by Zahra Girard
“Oh, you got another?” she says, smiling and looking up at me from her coffee cup. “How come you get them all?”
“Yep. The senior center sent him in. He’s eighty-two. He sprained his ankle pretty bad in a fall. When I was checking his vitals, he hit his nurse call button. I asked him what he was doing cause I was right there, and he told me he’d just seen something so beautiful that it made his heart stop. Then asked me out to the early bird special tomorrow.”
“Do it,” she says, half-seriously. She swirls her coffee cup around and finishes it in one gulp. “He’s better than most guys out there.”
I laugh. “True, but I have plans. But you could head over there yourself if you’re interested.”
“I just might. I tried out Tinder last week. I got desperate. And bored,” she says, and my ears perk up. Though that’s it, I don’t have the energy to actually turn my head and look at her. “Didn’t go on any dates. But I did diagnose three STDs via unsolicited dick pics, so it was a pretty productive weekend.”
“Gross.”
“I’m just saying, you gotta learn to make the best of a situation. So, life puts a good man in your lap, you take advantage, cause you don’t know the next time it’ll happen. Doesn’t matter if he’s eighty-two, he still could be a fun time on a date. What room did you say he was in?”
“Sixteen.”
“And you’re sure you’re not interested?” she says, eyebrow raised.
I can’t tell if she’s serious or not.
“I’m meeting Detective Erickson for drinks.”
“This about the shooting? Tracy was talking to some guys about it in her office earlier. They didn’t look like cops, though. But I didn’t have much time to ask her about it.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Detective Erickson was my dad’s partner before he died.”
“Oh,” she says. “You want to ask him about what happened?”
I sigh and get quiet for a second. My dad was killed on the job when I was young — just eight years old — and, though I knew the basics of what happened, my mom would never talk about it. It hurt too much to talk about, she’d say every time I asked.
“Kind of. Yes. I don’t really know what I want to ask. It’s just, when I was a kid, all I knew is that one day dad went off to work and then he never came home. Even when I was older, my mom would never talk about it. There were two days every year — my dad’s birthday and their wedding anniversary — where she was inconsolable. I’d go to a friends house sometimes.”
“Jesus, Jessica. Did your mom ever talk to someone? Like a therapist?”
It’s been fifteen years since my dad died, but even so, it’s hard to talk about him without feeling my heart ache.
“My mom went into therapy for a while. And she got better. But she said that she buried half her heart with my dad and that you can’t just get over that.”
Cassie gets up and comes over and gives me a hug. “Will you text me, or call me, afterward? It doesn’t matter what time it is. I just want to know that you’re ok.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say, and I give her another hug. “Finding out about my dad is one of the reasons I came back here. I’m kind of looking forward to tonight. It’ll feel good to have some answers.”
* * * * *
I check the address again on my phone. Everything says I’m in the right place, but the building in front of me is giving me the creeps. It’s gritty-looking, rough around the edges, with exposed brick walls and a flickering neon sign that’s obscured under a layer of dust. There’s a folding sign out front advertising a happy hour special dated a month ago.
The Tap Room has the same kind of vibe and look about it as the Joker’s Wild. Except, the vibe at the Joker’s Wild felt like it was something by design, something the place worked to maintain to give it’s patrons a bit of a thrill at drinking somewhere on the wrong side of the tracks all while being perfectly safe and sanitary. Here, the vibe feels real. Authentic.
It makes me hesitate. Visions of the violence of the other night play behind my eyelids and I feel my chest constrict. It’s all so raw, and it’s in those rare moments of quiet that I’ve had since then that I can hear the gunshots and the screams.
It’s going to be a long time before I’m comfortable alone again.
I wish Preacher was here.
I get out of my car and head towards the door.
I make it a few steps before I have to stop outside in the parking lot and pull some of the chill desert night air into my lungs in great big gasps to calm down. I’ve volunteered in conflict zones, in refugee camps, in violent parts of the world, but I’ve never seen anything as brutal and scary as what I saw the other night.
Someone broke in the door and came this close to killing someone right in front of my eyes and killing me, too.
It makes me feel stupid to be standing out here, pacing in the parking lot of this run-down dive bar, trying to get my shot nerves together.
“Come on, Jess, you can do this,” I tell myself.
There’s a creak of the bar door opening.
“You all right, Jessica? Need a smoke?” Detective Erickson calls to me from the entryway of the bar.
The embarrassment at being on the verge of an anxiety attack in front of a dive bar somehow makes me calm down. I’m stronger than this.
“I’m fine,” I reply between temperamental breaths. “I’ll be right in. Order me a vodka tonic, will you?”
“Copy that,” he says. “I’ll see you inside. I’ve saved a stool at the bar for you.”
I count to ten before I head inside.
The bar’s about as careworn on the inside as it is on the outside. A bartop that shines from years of use and stools that shine from years of being sat on. Three parallel shelves line the wall behind the bar, filled mostly with dark liquor. Dusty, gritty, old-Reno types sit at the bar, some of them talk to each other in mumbled voices and others watch a baseball game on a TV above the bar.
