No Such Creature (12 page)

ELEVEN

S
ABRINA SAT IN FRONT
while Owen drove and Max took his siesta in the back bedroom. It was unlawful to be out of the seats while the vehicle was travelling down a highway at sixty miles an hour, but it was useless to try and talk Max out of it. The afternoon nap, according to Max, was just one of many things he and the great Winston Churchill had in common.

The desert rolled by on either side. They passed the turn-off to Laughlin, and the huge letter C that marked the town of Chloride. They sailed by Kingman, and then it was miles and miles of cactus.

“They look fake,” Sabrina said. “They look just like the plastic ones, except they’re all different sizes.”

The temperature gauge said it was 104 Fahrenheit outside; the air conditioner was working overtime. Owen became acutely aware of the scent Sabrina was wearing, something incomparably fresh and clean that increased his desire to bury his face in her graceful neck.

“Those are the Hualapai Mountains,” he said, just for something to say.

“So that’s what the Hualapai Mountains look like.”

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you.”

“Why, yes, Owen. I am.”

He tried to find a music station that wasn’t playing country, and finally gave up. Sabrina pulled out an iPod with an FM attachment, so for the next stretch they listened to Dido.

“I like her,” Sabrina said. “She’s a bitch, but vulnerable—like me, I guess.”

“Don’t say that.” Owen pulled out to pass a spavined Buick that was belching black smoke. “You may be vulnerable, but—”

“Tell me something, Owen.” She turned her whole body round to face him. “What’s a grown boy like you doing travelling around the desert for the summer with his uncle?”

Owen smiled and pulled back into the slow lane. “Pretty weird, huh?”

“Tell me, though. Isn’t he too old to be your uncle?”

“He’s my great-uncle. But really he’s more like my stepdad.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“It’s kind of like what you went through, only I was younger. I was ten.” Owen told her the story of the car crash, and his brush with foster care.

“God,” Sabrina said. “I don’t think I would have recovered from something like that.”

“It turned out Max was the only relative I had. When he heard about my situation, he applied for guardianship and I’ve been with him ever since.”

“Pretty eccentric guy.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”

“Well, if he loves my dad, he’s got to be a crook. Made you part of the life, right?”

Owen looked at her, her green eyes bright, daring him to admit it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. You’re forgetting how I grew up.” She touched his knee, warm palm through denim, quickly gone. “It’s okay. You don’t have to pretend around me. You do these, uh, road trips every year?”

“This is the last one. I mean, I like to see the country and all—it’s been a real education—but I’d like to spend at least one summer just hanging out.”

“Listen, don’t you have a girlfriend back in New York? She must hate it when you take off like this.”

“No girlfriend. Not at the moment. What about you? You said Bill was not a boyfriend.”

“Nope. Haven’t had one of those in years, and I don’t want one. Boys are just too … too everything. Personally, I find females a lot easier to take. Which is why I’m a total lesbian.”

“Get outta here,” Owen said. “You are not.”

“How the hell would you know?” A sudden deep furrow between her eyebrows hinted at an as yet unexpressed temper.

“Because there’s nothing about you that says lesbian. Everything about you says guys, guys, guys.”

“Oh, really. Here you are driving across country in a trailer with an old man who’s not your father, you want to be onstage, and you’ve got no girlfriend. Do you ever have just the tiniest suspicion that you might be gay?”

“No, actually, I don’t.”

“Uh-huh. And tell me how exactly it is you know you’re not gay?”

“Very simple.” Owen sat up straight and looked out at the highway. He cleared his throat, thinking how best to put this. Finally he said, “I know I’m not gay, Sabrina, and I’ll tell you exactly why: if you were to disappear right now, this instant—if I was to never see you again for the rest of my life, never hear from you, never again have any contact with you whatsoever—no matter how many girls—women—I might meet and be friends with over the years, no matter how pretty they might be, how smart or how sexy, I will never, ever forget how you look in that red tank top right now.”

Sabrina looked down and shook her head slowly from side to side, but Owen could see the dimple of a smile in her cheek.

