by Gerry Boyle
It was the white Focus, pulled up to the curb across the street. Danni was at the wheel. She waved like they were old friends.
Brandon crossed, and Danni buzzed the window down.
“Hey, I said, ‘That looks like Brandon. What’s he doing here?’ You should’ve told me. I would have bought you that beer.”
“Had to get out of Dodge,” Brandon said. “Your town’s growing on me.”
“Good deal. It’s got a bad rap, you know. I think of it as sort of this secret place.”
He was standing in the street and a box truck slowed and passed.
“Hey, get in,” Danni said. “You come down in the boat again? I’ll give you a ride.”
“No, I drove this time. Navigating at night isn’t something you do if you can help it.”
“Okay. Where you parked? I’ll drop you.”
“I got a ride,” Brandon said.
“Then where you need to go?”
Brandon looked up the block, wavered.
“I’m staying on Route 1. Motel 5.”
“Christ,” Danni said. “Only time cops go there—”
“I know. To kick in doors.”
Nineteen
The car was small and he felt very close to Danni, more than on the boat at the Bowl or in his truck. She was chewing gum and it filled the car with the smell of mint. She pulled away and he heard bottles clink in the back seat. “Picked up some beers,” she said. “Home alone. Clutch got a repo job in Mass. for the next coupla days. He does these three a.m. grabs down there. A little sketchy but wicked good money. New Range Rover this time. Some guy got up the downpayment, six months later, hasn’t paid a cent.”
“Cool,” Brandon said.
Danni swung off Main Street, headed west to Route 1. Brandon waited for her to bring up the note, the diary, but she talked about the business, how it was getting harder to find good buys at the car auctions since everything was online. And then it was how Clutch still drank Bud Lite, but he had to drink like twelve of them to get a buzz.
“I say, ‘Why don’t you buy real beer. Something you can taste. Have three or four of ’em. Won’t be peeing all night long, either.’”
Brandon nodded, wondered if she’d forgotten the last time he’d seen her boyfriend Clutch had been on the pavement with his arm jammed up to his neck.
“So I get a good IPA for me. Even a double IPA. I like the hoppy stuff,” Danni said.
She swung into the motel parking lot, scanned the lot for Brandon’s truck. Spotting it, she drove to the end of the lot, pulled up to the building. She shut the motor off, lowered the window halfway, took the gum from her mouth and tossed it out. She turned back to him.
“So,” Danni said.
“Thanks for the ride,” Brandon said.
“How ’bout one of those beers now? I owe you big time, for everything you’ve done. The diary and all.”
Brandon looked away. “I don’t know. I already had a few.”
“Oh, yeah. Where?”
“Twilight Lounge.”
“Jesus, Brandon. Motel 5 and the Twilight? What would those cool people in Portland say?”
He smiled. She leaned toward him, then reached into the back seat and brought out two beers. IPAs. She handed him one and took an opener out of the ashtray, leaned over and opened his beer, then her own. The caps went into the ashtray with the opener. Danni held her bottle up and clinked his and said, “To the good guys.”
Brandon smiled and drank. Danni did, too, and then turned in her seat to face him. He smelled some sort of perfume, mixed with the mint.
“Because that’s what you are, Brandon. A good guy.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, you are. I know what you’re going through. It’s some serious shit so you don’t see this, I know. But you’re a wicked good person.”
“About ten thousand people would disagree with that.”
“Well, they don’t know you like I know you,” Danni said. She looked at him, fixed him with a long gaze.
“I’ll come right out and say it. I like talking to you,” she said. “And I think you like talking to me.”
“Sure,” Brandon said.
“This is gonna sound weird, but I think you need somebody like me right now. Somebody real, you know? Somebody who isn’t connected to the whole rest of your life.”
Brandon took a drink.
“I’m like this escape thing, you know?” Danni said. “I’m not a cop. I’m not a cop-hater, either. I’m not, like, judging you.”
“No,” Brandon said. “You’re not.”
She lifted the bottle, drank down a third of it.
“It’s like we have this weird little bubble, you know what I’m saying? You know me from the diary. I mean, nobody else in the whole world has read that stuff.”
Brandon thought of Mia and her writers group. Danni smiled, moved closer.
“I mean, it’s weird but in some ways you know me way better than Clutch does. I’ve only known you what, three days? And I feel like we really, I don’t know, we just get each other.”
Danni reached over and touched her fingers to the top of his left hand.
“How ’bout we go inside and finish these beers.”
She leaned closer, cleavage exposed. There was the edge of a tattoo, blue and unrecognizable. A bird’s wing? Her lips were glossed and her mouth was slightly open. “Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe something will.”
“Wow, Danni. I’m flattered. Really. But I can’t do that,” Brandon said. “I’m with this woman, Mia.”
“And I have Clutch. But they aren’t in our bubble. This doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of our lives. We can just do it this once. Kinda seal our own secret deal. Like the blood brothers thing, except not.”
