When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) (22 page)

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

“You retard. Why the hell would I spend it with them? I don’t even remember when I last talked to them.”

“Uh... I don’t know.”

“I’m spending it with you, asswipe.”

“Okay, cool. I just didn’t want to presume anything.”

“Well, I already presumed you wanted to spend it with me. Was that wrong?”

“No, of course not.”

David wasn’t fond of turkey, saying he found it bland and could never understand why it was so popular. They discussed getting a ham, but when they went to Trader Joe’s they found some ducks on sale, and bought one. When Laura arrived at David’s house the next day, the bird was roasting, and David was singing,
“Be kind to your web-footed friends, ’cause a duck could be somebody’s mother...”

The meal was so good that Laura couldn’t stop eating. When she finally got up from the table, she felt bloated. “Damn, that was awesome,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You should thank the duck, too,” David said. “The bird showed commitment.”

They’d drunk a bottle of Trader Joe’s French Market Merlot, and as Laura went and sat on the couch, David went to the kitchen for another bottle. He sat next to her, refilled both their glasses. Curtis Mayfield was playing on the stereo. They listened for a few minutes, then David said, “Mind if I turn off the music?”

“No,” she said. That was something she liked about him. As much as she loved music, sometimes she preferred silence. She’d once dated a guy who’d always had music playing, and sometimes had the T.V. on at the same time. First thing in the morning, he’d turn on the T.V., even though he wasn’t going to watch it. He couldn’t stand silence, and Laura wondered at the time if it was a fear of being alone.

David turned off the stereo, went back to the couch, sat next to her. She leaned against him, and closed her eyes.

“You tired?” he said.

“No, just full, and buzzed. It’s a good feeling.”

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F
rank and Tommy were sitting in Pomeroy’s, a dark bar on Seventh Street and Bethany Home. They drank rich, dark beer and didn’t say very much. The place was almost empty. Frank could tell that the bartender felt sorry for those who had to spend Thanksgiving in a bar, and he wondered what the guy would have thought if they’d told him they were happier than anybody else in the city today.

Frank thought about his father, who’d died while Frank was locked up. He thought about his mother, how much she’d loved his father. Frank was thankful for her life, and he was thankful that she had died.

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I
t was three weeks from Christmas, and the closer it got, the worse Barbara felt, because the crowds at Wal-Mart, where she worked, got bigger, faster and ruder. She knew that the only way she was going to be able to get any real presents for her daughter, Whitney, would be if she somehow managed to steal them from work.

But that wasn’t likely. Employees at Wal-Mart were watched so closely it reminded her of the Durango Jail, where she’d once spent ten days on a D.U.I. bust. At Wal-Mart, during a ten-hour shift, you couldn’t even take a break from your station to use the restroom. If you did, they called it “time theft” and you got written up.

The pay was shit. Barbara and Whitney lived in a motel room, and the rent, food and gas wiped out her paycheck. If she didn’t have Whitney to think about, she might have tried living out of her car for as long as it took her to save enough money for the first month’s rent and security deposit on an apartment, but she couldn’t do that to the kid, even though she was now thirteen and wanting things – wanting clothes, C.D.s, wanting to live in a place where she could have her own room.

Barbara wasn’t good at much. She couldn’t type fast and she couldn’t spell. She hadn’t graduated high school, and had tried a couple times to get her G.E.D., but that just wasn’t something she could do. She’d gotten knocked up at twenty by a guy who didn’t want to know. For a while she’d gotten by on welfare, but Clinton’s welfare reforms had put her out of her apartment, and she’d had to put Whitney in a group home for a while until she got the job at Wal-Mart and could at least pay for a motel room.

A social worker had told her that since she wasn’t on welfare anymore, and had a job, she was one of the successes of welfare reform.

She finished her shift, drank a bottle of water, and went to the rest room. Her piss was thick and yellow because she was dehydrated. She and her co-workers avoided drinking fluids while working, so they wouldn’t have to use the restroom. She’d seen people get fired for too many write-ups for time theft.

