by Layla Wolfe
I called my half-sister. “Lyric? How’s it going at Bellamy’s?”
“Oh, it’s beyond groovy, Unity. I’ve got my own bedroom with a fucking view over the fucking red mountains.”
“Don’t say ‘fucking’ so much. Are you going back to school?” Lyric had just started her sophomore year.
“Well yes, but at P and E High, not Cottonwood. I want nothing to do with that place. Mom hasn’t even tried to call my cell.”
“I imagine what kind of abuse she’s been getting from that pig.”
“Unity, Bellamy said she wants to adopt me. She’s your age, I know, but all that’s required is they be over twenty-five. Knoxie’s way over that. And, Unity. Is that dog rescue guy still around?”
“Yes, why? I’m about to eat lunch with him.”
“Really? How’d you score? Tell him thanks from the bottom of my heart. I’ve never seen anyone stand up to that asshole like that. Sure stopped him in his tracks. That dog guy’s a real hero.”
My heart swelled to hear this.
It was what I suspected—that Tanner was a hero. What he’d done at my childhood house was definitely not the only heroic thing he’d ever done. He’d been a pilot in the Air Force! He rescued dogs and trained them to help disabled people! But I didn’t want to start thinking like this, so I went back downstairs to the restaurant. Thinking like this only led to disappointment. Big, crushing letdown. I’d thought like this once, and it had been a disaster.
The theme of the place was Bigfoot, and half of one wall was covered with children’s crayon renderings of what they imagined the critter. Neon beer signs, checkered cloth picnic tables pushed together, and some most excellent examples of bad taxidermy gave the place its feel. Favorites were the inebriated fox couple standing on hind legs and the coyote sitting in a chair cross-eyed and knock-kneed from a full bladder. Tanner had taken a seat near the best. A poor leopard must’ve been mounted over a chair’s bolster. Shaped like a filing cabinet—or a bench—the guy’s snarl took up half its face, the bulbous tongue like a plastic Halloween liver.
“Tanner,” I said, slinging my purse around the back of the chair, “you’re sitting underneath the best—“
“I like that one.”
“What?”
Tanner lifted his chin at my arm. “That tattoo. Those flowers.”
I looked down at my elbow. “Those are opium poppies.” The goofy grin evaporated from my face. “I’ll bet you disapprove of that too. I’m a spokesmodel for cannabis extract companies. Everything natural, like smoking opium before fucktards turn it into heroin. Done heroin once. No thanks.”
Tanner shrugged. He was looking me directly in the eye, maybe figuring I’d gotten over my fear of capture. “I’ve got no gripe with ganja. It never killed anyone.”
“Unless it falls on you.” I was thinking of the time some moron tried to steal weed from the Ochoa’s warehouse. I almost laughed, thinking how the guy had been found with a fractured skull under half a ton of Critical Mass. I remembered to defend myself to Tanner. “Look, I get your beef with cutting. But tattooing is different. It’s a totally ancient and sacred art form. It’s like . . . the way chimps groom themselves. When Knoxie inks me, it’s an intimate act of grooming. The pain gives me an endorphin rush. That’s good, right?”
“I’m not saying it’s not beautiful,” Tanner admitted gruffly. He finally sucked on the baby back rib that had been dangling from his fingers, and I took a giant unladylike bite of my sloppy sandwich. “To each his own. I just could never see being eighty-years-old and stuck looking at a wrinkled, sagging anchor.”
I thought he referred to the giant six-inch anchor in the middle of my chest. I spoke through a mouthful of sugary pork. “Excuse me. My chest will never be wrinkled.”
“I didn’t mean that. I was thinking of those traditional old-timey anchors sailors would get.”
“Oh. Well. Your chest will never be wrinkled either.”
Then I felt I’d said too much. Why was I talking about his chest? As though I’d been wondering how hairy it was! How developed the pecs, how tight the nipples, how firm a bite of his deltoid . . . Oh my God. I’ve been thinking all those things.
I wagged a sweet potato fry at the lopsided pair of googly-eyed foxes. “We always say these stuffed animals look more like taxiderpy, not taxidermy.”
Tanner didn’t seem amused. Stuffing animals probably offended him, too. “Stress, seclusion, and boredom create self-harm. Joining groups almost always snuffs out the tendency. Backyard gardening gives satisfaction.”