The evergreen scent was cloying and Danni was still leaning toward him. More of the tattoo was exposed but he tried not to look, fixed his gaze on the pine-tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the heat control on the dash. The beers at the Twilight were spinning around in his head as she moved closer. When he turned he could see pores, a speck of stray eye-liner on her cheek, tiny welts where she had plucked her eyebrows.
“Just kiss me and we’ll get this party started,” Danni said. “I’m telling you, Brandon, I want you bad.”
Her mouth was open, lips coming closer.
“The paper,” Brandon said.
“We can get to that after,” she said.
“No. I mean, is that why you’re doing this? So you can have that note?”
She pulled back. Her mouth snapped shut. The amorous haze fell away from her eyes.
“Screw you,” Danni said.
“Sorry.”
“You think that’s all this is? You have something I want?”
“I think I have something you need,” Brandon said.
She looked at him—not angry, not seductive, just real. “What makes you think I need just one thing?” Danni said.
“How many things do you need?”
She smiled, snorted. “Ha.”
And then her expression changed. Brandon waited. She started to tear up.
“Hey, okay. You want to fucking know? Okay. I need a life. I need a guy really loves me, not one who walks around like he’s the jail guard. Not one who only talks to me when he needs something. ‘What’s for supper? I gotta go to friggin’ Brockton. Make me a sandwich. You wanna jump in the sack before I go?’ Hey, he had a half-hour. Why not get laid for the road?”
“So why are you still with him?” Brandon said.
Danni looked out of the window, turned quickly back as a car pulled in.
“All I need, one of his garage buddies showing up here.”
A pickup, a beater Ford Ranger, pulled up a couple of rooms down. A skinny gray-haired guy got out. He reached a Miami Dolphins duffel out of the truck, walked to the door and knocked. The door opened and he went in. Danni drank the next third of the beer.
“Habit,” she said. “Clutch is a habit,
you know? Like smoking.”
“You do this a lot? Come on to guys?”
“Last time was four years ago. That guy didn’t turn me down. What are you, gay?”
“Every four years?” Brandon said.
“Fuckin’ A, Brandon Blake. Don’t you get it? I’m so fucking lonely.”
“Why? You know half the people in this town. Lived here your whole life, right?”
“But they don’t know me,” Danni said. “And I just felt like, I don’t know, that you did. Or you could. You know why?”
“No.”
“Because you’re lonely, too. You have this girl—”
“Mia.”
“Right,” Danni said. “Some rich chick, probably. Probably really pretty. I’m picturing a hard little body. Probably jogs. What’s she do for work?”
“She teaches kids to write. At USM.”
“A teacher. I get it.”
“But she thinks of herself mostly as a writer. She writes stories.”
Danni looked at him quizzically.
“Like fiction. Novels except shorter.”
“She get paid for that?”
“A little. Not a lot.”
“So it’s like her hobby,” Danni said.
“Sort of, but maybe more than that. She doesn’t do it for money. She does it because she likes it. And she’s good at it.”
Danni looked at him and then she smiled.
“Okay. So here’s the real story. She doesn’t really know you. I can tell ’cause I’m the same way. We’re both inside our heads. I mean, we talk to people, Clutch and Mia, but underneath it we’re alone. Stuff in there you never tell her. Things you keep all to yourself.”
It stunned him, the truth of it. He looked away, saw another car pulling up beside the pickup. A Nissan two-door something-or-other, after-market wheels and buzzing exhaust. Two guys got out, when to the same door where the guy went with the Dolphins duffel. They knocked. Waited. The door opened and they went in, closed it behind them. A door that needed to be kicked in, an MDEA case waiting to happen.
“You’re not denying it,” Danni said.
He looked back.
“Denying what?”
“What I just said. That we’re the same. You’re not saying I’m wrong.”
Brandon sipped his beer. Danni finished hers, turned and leaned over and fished two more bottles out of the back. The tattoo was a dragonfly. She opened his beer and hers, handed his over. Danni drank. Brandon held the two beers in front of him.
“You know what I think?” Danni said.
“No.”
“I think little shit turns into big shit. Things you decide or don’t decide. Things that just happen for no reason. Turn into things that end up being like the most important things in your life. You didn’t know it when it was happening. You said to yourself, ‘Oh, this is what happened today. Something else will happen tomorrow.’ But what you don’t get is that it doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow because what happened today is just too fucking key, or whatever the word is.”
“Pivotal,” Brandon said. “But I hate that word.”
“Yeah, right. But it’s like it turned you in a whole new direction and you never saw it coming. And there’s no going back.”
“Like hooking up with Clutch?”
Danni smiled, the rejection from Brandon a half-beer ago. “Yeah, like hooking up with Clutch. I was a kid, you know what I’m saying? I liked him ’cause he had a big truck.”
“And you stayed with him,” Brandon said.
Another smile, then a long pull on the beer. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Yeah, I stayed with him.”
“He didn’t screw you over like the other guys? The ones in the diary?”
“Oh, them? They just wanted to get into my pants. I was too young and dumb to know the difference. Clutch wanted that too but at least he stuck around.”
The two guys came out of the room. Baseball hats on backwards, built like they lifted. One glanced over at Danni and Brandon, then got in the car and looked over again. Danni lifted her beer and the guy looked away.
