—we got in his van and went somewhere—”
Nicki’s cell rings. She looks at the caller ID and answers.
“Hey,” she says into the phone. “Okay, let me talk to him.” She looks at me and I can tell from her eyes who it is: the DA from LA.
I turn away from her, returning to the stream of images that were on the verge of becoming memories…
We went out of the bar and stood there like Nicki and I are standing now, me shielding the wind from him while he lit his cigarette with his silver Zippo.
“Let’s go, I want to show you something, Doc.”
I follow him and we get into his van and drive…
I am distracted by Nicki’s voice as it rises with impatience and then she hangs up and looks at me.
“They found the hair clip,” she says.
I look at her and feel a knot begin to tighten in my stomach. A hard gust of wind nearly knocks me off balance, making me lean toward her.
She crushes the cigarette out with the toe of her black patent leather pump.
“I have to go back to the office,” she says. “Go to the hotel and wait for me. I have to arrange for a meeting at the DA’s office here, tomorrow morning.”
“LAPD is coming here tomorrow morning?” I ask.
Her eyes soften at me. “Not LAPD,” she says gently. “FBI. Marsh and his team found the hair clip last night and just got a match on your prints from your previous arrest. They were holding out until they got the results from the prints,” she says. “You should be prepared to be arrested tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Jack.”
I feel weakness in my knees and the grinding knot tightens in my gut.
“I’ll arrange with Joel and your accountant for bond, but we can’t expect there will be an opportunity for you to post because they’ll call you a flight risk. You’ll be taken back to L.A.”
I turn from her, rubbing my hand across my forehead. Shit. Shit...
She comes close to me, her hand on my arm, and looks right into me.
“Jack. I’ll go to L.A., I’ll be on the plane with you and I won’t leave you, okay?”
I nod.
“We’ll get through this.”
I nod again, but I don’t believe her.
“I’m sorry, but I have to get back to the office right now to prepare for tomorrow.”
“Go,” I say.
“Just go back to the hotel and wait, okay? I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”
I nod again and she turns to look for a cab and then she changes her mind and comes back to me. She puts her hand on my arm again and looks at me. Her face has softened but her eyes are clear and direct.
“Listen to me, Jack. I have never said this to a client before, ever—but I know you’re innocent. And I will get you out of this.”
I look at her and my throat tightens and all I can do is nod again. She holds my gaze for a moment, then she leans forward with a quick movement and touches her lips at my cheek for an instant, then turns and waves at a cab, which stops for her. She gets in the cab and it weaves into traffic and is gone.
I stand there, the November wind blowing my collar up. I turn back to the bar and go inside and sit at the counter. The bartender comes over, a stout middle-aged woman with a nametag—Madeleine.
“Jack Daniel’s on the rocks,” I say.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
First, the cold glass weighting my hand to stillness. I am trembling from the Manhattan wind and the chill of fear that is seeping deeper inside me by the second.
Then, the soft sound of ice cubes against glass, muted by liquid. Music.
Then I raise the glass—the sharp, heady sour mash and burnt Tennessee oak mingling in my nostrils…
…along with the dank, sweet-smelling McDougal’s and its dirty floor and the bowl of stale Spanish peanuts on our table that no one ever eats…
Then, the taste—
As I tilt the cold glass against my lips to steady it and the brown liquid slips over my tongue with the old familiar sting that makes me shudder with the strong shock of alcohol after all these years and the whiskey burning down my throat, into the pit of my stomach, where the burn becomes a warm glow that radiates up and into my chest and out to the tips of my fingers, taking me back to the booth and to him and his glasses and his low, deep voice and his—
—his pictures.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Took a jump though Mississippi, well, muddy water turned to wine
Took a jump though Mississippi, muddy water turned to wine
Then out to California through the forests and the pines,
Ahh take me with you, Jesus!
“I want to tell you about a girl I know.” he says in his calm, low voice, over ZZ Top on the jukebox. From his shirt pocket he takes a picture. He doesn’t show it to me at first, but I see the picture reflected in his glasses—but flipped, reversed.
“Wha’s her name?” I ask, looking at her picture in his glasses.
“Beverly.”
“Pretty,” I say.
“Oh, she’s an Angel,” I hear the smile behind his voice as he turns the photo around and shows me Beverly Grace, smiling in her senior picture. “My Angel,” he says, the smile gone from his voice now.
The smile comes and goes...
I take another sip of whiskey, no sting this time, my tongue anesthetized by the first sip—now it is only warmth that spreads down my throat and out from my middle and deeper, further up my spine and into my head and opening doors that haven’t been opened in years, into rooms and hallways and then more comes, a rush of pictures and smells and sounds that gather themselves, once again, into a single memory.
