Gate 76

by Andrew Diamond

  He lets out a little laugh. “Weddings and funerals. You know a wedding’s just a funeral for two single people. I ain’t a churchgoer either. One of them hardline types talked me into going a while back to heal my soul—which, by the way, I didn’t know was aching in the first place. I spent an hour of my Sunday listening to this fella talk about how Satan was gonna roast my soul over eternal fire. Who the hell wants to listen to that kind of talk when there’s football on TV? Then he hands me a plate and wants me to put a dollar in it. I gave him a nickel and he got the hint.”

  He takes a swig of beer and sets the glass down a little too hard as a fat man with a grey beard enters the bar. Travis watches him walk back to the restroom and says, “I get that some people are into it. If faith is what a person needs to get through their day, I ain’t gonna kick that crutch out from under ’em. You go ahead and pray your comfort. I’ll drink mine. World’s big enough for every man to have his church. ’Scuse me now.”

  He gets up and nearly falls sideways onto the bar. Then he steadies himself and staggers back to the men’s room.

  “Hey Kendra,” I say to the bartender. “I want to settle up. Gimme Travis’s tab too.”

  The bartender hands me a receipt for two Lite beers, along with Travis’s receipt, which is a flat sixty bucks.

  “He’s been on a roll the past few days,” she says.

  Travis’s receipt isn’t itemized. “How much did he drink?”

  She shrugs and says, “At least twice what the bill says. We comp him ’cause he’s a regular. He’s been in since ten this morning. Don’t let him drive.”

  As I’m paying the bill, Grey Beard comes out of the men’s room and goes straight out the front door without looking at anyone.

  Half a minute later, Travis stumbles out of the restroom, trying to walk upright and veering sharply sideways. A couple of guys jump up from their table and grab him before he can knock over their beers. As they steer him back toward the bar, I notice the lump in his pocket where the pills used to be is gone.

  I say, “I’m taking you home, pal.”

  He points to the half-empty beer in front of my stool. “What about that?”

  “I don’t want it,” I say.

  He picks it up and drinks it, bracing himself against the bar to keep from falling.

  “Hey,” I say. “You gotta stay awake. You want some coffee?”

  “Another beer,” he says.

  “No. Let’s go,” I say. “And remember, my name is…”

  “Fray Furgsen,” he says. “Pee. Eye. Friend of Anna’s sister.”

  I loop his arm over my shoulder so he can’t topple over, and we start toward the door. “Don’t pass out,” I say.

  The TV in the front corner is tuned to the local Austin news. It’s on mute, with subtitles across the bottom of the screen. Travis leans heavily on me as we cross the floor. The reporter is talking about a big drug bust in Longview, over on the eastern side of the state. They cut to footage of the suspect being marched from a low brick building to a patrolman’s cruiser. It’s him! The tall, angular guy who was holding Anna Brook by the arm back in San Francisco. There’s his name in the subtitles. Ramón Ramírez.

  “Jesus!”

  “What?” Travis says drowsily. “Whazzit?”

  “That guy! That’s…” Wait, didn’t he have a record down here in Texas? Looks like he came home and found some more trouble.

  Travis starts to slump.

  “Come on, buddy,” I say. “Let’s keep it moving.”

  18

  “Travis, wake up.” I give him a little nudge on the shoulder as he snores in the passenger seat.

  “Huh?”

  “Wake up. This is your house.”

  He turns and looks. “Yeah it is.” Then he closes his eyes again.

  “You gotta stay awake for five minutes. Introduce me to Anna. Why the hell’d you drink so much?”

  “S’what I do. Why you nag so much? Like a goddamn wife.” He folds his arms across his chest, slides his hands under his armpits, and his eyes sag shut as he slumps against the door.

  I grab the shoulder bag from the back seat and get out. When I go around and open the passenger door, Travis almost falls out of the car. The shoulder belt stops him, jerking his neck and jolting him awake.