“I’m not exaggerating, Sabrina. You and your red tank top are in my head for all eternity.”

“And that’s how you know you’re not gay.”

“That’s how I know I’m not gay.”

“Well,” Sabrina said, “despite how I may or may not look to you, I personally find women a whole lot more attractive than men. Men are such lunks, so completely insensitive. All they want to do is drink beer and watch sports. And let me tell you, despite what the movies might have you believe, they are perfectly terrible in bed.”

“And how’d old Preacher Bill take the lesbian news? Bible-thumpers aren’t usually too forgiving when it comes to loving your gay neighbour.”

“I never discussed my sexual preferences with Bill.”

“Good choice. Not worth getting stoned to death.”

“The reason I didn’t tell him was because he was so obsessed with me, and obsession just gets worse the more obstacles you put in the way—or didn’t you ever notice that?”

“I have to tell you the honest truth,” he said.

“What’s the honest truth, Owen?”

“I’ve always had a real soft spot for lesbians.”

“Yes, sir,” Sabrina said. “I bet you have.”

Bill Bullard stood in the dining room of his compact little bungalow and read the note for the fourteenth time.

Dear Bill
,

I’m sorry to leave you like this, especially with such a nasty bump on your head, but it’s time for me to go. You’ve been kind, but you’re just too nuts about me, too nuts in general, and too fond of hitting people
.

Please don’t try to find me. Let’s just remember the good times, okay?

I wish you nothing but the best,

Sabrina

Bill set the note down on the dining room table. He was a security man, for Pete’s sake, he carried a gun, he was good at hitting people, he used to be a cop. In short, he wasn’t supposed to cry. But he wanted to, he wanted to bawl like a baby. He rubbed a hand over his scalp and felt the gauze taped around his skull. In the mirror he didn’t look as bad as he felt. The bandage sat at an almost jaunty angle, and it made his eyes look bigger and more sensitive. Noble even. The total effect was kind of war veteran, though he had never been in the armed forces.

Feeling dizzy, he went over to his blue leather couch and lay down, the TV remote digging into his back until he pulled it out and tossed it onto a matching blue leather armchair. His head throbbed and a wave of nausea travelled up to his throat; the room, blue and white as a china plate, spun around him until the white bits stretched and thinned into cirrus. Lying on his back provided no comfort. He turned, ever so slowly, onto his side and curled up with his hands pressed between his knees like a child.

That reminded him to pray. He hoped that Jesus would forgive his not getting onto his knees in his current state. He wanted to avoid the likely blasphemy of vomiting in mid-prayer.

“Oh, Jesus, who suffered for my sins and the sins of mankind and who bought with your blood our everlasting redemption and salvation, I beg you, please bring Sabrina back unto me. Please bring her back, and I will do anything, anything at all, you may see fit to demand of your lowliest, most miserable servant.”

Servant.

He was so tired of being a servant. Fifteen years a cop, five of those a detective with the LVPD, and he was still a servant. He’d been working for Baxter Secure Solutions for four years now, making hardly more than half what he had earned as a detective. Between alimony and child support for kids he got to see twice a year, his financial future filled him with dread.

His plan had been to stay a cop for twenty years, then take his pension and open a private business—possibly as a PI, possibly in security—and hire a bunch of guys to do the actual dirty work. But the chief and the mayor had apparently had different plans for him. They didn’t like his methods, even though his methods got results—great results, in fact.

There is an essential truth about working Robbery: you can’t be a nice guy. Nice guyism is a definite no-no. You work Robbery, you’re trucking with scum from daybreak to nightfall. Yes, there are victims to deal with, and yes, they are upset, but once you’ve extracted descriptions of the stolen items and ruled out insurance fraud, an investigator doesn’t have a lot to do with the victims. In Homicide you have to hold hands, you have to walk on eggs, you have to be half social worker. Not in Robbery.

