With her phone still in her hand, she dialed Detective Barnes. He didn’t answer, as usual. Rebecca supposed he was pretty busy; there had been a lot of murders in the area lately, so she left him the standard message to call her back. She no longer cried or pleaded with him to find her husband. She didn’t have anything left in her anymore. She was curious about what they knew about the two murders. Did they know it was her? She didn’t think so, or surely Barnes would be answering his phone. Rebecca only hoped that they would find something in the old man’s van that belonged to Jon or Oliver, something that would close the case for them... for her. Of course, she didn’t ask that, but she was hoping he would have news for her when he did call back.
Her stomach grumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten all day. A quick look in the fridge revealed a very old, moldy casserole she couldn’t identify, a half bottle of ketchup, and an expired jug of milk. She grabbed her things and headed for the front door, it would do her good to get out of the house anyway.
The sun beat down through a cloudless sky as Rebecca drove away from her house. After the previous storm, the air hung thick and steamy around her, and water pooled in ditches and potholes. She drove with the windows down, soaking in the warmth from the sun. She headed down Plum Street and took a left onto Miller, away from the busy shopping center. Instead, she headed towards the meat market over on Kiber. There was a small taqueria in the back, where she liked to have barbacoa tacos, a Mexican coke, and a quiet corner to sit in.
There, no one knew she had buried a child, and no one would hug her or want to talk about it or give her the look. It had always been her favorite place to be alone. Funny, with a toddler, a husband, and work, she used to relish her alone time. She had worked hard to seek out quiet moments, and they came all too rarely. Most days she hid in the bathroom for a bit of peace. Her husband joked that she had intestinal issues, but she was pretty sure he knew what she was doing in there. Which was absolutely nothing. She wasn’t arguing with a toddler, or making snacks, or any other tiresome mommy activity. Unfortunately, now, that’s all she had. Quiet moments. Quiet days, with fleeting moments of noise and human interaction; moments with the TV on, when the detective called, or when Beth from work stopped by with another casserole. Then it was quiet again.
La Michoacana Meat Market sat between an oil change shop and an abandoned building. There were vague memories of a Chinese buffet restaurant being in that space before, but she wasn’t positive. That end of town hadn’t thrived since they built the new highway, and cars no longer needed to drive by to get to where they were going. Apparently they had just enough business to stay open. Covering the front door were fliers for Tejano and Mariachi bands, benefit dinners for lost loved ones, and ads for everything from babysitting to lawn mowing. Rebecca wondered why anyone would allow a stranger to babysit their child.
As she opened the door, mouth-watering aromas awakened her taste buds, and a juke box in the corner belted a Spanish song too loud for anyone to enjoy. To her left, an older Mexican woman sat at a small table with a pile of receipts and an adding machine. Her long gray hair was piled in a loose bun, and a cup of coffee sat in front of her. Next to her, a slender young woman folded silverware into paper napkins and stacked them in a gray dish bin. The old woman looked up as Rebecca passed, and smiled and nodded her chin in a greeting before she returned to her receipts. They knew Rebecca by sight, if not by name. She returned the nod as she walked by and headed towards the back of the building.
Past the butcher counter was a small room consisting of three booths covered in torn maroon plastic upholstery. A sturdy old cash register sat on a chipped counter, flanked by a basket of milk candy and a plastic tub of chiclets. To the right of the counter, a window was cut into the wall between it and the kitchen. Rebecca slid into a booth in the corner, shifting past the slump in the cushion where the stuffing had flattened over the years. A waitress appeared with a red plastic basket of chips, two different kinds of salsa, and a laminated menu.
Before she could get to the bottom of the salsa bowls, the waitress placed her usual meal in front of her. There were five small corn tortillas filled with beef, cilantro, and onions, circling a small stack of radish slices and grilled peppers. The food was as good as it always was, no more and no less. The consistency was comforting. No matter what happened elsewhere, inside the walls of the Taqueria, you could count on good food and a seat where no one would bug you.
She lingered in the booth long after she stopped eating, her fingertips playing at the edges of the bandage on her left arm. Under the bandage, the remains of a painful burn reminded her of what she had done. She had made it right, had evened those unseen balances that hang above it all, but it still didn’t feel right. She was still alone. Not quite a widow, since they hadn’t found Jon’s body, but she knew in her heart that he was no longer alive. He would have come home to her if he was. And there wasn’t a word for a mother without a child. Heartbroken, despondent, angry... she could think of a plethora of words but none that identified what she had lost. She stacked her dishes, wiped down the table, and slid out of the booth, leaving over half the meal on her plate.
Rebecca didn’t notice the man’s watch until he was standing at the register in front of her, paying for his meal. It was rose gold with a black leather strap, ordinary at first, a watch you could see anywhere. But what caused her heart to stop was the green ring inside the face. Rebecca pretended to look at the dish of milk candy on the counter next to the man, so she could get a closer look. It was a Bulova. The Accutron II Alpha, to be exact. Rebecca wasn’t a connoisseur of watches by any stretch of the imagination, but she knew that watch. That was Jon’s watch. She had bought it for their one-year anniversary, back when they were still intoxicated with each other and filled with dreams. She had ‘Until we’re 70’ inscribed on the bottom, an inside joke from a song they both loved. She eased closer to the man, breathing in a mixture of sweat and moldy water. She had a fish tank that smelled like that once, when she was small.
