Nowhere Fast (A Mercy Watts Short) (2 page)

“Do you mind if I take this and make a copy?”

“Keep it. We have a bunch,” Carol said.

“I’ve heard the basics on the news, but can you tell me what happened? She left a note?”

Carol sat silent. She crossed her arms and looked at the ceiling. She’d told the story too many times. Carl cleared his throat and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together.

Charley had run away six weeks ago on October 6
^th
. She’d said she was going to spend the night at her friend Rachel’s house. It turned out that Rachel’s parents were out of town and thought Rachel was staying at Charley’s. The next morning Rachel’s parents came home to find a note and their emergency cash gone. The police had the note, but it was the usual teen angst stuff.
You don’t understand me. You don’t really love me. You won’t let me have any fun.

In three days, Rachel was back, dirty and hungry. Two hundred dollars didn’t go very far. They’d gone to a friend of a friend of a friend named Terry Obermark. He was a twenty-eight-year-old convicted drug dealer. Rachel claimed they didn’t know that, but on the other hand, she tested positive for marijuana, ecstasy, and quaaludes. Terry lived in a dump with no food and rats the size of toaster ovens. When the money ran out, Rachel decided that home wasn’t such a raw deal and came back. She claimed that Charley said, “Screw that!” and stayed. The police searched Terry’s apartment and found blood, but it turned out not to be Charley’s. Terry said she left on her own and a witness confirmed. A neighbor saw Charley leave the apartment building at ten o’clock in the morning, an hour after Rachel left. She was alone. Terry was questioned and held for drug possession with intent to sell and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He made bail in three hours and would probably plead out on reduced charges. There was no evidence that he did anything to Charley. Police weren’t optimistic about Charley’s case. The leads had dried up. They’d tried everything and were still looking, but it wasn’t like she was a two-year-old snatched from the supermarket. In a world where thirteen-year-olds are charged as adults, a lot of people thought she knew what she was doing. In my opinion, those were people who didn’t remember being thirteen.

“How was Charley doing before she left? Problems at school? Boys? That kinda thing?” I asked.

Carol stood up, walked to a window, and lit a cigarette. I caught a flash of disapproval from Carl. He didn’t say anything with company present and all. My kinda guy.

“She was doing all right,” said Carol. “Not great. Not terrible. I never thought she’d run away.”

“How were her grades?”

“B’s and C’s. She could do better. Her IQ is off the charts.”

“Boyfriend?”

“She’s thirteen.”

I had my first boyfriend at thirteen, but it didn’t seem like a good time to mention it.

“Can I see her room?”

Carol took me down a plain, undecorated hall to Charley’s room. It looked like a million other girl’s bedrooms. There were posters of the latest boy bands taped on white walls. The floor had clothes strewn about. Carol had resisted any motherly urge to clean. It remained a messy monument to her daughter.

Carol excused herself and I started going through drawers. I wasn’t neat about it, since they were a friggin mess already. The drawers and closet revealed nothing. Of course, it’d been searched by the cops at least once. In Charley’s nightstand, I found some of her notebooks. Scribbled on them were assortments of “I loves”:
I love Jamie
.
I love Chris
and more. Charley had written in her best cursive,
Mrs. Sean MacIntyre
. Charley had a plan for the future. Inside the notebooks were the normal homework assignments I’d expect.

While I flipped through Charley’s school stuff, I noticed someone watching from the room across the hall. He was discreet, but a teenage boy was checking me out. My boyfriend, Pete, says that teenaged boys will fantasize about any woman under forty, so I wasn’t flattered.

He looked away when Carol came back. When we left the room, I caught him watching me again. It wasn’t sexual interest, more like fear and discomfort. Maybe I was a reminder that his little sister was missing, but I wasn’t getting a sad vibe off of him.

“Carol,” I said. “Who was that back by Charley’s room?”

“That’s my son, Kevin, Charley’s older brother.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. He’s very upset.”

He didn’t seem upset to me and, frankly, if my daughter was missing I wouldn’t care who got upset. Of course, I didn’t care about that much normally.

Charley’s father was at work. With no more questions to ask, I headed out with names and addresses of Charley’s friends. I drove down the block and parked to think things over. Carol didn’t want me to talk to Kevin, but I wasn’t big on obeying parents. Fifteen wasn’t five. I’d noticed that grandparents tend to be more reasonable when it comes to kids, so I found Carl’s number that Aunt Miriam gave me and I called. Carl readily agreed to send out Kevin to talk to me. He didn’t mention Carol, but I could tell he thought Carol was worrying about the wrong kid.

My phone rang and it was Pete, yawning as usual.

“Can I sleep at your place again?” he asked.

“Of course. Bring wine.”

“To help me sleep?”

“You don’t need help. I’ve seen you sleeping in the ambulance bay. I might need it, though.”

“Are you helping your dad again?”

“Sort of. Do you think I could get a fifteen-year-old boy to tell me something he wouldn’t tell the cops or his parents?”

“What are you wearing?

“Seriously?” I asked.

“Do you want my help or not?”

“I’m wearing sweats.”

“Loose or tight?”

“Medium.”

“Lower the hoodie zipper and hoist up those breasts and he’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“So it’s all about the boobs, is it? What about my brain? My sparkling wit?”

“They’re harder to see.”