She sniffed her armpits, and smelled the sweat that had overwhelmed her deodorant. She thought about getting back to the motel room with some food from Taco Bell for her and Whitney, eating and then taking a shower and then getting some sleep before she had to get up for tomorrow’s day at work.

She didn’t realize how shredded her nerves were until she got in her car, turned on the ignition, and nothing happened.

She kept turning it, and still nothing happened. She got out of the car, started to walk away from it, then got back in it and tried again. It still didn’t start. It didn’t even seem like a car, like a machine, just rusty metal and torn upholstery. She got out of the car again and started to walk back across the parking lot to Wal-Mart, and then the tears started to come. She fought them down, knowing that if she started to cry she wouldn’t be able to stop. She almost managed to keep it together, but then she slipped out of her own grip, and she was crying harder and harder, getting angry at herself for crying, getting angry at the car for not starting, and she turned around and stumbled back towards her car, wanting to get away before anyone from the store saw the state she was in, but not knowing how she was going to get to anyplace else.

The guy who saw her was in his fifties, athletic and not bad-looking. He was carrying two plastic bags with the store’s logo, and he had a kind face. He walked towards her, where she was standing next to the dead car, and she didn’t know she was going to speak to him until he looked at her and started to speak, and she didn’t hear what he said but she heard herself say, “Will you help me?”

She got in his car with him. They didn’t drive anywhere at first, just sat there in the parking lot while she told him what was wrong. Not just that her car wouldn’t start, and that her daughter was waiting for her back at the motel room, and that she had no money to buy the kid anything. She also told him about her job, and how even though she was tired every night she didn’t want to go to sleep, because the sooner she went to sleep the sooner the next day would come when she had to go and work for another ten hours, her body drying out, her legs and arms aching.

Frank listened, and then he said, “Tell me how I can help you.”

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W
hen Frank saw Whitney, he just knew. Everything had changed, or nothing had changed at all. Everything was lost, or he’d never had anything at all.

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L
aura knew too. She made the connection faster than the cops did.

It was New Year’s Eve. She was sitting on the floor of her living room, playing with Tubby Franklin as she watched the evening news. When she heard there was a missing girl, she reached for the phone. After making a couple calls, she went to her computer, printed out a photograph.

She got in her car and headed West, to a motel on Van Buren. She talked to the desk clerk, then went and knocked on the door of the room that bore the number he gave her.

“Barbara Luffey?” she said to the woman who opened the door.

“Yeah.” The woman was so tired she could barely speak. “Are you a cop?”

“No, but I need to ask you something.” Laura handed her the picture she’d printed out. “Do you know this guy?”

Barbara looked at it. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s Frank. My God...”

“
My God
is right, you stupid bitch. Look at it. You see what it is?”

“Yeah. God help me.”

“I hope he helps your daughter. That picture is from the Department of Corrections website. You can look up any sex offender in this state.”

“God help me.”

“You let him be alone with your daughter?”

“He was nice to me.”

“See how nice he is to your daughter. You’re never going to see her again, I promise you. He’s going to kill her.”

“God help me. God help me.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you protect your daughter?” Laura imagined punching Barbara in the face, and realized that she was close to doing it. Her fists were clenched, and she consciously unclenched them.

“I didn’t know. How was I to know?”

Laura clenched her fists again, and almost swung at Barbara. Then it was herself she wanted to hit. Barbara was right. How could she know? Did anybody look up everybody they met to see if the person was a sex offender, even if they actually knew where to look online and how to do it?

“I’m so sorry,” Laura said. “I’m being an asshole.”

“Why?”

“Because he did it to me when I was a little girl.”

“I mean, why will he hurt my daughter?”

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “I hope he doesn’t.”

“You said he would.”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sorry.” Laura turned and walked away.