Bill Bullard modelled his detective work after the foreign policy of the presidents he loved, Reagan, Bush I and the much-misunderstood, much-maligned George Bush II. You are merciless with your enemies, generous to your allies, and if you have to befriend a bad guy to get a worse guy, you do it. And so he had developed a stable of very dependable, very helpful hard cases as his CIs. You didn’t want to have dinner with them, you didn’t necessarily want them in your home, but you did want them on your side when it came to catching bigger fish. That entailed ignoring a lot of crimes not directly relevant to your investigation. You don’t nail the guy for what you have on him—you get him to give you information on other, badder asses, guys on whom you had nothing, nada, zip.

Thus it was that Bill had cultivated certain relationships that in the cold light of civilian life looked pretty questionable. In the course of trying to bring down Sammy Gibbons—an evil bastard who had been running a team of kids who robbed patrons of ATMs—he had relied on one Artie Doyle, known as Conan, who had a history of rape, robbery and aggravated assault. When it came out in court that he had let Conan get away with numerous frightening activities in order to bring down Gibbons, not only did the case against Gibbons go up in smoke, but Bill lost his job.

Five years later he still couldn’t believe it. Conan was not that bad an actor, not compared to Gibbons, but this is the justice system we are stuck with—a system that sees fit to dispense with the services of its finest investigators.

Oh, the blackness of the pit into which he tumbled after that! Looking back, it was amazing to Bill that he survived it. Then his wife had left him—for weeks he had stayed in his house with the shades pulled, hardly getting out of bed, barely able to eat. No one came knocking on his door to see if he was all right, and several guys from work wouldn’t even return his calls.

If daytime television had been any better, he might still be lying in bed to this day, but finally Oprah and Dr. Phil just drove him out of the house. He began to look for things to do, physical things, like painting his porch and repairing the picket fence that ran around the perimeter of his property.

But the fence was hardly worth painting, the way it kept tilting closer and closer to the ground. The gate was totally unusable and had to remain open at all times as an additional prop. So he set about repairing the thing—a big mistake, since he’d never worked on a fence before and was unprepared for certain difficulties. Just removing the old fence posts proved a formidable task, involving the digging of holes even bigger than the concrete base of the posts. Then you had to haul them out of there.

The result was he had to dig all new postholes, and that proved all but impossible, the desert soil was so rocky. One day he was toiling away at this in ninety-degree heat, blinded by sweat and rage, when a cheerful voice said from behind, “Looks like you’ve got kind of a tough job there.”

Bill rubbed the sweat from his eyes and looked at the bleary image before him: a diminutive man in a short-sleeved shirt and necktie wearing the kind of glasses that had gone out of style sometime in the sixties.

“Ronnie Deist,” he said, pointing to the east. “I live half a block up.”

Bill introduced himself, leaning on his posthole digger.

“I could help you with that. I used to be a contractor and I still have the tools.”

“Oh, yeah? And how much would that cost?”

“Nothing,” Deist said. “I’m a neighbour. I’d be happy to help.”

“Well, if you know how to dig a posthole and set a fence, I could sure use you.”

First Deist told him where to rent a gas-powered posthole digger. Bill hadn’t even realized such things existed. When he got back from the rental place, Deist had returned dressed in serious contractor’s clothes and with a pickup full of tools. They spent the rest of that morning pulling out the old posts using the truck, and then Deist produced a picnic hamper packed with sandwiches and lemonade.

“Man, you come prepared, don’t you?” Bill said.

“Oh, that’s my wife. She’s one of those people who always makes sure other people eat. I’d probably forget lunch myself, or grab a McDonald’s or something. I’m not as smart as she is.”

Bill found he simultaneously really liked Deist and didn’t trust him. He was the most cheerfully self-denigrating person he had ever met. Also the most relentlessly happy. Deist whistled, he told dumb jokes, he commented on anything that passed by, always in a positive way. As they sat in the shade eating turkey sandwiches, he praised Bill’s choice of house and location, admired Bill’s strength in how he handled the posts. You couldn’t get him to say a bad word about anybody—the Congress, the mayor, you name it, he had a kind word for them all.