  “Goddamn fuck! What the…”

  I grab him under the arm and say, “Come on now. You remember my name, right?”

  “Freddy Fergis from Redskins land.”

  “You have the house key?”

  He fishes through his pocket as I walk him toward the porch. When he pulls out the key ring, a wad of neatly folded cash drops to the ground. The money from the pills he just sold. I pick it up and give it back to him as he hands me the keys.

  “It’s the one that don’t say Ford,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  When I get him up the steps onto the porch the old wood planks sag beneath us. A flickering spiral bulb hangs above the door, giving off a weak pinkish-blue light. I have to let go of Travis to get the key into the lock, but as soon as I loosen my grip, he starts to fall.

  I hook one hand under each of his arms and get him seated on a milk crate beside the door. I slide the key into the lock and give it a turn. As the door opens, Travis topples onto his side with a thud. I watch him for a few seconds to make sure he’s breathing, then I look inside. The house is dark, except for a dim shaft of light in the room at the back.

  “Anna?” I wait for a few seconds, but there’s no answer. “Travis had a little too much to drink.” I wait again. “Anna?” The house is silent.

  I step inside and feel for a light switch on the wall. I push it up, it clicks, but no light comes on.

  I take another step and the floorboards creak beneath my feet. This house must be over a hundred years old.

  “Anna Brook? Are you in here?”

  I walk through the front room, where I can make out the shapes of a couch and coffee table to the left. I pass an open doorway on the right. The only light in there comes from the green digits of the microwave clock. It’s not 4:06, a.m. or p.m.

  There’s another door on the right, between the kitchen and the back room. A closet.

  The front of my foot goes into a fist-sized hole in the floor, and I almost curse out loud as my ankle twists.

  One more step, and I’m in the back room. It’s a bedroom. The light is coming from a nightlight in the bathroom to the right. To the left is a bed with a body in it.

  “Anna Brook,” I whisper.

  No response.

  I wait a moment, and in the silence I hear the slow, rhythmic breath of sleep. She’s on her side. I can see her shoulder rise and fall beneath the sheet.

  I turn and walk quietly back into the other room, avoiding the hole in the floor. I should drag Travis into the house and throw him on the couch. Or maybe not. Maybe I should drag him onto the gravel driveway and let him sleep there, the bum.

  I stop in the middle of the front room and look again. There’s trash all over the place. Beer cans and I don’t know what. I step back and bump against a small card table. Two bottles tip and rock, but they don’t fall over.

  No, those aren’t bottles. They’re candles. And there’s a book of matches. What the hell is this stuff all over the floor?

  I kneel and light one candle, then the other. They’re religious candles, encased in glass. One has a picture of the Virgin Mary, her eyes turned upward toward heaven. The other shows Saint Peter being crucified upside down. There’s a dark wood crucifix on the table like the one that loomed over the priest in the church my mother used to take me to in Philly.

  The two candles and cross form a triangle, and between them is the Bible, opened to the book of Luke. A few sentences are underlined in pencil. I can just make them out in the flickering light.

  You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not
give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.

  I turn and look at the floor, the coffee table, the couch. They’re covered with newspapers. A familiar face stares up at me from the floor. Rashad Obasanjo, with a bootprint stamped across his face. Travis must have stepped on it.

  What did he say about Anna? That she reads the newspapers to get worked up and the Bible to get calmed down.

  I pick up the paper with the photo of Obasanjo. She’s underlined parts of sentences: had access and opportunity, but no apparent motive… described by friends and family as devout, but no ties to radicals. The word devout is underlined twice, and the margins are littered with notes in a shaky hand.

  I pick up another section of paper from the coffee table and read it by the light of the candles. It shows photos and brief written profiles of some of the crash victims.