“Dog grooming.”
“Dog grooming, sure. Anything that connects you on a primal level is a tool that fixes an evolutionary disconnect.”
“Joining groups. Like the Bare Bones MC.”
“Why not? A sense of brotherhood is what we all need,” he said, distracted now as his phone buzzed. I liked how he looked to see who it was before answering. I hated when people stopped conversations to answer junk calls, calls from their mothers. “Tutti,” he acknowledged, looking significantly at me.
I wiggled my eyebrows, chowing my sandwich as I listened to Tanner’s conversation.
“And you’ve never heard of this Barbara? Where exactly did she say Lavinia fell?”
Fell? As in fell down?
“Uh-huh. Listen, Tutti, let me put my partner on speakerphone.”
Then, although the somewhat crowded restaurant blanketed his words in fog, I heard the voice of a complete liar.
I said, “Hi, Tutti. I don’t know any Barbara either. What did Barbara say?”
“Can you repeat yourself?” Tanner asked him.
“Sure,” said the stressed “Walter White of Flagstaff.” “I received an email from a gal named Sideshow Barbara. You heard of her, Unity?”
“Never.”
“She said the day Lavinia stormed out of here, they went walking somewhere. She didn’t say where. The email just said ‘Lavinia came for a ride in the woods with us. She got out to hike and we are sure she fell.’”
“Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
“Who knows? Then she said to cancel the missing person report and call off Tanner. Well, she didn’t say Tanner directly, of course, not knowing who he is. She just said call off the search because Lavinia is gone for sure. She fell off a cliff.”
“Oh, right!” I exploded. “We’re just supposed to stop looking and believe this bitch? Tutti, can you forward that email to us?”
“Uh, sure,” he said uncertainly. “But this person really seemed convinced that Lavinia is gone forever.”
Tanner said, “Without telling you where she fell off a cliff? Sounds like someone is playing a cruel joke on you, my friend.”
“Well, of course I emailed her back asking where she fell. No answer yet. This was just half an hour ago.”
“Wanting you to call off the search is suspicious too,” I said.
But we couldn’t convince Tutti this Sideshow Barbara person was phony. Tutti promised to let us know the second Barbara answered him, but he sounded doubtful she would. In our mind, that made her even more suspicious. We hung up.
We had no more interest in our food. We just gulped our lemonade. I said, “If Barbara is so convinced Lavinia is dead, why won’t she help us find the body? Why do I get the feeling Tutti is a complete liar?”
“Hmph,” said Tanner, looking me directly in the eye. “I get the feeling Tutti is a totally random weird wolf.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tanner
Lytton Illuminati’s spread on the way up Mormon Mountain was spectacular. The back deck gave an unfettered view of the bowl of Mormon Lake and the pine-encrusted mountains around it. Wolf actually lived at the pot plantation farther uphill, and this was his tech center with all his equipment and communications.
It also came with a big-nosed, bowl-headed rival of his named Tobiah Weingarten.
The slim-hipped Tobiah with his white acrylic belt was not a member of the MC like Wolf. He’d started out
CEO and CTO for Leaves of Grass, but apparently, Unity told me, he’d become so much more. His know-how had brought down drug kingpins, psychos, and human traffickers.
And contrary to popular belief, the ménage he was having with Wolf and a gal named Tracy wasn’t a match made in heaven.
“Get your goonish shoes off my table,” said Tobiah.
“They’re not goonish,” Wolf said. “They’re engineer boots. Trés cool, which is more than I can say for your high-top tennies.”
“They’re Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars,” yelled Tobiah through gritted teeth. I expected him to say Wolf was giving him high blood pressure, that he needed his meds. He bellowed, as though to be heard over Wolf’s next interruption. “All right. The first thing I noticed about this purported email from Sideshow Barbara—“
Wolf yelled just as loud from his perch kicked back on the sofa, feet still on the coffee table. “We should go in chronological order. Mine came first. I found old stuff on Lavinia’s phone going back a few months.”
Lytton, no doubt familiar with the two clowns, held out calming hands. “All right. Let’s take it down a notch. But Wolf’s right. Lavinia’s phone came first.”
