“Yeah, but he has a beard, and he’s wearing a vest stuffed with explosives.”
“You mean he’s a terrorist?”
I let him hang for a moment—watching people intellectually squirm is one of the few genuine pleasures life offers me. The fact that I never finished high school makes it particularly gratifying. “Do you get my point, Tim? This isn’t about what the guy ‘really is,’ it’s about you— about the traps everybody falls into when hearing or reading language. At each stage it seemed pretty clear, didn’t it—what the gunman was? But each time I complicated the background, he suddenly became something different.”
“So?”
“So, it demonstrates two things. First, that what words mean depends on the background we bring to them, contexts—and contexts can potentially go on forever. Second, that people are prone to jump to conclusions. You can’t see what you don’t see, so you simply assume that what you do see is all there is. That it’s simple, clear as day. The guy’s a robber.”
“But he is a robber, isn’t he?”
Uncertainty had wired him, I could see that much. But whether he was freaked because he understood what I was saying or because he didn’t have the slightest clue, I couldn’t tell.
I looked away to the dance floor. Some old sunglass-wearing drunk had taken the place of the two heifers, smiling with rotten pride, dancing with his arms held out—to some Ozzy tune whose title I couldn’t remember because I had only read it. “Suicide Solution,” I think.
“So what?” Tim finally said. “You don’t believe anything?”
“I believe plenty.”
“Like what?”
“That you and I are sitting in a bar drinking beer, for one.”
A scowl furrowed his narrow face. He was taking our conversation seriously—dreadfully so. “No, I mean, like, you know, the big picture.”
I shrugged. “Big picture? Well, I believe that humans are survival machines, and that pretty much everything else is plumage.”
“What’s plumage?”
“Something for show,” I said in the quick way you use to dismiss a conversation. “You know what? I think I will take you up on the church pig roast thing. Check it out ...” I made a show of rubbing the back of my neck. “I’ve been feeling a little, I dunno ... hollow lately.”
It would be a free meal at least, and at most it would allow me to further penetrate Ruddick’s social marrow. Fucking church pig roast— hilarious. When you remember as many things as I do, you really come to appreciate little gems like that.
“Awesome!” he exclaimed. “You could hit the Reverend with that whole-whole context thing—let him sort it out.”
I winced at that, realizing that Tim was more than just a little naive. Everyone, but everyone, makes noises about being critical and open- minded—even extreme believers like Baars. But confirmation is really the only thing they’re interested in. People are as allergic to contradiction as they are to complexity and uncertainty—and none more so than those who devote their lives to bullshit.
I already knew how to get to the Church of the Third Resurrection, but Tim seemed to take so much pride in his knowledge of the town thatI listened like someone oblivious. I used my cigarettes as an excuse to bail after that. I kind of felt bad leaving him alone there drinking, but then I kind of felt jealous as well.
Truth was, I had completely slipped back into a working mindset. According to my cell, it was almost ten, which struck me as a likely hour for a high school administrator to go to sleep on a work night.
As good a time as any to stake out Eddie Morrow.
I parked about twenty yards or so down from the Morrows’, in front of a house too dark not to be filled with sound sleepers. I spend quite a bit of my time in my old Golf, watching this or that residence—primarily waiting for husbands. Typically, I kill the time either banging my head to heavy metal (during the day) or arguing with my memories (during the night).
Talking to yourself doesn’t necessarily amount to anything. You can do it for years without experiencing any personal growth or cognitive decline. Listen to yourself long enough, however, and you eventually become a comedian, whether you want to or not. It’s the only way to stay interested.
Eddie Morrow slipped out his door at exactly 11:13. No porch light, as expected. A quiet tug to close the Saturn door, as expected. He had backed into his driveway so he could slip out without bathing the front of the house with light. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t back in when he returned. I found myself wondering whether Jill ever noticed that the car had done a magical one-eighty while they were asleep. I’d witnessed enough of these capers to grasp their furtive Gestalt. This was my eighty- seventh, to be exact.