  She’s circled the paragraphs describing Sheldon Brown and his friend Franklin Dorsett, “two successful businessmen on their way to Hawaii to take a break from the pressures of work.” Brown owned several car dealerships. Dorsett owned a company that leased equipment for oil drilling. The story doesn’t show their photos, but in my mind, I can see them clearly. They were the ones in the VIP lounge in that video the airline sent us. Brown was the skinny, fidgety one. Dorsett was the fat drinker.

  In the margin beside those paragraphs, she’s written, 2 + 2 = ?.

  What does that mean?

  I feel a little vibration in the floor, just a tiny bounce, and then a bright red bead of light appears on the question mark. 2 + 2 = a bright red dot of jittery light that travels up my arm and comes to rest on the side of my face.

  “Who are you?” Her voice is tense and deadly serious.

  She flips the switch beside the closet door, the light comes on, and there she is. Anna Brook, in faded cutoffs and a white tank top.

  I put my hands up slowly beside my head as I turn toward her. “Freddy Ferguson,” I say. “I’m an investigator.”

  “Where’s Travis?” She has a fierce look in her eye as she holds a black automatic pistol in a two-handed grip with both arms extended. I can tell by the hard look in her eyes she’s looking for reasons not to shoot me.

  I nod toward the front door. “He’s on the porch.”

  The fear rises up in her all at once. “Dead?”

  “Drunk,” I say. “I had a little chat with him at the bar and—” I turn just slightly and she flinches. The gun is pointed at my chest now, the red bead of light dancing erratically on my shirt as she shakes. She’s too wound up to handle that thing. She’s going to shoot me without meaning to.

  “Can you point that somewhere else, please? The way you’re shaking…”

  She points it at my crotch and says, “Why were you following me at the airport?”

  “You remember that?”

  “I had a feeling if anyone came after me it would be you. Who do you work for?”

  “A private outfit.”

  “The FBI?” Her pitch just went up a notch.

  “No, I—you’re really shaking, you know that? You shouldn’t be holding a gun—”

  “Raise your hands up as high as they’ll go.”

  I do as she says.

  “Turn them around. Let me see the backs.”

  When I turn my hands around, I see the sharp observation in her eyes as she examines the scarred knuckles, the swollen joints, the pinky that will never be straight again.

  “You hit more with your left,” she says.

  “That’s the setup for the money punch.”

  “Raise them higher,” she says. “So your shirt comes up.”

  I raise them higher so there’s an inch of space between the top of my pants and the bottom of my shirt.

  “Now turn around,” she says. Her voice is shaking. “All the way.”

  I turn around, three hundred and sixty degrees, nice and slow, and she looks at my beltline to see if I have a gun. Then she looks down at my ankles, checking for the telltale bulge of a pistol.

  “Who did you say you work for?”

  “A private outfit,” I say. “Right now the airline is paying us.”

  “They pay you to find me?” She takes a step to the side. One more like that, and her foot will go into that hole in the floor.

  “They don’t know about you,” I say. The tilt of her hands changes ever so slightly, and the glowing red dot dances on my liver. “No one does.”

  “I think someone does.”

  “Listen, Anna, I came here because I think you might know something—”

  “I do.”

  “I think you’re in trouble, and I think it’s something bad.”

  “It is.”

  She’s thin and pale and looks like she’s getting tired of holding that heavy gun out in front of her. The red dot keeps getting lower, and then she keeps jerking it back up.

  “You’re not taking me to the cops,” she says.

  “No, I’m not.”

  That seems to surprise her.

  “Then why did you—”

  “Can I put my hands down?”

  “No!” She takes a step to the side and her bare foot goes into the splintery hole. Her ankle twists and as she goes down on her ass, her right hand goes behind her to break the fall. Her knee knocks the gun out of her left hand, and I spring forward to pick it up.

  She sits with her back against the closet door, watching in paralyzed terror as I activate the safety on the gun. Her eyes are fixed on me, wide and watering as her throat contracts with a hard dry swallow.

  Her foot is bleeding, and the bruises that ring her wrists have faded to a pale greenish yellow.