Now that he had center stage, Wolf popped to his feet and strode with one arm behind his back. He waggled the phone as a prop. “Now, this Android S7 Edge needed its contacts back. Odd how even the contacts had been stripped, always a suspicious sign. If Lavinia did not take her phone on this alleged walk where she fell off a cliff, why would she leave it stripped in her garage, just waiting for Tutti to find?”
“She wouldn’t,” said Bellamy. She’d wanted to come and help, now that Lyric was settling into her new house.
Wolf shot her with the phone. “Exactly! She wouldn’t! So, in addition to recovering contacts, I was able to get photos and text messages. A text to Unity from September sixteenth illustrates what I am trying to say.”
Tobiah muttered, “Any moron can recover phone data.”
Wolf’s nostrils flared. “The first thing I noted, there was only one José in her entire contacts. And it’s the José in Flagstaff you two went and saw. Maddy later verified his wife had been giving birth the day Lavinia went missing.”
Unity sat by me on the loveseat. Her body heat slammed me like a wall. The weather was sublime for November—not a whisper of wind, sliders open to the fresh piney air—and Unity had squirmed into a skin-tight halter that accentuated her boobs. Those babies must’ve been placed up on an inner bra shelf of the shirt because they sure bobbled out the deep neckline. I was even starting to like her giant anchor. Her long blonde-striped hair was wrapped in dread rags to keep them clean when she rode, and she chewed on a sharp pencil she took notes with.
“Tutti could’ve gotten the name wrong, because José didn’t own anything with California plates.”
Wolf pointed at Unity. “The next thing I did with the contacts was run them through the ADOT vehicle registration database. Course, there’s a margin of error here because sometimes kids will drive their parents’ cars.”
“True,” said Lytton, “but not many of those are tricked out for sideshows.”
“No one ever really said the guy who took her away was a sideshow participant,” said Tobiah. “He could’ve been driving a Lincoln Continental or a VW Bug.”
“Bugs are distinguishable,” said Wolf. “Tutti would’ve said a Bug.”
“Okay, point being,” Tobiah said irritably, tapping a pen on his desktop, “it could’ve been any guy. You’ve got to throw your net wide.”
“Which I did,” Wolf said with narrowed eyes, turning to a wide screen on the wall. He clicked a remote, and a list of three people appeared. “These are the contacts in Lavinia’s phone who have registered cars in California. One, Gloria Steinman. Tutti said it was a guy, so Gloria’s out. Here’s a guy, Jens which is similar to José, but he drives a red Nissan Cube. Gross. I think Tutti would’ve noticed that.”
“Maybe not,” said Tobiah, ever the devil’s advocate. “He said it was dark out.”
Wolf put on an exaggerated patient face. “Please. You’d have to be blind to say a gross red box was a blue sedan. Now for the third guy, John Kinkaid. He does have a blue Honda accord which is a four-door sedan. But I ruled him out because he actually does live most of the year in Eureka, California, almost all the way to Oregon. He has a skiing cabin near the Flagstaff Snowbowl.”
“So you found nothing,” bawled Tobiah, eagerly moving his mouse in a circular pattern. “Now about this email from Sideshow Barbara—“
Wolf held his arms up high. “There are no Barbaras in her contacts either.”
“Big deal,” sneered Tobiah. “Could’ve been an acquaintance from the sideshows.”
“Wolf isn’t done,” Lytton said. “What about the texts you recovered?”
Wolf bowed prissily to Lytton. “Exactly. Ladies. Let me ask you a delicate question. Were you aware that Lavinia was, ah, with child? Well, she was. Four months along, as she texted to her sister Ophelia in Ganado.”
Ganado was in the Four Corners rez, part of the Navajo Nation. I’d rescued a few strays from those rezzes before. They loved dogs like the rest of us—they just didn’t have the resources to feed or care for a lot of them, so the dogs roamed around in feral packs.
Wolf said firmly, “Yeah. You see what I’m getting at. All the more reason for Tutti to not want to marry her.”
I said, “And a damned good reason for Tutti to marry her.”
Wolf shrugged. “It could go either way. But all those times Tutti reiterated how their marriage wasn’t in such a honeymoon stage? Well, I found plenty more evidence of that.”
