Smiley

by Ezell, Michael

  “So? What’s that got to do with me? And who the hell are you supposed to be?” The last bit directed toward Garrett.

  “Me? I’m nobody. I’m with the band,” Garrett said.

  The guy looked more and more agitated by the second. “Well fuck you, and the band. I stopped here to eat, not to get questioned about some missing truck stop whore. I got two daughters at home, assholes. I don’t play that game.”

  For a split second, he became Robert Lee swearing at them from the porch right before the shooting started. Garrett choked it down, but he felt the red rising behind his eyes.

  LaSalle produced his flier. “All I’m doing is asking everyone who comes through here if they’ve seen her. That’s it. It doesn’t make you a bad guy if you just saw her.”

  “Buddy, I’ve seen ‘em all, from one end of this country to the other. Stupid little whores who want to get a look inside your cab, steal you blind if you let ‘em. They all look alike to me. You know how that is, right?”

  LaSalle’s Zen master calm never broke. “That I do.”

  The big trucker sneered and turned to go back inside and Garrett knew it would go bad from there. Too late to stop. The red tide had risen and the little voice of reason his therapist taught him to consult had been told to shut the fuck up. He knew the words came out of his own mouth, but it sounded like someone talking underwater.

  “What if that was your daughter? Would you want some asshole to call her a stupid whore?” Garrett said.

  “The fuck did you say?”

  There was the expected quick turn to face them, big strides coming back, arms cocked to give Garrett a hard shove. The trucker was a big man, but not a fighter.

  Everything blinked red. The big man oofed out a blast of air and doubled over before Garrett even realized he’d hit him in the solar plexus. It felt good to hit him.

  His first year on the streets in LA, Garrett learned not to break his knuckles on someone’s head. He hit the trucker hard across the face with two elbow strikes. Robert Lee’s face flashed over the trucker’s and Garrett hit him again. And again.

  Hands like industrial vises grabbed Garrett’s upper arms and stopped him cold. He came back to reality and found himself staring into LaSalle’s dark eyes. “Easy, easy. It’s over, he’s done. Go wait in the car, my man. I have a feeling we should go elsewhere.”

  “You mean we better get out of here before someone calls the cops,” Garrett said. For some reason that made him giggle. Maybe he should go sit in the car. Get his shit together. Because right now, his shit was anything but together. He headed back toward the Mustang.

  LaSalle helped the big trucker to his feet. “There you go. Just take it easy for a second and make sure you can stand up. Sorry about that, my friend has been going through some personal issues lately. You know about that, right?”

  Eyes still rolling a bit, the trucker nodded. LaSalle let him go and he staggered toward the diner. That’s when LaSalle noticed the two other truckers. Mouths open, standing stock-still.

  LaSalle waved the flier at them. “Could I talk to you gentlemen about a missing girl?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Absolutely.”

  ***

  Temperatures had dipped again, making the Mustang lots of fun around icy corners. The gray afternoon sky dropped lazy tufts of snow like tiny paratroopers attacking the roads. LaSalle gripped the console as Garrett tapped the gas and steered into a slide. His confident grin looked a little shaky, but he got the car back under control.

  No one had thought to confiscate the County radio in the former Chief’s personal car, and Garrett was making full use of it. He and LaSalle were headed out a lonely two-lane blacktop. They’d heard the dispatcher send Smiley out to handle a deer hit by a truck and Garrett figured it would be a good spot to talk to Smiley without attracting prying eyes in town.

  “Hey, sorry about back there,” Garrett said.

  “The fucked-up driving, or beating that guy’s ass?” LaSalle said.

  “The driving is not my fault. It’s icy and I’m in a Five-Oh. Cut me some slack. But yeah, about the other thing.”

  “You figure to see trouble?”

  “Oh, probably. Just a misdemeanor, though, so it won’t be too bad,” Garrett said.

  LaSalle’s deep baritone laugh actually made Garrett smile.

  “Look at you,” LaSalle said. “Five minutes off the job and you’re workin’ the system like a career criminal.”