She had arranged to meet David at the Rhythm Room, where Big Pete Pearson was to perform at the New Year’s party. She called David’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer, so she guessed he was already there, and that the noise of the place was kept him from hearing it ring. She drove there, parked her car, went inside. It was busy, though the show hadn’t started yet. She found David sitting at the bar talking to Pat. They both waved at her. She motioned to David to follow her, and then walked outside.

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A
t first, Whitney was having fun. Frank listened to her, and he told her stories about Phoenix. He told her the legend of
La Llorona
, a woman who drowned her babies, and has been searching for them since her own death. In the night, she searches for the sound of children crying, thinking they are her own children, so if you cry she will come for you. There are many children who, though unhappy, will never cry at night because they fear that she will hear them.

That scared Whitney, but it was the fun kind of fear, and she came close to Frank and let him put an arm around her.

She didn’t like it when he didn’t take his arm away. And then she wanted to go home, and he said no, and then she was crying, and Frank was crying with her.

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L
aura and David were sitting on the hood of his car in the parking lot of the Rhythm Room. Laura had talked and he had listened, and now they sat in silence, as David searched for something to say.

The parking lot was full. Some people were sitting in their cars toking up, and a man was selling barbecue by the door to the club. The door was open, and Big Pete’s voice floated out on the smoky air and drifted across the lot. David sat looking up at the sky. He thought about an astronomer he had once gotten drunk with in this club. The guy had told him that there may be fifty billion galaxies in this universe, and that in one of those galaxies we inhabit a small planet in orbit around a small star, and that this planet is only a tiny smudge, hardly more than a molecule floating in the dust of it all. He wanted to tell Laura that, as though it was vital for her to know that now, but he didn’t know how to say it.

“Are you sure?” he finally said.

“Am I sure about what?”

“That he definitely took her. That he’ll definitely hurt her?”

Laura laughed, and David didn’t think it sounded human.

“Are you sure he really killed a girl?” David said.

“Yeah. And he would have killed me. And he’ll kill this one. They’ll find her eventually. It’ll depend on what Frank knows about dumping bodies. He might do the clichéd thing, and dump her in a mine shaft. That’ll actually make her easier to find, because there’ll be vultures circling above it. But if he just does the sensible thing and leaves her to rot in the desert, we’ll probably never know anything until somebody goes hiking and trips over what’s left of her.”

“Laura, come on.”

“What?” When he didn’t say any more, she went on. “DNA should convict him this time. It would have put him on Death Row way back when, if they only knew about DNA. It’ll be too late for Whitney, though.”

“Laura, why are you doing this to yourself? How can you even know he ever killed anybody?”

She tried to answer him, but found no words that would make him understand. “I need to find him,” was all she said.

“Come on. Cases like this are solved by teams of homicide cops, not one former beat cop.”

“Whoever gets him, I’ll be there.”

“Yeah, that’ll do a lot of good.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Have you ever, once in your life, tried not just lashing out?”

“Here we go. Forgive everybody. Put it all behind you. You’re a fucking phony, David.”

“Why are you –”

“You can talk all the shit you like, you’re a fake. You think you’ve gotten over what your mom and dad did to you because you can forgive and not get angry about it. All you’re doing is turning a blind eye to everything. You’re just blowing off any responsibility. And you dare to say the lawyers I used to work with are hypocrites because their clients need to take responsibility. You’re a fucking joke.”

Slowly, David said, “I just think you need to be able to let things go, or you can’t be happy.”

“Yeah. Well, why don’t you just go and be happy, then.”

David stood up. “Okay,” he said. “If that’s what you think of me, I guess we don’t have what I thought we had.”

She sat there and looked at him and said nothing.

He wanted to say something about what the astronomer had told him, about smallness and vastness, and he still didn’t know how to. So he said, “Get off my car.”

Laura got off the hood as he got behind the wheel. She watched him drive away. Another car had taken his place before he was even out of the parking lot.