Clicking a few more times, Wolf brought onscreen a text from Lavinia to Ophelia. The little graphic balloon said:
Tutti is such a stupid bilagaana. He treats me like a slave, so I have no time to go out. I spend all day Monday washing and ironing his asshole clothes. Tuesday is housecleaning. Wednesday is food shopping. At least then I get to see my friends. Sideshows are my only outlet. I tell Tutti I am picking up his favorite ribs and cornbread, which gives me a little extra time.
“I didn’t realize she was such a slave,” said Bellamy. “I know Tutti encouraged her to quit her kiddie daycare job, mainly because it didn’t pay squat. Guess he could use her cheaper than a maid.”
“Or a charwoman, prostitute, chef, and bookkeeper,” said Unity.
It made me think. Had I treated Joy like that? Had she gone back to Bernard, a guy who seemed completely built of flaws to hear her tell it, because he didn’t force her to wash his skivvies? Not that I did—Joy and I didn’t even live together. But would I, if we did live together? It wasn’t entirely out of the question. And sure, if she didn’t work and I was out in the field picking up, training, and delivering canines, it’d be nice to have a home-cooked meal. And someone who was dog-friendly to help with training or cleanup or general maintenance. Fact, I could sure use an assistant other than Josie and Curly, my faithful Air Force reject with Down’s Syndrome. Curly was slow but thorough, and Josie wasn’t much for women’s touches, like cooking.
Someone to wash my skivvies. Was I a sexist? I realized I was starting to sound like a Bare Boner.
Wolf flashed a text from Ophelia to Lavinia:
What about that time he tried to strangle you, Lavinia? I feel you are playing with a loaded gun here.
“That’s it?” cried Unity. “That was the whole text? How did Lavinia answer?”
Wordlessly, Wolf clicked.
I am trying to forget that time, Ophelia. Let’s just say it was a one-off. Besides, he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant yet. That’ll change him. What man could fail to fall in love with his own unborn child?
The sentiment was so outrageously ignorant that everyone in the room went silent for several seconds. Finally, Unity sighed deeply.
“It’s more like the opposite. Men find out you can’t get pregnant, they flock around you.”
“Right,” said Bellamy. �
��You’re a free ride.”
The women seemed to know a lot about infertility and it seemed to pain them, so I stood and said with authority, “All right. We’ve established that Tutti, as expected, is a giant peckerhead. Wolf, what were the very last texts?”
“Well, it’s telling,” said Wolf. “The last texts were Sunday. As you recall, Tutti reported she drove away with José Tuesday.”
I commanded him. “Show.”
He clicked. The text was from the random wolf himself, Tutti.
Lovey. I feel that since we wed, we have become distant from each other. I propose to take a romantic drive down the south rim of the Grand Canyon. We can watch the sun set over the flaming gorge, and hike as you love to do down to Grandview Point. What do you say, Lovey? Do you think this would revitalize our marriage?
Many lip farts were made, but it was Unity who said, “The Walter White of Flagstaff he may be. But he’s not the Ezra Pound.”
Tobiah laughed. “I was going to say the same thing! Robinson Jeffers he ain’t, with his flaming gorges.”
“Ha,” Wolf barked. “I saw that piece of shit poem you wrote Tracy on front of the fridge.” His voice took on a sappy drip, and he used the remote control as a microphone. “’Oo, Tracy! What happens in the nighttime when it’s quiet, you sit on your bed and think why?’ I’ll tell you why, nerd! Why is because your dick is too small! There’s the answer to all your cornball questions.”
“Oh, yeah?” whined Tobiah. “You’re the one who couldn’t figure out the harness pulley and left me dangling from the ceiling ‘til Tracy got out of the bathroom.”
Wolf acted as if he didn’t hear Tobiah. He kept reciting the poem. “’Oo, Tracy. The black empty hollow of your being, yearning for someone, yet afraid, wants to be filled.’ Hey, I’ll tell you where you can get your black empty hollow filled for free, bud.”
Tobiah got to his feet. His spindly legs, clad in burgundy velveteen pants, seemed hardly strong enough to hold up his beak, much less his skull. “That’s it, egghead! I know you borrowed my gladiator harness without asking and stretched it out. I thought we agreed no play time with Tracy unless all three of us are present? Yet I go to put it on, and it looked like Dolly Parton’s been wearing it!”