Detective Erickson’s saved me a seat not far from the beer taps and there’s a vodka-tonic waiting for me. I sit down, take a sip — it’s strong — and try to put my nervous thoughts in order.
Truth is, I’ve waited years for tonight, but now that I’m here, I’m so frazzled that I don’t know what I want to say first.
There are so many questions I want to ask, so many things I want to learn about my dad — he and Detective Erickson were partners for most of my dad’s time with Reno PD — but I can barely put words together.
I take a drink. The vodka-tonic is mostly vodka, and it’s the rotgut kind of vodka that’s as bracing as a slap in the face.
Thank God.
“How you holding up?” he says.
“Huh?”
“The shooting. I heard you were there.”
I don’t want to talk about the shooting tonight. I want to talk about my dad.
“I’m OK. I’m glad I have work to keep me busy.”
“Good. I don’t think it’ll be too long before we bring in the criminals that were involved. Have you given a statement on it, yet?”
I shrug and find calm in another long sip of my drink. My nerves are rawer than I thought.
“I’d like to not talk about that for a while. Thanks.”
“Got it. We’ve got more important things to talk about: your dad,” he says, with a knowing look. “You know, I was a bit surprised that it took you so long to look me up.”
I look down at my hands clenched tight around my drink. Detective Erickson and my dad were close friends as well as partners on the job. But after my dad died and we moved away, so many of the friendships we had here were left behind. Reconnecting isn’t easy.
“I’m sorry. It was hard. When mom moved us away, she wanted us to start fresh, to try and leave behind everything that reminded her of what she – what we — lost. I thought about calling you when I graduated high school, even thought about applying to the University of Nevada, Reno… But I wasn’t ready.”
“My mom never really talked about what happened when dad got shot. She didn’t really talk about him at all, honestly. All I know of what happened to him is the scraps I found in newspapers when I got older,” I say.
I pause, feeling embarrassed again at how much I’m rambling.
Thinking about my dad, being around someone who really knew the man that he was, makes me feel almost like a kid again. I’m jittery, I’m stammering words from nerves.
I continue. “I have all these memories of him, of things we did, but there’s this huge chunk of who he is — what he was like at work, how he died, who killed him — that I don’t know about. It’s like I only know a piece of the man that he really was.”
Even though it’s been fifteen years since I’ve lost him, just talking about him brings up so many memories. I can see his face, I can hear his voice and his booming laugh, I can remember how it felt every time he would scoop me up in his arms and twirl me around — which he would determinedly do even when I went through my very mature and moody phase at eight and insisted I was too old to be twirled around. That was the same year he died. I still regret those times I told him to put me down.
He was larger than life. He was my hero.
Still is.
Detective Erickson looks into his beer like he’s seeing old memories swirling around in the foam. “Your dad was a damn fine cop and an even better man. He made detective faster than anyone because people loved him. I mean, people actually loved him. For a cop, that’s a big deal. Most people try to avoid us at best, and others outright hate us. Your dad started out as a beat cop, back when we still did that kind of thing, and everyone on his beat liked him. When he got promoted to detective, he never lost that connection to where he started. He’d go back to his old grounds from time to time. People would tell him things, tip him off, because they knew he gave a damn.”
I shut my eyes and I can see my dad in his uniform and the way he always stood up straighter when he was wearing it. There was no one more proud of what they did than my dad.
“What was he like on the job?”
“A hero,” he says without hesitation. Then he shifts in his place on the stool, wets his lips with his drink, and clears his throat. “There was this one time — not long after you were born — that your dad responded to this call out at this little bodega in the south part of town. A little family shop that got robbed. Owner was an immigrant, new in town, and he and his wife had a little daughter just like you. They didn’t have any friends, they didn’t know anyone, and it hit them so hard to have the head of their house in the hospital like that,” he says, then he pauses and clears his throat. He shuts his eyes for a second, like he’s searching through memories. “Your dad never told anyone, but, once a week, he used to insist we go to the bodega, we buy some things — food, baby stuff, you know, the essentials — and we give it right back to them. Once a week for months, we did that. Paid for it out of his own damn pocket, that’s the kind of man he was.”
I feel myself smiling and crying at the same time. It feels so good learning more about my father, and learning that the man I really admire is worth that admiration.
“Thank you, Detective Erickson,” I manage to say. Tears are making the world around me look glassy. It hurts hearing these things about my dad, knowing that he really was the kind of man that I remember, and know that he was taken from me.
“Call me David.”
“Thank you, David.”
“You know, he would’ve been so proud to see you grow up to be the woman that you’ve become. You’re helping people, Jessica. Just like him.”
“Thank you,” I say. “How did he die? What happened?”
He goes noticeably colder. “He was shot. You know that.”
“I know. But you were the one who found him. What was he working on? Why did he die? Who do you think did it?” I say.