I hissed, but did as Pete suggested. He knew boobs opened doors, whether I liked it or not. I hung up when I saw Kevin come walking down the street toward my truck.

I got out and said, “Hi Kevin. I need to talk to you about your sister.”
“I don’t know anything.”

“I think you do.”

“Think whatever you want. I gotta go.” He snuck a peek at my cleavage and walked away.

I had to get him to talk to me. I would’ve expected him to be friendlier, if only to use me as eye candy. But he wasn’t playing, so he definitely knew something. If I could get him to come back, I had him. If I couldn’t, he’d never tell me anything.

I called out the only thing I could think of. “I won’t tell them what you did!”

Kevin turned and said with surprising fire, “I didn’t do anything.”

I smiled. Oh, he did something. Probably a lot of somethings. He was fifteen and that age has plenty to hide. “I won’t tell them.”

Kevin didn’t say anything for a minute and I thought I was plenty close.

He sneered at me. “You think you’re pretty cool, huh?”

Well, maybe not that close.

“I won’t tell them,” I said.

“Stop saying that.” With that, he walked back to me.
Score
.

“Whatever you want me to say? I’ll say it. I want to find your sister.”

He snorted.

“You don’t want to find her?”

He shrugged.

“Do you know where she is?”

“No, I don’t,” he said in a tired voice.

“What you tell me is just between the two of us. I won’t tell a soul.”

He walked back up to the house and sat on the steps. I followed and sat beside him, hoping Carol wouldn’t look out and notice us. He looked at my charm necklace, delightfully tucked between my breasts, an attention-getter if there ever was one. Kevin started to blush. He fought it. The harder he fought, the redder he got.

“So you wanna tell me?”

“About what?”

“Your sister.”

“I’m not sick or anything.”

“Who said you were?”

“Nobody. But I’m not, really.”

“I believe you.”

“Sometimes me and Corey get on my computer and look at stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Pictures of girls.”

“Porn?”

“Yeah. But I mean lots of guys do it.”

I laughed and leaned back. “Don’t I know it.”

He smiled and looked at my necklace. “Charley has a necklace like yours.”

“Does she? Is it her favorite?”

“She never takes it off.”

“Have you seen her necklace somewhere?”

He fidgeted with the hem of his tee shirt. “Yeah.”

“When did you see it?”

“Corey saw it first. Then I kind of hit him.”

“You hit Corey?”

“Just in the arm. He wasn’t mad. Not a lot.”

“Why’d you hit Corey?”

Kevin stood up and looked away from me, crossing his arms. “He said he saw her on the computer. I thought he was lying.”

“Was he lying?”

“No.”

“Where did he see her? What site?”

“I don’t know. He had it saved to his favorite places, but he deleted it. His mom checks his computer and he was afraid she’d see.”

“Did you see Charley?”

“Yeah, I went over to his house. I told you he wasn’t mad.”

“And you saw Charley on a porn site.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure it was her?”

“She looked different, but it was her. She had on her necklace. That’s how Corey recognized her.”

“You can’t remember the site name? Anything would help.”

“It was a girl’s name, but I never heard it before.”

“Do you think that Corey might remember it?”

“He tried to. We thought we might call the tip line or something. They said it was anonymous.”

“It is and that was a good idea. Are you going to see Corey tonight?”

“Yeah, but I’m supposed to be staying home.” He gave me a quick look to see if I caught his meaning. I did.

“We never had this conversation.” I pulled my father’s card out of my purse. I wrote my email and my cell phone number on it. “If you or Corey remember anything else, call or text me.”

On the drive home, I thought about what makes a girl run away in the first place and what makes her stay away when it gets rough. Abuse was number one and drug use was number two. In the back of my mind was the uncomfortable thought that she had been looking for trouble and found it. I remembered three different kinds of kids when I was that age, each a total pain in the ass. Being a cop’s daughter, I was the wary kind. From early childhood, I was suspicious of strangers and considered everybody a possible bad guy. I was the bane of child molesters everywhere. There was no way I’d have been lured off by the promise of a puppy or chocolate. God help you if you tried to take me by force. My friends, on the other hand, weren’t a bit like me. They were the hearts-and-flowers types. My best friend Ellen and I have been friends since the second grade. She had no concept of evil, still doesn’t. She looked at the nightly news like it was a bad fairy tale and that stuff didn’t really happen. Her little girls, ages two and four, are just the same. They have unicorn wallpaper.

The third kind was as far from my nature as the second. These kids weren’t looking for trouble; they were hot on the trail. I’ve had friends like that, but they never lasted long. I couldn’t stand the stupidity. “Hey, let’s ride our bikes over that cliff and see what happens.”
 
They were the first to smoke, drink, and take drugs. I’m not saying I didn’t do those things, but I’ve never drank anything that smelled like it was poured out of a gas can. Those kids were extreme. They couldn’t just have a beer. They had to have malt liquor, followed by an LSD chaser with their car straddling the railroad tracks. Charley might be one of those. If we got her back, no telling what shape she’d be in.

When I walked in my front door, the smell of expensive cologne, vomit, and antiseptic wafted around the apartment like a ghost. That and the gentle snores coming from the bedroom told me Pete had gotten there before me. We’d been together for seven months by then and he’d taken to sleeping at my place quite a bit. My apartment was closer to the hospital than his and my fridge has been known to have food in it.