  “That’s only half a joke. I’ve got a little money put away, but I may just have to resort to a life of crime before long. I’ve got two years of questionable grades in college and I’m an ex-cop on psych meds. Maybe I can get hired as a door-greeter somewhere.”

  “You know anything about cooking meth? It’s a growing industry,” LaSalle said.

  “The only chemistry I know I learned from Bill Nye the Science Guy. I’d burn the place to the ground.” A flurry of snow hit the windshield and Garrett turned up the heater. LaSalle opened his coat.

  “You tryin’ to raise exotic snakes in here?” LaSalle said.

  “Sorry. I hate the cold.” Garrett snapped the heater back down a notch.

  “I don’t understand you, my man. It seems like not one thing about this place appeals to you, yet you willingly came back.”

  “If I knew the answer to that, I’d probably know the answer to why I just went ape-shit on a marginal asshole. And for the record, there is at least one thing here that appeals to me.”

  Up ahead, a big farm truck had pulled off to the right. Garrett saw the County Animal Control pickup behind it. “There they are.”

  Garrett parked far enough behind Smiley’s County pickup to let him to winch up a dead deer if need be. LaSalle saw Smiley through the windshield, the white hair under the hunting cap. “Little old to be manhandling dead deer, isn’t he? What’s the retirement age around here, seventy-five?” LaSalle said.

  “Small towns have a way of holding onto their old people. All the young ones are anywhere but here, if they can be. You tend to see folks with gray hair in charge of things most of the time.”

  Garrett got out and zipped his coat to his chin. He and LaSalle walked up just as Smiley put a tiny rimfire shell into his bolt-action .22 rifle. He still gave Garrett a big smile.

  “Garrett, how the hell are ya?” Smiley said.

  “Fair to middlin’, Smiley. I promised my friend I’d introduce you sometime, and I heard this call go out. Hope you don’t mind.”

  A slight falter in the smile when he saw LaSalle? Smiley held the rifle in his left hand and stuck out his right.

  “Jebediah Carmichael. Folks call me Smiley.”

  “Chester LaSalle. Good to meet you.” LaSalle shook the hand and turned an eye on the deer. “What happened?”

  “This old girl decided to run out of the trees just as these fellas come along. Bang.” A farmer and his teenage son stood near their truck. The front left fender was dented to hell.

  “You fellas might want to step back and plug your ears,” Smiley said. He squatted down next to the deer. Obviously mortally wounded and in pain, the doe tried to move broken legs and snorted blood out of her nostrils.

  “Easy old girl,” Smiley whispered. “It’s all over now.”

  He put the rifle’s barrel behind the doe’s ear. A flat bang and the deer went still. Smiley stood and nodded at the farmer. “Darryl, it would take me a coon’s age to load this thing up and dispose of it properly. I don’t suppose you’d have any use for venison?”

  The farmer grinned. “We could probably take care of that for ya, Smiley.”

  Garrett and LaSalle followed Smiley back to his truck and waited while he put the rifle away. “I’m not really supposed to do that, but I’m just getting’ too old to drag all these deer back to the County lot,” Smiley said.

  Smiley offered a hand to Garrett once the rifle was secured. “Garrett, I ain’t had a chance to tell you how sorry I am. I feel like everything that happened
is my fault.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Garrett said. He gripped Smiley’s hand, remembering the first time they shook. Garrett was probably five years old and his dad was teaching him how men greet each other. “It’s my judgment they questioned, not yours. Something about the Law of the Hills outweighing the actual law.”

  “It’s a tough damn thing to get away from, I’ll give ya that. Old ways die hard.” Smiley shifted his gaze to LaSalle. “What can I do for you, Mr. LaSalle?”

  LaSalle took a flier from his coat. “I’ve been hired to find this young woman. She went missing about two years back. Some folks said you eat at the truck stop quite a bit, so I thought you might have seen her at some point. She, uh, she ran with those girls who work the truckers.”

  Smiley accepted the flier. A flicker of recognition? Garrett couldn’t be sure.

