Lucky Town

by Peter Vonder Haar

  “Hands where I can see them,” came the expected voice.

  “Obviously, you weren’t arrested. Or it was the fastest trial since Judge Roy Bean,” Charlie said.

  “One of the cops was Jeff Ramsey. He was a rookie during my last year on the force.”

  “And he convinced everyone not to press charges?”

  I said, “I assume so. They talked to the bouncer and the waitress while I was sitting in the back of his cruiser.”

  She looked at me in a manner disconcertingly similar to our mother’s. “Naturally, it didn’t occur to you to mention this when you rolled in last night.”

  “Why?” I said. “The EMTs said I didn’t have to go to the hospital, so what were you going to do?”

  “Maybe you should take some kickboxing classes. Anything would be better than white-knighting your way through neighborhood watering holes looking to get your ass kicked.”

  “The bouncer actually offered me a job,” I said.

  Charlie rubbed her eyes, “You got into a lot less of this kind of trouble when Emma was still around.”

  “Watch it,” I cautioned. It had been almost a year, but hearing my ex-girlfriend’s name was still enough to sour my mood.

  She smiled, but raised her hands in mock surrender, and I elected not to escalate.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said at last, “I bore easily. Plus, I’m good at it.”

  “You can take a punch,” she agreed, “but your superhero shtick needs work. Batman doesn’t make a habit out of getting the shit beat out of him.”

  “Sure he does. And when he gets home, Alfred has cleaned the house and made him a hot meal,” I said.

  “I know you didn’t just call me a butler,” Charlie said.

  I smiled. “You’d have to learn how to load a dishwasher before I went that far.”

  She shot me the finger and returned to her desk.

  “I’m going to get the Chronicle,” I said.

  “Cy Clarke: the only person not employed by the journalism industry who still reads an entire newspaper,” she said.

  “Not true,” I replied. “Those guys at the doughnut place do as well.”

  “The doughnut place.”

  “Yep.”

  “Those guys are eighty years old if they’re a day,” Charlie pointed out.

  “I … fail to see your point.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine, journalists and retired postal workers are the only people who read the newspaper anymore. Happy?”

  “A rare and special breed,” I agreed as I went to the driveway. I needed some air. The mention of Emma was a gut punch I hadn’t anticipated. Ours hadn’t been a particularly nasty breakup, just the bifurcation of two lives going in different directions. But the ache was still there.

  I picked up the paper, mildly curious to see if my evening’s exploits had made the news, but it was a long shot. Murders barely made the front page, and then mostly if they involved innocent bystanders or kids.

  The article that eventually caught my eye wasn’t something most people would notice, buried as it was on the eighth page of the Houston Chronicle’s Metro section. I only came across it because of what Charlie describes as my archaic habit of reading the entire thing every morning.

  Charlie is my sister. My twin sister, to be precise. She and I were the youngest of six kids, though she’s older by two minutes, that being the amount of time it had taken my mother’s obstetrician to arbitrarily pull her from the womb ahead of me. Not that I’m bitter or anything. Charlie is as deliberative as I am impulsive and has forgotten more about computers and technology than I could ever hope to learn.

  All six of us were named after baseball players. Specifically, we were named after Major League pitchers who’ve thrown perfect games. It started with my older brother Lee, named for Lee Richmond, the first player ever to accomplish the feat, though Lee had been dead for three years now (my brother, that is; the pitcher died in 1929). My other three brothers, in chronological order, were Mike, Jim, and Don, named after Witt, Bunning, and Larsen respectively.

  I lucked out in getting what was maybe the most recognizable name: Cy. Even non-baseball fans have heard of Cy Young, thanks to the award bearing his name and given to the best pitcher in either league each season.

  Thankfully, Mom and Dad didn’t use Young’s real name. “Denton” Clarke doesn’t really have the same zing.