We stand outside McDougal’s and I shield him from the wind as he lights a cigarette.
“Let’s go, I want to show you something, Doc.”
I follow him and we get in his van and drive.
Los Angeles at night, speeding by my window like a movie in fast forward. We float above the
low buildings with their bright signs and the mercury vapor street lights that turn the sky a dirty orange. ZZ Top plays on the van’s stereo as we fly above the streets in the neon space between the city and the starless sky. Over the streets we ride, on the freeway, then down the California Incline and up Pacific Coast Highway and past Will Rogers Beach and I have a bottle of Jack in my hand as I ride shotgun.
“Where we goin’?” I ask, turning from the dizzying show outside my window.
“Almost there,” he says, the coast highway unreeling in his glasses as we head north.
I suddenly realize I don’t know who this guy is. I only met him tonight—or last night?
“Hey,” I say. “I’m sorry…I’m not so good at names… An’ I forget things… What’s your name again?”
“That’s alright, I never told you my name.”
“Oh,” I say. “What is it?”
“Dave,” he says.
And then we turn into the gravel parking lot at Temescal Canyon Park.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Hey.”
My face against something cold and hard. Something pushes on my shoulder.
“HEY.”
I look up into the face of a bald giant who is shaking me with a piece of paper in his hand.
“Pay up and get the fuck out. You can’t sleep here,” the Giant says.
I look around. I am in the Midtown bar where Nicki left me and it is dark outside now and the bar is crowded and I am drunk—
“Let’s go, this id’na fuckin’ hotel,” the Bald Giant won’t wait for my shame bath. I lift my face from the cold copper bar and fumble in my back pocket for my wallet, unfamiliar with my new pants—Don’t thank me, Nicki had said, Thank Barney’s for opening at nine-thirty on a weekday.
I pull open my back pocket, popping the button off, and I take out my wallet and hand my Amex to the glaring Bald Giant across the bar.
“Need a driver’s license,” he says.
I give it to him and he scrutinizes it under some kind of magnifying scope like he’s fucking Louis Pasteur, then he goes to the cash register. I feel people crowding around me, looking at me with contempt, with impatience, with fear—there but for the grace of God…
I wipe the saliva from my face and look in the mirror across the bar. I am a fucking slobbering, slit-eyed drunk, and I know it’s no dream this time because I am still drunk, despite my little nap. I look at my watch: 5:22 pm.
The Giant comes back and gives me a piece of paper and I squint to focus on my bar tab: $126 dollars.
That’s fucking respectable, even for New York, I think to myself, with the stupid gallows humor and perverse, self-destructive pride that only other drunks find amusing. I sign the damned thing and slide off the stool and walk out into the cold, which slams me a little more sober.
I nearly walk into two women who are smoking, the smell bringing me back yet again to a memory…
Heading up the trail behind him…behind DAVE…up the railroad tie steps, toward the small plateau in the shallow moonlight…
And then it’s gone.
I move away from the women, who glare at me as I weave down the street. I straighten my stride, the wind sobering me more, feeling the cold and welcoming it now.
Have to think, have to remember…
But I can’t.
I walk until I see the Mirabelle Hotel sign down the street, and I head toward it like a lost mariner toward a lighthouse and I reach it and nod at the doorman, who opens the door for me.
I go inside the warm lobby and I am heading to the elevators when a voice calls to me.
“Mr. Rhodes?” she says. I turn and see a stunning young woman at the front desk looking at me.
“You’ve got a lot of people looking for you,” she says, flashing a dazzling smile full of impossibly white teeth. She reaches under the counter and takes out a packet of messages.
I go to her.
“Somebody sure wants to get a hold of you,” she says, with her brilliant, friendly smile.
“Thanks,” I say, and take the pink message slips from her. I look down at them—a dozen phone calls—from Nicki, Joel, Arnie—and from others, whose names I don’t recognize. Some of the phone numbers have 213 area codes. Parker Center.
Fuck.
“D’you have an ATM?” I ask her.
“Yes, right down there, just past the elevators,” she points the way for me. I wish I could stay and chat with her. I wish I could get to know her and find out what time she gets off work and buy her dinner and meet her daddy but I can’t. I will be arrested tomorrow. If I stay.
I go to the ATM and withdraw all the cash I can: $900 bucks in three whacks of $300. The machine won’t let me withdraw any more. I look into the tiny camera lens over the ATM machine’s screen and I know that my face—from this camera—will be scrutinized in a matter of hours by FBI and LAPD and God knows who else.