Sweat shone on his pale skin. He was tall, at least 6 foot 4, and broad shouldered. The top to his blue coveralls hung at his waist, revealing a stained white undershirt. He was bald, but his goatee and mustache were orange-blond. When he glanced over at Rebecca, his dark blue eyes shifted down her body, resting back on her face. There was no mistaking the hunger in them as he opened his mouth to speak. She moved back in disgust. He shrugged, continued paying, and turned to walk to the front of the market.
Rebecca threw down a ten, told the woman to keep the change, and hurried after the man. As she left the building she caught sight of him across the parking lot, opening the front door of a white van. Emblazoned along the side in green were the word ‘EZ Plumbing’. Next to it, a smiling cartoon man held a plunger while water droplets rained down around him.
Rebecca rushed to her car and put it into drive. Confused, she wasn’t sure what she was doing, only that she needed to follow that man. It had to be him, he had Jon’s watch on. It couldn’t be a coincidence, him having Jon’s watch and getting into an old van. It had to be him, there was no other explanation for it. He was the man who had killed Ollie.
All thoughts of the man she had burned in the ‘Lucky S’ parking lot vanished as she leaned on the gas pedal and hurried after the plumber’s van. They took a left out of the parking lot onto Plum Street and blended with the traffic heading North.
“We got him, Ollie.”
From the backseat, Oliver caught his Mother’s eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Pale round cheeks squished up towards his eyes and a giggle floated across the car and into the front seat where Rebecca sat, determined and more than a bit unhinged.
24
FRIDAY, JUNE 8TH
“Hey, are you still in town? Looks like the AAA guy is here already, we’ll just ride with him. You can meet us at the mechanic shop, it’s closer to home anyway.”
“I’m not, but I can turn around. They got there fast.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah, I thought so too. But he’s not in a tow truck. This is probably the car service so we don’t have to ride with the tow guy. Either way, they really need to invest in nicer vehicles. This van looks like it’s about to fall apart. I’ll call you back when we’re on the road again. Love you.”
Jon opened the driver’s side door and flipped the trunk latch, “Hey buddy, you doing okay?”
Nothing.
He leaned across the seat to peer into the back seat, where Oliver had been singing and talking just a few minutes before. He was still there, eyes closed tightly, and head tilted to the side. Jon chuckled. The beach did it for him, every time. The combination of scorching sun, running around in the hot sand, and swimming against the currents, had always been a fast ticket to a long nap.
Jon left the car in neutral and closed the door with a soft click. Just ahead, the van had navigated the rocky side road and was creeping along towards him. But unless they had started offering plumbing services along with roadside assistance, it wasn’t AAA. The words ‘EZ Plumbing’ screamed at him garishly from the side of the van in bright green paint. He would have bet money it glowed in the dark. Beside the text, an obnoxious cartoon plumber danced in the rain with his fist wrapped around a plunger. Jon’s shoulders sagged as he rummaged in the trunk. Perhaps the spare tire would materialize if he stared hard enough at the empty space where it should have been.
In the van, a bald white man was dancing his fingers on the steering wheel along with the radio, every beat a tap-tap on the faded black plastic. He was technically on the clock, hence the van, but his boss didn’t care about what he didn’t know. The last job had only taken a minute, so it wasn’t like he was running behind or anything. The gray haired old Mexican lady in the bright blue house on stilts over on Crab St. had lost her wedding ring down the sink. Five minutes in the P-trap, and he had produced a soap-scum covered ring. The woman had practically cried and began telling him all about her dead husband in stilted English. He got out of there as fast as he could.
That’s when he saw the blue Chevy down by the water, just as he was about to pull onto the bridge. Glancing at the clock on the dashboard, he figured he’d go see what was up. Looked like an easy enough take, anyway. The car didn’t look like much, but you never knew what kind of money people were carrying around with them. As he pulled closer, he could tell it was a flat tire by the way the car sat tilted up on one end. A man had already jacked it up to get it ready for the new tire and was standing in front of the trunk with his back to the van, looking down. Yeah, it was going to be an easy take.
A bright flash of light flickered through the passenger side window. Under the bridge, a shiny silver bike leaned against its rusted kick stand. The evening sun shone directly on it, throwing reflections around the dark underside of the bridge like confetti. Another bike, not as shiny, had been dropped into the dust, and a few more lay hidden in the shadows of the bridge. Standing nearby was a small group of kids. Well, probably older teenagers but everyone under the age of twenty seemed like a kid to him. One of them sort of looked like his nephew, but he couldn’t get a good look. That boy didn’t know how to stay out of trouble. Tall, pale as a ghost, gangly, and a head full of wayward red curls, the boy was leaning against a large rock, smoking something. He’d bet money on it being a doobie and not a cigarette. The man leaned over the passenger seat to get a better look...