But then, none of them had ever involved a missing cult member before.
I fired up the Vee-Dub, winced the way I always wince at its tractor roar and rattle, then began following him at a discreet distance. Ruddick was small enough that I didn’t have to follow him far.
He turned down an unkempt street, Omeemee, where every other house seemed abandoned—yet one more demographic relic of better days. Idling at the intersection, I watched his Saturn cruise through the glow of its lights, slow, then park before a low brick bungalow—a place that had an un-illuminated sign of some kind posted out front. I waited until he had disappeared into the building before turning to follow.
I did a cursory drive-by, caught enough of the sign in my headlights to read
MASSAGE-BY-JENNY
Registered Physiotherapist
Then I turned around and parked along the curb opposite the house. I rolled down the window, sparked a J, absorbed that magical combination of boarded windows and sixty-year-old trees. To tell the truth, it almost felt like home sitting there, periodically glancing at the hooded picture window, pondering the sordid shenanigans behind the drapes. Summer darkness surrounding an orange-glowing world.
Ah, Eddie ... Did you lie awake in shame? Cringe from the enormity of your petty crimes? Think Oh-my-god-if-Jill-ever-found-out...
Or were you a different animal altogether? Had your appetites slipped their leash, compelled you to commit atrocities? To do things that convinced our ancestors we needed hell?
What about Jennifer, Eddie? Did you hurt her? Hide her?
Eddie was definitely more relaxed leaving 113 Omeemee than he was 371 Edgeware. I heard feminine laughter as he bantered back and forth with someone at the side door. The fear didn’t climb back into his face until he climbed behind the wheel of his car. He pulled farther down the street, turned around in someone else’s driveway, then passed within spitting distance of me on his way back home. He had the clutched look of someone running through worst-case scenarios.
I cracked open my door, crossed the street, walked the narrow slot between the brick wall and the Ford F-150 parked in the driveway. I came to a screen door, which I knocked on because its wood companion was already ajar. I could see linoleum and half a kitchen hutch in dim light through the screen. Moths and gnats tapped at the light above me.
After a moment, a woman answered the door dressed in a tank and panties. Jenny—obviously and immediately. She was too petite to be a model, and she had a friendly, farm-girl face, but I found her horribly attractive. Eddie was making more sense to me with every passing moment.
“Do you take walk-ins?” I asked.
She looked me up and down, smiled, and rubbed her cheek into her shoulder like a kitten. When they look like you, her eyes said. But her voice asked, “Sore shoulders, honey?”
“Like I’m carrying the weight of the world.”
She welcomed me in with a swing of her arm—clipped enough to tell me she was sober. I really hadn’t known what to expect from the sex trade industry out here in the backwoods. A part of me had expected rotten teeth and hilly-billy diction—but Jenny seemed all right. The house was tidy, nary a single dirty dish on the ceramic countertop. The floors were slightly bowed: old houses tend to sag in the middle—kind of like people that wa
y. The furniture was newish—veneer, but hey, who the hell was I to judge? Two massage tables dominated the living room; they almost looked like gurneys with the white sheets that had been draped over them. The couch, the flat screen, and the coffee table pushed beneath the picture window suggested that Jenny broke the tables down during the day and used the space the same way civilians did: to rot in front of the tube.
“So what can I do you for, handsome?”
“The works,” I said, fishing out the wad of fives and tens I’d scored over the course of the day. What can I say? Sex is just one of those horses I ride backward. “That ... and ... some questions.”
She did her best not to roll her eyes. Hookers generally don’t like guys—guilt-ridden nerds, mostly—who ask a lot of questions. All the questioners want is to get fucked, and yet they go through all the motions of “empathizing with the plight” of the women they’re fucking as a way of servicing their moral debt. I actually knew this one hooker who had CASH ONLY tattooed above her shaved pussy. “Read the sign,” was the only answer she would give to questions. “Money ain’t the only thing that talks,” she told me once, “un-fucking-fortunately.”