  “Poor girl,” Smiley said. “Doesn’t look more than fifteen or sixteen. You know, maybe. It’s hard to say. There’s been so darn many girls come through there over the years.”

  “Anybody else you think might have seen her?” Garrett said.

  “Maybe a few of the boys who work for the County. Can I keep this? I’ll show it around and see what people say,” Smiley said.

  “Please do,” LaSalle said. “I’ll give you my card so you have my number.”

  Smiley put the card in his wallet and the flier on the front seat of his truck. From his angle, Garrett saw Smiley carefully smooth out the crease down the flier’s middle where it had been folded in LaSalle’s pocket.

  “Have you talked to Nadine?” Smiley said. “She sees darn near everything goes on around this town.”

  “We did. She remembers the girl, but didn’t know much more about her,” Garrett said.

  Smiley shook his head. For once, he wasn’t smiling. “Damn shame. What kinda world makes a girl have to sell her body to get by?”

  “We’re all trying to figure that one out,” Garrett said. They shook hands all around and Garrett and LaSalle got back in the Mustang. Before they could leave, Smiley’s county pickup swung around the farm truck, skidding a bit in the new snow.

  Then it straightened up and took off like a shot.

  “Looks like he’s in a hurry,” LaSalle said.

  Garrett chuckled. “It’s almost five o’clock and he’s a county employee. Probably in a hurry to turn his truck in on time.”

  ***

  Smiley forced himself not to look at it. Not until he got downstairs and secured the door to his special room. The physical arousal started before he even scanned the photos pinned to a corkboard on one wall. She wouldn’t be in the fading Polaroids. Those were old ones.

  She’d be in the glossies from his printer. Misty showed him how to use one of those new digital cameras and set up his printer for him. She said the new inks didn’t fade for decades.

  There. Halfway down, between a chubby brunette from Riverside, California and a red-head who didn’t have ID.

  She looked so different. In the colored fella’s flier, she was bright and lovely and had a defiant air about her. In Smiley’s picture, she was small and scared, her breasts caked with dried brown blood from some preliminary cuts.

  He smoothed the flier on his workbench with trembling hands. Pale blue eyes drank in every detail. She still had the eyebrow piercings when she met the Hunter, which gave the picture an immediacy that set his heart racing. He tried to resist, to deny himself. But it was just a game. He knew what he’d do.

  He pinned the flier to the center of the corkboard and stripped off his clothes. He donned the rubber apron, smelling the moldy copper of dried blood.

  His fingertip tingled as he brushed it against the power button on the flat little DVD player Misty and Angela gave him for Christmas. All his recordings resided in a leather-bound steam chest from another age. Some were just audiocassette tapes. Those were from his early ones, the ones he only saw in his fading memories.

  The newer ones, like the girl from the flier, he had on video.

  9

  Garrett spent the morning pacing, pacing, his mind going everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He tried to think of the last time he’d been this bad, unable to sleep, unable to focus on a single goal and map out a plan. A plan for the day, much less for the rest of his life.

  When he quit LA, he quit therapy. The tools were still there, you know, in his head. He’d spent enough time with enough shrinks to know all the catchy mental triggers he was supposed to use. Knowing it and doing it always seemed to be polar opposites. Kind of like knowing you shouldn’t smoke because it turns your lungs into blackened cancerous chunks, and doing it anyway because your body runs the show and it wants that cool nicotine rush.

  If he hadn’t hit the guy in the parking lot, he would have tossed and turned all night, imagining it, going through varying levels of damage in his head, ending with the guy pulling a knife or something and Garrett putting a bullet in his head. As it turned out, hitting him didn’t make things come up roses.

  He wandered into the kitchen. LaSalle’s flier hung on his refrigerator under a magnet from Davis Hardware. American Tools for American Homes!

  Alongside the flier, he’d stuck a printout of LaSalle’s map with all the red and blue dots.

  LaSalle’s case, if you could call it a case, helped Garrett focus. Looking at the girl’s picture settled his mind, made his thoughts move into more constructive areas.

