Bad Things Page 13

  I knew this, and yet still I found talking to my father hard. It hadn’t always been that way. When I was young, he and I used to go for a walk every Saturday morning. We met in the kitchen at ten o’clock sharp. It was our Norman Rockwell moment. I suspect now that the ritual was likely a negotiated concession, driven by a mother’s need for a couple hours’ friggin’ peace, but regardless of this drab adult insight it remained a slot my dad and I got together. There was a randomness in the way my father chose which streets to cross and at which points that made the voyage seem different every time. The last stop was always the same, however, the drugstore, where dad would order a coffee and Mr. Franks would ask how he wanted it and Dad would say “hot and wet.” Neither ever smiled during this exchange, and it took me a long time to realize it was a weird grown-up joke, not evidence that both were retarded.

  Before the drugstore came the penultimate stop, Walter Azara’s Ford dealership. My father knew Azara to nod to, but when we paused outside the lot he made no effort to strike up conversation. Quite the opposite. Unless we’d happened to pass Walt earlier, so Dad knew he wasn’t on the premises, the time we spent looking at the cars was charged, as though there was something illicit about it. I didn’t get why this might be. Weren’t they on the front lot precisely so people could admire them?

  This was the early 1970s and the glamour Fords were Mustangs, which Dad would peer at for some time, conferring judicious attention to every detail except the price banner across the windshield. For me the real draw was the area where Walt displayed a couple of older vehicles, including a 1956 De Luxe in canary yellow and a Crown Victoria from the same era, in tan and cream. Back then you still sometimes saw these finned showboats on the roads, shedding rust and lumbering along as if baffled at the modern world, this cramped universe of straighter lines. The cars on the Azara lot were mint, however, restored by Walt’s wizardly chief mechanic, Jim.

  I would look them over, week after week, running my hands over bulging fins and smooth panels that were searing hot and shiny in the summer and cold and sleek the rest of the year. I would try to fill in the gap between when all cars looked like this and the way the survivors on the roads looked now, but could not. I did not yet understand about time, or how there could come a point where something bright and sparkling new—a car, job, or wife—becomes just another thing you have; then something on the periphery of your vision that you don’t think about much anymore; and finally the thing that’s breaking down the whole time and making your life a living hell. You learn, though. You learn about all that.

  We made this walk every Saturday for a number of years. I don’t remember the first time, so I can’t be sure when it started. I do remember when they stopped. I was twelve. There had been an atmosphere in the house for a few weeks. I didn’t know what was behind it. Dad simply seemed distracted. We took our walks as usual but one time he forgot to say “hot and wet” and Mr. Franks just had to get on with pouring him a coffee. I remember the sound of it splashing into the cup, and seeing him glance at my father. Dad remembered his lines the next week, and I didn’t think much about it. You don’t, when you’re a kid.

  Then one day we got to Azara’s and something changed. It was a cold fall morning and there was no one else in the lot, and I remember feeling relieved because by then I’d begun to sense the tension in my father if there were other people around. We started across the road, me veering straight toward the flashy dinosaurs, but I hadn’t made the far curb before I realized something wasn’t right.

  I turned to see my father had stopped halfway across the street. He wasn’t looking at the lot, or at me, but at some empty space halfway in between.

  “Dad?” He didn’t say anything. “You coming?”

  He shook his head. At first I thought he was joking. Then I realized from the set of his body, already half turned to head up the street, that he was not.

  “Why?” I said. It was inconceivable to me that we would not do this. We always did.

  “I’m tired of looking at other people’s cars.”

  He walked toward the drugstore. After a moment I followed. When he ordered coffee he and Mr. Franks did their joke but my father laughed afterward, too loudly.

  The next Saturday I went to go find him in the kitchen at ten o’clock and he wasn’t there. I looked through the window and saw him in the yard, raking leaves. I waited a few minutes but it looked like he was going to be a while over it and so in the end I went back to my room and read a book.

  Over the next few years we’d occasionally find ourselves heading into town together on a Saturday, occasionally covering much of the same ground, but we never really took that walk again. When you’re a kid so much changes, all the time, that it’s hard to tell what’s important and what’s not. It was a decade before I came to regret the loss of the walks we did not take, and to wonder why they had stopped.

  In your twenties you think you know every damned thing—and are furthermore prone to grand gestures. So I went back home one weekend and tried to get my father to go on the walk again. At first he didn’t appear to remember what I was talking about, but finally I got him out of the house.

  At the pace of two adults, it only took ten minutes. Walter Azara’s lot had become a discount carpet warehouse. At the drugstore—now a Starbucks, naturally—I gave a great big smile and asked for my coffee hot and wet. And both the barista and my dad looked at me as if I was retarded.

  I called him, in the end. We spoke for ten minutes, and, as such conversations go, it was fine. Afterward I walked out to the burger hut on Kelly, bought the last quarter pounder out of Dodge, walked back with it. Then I watched more television until I fell asleep.

