Stone Rain (16 page)

“Hmm,” I said.

“What?” Angie asked.

“Well, I could ask some questions in Canborough on my way to Groverton.”

“That’s my dad,” said Angie.

I MADE MYSELF
a mental list of things to do.

First, I wanted to know what made Trixie run, what she was mixed up in, who’d killed Martin Benson. I thought maybe, if I could get the answers to some of those questions, it might mitigate the damage caused by my getting mixed up in this whole mess in the first place.

Second, I wanted to get my job back, and get Sarah out of Home! She was about to have her first day with Frieda. I could just imagine Sarah’s reaction when Frieda passed over to her what I’d managed to get done so far on the linoleum story.

And finally, I had to repair things between Sarah and me. I thought that if I could accomplish the other things on my list, this last and most important thing on it would fall into place.

A trip to Canborough and Groverton, I hoped, might help me accomplish a few of my goals.

Once Sarah had left for work, I put in a call to a local car rental agency and reserved a sedan. I told them I’d probably need it a couple of days. I just didn’t know whether one day out of the city would be enough to do everything I might need to do, so I grabbed an overnight bag from the closet and tossed it onto the bed. I had saved packing until Sarah was gone so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about what I might be up to, assuming, of course, that she would even have asked me. Even though we’d slept in the same bed the night before, and been in the kitchen at the same time grabbing some breakfast, we had not spoken.

I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, seeing me pack a bag. She might think I wasn’t coming back. No sense getting her hopes up.

I tossed a couple of pairs of socks and boxers into the case. I must have been in the bathroom, my head full of the sounds of brush scrubbing teeth, when Sarah returned to the house and came upstairs.

She was standing in the bedroom, staring at the open case on the bed, when I came out of the bathroom. She looked at me, bewildered.

“I forgot my watch,” she said.

“You won’t need it in the home section,” I said, trying to sound apologetic. “Deadlines are somewhat ethereal. Although Frieda’s fairly rigid about cookie time. You won’t want to miss that.”

Her eyes went back to the overnight bag. “You’re going away?”

“Uh,” I said. “I was just throwing in a few things—”

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Sarah said.

“Huh?”

“I mean, maybe we do need a bit of time. Apart, I mean.”

“You see, I was actually—”

“Where are you going to stay? Are you going to go back up to your father’s place? He might be happy to see you. You know, spend some time without all that other stuff hanging over you.”

“Uh, no, I’m not going to see him.”

“I can’t imagine Lawrence Jones would let you move in with him,” Sarah said softly. “Even for the short term.”

“No, I don’t imagine he would,” I said, feeling a growing emptiness. My detective friend Lawrence, he liked his world well ordered. I would be a piece of paper not lining up with the edge of his desk.

“Have you told the kids?” Sarah asked.

“The thing is, Sarah,” I said, “I wasn’t actually leaving. I was just figuring to be away overnight, maybe two nights at the most, sorting out some things. But not actually leaving. But now maybe I should get a bigger suitcase, take a few extra things, if that’s what you’d like.”

She started to speak, stopped, opened her mouth again, closed it. Finally, “I just figured, when I saw you packing…”

I looked into Sarah’s eyes and said, “I would never leave you.” I paused. “Unless you didn’t want me here.”

Sarah broke eye contact, saw her watch on the bedside table. She went over, picked it up, slipped it over her wrist, concentrating on the task, making more out of it than she needed to. But it only takes so long to put on a watch. Finally she said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to try to figure out what’s going on. I’m heading to Canborough, and then on to some place called Groverton.”

“So you’re helping Trixie,” she said quietly.

“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. All I want to do now is find out the truth. I’ve been suspended from work, handcuffed next to a corpse, and implicated in a murder. And”—I shrugged—“now that I don’t have a job to go to, it’s important to keep busy.”

She still wouldn’t look at me. “I used to laugh when the suggestion of you having an affair came up. The idea that someone like you, someone as nervous as you, someone whose emotions and anxieties are so close to the surface, could pull it off.” She took a tissue from the box next to her bed and appeared to be dabbing at her eyes. “Now, I don’t know anymore.”