He must have been closer to the parked car than he realized, and he swore he only took his eyes off it for a second, but a second was all it took. In the time he had spent analyzing the kid under the bridge, his van had continued traveling towards the parked blue Chevy. A thud, a jolt, and a muffled scream brought his attentions back to the front of his van. Directly in front of him was the blue car. Technically it was slightly under his front bumper, but no one was arguing with him. The only other person around was caught between the two vehicles, legs pinned and eyes wide, staring straight at him through the grimy windshield of the van.
The guy must have been in shock. Anyone would have been, with their bottom half squished all up like that and their top half just frozen there. His mouth gaped open, gasping and trying to take in air. His chest, caught between the hood of the van and the back frame of his car, was sunken inwards in a most unnatural way.
The ‘good Samaritan’ slammed his van into park, threw his door open, and hurried to the man’s side. There was a lot of blood coming from high up on his legs, spurting and spattering onto the vehicles and into the dirt below. The man grunted repeatedly, each sound smaller than the previous, until there were no more sounds, and he lay slumped forward onto the hood of the van. The driver stood watching in morbid fascination, just out of reach of the pool of blood in the dust. Sure, he had seen people die before, but never like that. Dirt and gravel crunched beneath the Chevy’s tires as it inched towards the water, set in motion by the impact while the man, no longer pinned upright, slumped to the ground in a cloud of dust.
The plumber glanced furtively towards the bridge and the darkness beneath, but the kids were gone, leaving nothing but shadows and ashes in their wake. It probably wasn’t his nephew, anyway. He bet they all had high-tailed it out of there the minute his van hit that man. They had the right idea, that’s what he needed to do, get out of there. It looked like the issue was going to take care of itself anyway, the car was still on a steady roll towards the water’s edge. With any luck, it would go in and he wouldn’t need to deal with it drawing attention. By the time anyone else decided to pull off the road for a quick wiz or a make out session, he’d be long gone and headed to another plumbing emergency.
Halfway back to his van he had an idea and jogged back to the man on the ground. There was his back pocket, staring straight up at the sky, with the tell-tale square indention puffed out. The driver leaned down, wriggled the man’s wallet out of his pocket, grabbed his watch for good measure, and scurried back to his van. No sense letting a good opportunity go to waste.
25
Rebecca followed the white van down Plum Street, past struggling mom and pop businesses and run-down homes. The eclectic mixture of residential and commercial lots left a palpable identity crisis. An old concrete building marked ‘Discount Dental’ kept company with a ‘Tom’s Pawn’, a home topped with mismatched roofing shingles, and a ‘La Vida Regional’ church. The van slowed as it approached a square house on the left with tan walls and black trim, before pulling into its gravel driveway. The house had seen better days and sagged on its wooden foundation. She thought it was fitting, a man like that didn’t deserve to have nice things, and he didn’t deserve to live.
Half a block down from the tan house, she eased onto the side of the road and killed the engine. Rebecca hunched low in the seat and held her breath while the man walked up a few steps to a small porch on the side of the house. He checked a mail-box hanging to the left of the door, pulled out a handful of papers, and walked inside.
With no other cars in the guy’s driveway, it looked like no one else was home, at least not anyone with car. Rebecca wiped the sweat off her forehead and onto her shorts. The car was getting damn hot, but she couldn’t risk turning the engine back on, so she cranked her window down to let in some fresh air. Though really, fresh air was no part of the Texas summer, it was still better than baking in the car. In her rear-view mirror, once again, Oliver sat in his booster in the middle of the back seat. He giggled and sang to himself while Rebecca forced her eyes forward, afraid he would disappear again if she turned around. She sat in the oppressive heat swatting mosquitoes for twenty minutes before summoning the courage to get out of her car.
Resisting the urge to look in the backseat, she whispered, “I’ll be back, Ollie. I’m going to make this right.”
Pulling the gun from her glove box, she was still surprised by the weight of it. She figured she would never get used to it, but after that day it wouldn’t matter. Rebecca’s mission was to make it right, the horrible thing that man had done. Then, she would return home
and put the gun in her nightstand like every other American, never to look at it again. The gun, and that man, would never be thought of again after that day. She placed it in the front pocket of her jeans and untucked her T-shirt. With the bulge sticking out against her slim frame, she knew it wasn’t well hidden, but unless she wanted to wear a sweltering jacket, it was her only option.
She looked up and down the street before getting out of her car. Thankfully, the street was empty. So close to the end, the last thing she needed was a witness. Everyone was either getting their teeth pulled, counting their offering money, or inside their homes napping on the hot July afternoon. A small dog, half beagle and half rat, jogged by, turning its head briefly to bark in confusion at her presence before continuing down the road.
“Yeah, I know. I won’t be here long,” she muttered.
Traffic roared in the distance and a couple of birds sang to one another as she sidestepped puddles in the road on her way to the small house. It wasn’t long before she was standing on his porch. Peeling green paint on the front door revealed shades of dirty white underneath, and the window screens to her left were ripped and worn. Rebecca reached into her pocket and gripped the gun with her right hand, using the knuckles of her left to rap on the door.
A deep voice echoed from the back of the house, “Coming!”
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