  What would we do without TV? Live, I guess. And sometimes you’re just not in the mood for it.

  I woke with a start, as if someone had slapped me hard across the face. It took me a couple of seconds to realize a phone was ringing.

  The sound rang out again, a harsh, jangling noise, and I realized it was the phone next to the bed. I levered myself up, groping for the handset. The room was dark but for a glow from the television screen and red numerals on the bedside clock which told me it was one-fifteen. It was raining hard on the roof, and the wind was up.

  “Yes,” I croaked, into the phone. “Who is this?”

  “You’re making a mistake,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Ellen?” I said, but I already knew it was not. This voice was harder, deep with cigarettes and command.

  “Bad things have already happened,” it said. “If you get involved in matters that aren’t your problem, it will get worse.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “No one you know,” she said, and laughed, rich and throaty. Then the line went dead.

  CHAPTER 19

  There was no sign of life in the motel office but I kept banging on the door anyway—crowding in close to get out of the rain. After a few minutes a light came on in the back and Marie came into view, wrapping a gown around herself. She opened the inside door and peered up at me through the screen.

  “What is it?” Her voice was slurred, befuddled with sleep. Her hair was sticking up in back. “Isn’t it late?”

  “Someone just phoned my room,” I said. “Is there any way of finding their number from your switchboard?”

  “Well, no,” she said, confused. “They’ve all got direct lines. From”—she yawned massively, before continuing—“when you could rent them by the month.”

  “How would someone find out the number?”

  “It’s not hard,” she said. She had the weighed-down look of someone who’d assisted the onset of sleep with either a pill or a sizable glass of something with a kick to it. “It’s listed in the room. Don’t you know who it was called you?”

  “Sorry to disturb you,” I said.

  She blinked owlishly, turned around, and trudged away into the gloom.

  When I was back in my room I checked and, sure enough, found the direct line handwri
tten at the bottom of the framed list of things that you weren’t allowed to do. That ought to have made things easier, but when I reached the operator I was told the call was from an unlisted number.

  I’d been barely awake during the conversation, and found it difficult to recall the exact words, but I had no problem remembering what had been said. It struck me, too, that whoever had called had been confident I would be there. Since I’d been in Black Ridge I had not mentioned the name of where I was staying to anyone—not even Ellen. Also, though it was late, it was not so very late. I could have been elsewhere. Had the caller just assumed I was at home, or. . .

  I went back outside. The wind had grown stronger, and was very cold. A plastic bag zigzagged suddenly across the parking lot, as if jerked through the air by an angry hand, momentarily wrapping itself around the solitary lamp before being sucked back into the trees. It felt as if there was no other living human within miles, and I was alone, just outside a town which was itself a thin veneer upon a sheet of tilted and jagged rock. There were three other vehicles in the lot, but I could not feel the presence of any of these people. The middle of the night makes you feel like you’re peeking backstage even if you’ve not just been woken by a strange phone call. Everything seemed too still, the objects of man standing out unnaturally against the surroundings.

  Then, on the far side of the road, I thought I saw something move. A paler patch, just in front of the trees, or a little way inside them.

  I remained absolutely still, staring until my eyes started to sparkle, and saw nothing more. Just the plastic bag, perhaps, drifting back to earth?

  I walked slowly across the road, feeling the skin on the back of my neck tighten. I headed over the mud on the other side, and into the bushes, feeling cold twigs scrape across my jeans. I trod on something that cracked, loud in the silence.

  When I got into the trees I stopped.

  There was a damp, rich odor, like water in which flowers have been left too long. Then I saw it.

  I don’t know what it was, but something moved, back in the trees, like a shadow.

  It wasn’t tall enough to be a man, at least not one standing upright. Some part of my brain threw up a flag of animal fear, but I don’t think it was an animal I’d seen, either.

  Then I saw it again—it or something else—ten yards to the right. A paler movement this time, as if moonlight had fallen upon shifting mist. Maybe that’s all it was.

  “Who’s there?”

  I hadn’t intended to speak, and my voice didn’t sound great. It rebounded weakly against tree trunks and silence and fell to the ground.

  A second later I heard a very distant shout, or a cry. It could have come from behind me, from back in town, but I didn’t think so. It sounded like it came from deep in the woods.

  I stood my ground for another couple of minutes, and saw and heard nothing more. So I slowly backed away, and out of the trees.

  When I got back to the road I saw the plastic bag, lying forty yards away. It had come back down to earth, after all, but nowhere near where I’d first thought I’d seen something.

  I went back inside my motel room and locked the door and lay awake on my back for what felt like a long time, tensed against the phone ringing again. It did not. The only sound was that of the wind and rain, and of branches once again scratching against the shingles on the back of my room.

  As I was driving out of the lot early the following morning, my cell buzzed. When I saw who it was I pulled over and took the call.

  “Tell me you’re coming back today,” Becki said, without waiting for me to speak.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “John, it would be real good if you did.”