  My sister gets her name from Charlie Robertson, who threw his perfect game against the Tigers in 1922. Robertson would unfortunately go on to own the worst winning percentage (0.380) of any pitcher who’d thrown a perfecto, for which my brothers and I would give her no end of shit.

  Not that she had any control over it, but it obviously pissed her off. “Why Charlie?” she’d complain. “Sandy’ (meaning Koufax) was right there.”

  Growing up, Mom was always the sports fan, and our home was littered with memorabilia from the Houston Astros, Oilers, and Texans. To his credit, my dad Al — may he rest in peace — never fought it. More analytical than confrontational, I think he secretly enjoyed being married to a woman who loved baseball and football more than he did. Besides, it wasn’t like the names were that objectionable. Charlie could whine about it until she was blue in the face; at least she wasn’t named “Catfish.”

  That honor went to the dog.

  I didn’t know why I was thinking about my brothers that particular morning. It was mid-May, far from any sibling birthdays or, more poignantly, the anniversaries of Lee’s or Dad’s deaths. Still, almost as soon as I turned to the page in the Chronicle, my eyes found the name “Mike Clarke.”

  And while there are undoubtedly several men by that name sprinkled among Houston’s estimated population of six million, the article’s headline removed any lingering doubt:

  DHS OFFICIAL SOUGHT IN MURDER

  I skimmed the text. A Department of Homeland Security officer named Bob Ramirez had been found dead in his office near the Port of Houston. One of Ramirez’s fellow officers — Mike Clarke, an ex-Marine — was being sought after witnesses put him at the scene. According to the report, Mike hadn’t been heard from in two days.

  Unless another of the region’s Mike Clarkes was also working for the DHS (following a highly decorated career in the USMC), they couldn’t be talking about anyone but my brother. I tried to recall the last time I’d spoken to him when Charlie burst in.

  “Did you know about Mike?”

  I nodded, “Where did you see it? Don’t you famously reject printed media?”

  She said, “I have a search agent for our names. It fed me the story as soon as I booted up the computer. When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “Four, maybe five days ago,” I said. “You?”

  “About the same.”

  We looked at each other for a minute. I could feel dread spreading like poisonous vines in my stomach, the instinctual reaction when your gut immediately starts anticipating the worst even as your rational mind tries to intercede. I imagined Charlie was feeling the same way.

  As one, we said, “We gotta tell Mom.”

  chapter three

  Let me tell you about my brother Mike.

  He’s my second-oldest brother. Technically, the oldest now that Lee was gone. And while Lee was firstborn chronologically, Mike always fit that mold better anyway.

  There’s a long tradition of movie characters who are effective in spite of (perhaps because of) the fact they don’t speak much. Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns comes to mind, as does Red Grant in From Russia With Love, or Max in the Mad Max movies.

  Mike is like that.

  Charlie and I never got to know Lee all that well. He was eight years old when we were born, and by the time we were old enough to conceivably have a relationship with our eldest sibling, he was a teenager and barely around. He enlisted in the Army when we were still in grade school, and though we saw him occasionally when he was on leave, his influence was more
by way of reputation than actual presence.

  Mike was only a year younger, and therefore also subject to the existential vagaries of adolescence, so he stuck around for a while. He lived at home while he went to Rice University for two years before enlisting in the Marines. I still have a hard time comprehending that, considering there were four other kids tearing around (Don was a one-man demolition crew in his own right), but the mayhem never seemed to faze him. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he enjoyed it.

  It wasn’t until we got to high school, by which time Mike was already enjoying the hospitality at Parris Island, that Charlie and I learned of Mike’s rep there. He’d played baseball and basketball at Reagan High (now Heights High, since the school district finally realized they shouldn’t name buildings after dudes who served in the Confederacy), and featured prominently in several photos of District and State Championship teams from the eighties. Even though he’d graduated six years before Charlie and I started school, the teachers and faculty still spoke of him with great fondness.

