The Debt Collector

by Lynn S. Hightower

  “The Angel?”

  “Yeah, I know. And always from that place in Indian Hill, as far as I can tell, but most of this is whispers, it’s hard to pin it down.”

  “Who owns it, do you know?”

  “I been trying for three months to unravel that paper trail. I’m nowhere yet, but maybe your people are better than mine. All I can tell you is, whoever that guy is, he’s either your best friend or your worst nightmare.”

  Sonora opened the note. Focused on Sam’s neat block handwriting.

  DETECTIVE WHITMORE FROM LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY, REPORTS THE PRIMER-STAINED MONTE CARLO AT THE SISTER’S ADDRESS ON OLD FRANKFORT PIKE. SUBJECTS MATCHING DESCRIPTION OF ARUBA AND KINKLE SEEN GOING IN AND OUT OF THE HOUSE. CRICK HAS THE PAPERWORK UNDER WAY.

  “Thank you, Mr. David, you’ve been a lot of help.”

  “Uh, you okay, Detective, you sound kind of funny. Not having a heart attack, are you?”

  “No, I’m fine, Mr. David, and very grateful for your help.”

  “That so? Because if you’re really grateful, Detective, spread the word there with your colleagues that it’s not legal for you people to be out there picking my clients up.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sonora said. It seemed too rude to tell him it wasn’t her department.

  36

  Sonora walked through the Dairy Mart, elbowing her way around every other person there on their way home from a long day at work, wondering if they’d have anything she could use for dinner. The kids were getting tired of Lean Cuisines, and she could not face the lines and jazzed-up panic of a major grocery store during the predinner after-work chaos.

  She wanted to buy something quick, she wanted to buy something easy, so she could take a hot bath and get to bed early. Tomorrow she would be up at dawn for the drive to Kentucky. She ought to be excited.

  But she wasn’t excited.

  Frozen pizza? Burritos? Pimento loaf, pickle loaf, stale doughnuts, what the hell was she doing shopping here anyway, when she should be at home doing something wholesome like making chicken and dumplings? Unfortunately, she did not have the first clue how one made chicken and dumplings, the kitchen was a mess, and the thought of clearing the rubble and cooking was enough to make her want to leave the country.

  A man in corduroy pants that sang with the movement of his legs walked around her with an exaggerated air of polite tolerance that told her, one, he felt she was in his way but he was going to be civilized about it, and two, she didn’t like his face. He did not look happy. She looked around, trying to find someone who did look happy.

  No luck.

  The door opened and closed, opened and closed, the line at both registers got longer. She decided on bacon. They would have BLTs, unfortunately without the tomatoes. Not the best dinner in the world, but not the worst. She would get the kids their favorite chips, totally unhealthy, but it would fill them up, and she was too tired to think of anything else. Unless … soup? Was there soup anywhere? Soup and sandwich, that was lunchy, but definitely wholesome, according to all those Campbell’s commercials.

  She found Chunky Soup, got into the end of the line. It wasn’t moving. The woman at the front was buying cigarettes, and she wanted them in the box, Marlboros in the box.

  The clerk found the right cigarettes. Now the woman wanted lottery tickets. Sonora gritted her teeth and made a fist. She hated waiting for people who wanted lottery tickets. People who wanted lottery tickets and cigarettes at dinnertime.

  Maybe it made them happy. This woman looked happy now, the first happy person Sonora had seen in the Dairy Mart, of the thirty or so who passed through while she was trying to make up her mind.

  She bit her thumbnail. Waiting in a line that was going so slow she genuinely thought she might prefer to die than wait her turn.

  Here I am walking through Dairy Mart and I want to die. Everybody here who wants to die, raise your hand.

  Sonora wondered what the percentage would be. Low, surely, but deep in her heart she was convinced that it could be pretty damn high. Which showed how far gone she was.

  By midnight, the witching hour, Sonora, back out in the car, cruising the streets, still wanted to die, even more now than when she was standing in line at the Dairy Mart. She had gone home not to kids, but to kid. Tim had not come home. On the one night she actually felt sleepy, had actually fallen asleep on the couch, had to get up very early the next morning to catch two desperate and dangerous killers, for God’s sake, this would be the night the boy did not come home, the boy did not call, this would be the night the boy, her son and firstborn, chose to disappear.

  Sonora, a mother, a cop, a woman with a great deal of common sense but a lot of imagination, thought she might never sleep again.

  The list of things that could happen to him was as long as the list of things she would do to him once she had him home and safe, bargains with her maker aside.

  She stopped at a red light, then turned the heat on in the car. It was cold out for cut-off jeans, but her sweatshirt was warm, and she was comfortable. Clampett, banished to the backseat, made a move for the front, which is where she would put Tim if she ever found him. She cruised slowly past the after-hours clubs and other places her son had better not be. Where the hell was he?

  She had made all the phone calls, hospitals, the city jail, and found no sign. No news is good news, this pearl of wisdom courtesy of the clerk on duty at the city jail.

  Cincinnati was quiet, she should be home in bed, so should all two of her kids. She closed her eyes, waiting for the light to turn. She had never felt so alone, so “back to the wall,” so afraid that she just couldn’t do it anymore. The light changed. She found a blues station on the radio. Something from Hot Flash by Saffire—The Uppity Blues Women.

  They call me a tramp. They don’t understand. I just want one good man.

  She wondered what Gillane was doing, if he was working the night shift. She considered calling him to help her look. Changed her mind.

  The dark thoughts were with her like never before. They touched her forehead with sweat, they sat in her stomach like an ulcer pain, made a knot in her chest that was becoming as familiar as her reflection in the mirror.

  The thoughts scared her. They felt a long way from safe.