  The longer he looked at the map, the more he thought the big man might have something. A trucker could get away with coming through here from time to time, strangling an anonymous truck stop girl in his cab, or whatever means he used. If Garrett was going with this theory, then he had to admit the guy used a knife at least once.

  Where the hell were all the bodies? If these girls weren’t just runaways no one could find— and there were thousands out there— where could you put twenty-eight people without a hunter, hiker, or a motorist who pulled over to piss stumbling across at least one bone?

  The knock on the door triggered a flash of anger. What the fuck? He was trying to figure something out here.

  Opening the door didn’t do much to douse the fire.

  Whit Abercrombie stood on his front step, grinning like an idiot. He had Lyle Hampton and Dougie Armstead with him. In other words, the entire Artemis Police Department.

  Clancy Parker stood to one side in full State Police uniform, looking embarrassed.

  “Hey, Clance,” Garrett said. “What’s got you running with this rabble?”

  “Hello, Garrett. I’m sorry to say I’m here on official business. You know the deal. If I come into your town, I ask you to go along as a courtesy.”

  Garrett pushed open the screen, causing Whit to have to step back into the yard. Garrett looked Whit in the eye.

  “And it takes three of you to show courtesy? You expecting trouble, Whit?”

  “From you? Not likely.” Whit put on the macho act, but it didn’t work well when everyone there already knew Garrett. If it came down to a shootout, they probably hadn’t brought enough people.

  Clancy stepped in. “Now, Garrett, this has nothing to do with what’s going on in town. It’s, just... a trucker out at Burton’s filed a report, says you beat him up. Even has a few witnesses. That’s State jurisdiction, so it falls to me, unfortunately.”

  “You here to arrest me?”

  “Nope. Just here to get your side of it. It’s a misdemeanor at this point, so this report will just be filed with the DA. You won’t go to jail today, but you will have to go to court. But you know that.”

  “Yup.”

  They all stood there breathing white plumes in the cold.

  “Anything else?” Garrett said.

  “I would like to hear your side,” Clancy said.

  “Guy came at me and I put him down. You must not know me very well if you think I’m stupid enough to elaborate. Now, anything else?”

  “Yeah, I got something else,” Whit said. “Folks told me you been goin’ ar
ound with that PI from New York, asking questions about missing girls and such. You need to remember you’re not law enforcement anymore, Garrett.”

  “And you need to crack open a law book and tell me what’s illegal about handing out fliers and asking if people have seen a missing girl. If you can’t tell me, then you can get fucked.” Man, he was really using his words to hurt instead of heal today. His therapist would be disappointed.

  A deep red crept up Whit’s neck and into his jowls. “You want to watch your mouth.”

  “Or what?” Garrett said. “Even in the backwater, it’s called Freedom of Speech. If you’re going to use your position to screw with me, Whit, you better make damn sure you know the law. Because I do.”

  Whit’s jaw clenched and unclenched. Whatever he was holding in, it didn’t seem like something he wanted to say in front of a State Trooper. He ignored Garrett and spoke directly to Clancy. “We done here? He obviously doesn’t want to talk.”

  “Yeah,” Clancy said. “Thanks for the company, Whit.”

  Without so much as another glance at Garrett, Whit stalked back to his car, his boys in tow. Clancy stayed back, waited until they left.

  “I don’t know what’s up with you lately, man, but I hope things get better for you,” Clancy said.

  He held out a hand and Garrett took it.

  “It can only go up from here, Clance.”

  ***

  “How do you make the woods look so lonely?” LaSalle said.

  Tracy said, “I just paint the woods. You’re the one who decides whether they look lonely or not.”

  Garrett sipped some sweet tea and watched LaSalle move around Tracy’s tidy living room. She had five paintings on her walls, all personal favorites of hers. LaSalle stopped in front of one featuring a dilapidated barn with a shagbark hickory growing up through the roof. “What’s this?”

  “That one’s really from memory. My mom took me berry picking one summer and we came upon this barn in the middle of nowhere, with a tree growing through it. Even as young as I was, it gave me the feeling nothing we do is permanent. It all gets washed away by time.”