She drank, stuck the beer bottle between her legs. “No, he didn’t screw me over. He just friggin’ locked me away.”
Brandon waited. Danni looked at him and said, “So what’s your story, Brandon Blake? Other than shooting this kid. And the other guy, the one in the paper. In the hotel or whatever. This Mia, you save her life and now she won’t go away? I mean, that would totally suck. Like if you weren’t really into her and this thing happens with this kidnapping and you save her and now you’re stuck. I saw a movie like that once. Guy saves this other guy’s life and the other guy follows him around for like years, trying to save him back. Finally the first guy shoves the second guy, to try to get away from him, and the guy lands in the street and he gets run over by a truck. It was some weird movie like with Cary Grant.”
“It’s not like that,” Brandon said.
“What is it like then? What is it about you that makes me feel like we just fucking get each other?”
Brandon finished the one beer, put the bottle on the floor of the car. It fell over and rolled under the seat. He took a drink from the second beer and rested it in his lap.
“Killing someone?” he said.
Danni looked at him, suddenly serious, not dreamy.
“What?”
“Only thing you really know about me. I shot and killed someone. Twice.”
“But why would that—”
“So what happened on that day? July 21, 2007?” Brandon said.
Danni looked away, took a quick, nervous drink. She put the bottle back down and looked at him and said, “It’s a long story.”
Brandon waited but she ended it there. He pushed on: “I was curious. Like maybe there was a car accident or somebody died, like your mother or something. I read the paper from back then.”
Danni turned to him. “You read some old newspapers?”
“Yeah. Big news was three guys killed in a gravel pit.”
She blanched, then added a quick shrug. “Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“Bikers from Lawrence and a local guy named Damian Sash. Cops decided they got in some shootout over drugs and all bled out.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess I remember something about that. But I was just out of high school, doing my own thing. Some motorcycle gang guys get killed, I mean, who cares?”
“Clutch must have known this Sash guy, right? Same age, both car mechanics. Woodford isn’t that big a place.”
“What? Where are you getting all this shit?”
“It’s the biggest thing that happened in Woodford that day. By a longshot.”
“What the fuck are you doing?” Danni said. “Investigating me?”
“It’s what I do, Danni,” Brandon said. “I’m a cop.”
“But you’re not supposed to be working. You’re suspended or whatever.”
“I had time.”
“Jesus Christ,” Danni said. “And you come up with this crazy shit. Bikers and some old murders from a long time ago. All because I put something down with that day on it? Maybe I screwed my best friend’s boyfriend, you know? Maybe I stole from a restaurant. Maybe I hit somebody with my car and took off. Maybe I ran over a cat. Maybe I even picked some guy up outside the Twilight, went back to his motel ’cause I thought he was a nice guy, dumb shit that I am.”
She reached for the key in the ignition, sputtered, “Fuckin’ A, man. I thought we were gonna be friends. Maybe even more.”
“You can talk to me,” Brandon said.
“Fuck you,” Danni said. “I mean, sure I can talk to you. I been talking for a fucking half hour.”
“About that night, I mean.”
Danni flipped her beer up, finished it in two swallows. She flung the bottle into the back seat and it bounced, clinked against the others. As she reached for the shifter Brandon said, “I still have that paper.”
“Yeah, well that paper is nothin’. J
ust a girl with some problems.”
She put the car into reverse and it lurched. She jammed on the brakes and it lurched again.
“I gotta go,” Danni said.
“Okay,” Brandon said. “But I think you need some help.”
He opened the door and hoisted himself out.
“Maybe I do,” Danni said. “Maybe I don’t. I don’t know what I need. I just know I gotta get the fuck out of here. You know what? Like I said in the diary, guys are assholes. You included.”
Brandon closed the door. Danni backed up, slid to a stop, squealed the tires and sped out of the lot, turning south. Brandon watched as the taillights moved up the highway and disappeared into traffic. And then he went to the room door, opened the door with the metal key. He went inside, put the key on the bureau, picked up his backpack off the bed, stepped outside. He left the door ajar.
A half-mile up the road, he pulled into a MacDonald’s lot and circled around. Backed into a space and killed the lights. And watched the road. Five minutes went by. Nobody showed. Not Clutch. Not Danni. He leaned forward to touch the butt of his gun, under the seat. He called Davey, Woodford P.D., and said, “You got a minute?”
“I think you’ve mistaken me for an Uber,” Davey said.
“No,” Brandon said. “I’ll come to you.”
It was the darkened lot of a closed-up burger stand on Route 1, a cop meet-up spot, a place to watch for drunken tourists trying to make it back from Old Orchard Beach. Brandon and Davey parked side-by-side, driver’s doors lined up, windows buzzed down.
“How was the Twilight?” Davey said.
“Good. I made some new friends.”
“Be careful. You don’t know where they’ve been.”
“I met an old one. Danni spotted me coming out. Drove me back to the motel.”
“Is this one of those too-much-information things?” Davey said.
“Nothing happened,” Brandon said.