  Unlike Lee, who’d coasted through school almost unnoticed and bugged out to the military almost before the ink on his diploma was dry, Mike was remembered as both a helpful kid and one who brooked no tolerance for bullies or assholes.

  As you can imagine, this put him at odds with a not insignificant portion of his fellow students.

  There’s a possibly apocryphal story about Mike that Don would sometimes tell when he’d had a few. It would’ve been Don’s freshman year, before he’d earned his own reputation. He says he walked into the boy’s restroom by the band hall, the one farthest from the office, and three older boys were thumping another freshman, calling him “faggot” and generally being teenage assholes. Don says he tried to stop them, but one of the kids sucker-punched him and shoved him out of the restroom.

  Where who should he see heading to baseball practice but Mike?

  To hear Don tell it, he gave Mike a quick rundown on what was going down in the restroom. Mike told him to go tell the school security officer there was a fight going on, then turned and walked in to the restroom.

  By the time Don returned with the security officer, the bullied kid was gone, and the three assholes were lying on the bathroom floor, bleeding from assorted facial contusions. None of them ever said who beat them up (likely to avoid admitting one dude had handled the three of them), and Don knew better than to fink on his older brother. Don said no one ever messed with the freshman after that. I’d like to believe him.

  Mike also wasn’t a “teacher’s pet.” He didn’t raise his hand or shout out answers to questions. But if a teacher needed someone to stay late and help clean up after biology lab, or partner up with a student who was having a hard time with their trigonometry homework, Mike would be there for them.

  Mike’s spirit of giving, or charity, or basic human decency, whatever you wanted to call it, spread to our home as well. As did his general reticence. To say the Clarke household was loud would be like saying dogs aren’t overly fond of cats. I can’t recall a time when the average decibel level wasn’t somewhere around “AC/DC concert” levels, but Mike was never a contributor.

  On those rare occasions when the rest of the family did appear to finally aggravate him, he’d simply get up and go to his room (which he shared with no one, benefits of being the oldest).

  But his silence didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention. With Lee gone and Dad having the home improvement skills of a guy whose idea of “kicking back” meant rereading biographies of Al-Khwarizmi and Tartaglia, it fell to Mike to keep our century-old house from falling apart.

  Mom would mention loose boards on the porch or a leaky laundry room faucet at dinner, for example. And while no one would acknowledge this (well, my dad might make some comment about “looking into it”), Mike would be up before school the next day, nailing the porch back together or taking the faucet apart. If Jim was the weird one, Don the troublemaker, and Charlie and me the smart-asses, then Mike was the doer.

  Is he my favorite brother? Can all of us with siblings just admit we have favorites? If so, then … probably. Like I said, I never really got to know Lee before he died, and I regret that to this day. Jim was and still is a deeply odd dude, but I don’t begrudge anyone their adolescent nerd phase (I myself have been known to sling a few D20s in my time). Don is the guy you’d want to have your back, whether kicking down doors in Tikrit or walking into a sports bar.

  Charlie is our favorite sister, which goes without saying.

  But if I’m telling the truth, then yeah; Mike’s probably my favorite. All those movie characters I mentioned were like him in the strictest “actions speak louder than words” sense, but all of them also had an agenda. I never got the sense from Mike that he wanted anything from me. If he offered to help me move some boxes into the attic or push my shitty Corolla to a gas station, it was never followed by “You owe me one, bro.”

  Then again, I’m told still waters supposedly run deep, so it’s possible Mike was harboring homicidal tendencies all along.

  I was on the phone waiting for Mom to pick up. Charlie was already on her own phone, simultaneously calling Mike’s wife Kayla and clicking through other local web pages to see if there was any more information.

  “Any other news?” I asked.

  “Hold on,” she said to her phone. To me: “No. It’s the same AP boilerplate. The story doesn’t seem to have a local reporter attached to it yet.”

  My phone connected: “Hello?”

  “Hey, Mom, it’s Cy.”