“The lipstick,” I said.

Sarah froze, said nothing.

I couldn’t tell her that I’d already explained this to Angie. “It was when I was handcuffed,” I said. “Trixie gave me a kiss goodbye, before she ran off, with my car, leaving me there to be found by you. Maybe she thought it was the least she could do for the trouble she’d caused me.”

I knew I wasn’t being totally honest here, at least not about how I had perceived Trixie’s kiss. It had seemed like more, on her part, than a simple kiss of apology, or goodbye.

And I didn’t quite know what to make of that.

“Everything started to go wrong when you decided we should move to Oakwood,” Sarah said. “You got into that trouble, you met Trixie. If you’d never moved us out there, you never would have met her. And you wouldn’t be in this mess you’re in now, and I wouldn’t be heading in to my first day in the home section, having been humiliated in front of the entire newsroom.”

There was that.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see how you might put it together that way. But I need to follow this through now. I can’t just sit here.”

She turned around, her eyes red, her makeup smeared. “I think I liked it better when you were home, writing your books.”

I nodded. “It’s when I’m allowed to go out into the world that I start getting into trouble,” I conceded. I thought maybe she would laugh at that, but there was nothing. I took a breath, and asked, “Do you want me to pack a bigger bag?”

Sarah bit her lip, looked out the window. She lowered her head, glanced at her watch, and said, “I’m going to be late for work.” She sniffed. “One doesn’t like to be late the first day of a new job.” She had to move right by me to get out of the room, and as she passed she reached out and touched my arm for just a moment. “Be careful,” she said.

I listened to her go down the stairs and out the door, then, feeling almost dizzy and with a lump in my throat, dropped onto the edge of the bed. She hadn’t told me to pack a bigger bag, but she hadn’t told me not to. I had to make this right. I had to climb back out of this hole, to—

The phone rang.

I glanced at the digital readout, didn’t recognize the number, and picked up. “Hello?”

“Mr. Walker? Zack Walker?”

I thought I knew the voice, but wasn’t sure. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry for calling you at home, but when I called the
Metropolitan
, they said you were on a leave or something. But there was only one Z. Walker in the phone book, so I took a shot.”

“Who’s this?”

“Brian Sandler. From the city health department.”

Sandler? I suddenly felt my guard go up. The last time we’d spoken, he’d implied any number of threats. “What is it?”

“I—I need to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“I think I may have crossed some sort of line when I was talking to you yesterday. I think you might have taken what I said as a threat.”

I wondered what sort of game he was playing here. “Okay,” I said.

“Look, I think I’m ready to talk. I need to tell someone what’s going on.”

“Talk about what? What’s going on?”

“I can’t talk to you about it on the phone. Could you meet me someplace?”

I shoved a pair of rolled-up socks that I’d tossed onto the bed into my bag. “I’m heading out of town for a day or two,” I said.

“When are you leaving?”

“Pretty soon.”

“I could meet you in the next hour. You know Bayside Park?”

“Sure,” I said. I hadn’t even picked up my rental car yet. I might have to grab a cab if I was going to meet him within the hour.

“I’ll be in a blue Pontiac. In the parking lot that faces the lake.”

I was curious, and thought, What the hell. “Okay. In an hour.”

“Don’t bring anyone with you.”

“What is this, Sandler? Are you setting me up for something?”

“God no, just do it, okay?”

I ran my hand across the bedspread, feeling the texture of it on my fingers. “An hour,” I said, hung up, and instantly wondered whether I had done the right thing.

What if this was some kind of trap? What if Sandler was setting me up for a meeting with Mrs. Gorkin and her charming daughters? Maybe they planned to rearrange my face, fit me with concrete overshoes, or even worse, make me eat one of their burgers.

Was it smart to go into something like this alone?

I walked down the hall to my study, where, if I still wrote science fiction novels, I’d be writing them. It would be nice, I thought, to be doing that again. How much more relaxing it would be spending my days imagining encounters with multi-eyed, acid-spewing aliens than dealing with real-life thugs.