“Well, really, I only have one question.”
Jenny had already grabbed my hand and pulled me into the living room gloom. “Shoot.”
“You know that guy who was just here?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, undoing my belt and tearing open my button fly. “Brad.”
I smiled. “Brad. Exactly.”
“What about him?” She said this while palming the crotch of my boxers. The auto-tease. Most hookers are as mechanical as a car wash.
“Did he swing by here last Saturday night, say around midnight?”
She stopped, took a confused step back, which was kind ofembarrassing because she had peeled my jeans down to my knees. “You mean when that girl went missing ...” she said. “The other Jennifer.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you a cop or something?”
“Hell no. Just a private dick. Her parents hired me to assist the police.”
I could tell she had already guessed as much. It was pretty obvious that the two of us had come from the same side of the tracks, even though I was urban and she was country. The side that called cops “pigs.”
“Do you think they’ll find her?” she asked.
The way she said this told me she had been following the story closely. I supposed it was unnerving having someone with your name vanish in a town this small—especially doing what Jenny did for a living.
“No,” I said with a what-can-you-do shrug. “Not in one piece, anyway.”
“I think so too,” she said, her look wandering from sharp to vague to sharp again. “I just have this feeling, you know?”
Fucking feelings. Only do you any good in the movies.
“So what about Brad?” I pressed. Otherwise known as Edward Morrow.
“Brad? Oh. Yeah-yeah. He was here last Saturday around then, you know ...” A fatalistic hitch of the shoulders. “Balling me.”
“I figured as much,” I said with a sly glance at my dropped drawers. “Just needed to be sure, you know?”
She sidled back up to me with a husky chuckle, pulled my jeans to my ankles with the palm of her right foot. “So they hired you, huh? Her parents?”
“Yeah,” I replied, pressing my boy against her midriff. “I’m famous.”
Afterward, I quizzed her more generally, knowing that she, more than anyone, would know who the town freaks were. We had pushed the two massage tables together for the purposes of our transaction. She answered me with her chin on my chest. Periodically her hand would crawl down to my groin to tweak and twiddle. I chalked it up to force of habit.
When she had heard about Jennifer—or “the other Jennifer” as she called her—the same questions had occurred to her. Some of her clients liked the rough stuff, but they tended to be the ones she thought the least likely to do anything “wonky,” as she put it.
“No one much fucks with me,” she said, tossing a negligent thumb in the direction of the hall that led off the kitchen—to the bedrooms, I suppose.
“Why’s that?”
“Because my brother’s always out back, playing his video games.”
“Brother?”
“Well, stepbrother. Jerome. Nobody fucks with Jerome.”
“Could you introduce me to him?”
“Not unless you want to fuck wi—”
That was when the riff from “Back in Black” began wailing in miniature from my pants where they lay crumpled. My cellphone.
“Sorry,” I said, peeling myself from Jenny’s sweaty side. “I’m on the clock, you know.”
She just snorted. “Me too.”
God, I love hookers. Almost as much as I love the drugs that make them hook. It was making my skin itch just knowing that somewhere near, beneath the couch or in a cupboard or drawer, there was a bag of goodies.
According to the display, it was Molly. “Yep,” I said into the phone.
“Disciple. Disciple! Where are you?”
“At a rub-and-tug,” I answered in a querulous Where-else-would-I-be tone.
“A rub and what?”
“A rub-and-tug. You know, a jack shack.”
“Spare me the bullshit, Disciple,” she snapped, all, like, time-is-money and shit. “You need to meet me at the corner oflnkerman and Kane. “
“What? Why?”
“Nolen. He’s found a severed finger. “
A classic pan-in-zoom-out moment. Molly, it turned out, owned a police scanner, an item I had thought about getting several times but had just never seemed to muster the scratch for. Bad dice and the odd Jenny will do that to you, I suppose. Apparently while I was out busy investigating my vices, she was in her room watching CSI reruns and keeping tabs on what the state-sanctioned professionals were doing.