  “I know who it is,” she said, “your name shows on the screen when you call.”

  “Kind of takes all the suspense out of it.”

  She sounded bemused now. “Do you think I still have one of the old candlestick phones with the separate earpiece? I’m not that old.”

  I cut to the chase. “Mom, when was the last time you heard from Mike?”

  “Mike? About a week ago. He was helping me move boxes into the attic.” Her tone changed, and the hardass I’d grown up with replaced the affable grandmother she was now. “Why? Tell me what’s happened.”

  “He’s missing. According to the news, he’s a person of interest in a murder at DHS.”

  “What?”

  “It didn’t say he was a suspect …” I started.

  “Oh, bullshit. You know what ‘person of interest’ really means.”

  She had me there. “Look, Charlie’s calling Kayla, Don, and Jim to see if they’ve heard anything. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “See that you do,” she said. “And Cy?”

  “Yes?”

  “You both be careful.”

  “We will, Mom.” I ended the call.

  “We will what?” Charlie asked. She was off her phone.

  “Be careful.”

  She smiled without humor. “Always easier said than done.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Don hasn’t heard from Mike lately,” Charlie said. “I left a message with Jim’s service.”

  Our big brother Jim spent a lot of time overseas in his State Department job, though I feel like we should put “State Department” in quotes, because everyone in the family is convinced he’s continuing the spook work he began in the Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency.

  Even Mom.

  “What about Kayla?” I asked. Mike’s wife wasn’t a big fan of mine for a variety of reasons that are pretty much entirely my fault.

  “She and Tyler are going to Mom’s.”

  “When did she find out Mike was missing?”

  She said, “That’s what’s weird; she didn’t know he was. She found out right before I called, when another paper-reading weirdo, a neighbor this time, called to ask what was up.”

  I said, “Maybe we should go to Mom’s.”

  “No. Don’s on his way there now,” Charlie said. “He said he’d stay with her. I think he and Carlos are on the outs.”

  I didn’t have a respon
se for that. The Clarkes were notoriously difficult romantic partners.

  Charlie turned her monitor to me. “Look at this.”

  I walked over to her desk. “You found something about Mike?”

  “No,” she said, “it’s a story about an HPD raid in a house in southeast Houston three weeks ago.”

  Knowing Charlie, she had a reason for showing me an apparently unrelated story, so I scanned it. “What were they raiding it for? Drugs?”

  “Human trafficking,” she said. “They found a couple dozen women who were apparently in transit to wherever they were going to be turned out.”

  I exhaled. Seeing the treatment of women and children victims had always been the worst part of being a cop. “Okay, and?”

  She pointed to a paragraph. “DHS was there, too. Recognize the name?”

  “Bob Ramirez,” I said. “That’s interesting.”

  Charlie nodded. “And now he’s dead.”

  We exchanged another look. “What was that about being careful?” I asked.

  Chapter Four

  I mostly became a private investigator because of a promise.

  Being the youngest of five brothers carries certain challenges, especially when you also happen to be the smallest. I’m not a dwarf, by any means, but when every other male in your family is over 6' 3" tall, nicknames like “Runt” follow naturally. Such was the case throughout my childhood and into my adult years, even after I’d topped out at a hair over six feet tall.

  All the older men in the family are/were ex-military, just like Mom. Mary Duncan was one of a dozen women to receive the Bronze Star in Vietnam. While stationed as a nurse in Hue City, she rescued eight Marines from a downed, burning helicopter. After the war, she attended the University of Texas on the GI Bill and met Al Clarke when she took his math class. They were married in 1974. The kids, starting with Lee, followed at irregular intervals over the next ten years.

  Dad passed 12 years ago from a heart attack. A legitimate academic genius, he nevertheless refused to heed warnings about excessive red meat consumption. A year later, as if God decided to add an exclamation point, an IED would claim the life of my oldest brother Lee in Fallujah.