I found my address book and opened it to
J
, found the phone number I was looking for, and dialed.

“Jones,” said a voice after the third ring.

“Lawrence,” I said.

“Zack, I’ll be damned,” said Lawrence. “How ya doin’?”

“Well, I’m thinking that I might be in a situation where I’m in over my head.”

“Well,” said Lawrence. “There’s a surprise.”

Of course, Gary denied having anything to do with Eldon’s death. Shocked, he was. Simply shocked. But Miranda was pretty good at spotting liars. She’d had one for a father. When Gary said, “I can’t imagine what happened. How could he not see that train coming?,” it was just like when her father would say, “I was just tucking you in, sweetheart, don’t make a federal case out of it.”

And there was what the police had told her. That the engineer, up in the cab of the diesel that took Eldon’s Toyota for its harrowing trip down the track, said he’d seen a pickup behind the car, that he could have sworn the truck rammed the car, shoved it right onto the tracks just before the impact.

The police already suspected Gary’d had something to do with that other gang member whose Super Bee got pushed into the side of a moving train. So they figured this for a retaliation, a tit-for-tat kind of thing. Give them a taste of their own medicine.

“That must be what happened, Candy,” Gary said, when Miranda told him the theory the cops were working on. “A revenge thing. Although, still, it might have been an accident. You never know, right? Crazy shit happens sometimes.”

“It’s just funny,” Miranda said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Eldon dying just like that other guy.”

“Yeah, well,” said Gary.

The thing was, if the other gang had killed Eldon, why didn’t Gary want to launch some sort of counterattack? Even Payne and the others were puzzling over that one. “It’s time to be reasonable,” Gary said. “We need to come to some sort of a whatchamacallit, an accommodation.”

Accommodation my ass,
Miranda thought
.

She could have gone to the cops with her suspicions. That detective, Cherry was his name, he’d been around asking questions, but he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. She could talk to him, tell him
, Yeah, Gary did that other guy, but he did Eldon too, because he was getting too uppity, too big for his britches. Followed him around until he could do him the same way he did Grant Delmonico.

She could have done that. She could have gone to the cops.

But she decided not to. She decided on another course of action.

The tough part would be pretending to get over it. Pretending to believe Gary’s version of events. Pretending to accept Gary’s argument that retaliation was not the wisest course of action.

Pretending to go along.

But you did what you had to do.

So she kept on working at the Kickstart. Managing the money. The legit and the not so legit. Moving it here, moving it there.

Moving it to a few new places.

It wasn’t even all that difficult. Phony invoices worked best. You drew up a fake bill, you paid it. Except the fake company didn’t exactly have a bank account. But you did.

Once she had enough, she’d be gone. Just wouldn’t come to work one day. She’d take Katie and off they’d go, with more than enough cash to start new lives, with new names, in a new location.

She was doing it for Katie.

This was no kind of world in which to raise a little girl. In a world full of drugs and strippers and hookers and bikers who shoved people into the front of trains. She was going to get out.

And when she did, she was going to rip off this miserable fucker for everything she could.

Except one night, before she had all that she needed, there was a problem. A situation that made it very difficult to go on pretending.

It was after hours at the Kickstart. Katie was with the sitter. Miranda was counting receipts from the night, doing what she always did. And working some new financial magic, shaving off a bit of money into this account here, that account there. Gary, he couldn’t count his own fingers and toes if his life depended on it.

They’re all in the upstairs office, Miranda at her computer, the guys sitting around drinking. The girls—not just the strippers and waitresses from downstairs, but the ones giving blowjobs upstairs as well—have all gone home.

Eldridge and Zane, they’re drunk. Payne’s catching up. Gary’s there too, and his dimwitted friend Leo, the one he treats like a little brother. All a bit giddy. Made a lot of money tonight. There’s piles of cash on the tables. Some obscure Doobie Brothers song, “I Cheat the Hangman,” playing on the radio.