  “You’re not that busy, surely? And Eduardo or one of the others can make the pizzas if—”

  “The pizzas are not the problem,” she said dismally. “It’s my fucking boyfriend.”

  “What’s he done now?”

  “Fucked up. Is what he’s done. He’s fucked up.”

  She sounded close to hysteria, something so hard to imagine in her that I started listening properly. “I thought it got sorted out.”

  “So did I. He just . . . went about it in a really dumb way.”

  “Went about what?”

  “He subcontracted. Gave some of the stuff to some guys to try to shift it quicker.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Did he tell you he was going to do this?”

  “Yes. And I told him it was a dumb idea and he did it anyway. He’s been . . . he’s been dipping into the product a little too much. He’s really not thinking straight and he’s getting kind of hard to deal with.”

  “And these guys stole it?”

  “No. They’re actual friends of ours, not assholes like Rick and Doug. But they tried to sell a couple wraps to the wrong guys outside a gay bar in Portland, who turned out to be fucking Street Crimes Unit, i.e., cops, and so they got the shit kicked out of them. And lost the drugs.”

  “How much?”

  “About four thousand worth. And the guys who lent the money are beginning to get, they’re . . . it’s not good, John. I really wish you were going to be back today. I’m getting scared. I’d go to Dad but he’s always had a huge fucking downer on drugs. And on Kyle, too. There’s a ninety-nine percent chance Dad would just turn him straight over to the cops.”

  “Are the drug guys leaning on Kyle, too?”

  “Like, seriously. They called last night and Kyle’s too freaked to tell them the stuff’s actually gone, so instead he says he just needs another couple days to close it out. And now he’s really panicking. He’s . . . he’s losing it, John. At three o’clock this morning I was having to explain to him how he couldn’t go make a complaint against the Street Crimes Unit, for stealing his drugs. I swear to God.”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. It was too late for her to dump Kyle and walk fast in some other direction. Too late for me to state the obvious, which was that his suppliers would have a deal with the Portland police, and Becki and Kyle’s friends got rolled because they were not part of this arrangement. Too late to explain to Kyle that his suppliers would have been circling him from day one, biding their time. You don’t give a pile of drugs to some numb-nut in the hope of him selling it for you, unless you have a Plan B in place—and a Plan B that might, in fact, have been Plan A all along.

  Then I realized Becki was being ominously silent, and my heart sank further. “What else?” I said.

  “Kyle always told me they didn’t know where we live. But my neighbor told me she’s seen a couple of black guys watching our place. Twice. They . . . they so do know where we live.”

  “You know for sure it was them?”

  “Who the fuck else? What am I going to do, John?”

  “Text me your bank account details.”

  “What?”

  “Do it now. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just do it, Becki.”

  I closed the phone and drove out onto the road.

  Probably I could have gotten rid of her more gracefully, but I wanted to see whether I had got something right.

  There was only one person in whose problems I could be said to be getting involved (bar Becki’s, of course), and that was Ellen. Yesterday I’d met with her and we’d spoken for nearly an hour. If someone actually was spying on her in the way she claimed, that meeting could have provided enough provocation for the Robertson dynasty to get involved. It would not have been hard for that person to follow me to where I was staying, or to determine the direct line of my room.

  Cory had a sister.

  I thought it was probably Brooke Robertson who had left the original message on my cell phone, and then called the motel room in the middle of the night.

  I was going to go find if this was true, and explain to her—and anyone else who needed to hear it—that threatening me was not a good idea.

  On a section of road three miles short of the turn, I r
an into traffic.

  At first it was light but after half a mile it slowed to a crawl, and then a standstill for ten minutes.

  I used the time to make a phone call but after that quickly started to get frustrated, and was considering trying to U-turn and find some other way around when the traffic started to move again for no apparent reason. I didn’t notice a flashing light behind me until the approaching police motorcycle banged his horn at me to get out of the way. I pulled as far to the right as I could to let him pass—hampered by the wall of rock only a couple of feet away—and suddenly realized why the cop was trying to get by. Moments later I passed the cause of the snarl-up, and I nearly rammed into the car in front of me.

  I saw a sports car twisted against the side of the road, and the body of Ellen Robertson being cut from it.

  CHAPTER 20

  They took her to the county hospital, Hope Memorial. I knew it well, having once fretted in a room there while Scott had stitches put in a cut just below his knee, courtesy of a rogue nail sticking up out of the jetty over the lake—an event which had found me that evening crawling the entire length of said jetty on my own hands and knees, with a hammer, making damned sure it wasn’t going to happen again. I remembered sitting in the waiting room with a folded cloth held tightly against Scott’s leg, listening to my pale son describing how he’d stared down into the cut immediately after feeling the sensation of nail carving through flesh, seen it “empty,” and then watched as blood flooded in from the surrounding tissue to fill the gash until it dripped out onto the jetty. I remember smiling and nodding reassuringly while feeling absolutely certain I was going to throw up—in a way I never had when confronted with far, far worse things while in uniform.