“Wait,”she snapped. “Wait!”
I could hear her scanner squawking in the background ...
“Shit-shit-shit,” she gasped, her voice taut with genuine fear.
“What? What’s going on?”
“Another one,”she exclaimed. Frantic. She was genuinely frantic. “They found another finger just a couple ofblocks away!”
“How?” I asked, hopping with one leg in my jeans. Jenny’s laughter told me I had forgotten to put on my boxers. Bouncing around, my dick flopping like a tassel. Fuck it, I would go commando. “Did they say anything about how?”
“I can’t talk now, Disciple,” she called over my stream of muttered curses. “I gotta be out there. I’m going. I’ll meet you, ’kay?”
“Molls!” was all I managed before the line went dead.
It’s strange. I had no bonus arrangement with the Bonjours, so it really didn’t matter whether I was instrumental to what happened or not—I would get paid no matter what. And yet, beneath the move-move-move urgency, there was this crushing sense of failure...
I had known that she was dead all along, hadn’t I?
I kissed Jenny full on the lips, left her standing naked with the full roll of bills in her left hand and my boxers hanging from her right. I suffered a pang of remorse driving away. I had really liked those boxer shorts: a National Geographic number depicting The Whales of the World. They even sported a blue whale arching across the fly, boding the appearance of the purple.
Forgotten gauchies. As good an excuse as any, I supposed, to find my way back to 113 Omeemee.
My phone began riffing literally the second I shut the car door. It was Albert—and about fucking time.
“Heeeey! ” he cried over the sound of music and voices. “Disciple, he- heee... Didn’t think I would catch you. What you doing so late, man?”
He was more than a little drunk, I could tell.
“Jerking off to War and Peace. I always get wood when the French are defeated. You?”
Breathless laughter. Great, I thought. Albert was one of those guys who became cool on a blood alcohol gradient
. His cat’s-ass tone told me he thought he was pretty much the coolest thing going, which meant he’d hiked a good distance up shit-face hill.
“Impromptu grad party,”he said. “Talkingbullshit. Scoping hotties—you know how it is ... ”
“So what di—”
“Smoked the last of that green,” he interrupted. “If you know what I mean.”
A mental frown. “I’m sure I can hook you up.”
“Bonus! You put the Weeeee! into weed,, you know that? ”
He found this pretty funny. Over his laugh I heard a young feminine voice say, “Is that your guy? Is that your guy?” in the background. “He’s a riot! “ I heard Albert reply.
“And you put the Hurray! in shut-the-fuck-up,” I said, not at all comfortable with being Albert’s “guy.” “Have you been telling people about our little arrangement?”
Another guffaw, as if I had been joking. “Seriously, though. Dude. I meant to call earlier, but I fucking forgot... so I thought, heeey! I’ll just leave him a message! You’re my favourite round-eye bad-ass, you know that?”
“And you’re my favourite gook-geek. What did you find out, Albert?”
“Yah-yah-yah, sorry. I called this oldbuddy ofmine who did a philosophy post-doc at Berkeley. Baars was already gone by then, but apparently he was still big news...”
Like most drunks, Albert overestimated the drama of his stories, and so kept decent people hanging with trivia.
“And?” I said.
“Brilliant. Eccentric. Divorced...”
His tone told me he was saving the juicy bits. “And?”
“Rumour was he knocked up one ofhis sophomores...”
That was interesting, at least. But I knew there was more. “C’mon, Albert. Cut me a fucking break over here. What else?”
“Well, it seems he taught a course on cults ... Cults, Disciple!”
He fairly shouted this, so I knew he thought it was significant, at least.
“So?”
“Soooo, think about it, dude! The guy knows ...”
“Knows what?”
“All of it. The psychology. The sociology. The history. Which means he knows how to act, how to organize, what kind ofclaims to make ... “Music and droning voices swelled to fill the silence. “There’s just no way, Disciple. ”
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