“He was working on a drug case. Staking out a warehouse that we believed was a transit point for some major drug shipments. Someone shot him right in the head, execution style. There were no witnesses,” he says. Every word is so matter-of-fact it’s alarming. Then, he leans forward and David loses all sympathy, all softness in his voice and his eyes are hard as steel when he speaks. “Jessica, if there’s one thing you need to know about your father’s death, it’s that he was killed by the same type of people you ran into the other night. Bikers killed your father. You have to be careful.”
Weighty silence falls between us and he takes a handful of bills out of his pocket and sets them on the bar next to his empty beer glass.
“Take care of yourself, Jessica.”
His words stay with me long after he’s left. I’d come back to Reno to find out answers about my father and the kind of man he was, and now I’ve stepped right into the same kind of mess that got him killed in the first place. The man at home recuperating on on my sofa knows more about it than he’s letting on. He might even be one of them. Thinking about him stirs curiosity and anger inside me and some other feeling I can’t quite place, except that it quickens my pulse and shortens my breath.
If I want to find out more about the men who killed my father, I’ll have to get closer to Preacher. However I might feel about him, he’s my best shot at getting answers to the questions that have haunted me my whole life.
I need him.
Chapter Eight
Preacher
I wake up to find I’ve been asleep for sixteen hours. I wake with the mid-morning sun streaming in through the windows and the apartment all to myself.
I’m wide-awake, aching to get up and move around, but my body won’t cooperate.
Getting to the bathroom to take a piss has me feeling like I just worked a double-shift on an oil rig. It takes me five minutes to catch my damn breath once I get back to bed. I sit there, feeling like a fucking invalid, and take stock of my situation.
This ain’t gonna work. If I have to sit here all damn day, I’m going to lose my mind.
I decide I’ve got to do something. Anything. Sitting around will drive me crazy thinking about my brothers being out there without me.
I’m not the kind of man who enjoys sitting around and feeling my ass grow fat underneath me — nah, not my thing. The need to do something, to be moving, is one of the reasons I did so well as a roughneck; sixteen hour days, seven days a week, backbreaking labor, and moving from job site to job site all over a tri-state area was my idea of heaven. I could work until I could hardly stand, go back to my trailer to collapse with a glass of whiskey in my hand, and grab a few hours of sleep so that I could wake up again the next day and do it all over again. And, when one job was done, all I had to do was hitch my truck to my trailer and head to the next site.
When I finally earned a furlough, I got to go home to her, the woman who stood by my side through thick and thin.
Until she didn’t.
Until the day a phone call from her brought me home, to find her gone in a way that left me broken.
I’ve got to do something.
Top of my list of priorities is getting something to wear other than this hospital robe. I’m tired of having my ass hanging out. There’s a weird draught in this apartment that, no matter which way I stand, keeps making my ass cold.
I get up from bed, brace myself with both hands on the wall, and force myself to take step after agonizing step until I get to the apartment’s front door.
The doorknob is so busted that getting the damned thing unlocked takes twenty seconds of turning and maneuvering.
It’s a thirty-minute wall-hugging journey to get down the stairs to the basement laundry room and I feel like a toddler learning to walk again.
I’m lucky it’s the middle of the day — I don’t see a damn person around to witness my pathetic display of walking with my ass hanging out.
The baseme
nt laundry room looks like every dank, shared laundry room ever built in the history of mankind. There are two old coin-operated washers, two even-older dryers — one with an ‘out of order’ sign on it that looks old enough to drive — and a pile of clothes sitting on top of one of the washers waiting for the one working dryer to be open.
I pick through the clothes in the pile. They’re men’s clothes. Kind of. Whatever man’s wearing this stuff stopped maturing once they hit their teens. I grab a t-shirt with some logo of a dragon and some crossed guitars on it set over some euro-sounding band name and some jeans. The shirt fits, sort of, though it’s too tight around the chest and arms and way-too-stretched out and loose around the stomach. The jeans are way too large, but they’ll have to do.
I open the dryer, take out the clothes, and toss my new shirt and jeans inside. It only takes a few minutes for them to dry.
I put on my new clothes and head up to the first floor mail room. The building super’s mailbox gives away his room number: 103.
He answers on the fifth knock, smells like cigarettes and mayonnaise, and looks at me like I’m green. He’s wearing a tattered robe that looks like it’s made out of recycled shag carpet and has on a white t-shirt underneath.
“Stephen, the fuck you want?” he says, squinting at me. He pulls a set of glasses out of the pocket of his robe and puts them on. “You’re not Stephen.”
“Fuck no.”
“You’re wearing his shirt, though. And his pants.”
“I borrowed them.”
“From the laundry room?”
“Yeah. Is that a problem?”
“I don’t give a shit. But I’d suggest you wash them again. Stephen’s a weird son of a bitch,” he says. “What the fuck do you want?”
“Some tools. I’m visiting a friend — Jessica — and her apartment’s a piece of shit. I want to fix it up a bit for her.”