I turn around and head back out the front doors, where I fumble with my wallet and find my parking slip and a twenty dollar bill and give them to the doorman. He whistles and a kid runs up and he gives him the parking slip and I wait, letting the fresh, cold air sober me further, and soon my truck appears at the curb and the kid gets out and holds my door open and I get in and he slams the door after me and I drive away, flattening my hand against the buttons on the armrest, opening the windows to keep me awake and alert. I drive carefully through the Manhattan streets, looking for a sign for the bridge, the bridge, which bridge? Where’s the confounded bridge? Then I find it, and pull carefully into the flow of traffic and look for a sign that will take me west, out of the city. I don’t know how long it will take me to get to West Virginia, but I know where I have to go.
THINGS PAST
When he arrived in Kansas City with the Angel from West Virginia, the fat old trucker who gave him a ride offered him a job. The old guy owned a small company—three rigs, one of which he drove himself on short hauls to Chicago and back to KC.
At first the job entailed the young man doing the heavy lifting that they picked up and delivered at the loading docks—machine parts, mostly. The old trucker suffered from emphysema, which was getting worse as he chain-smoked his Camels day and night. But soon the old man came to trust him enough to let him drive for long stretches at night, while the old guy stretched out, wheezing, in the back of the cab.
The commercial trucking license was easy to procure. The Mexicans in Chicago could get pretty much any document you wanted. But his endless hours of communion with the Angel in almost total darkness had left him extremely near-sighted, so he had to get glasses in order to drive. He chose a rectangular wire-framed pair with lenses so thick that his small eyes could barely be seen behind them.
The old trucker, a devout Baptist, was impressed with his knowledge of the Bible. So when the wheezy old man lit up a Camel after a steak-and-egg breakfast, then turned as red as their Naugahyde booth and dropped dead of a heart attack, his widow sold the rig to the quiet young man with the glasses who knew his Bible so well, and was clearly such a good Christian boy.
So, in his new rig, his phony commercial truck driver’s license in his wallet, he took over the short hauls from Chicago, through Davenport, Peoria, Des Moines, St. Stephen, and back to Kansas City, carrying machine parts to appliance repair shops, car dealerships, and factories.
He lived in the rig, sleeping in the cramped rear of the cab where the old man had installed a mattress and a small TV. He bought window blinds for the truck’s cab, and at night he was with his Angel, when he wasn’t driving. He showered and shaved and ate at the truck stops along the way, and for a year or so he was content.
But the restlessness eventually returned. His embalming work on the West Virginia Angel had held up well, although he occasionally had to work on her with cosmetics. But this time it was his desire to have his story told again that drove him to the irritable, anxious state. He looked at the yellowing West Virginia newspaper articles about the girl Caitlin over and over, and
he felt the urgent need to have due attention paid once more.
He had almost told the old trucker about his Angel once, but stopped himself, of course. So he talked about the Bible, in the rare moments when they talked at all. He speculated with the old man about Jesus—what if Jesus hadn’t had Paul to travel the known world and spread His story? Would we ever have known His story, His gospel? But the old trucker was thick and slow, and just shook his head and wheezed, “Lord only knows, son, Lord only knows…”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It is 12:51 a.m. when I cross the border into West Virginia. I’m no longer drunk but I am still driving with the windows open and the heater going full blast to keep the alcohol smell out of the truck, just in case I get pulled over.
I have driven for seven hours and I am on the cusp of a hangover and almost out of gas but I don’t want to stop. I am heading toward a place I made up in my last book, an unincorporated area in Morgan County, in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, where I killed young Katie Stubens in Killer Unbound.
Once again, I don’t know where I am going and yet I do. I have never been here—at least I think I haven’t—but the details of Killer Unbound are still clear to me. I finished writing it less than a year ago.
I drive on, through the rolling foothills of the Appalachian mountains, passing a sign which reads “MARTINSBURG GHOST TOURS – Tour Haunted Graveyards Fridays.”
This is it, I know, and suddenly I can hear the voice of Dave once again, from the booth in the back of McDougal’s…
“Tonight we’re gonna talk about a little piece named Caitlin,” he says.
Caitlin. Whom I had named Katie…
“You’ll find her out in Morgan County, West Virginia…just off the interstate, past the billboard for the haunted graveyard there’s a county road…”
…and here it is. I signal and carefully pull off the interstate and onto the county road.
“There are signs leading to the graveyard, you just follow the signs,” he says, cupping his hands around his drink and making that low sound that passes for a laugh.
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