  This is when I take my gamble and see if all the little things add up. The fear and anger in her tone when she asked just now if I’m with the FBI. The fact that Lomax was in San Francisco the day of the crash, just like her. The way he was looming over her sister—her virtual twin—looking at her like a lost possession. Kim Hahn’s expression of fear and hatred when she saw his photo.

  I crouch in front of her, hand her the gun, and say, “I understand why you don’t want to go to the cops. When they find out you weren’t on that plane, they’ll take you straight to the FBI. And I know you don’t want to see Lomax again.”

  She looks confused as she takes the gun.

  “I put the safety on so no one gets hurt,” I say. “Now we’re going to talk this out.”

  19

  She’s sitting on the coffee table, pressing a damp washcloth against the scrapes on her foot. I’m on the couch, drinking a beer to take the edge off my nerves. I don’t do well with unstable women, and I don’t like guns, and I especially don’t like unstable women with guns. If I were alone right now, I might want to do what Travis just did and make myself forget about this day.

  “You mind if I empty this?” I say, pointing to the gun beside her hip. “It makes me nervous.”

  She hesitates, looks at the gun, then back at me, and finally says, “Yes. I do mind.”

  She picks up the gun and puts it in her lap and says, “You know I’ve thought of using this thing on myself. More than once.”

  “That doesn’t make me any more comfortable.”

  She gives me a long, curious look and says, “How did you know I wouldn’t want to come out? How’d you know about Lomax? How did you even find me?”

  I tell her the story. A talk with her sister. An inadvertent tip from Kim Hahn. A tip from Katie Green’s drunk mother.

  The mention of Katie Green gets her talking. She tells me Katie’s overdose really shook her up and made her vow to quit everything. She took the same pills Katie used to take before Katie started shooting: OxyContin, Vicoden, Tramadol. She did a lot of blow too. She tapered off the pills when Katie died. The last one was ten days ago. She stopped doing blow, except for one slip-up the night before the flight fro
m San Francisco.

  “And I stopped drinking,” she says. “I wish Travis wouldn’t keep it in the house.”

  “How did you know Lomax?” I ask.

  “He was my handler.”

  “Your handler?”

  “Yeah. Informants have handlers, you know.”

  “What were you informing about?”

  “A couple guys in Dallas,” she says. “Rich guys.” She hands me the newspaper I’d been looking at earlier and points to the two circled paragraphs. “Sheldon Brown and Franklin Dorsett.” Her hand is still shaking.

  “What’s this mean?” I ask, pointing to her note in the margin. “Two plus two equals question mark?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” she says. “There were two other guys on that plane…” She pauses for a second and thinks.

  “Who?”

  She rubs the crucifix that hangs from the silver chain around her neck. It’s an unconscious gesture that seems to soothe her. “I can’t remember their names,” she says. “They’re in one of these papers. The Austin Statesman from a couple of days ago.”

  “Where do you get all these?” I ask, pointing to the papers.

  “I send Travis out in the morning.”

  “Have you been out of the house?” I ask.

  “Just to the woods out back.”

  She tells me she’s afraid of going out. There’s a trapdoor in the closet that goes to the crawl space under the house. The first few days she was here, she hid down there when she heard noises. The hole we both stepped in goes right through to the crawl space. She tells me Travis dropped his keys through there this morning, and she had to go down and get them. “It’s filthy down there,” she says. “And there are probably snakes. But sometimes I get so scared that someone’s about to come through the front door, I don’t even care.”

  “Have you called anyone?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t want anyone to know where I am. I don’t have a phone anyway.”

  “Well I brought you one,” I say.

  I pick up my shoulder bag from the floor and pull out the cheap Android phone I picked up earlier today at Walmart. “This,” I say, handing her the phone, “has one number programmed into it. It goes to this.” I pull out the black flip phone, also from Walmart. “They’re burners. No one can trace them to you. I brought you some cash too.”