  Another red light, she was catching them all. A black Trans Am, brand new, pulled up in the right lane beside her. The windows were tinted, Sonora could not see the driver. She had the uncanny feeling he was looking at her, and when the light changed, she took off.

  The tires of the Trans Am screeched and he was with her neck and neck. She accelerated, looked at the speedometer. Eighty-five, and increasing. Traffic ahead. The car fell back. Sonora kept the speed up an extra second to make it clear who’d won, then braked hard, a red light ahead. Clampett slid forward into the dash and she grabbed his fur, keeping him in the seat, one hand on the wheel with the car weaving right and left and all over the road, till she got the speed down and the Pathfinder’s nose straight.

  “Sorry, Clampett.”

  He was a good boy, he didn’t deserve being slung into the dashboard. Sonora eased up to the light slowly like any middle-aged heavy, a BMW purring in the lane beside her. They both pulled away with a quiet decorum befitting a weeknight.

  Clampett licked her arm.

  37

  Sonora was annoyed that Kentucky—reputed to be part of the South, if you believed the natives—was socked in with an overcast gray miasma that rivaled the worst you would endure in Cincinnati.

  “Pretty here, isn’t it?” Sam said.

  Always the man with the cup half full. But in spite of the weather it was pretty here, cruising down the two-lane road, pastures greening-up on either side, a huge red brick Civil War mansion on the left, gravel drive leading to the front door, and a new barn going up on the right. New four-plank wood fencing on the right, wire fence on the left. Horses in the field, next to a pasture full of cows. Since her acquisition of her very own horse, Sonora had developed an apprec
iation of barns, that bordered on the obsessive. Where once she liked to look into people’s windows as she drove by, imagining the home within, she now wanted to wander in and out of barns, checking out the stalls and tack rooms.

  The road dead-ended into Old Frankfort Pike. Sam pulled the car off the pavement and opened a map.

  Sonora looked up and down the road. Sam had picked his spot carefully. No one around to ask for directions.

  On the left, an old cemetery, crumbling white headstones sagging tiredly against one another beneath the branches of a giant barren oak. It would be beautiful and peaceful come spring. Across the road, an old Baptist church, red brick. A tiny rural congregation. Trim green lawn, well-kept Kentucky bluegrass.

  A small white sign said pisgah pike, historic district.

  Sam pointed at the map and Sonora looked over his shoulder, pretending to make sense of the lines and splotches of color. They both knew better.

  “We take a right here,” Sam said.

  “Do we?”

  “There should be a restaurant about a mile on the left. Some kind of barbecue place.”

  Sonora looked up and down the road. On the right was an old stone fence, built, according to the sign, by Irish laborers before the Civil War and much appreciated by the clusters of cows eating the grass.

  “Way the hell out here? Sam, who would go to it? The cows? This is screwed up. We’re lost here, admit it.”

  He frowned at the map, looked up, squinting. “The landmarks are right. Church, cemetery.”

  “There’s not going to be a barbecue place out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “This isn’t nowhere, Sonora. It’s Woodford County.”

  “I thought this place was in Fayette County.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe we cross the county line somewhere around here.”

  “Sam, we’re lost.”

  “We’re not lost.”

  “We should have met this guy, this Detective Whitmore, in Lexington, like he offered.”

  “Why go all the way to town and then come all the way back out here? Don’t you want a look at the place on our own, before we deal with those SWAT guys?”

  “Yes, you know I do.”

  Sam refolded the map, restarted the car.

  “How do you do that, anyway?” Sonora asked, rooting in her purse for her cell phone. Martha Brooks’s phone was on the seat. She took it everywhere.

  “Do what?” Sam checked over his left shoulder and turned out onto Old Frankfort Pike, going right for the mythical restaurant that Sonora knew they would never find.

  “Fold that map up just like it was.”

  “It’s a guy skill. Beats the hell out of wadding it into a huge ball and throwing it into the backseat.”

  “I only did that one time.”

  Sam drove slowly. The houses were smaller here, closer to the road. They passed a sagging, boarded-up cement-block building that had never been pretty, though it had once provided groceries, beer, and car parts. The faded sign said FLOYD’S BARGAIN HOUSE. She still didn’t see any sign of a restaurant, but the road was leading them through an area that could pass for rural congestion if one were optimistic. But a restaurant? That was going to be stretching it.

  “There we go.” Sam had that superior tone of voice. “Good Ole Days Barbecue Restaurant.”

  Sonora squinted out the window. It was new-looking, a log-cabin air about it, but not a place she’d be afraid to walk into. A sign on the door said CLOSED. Good Ole Days looked like it had been closed for months, though it had the spruced-up air of a place that was reopening soon.

  A beige Dodge Ram pickup was parked to the side. No driver. Sam pulled into the small square parking lot of a grocery store separated from the restaurant by a sagging wood fence. Two ancient gas pumps stood in front of the grocery store, one in use.

  “Step two. The restaurant. The one you said doesn’t exist. Only thing missing is Detective Whitmore.”

  “That’s his car?”

  “Yeah, his personal ride. What, you think we should have a meeting of the Taurus and the Crown Victoria way the hell out here, stand around in suits, and talk into radios? Might as well send these guys a fax and let them know we’re on the way.”

  “So how come we didn’t take your pickup?”

  He paused. “Didn’t think of it, that’s why.”

  Sonora looked around the rectangular parking lot, counted three pickup trucks and a ’78 Mercury Cougar.

  “I bet they make great sandwishes in that place,” Sam said, looking over his shoulder at the grocery.

  “Sandwiches.”

  “Not when you’re this hungry.”

  “It says they’ve got chicken salad on that sign in the window. Go on in, Sam.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Call home and see if I’ve got any messages.”

  “Sonora. You’ve called every ten minutes since I picked you up this morning. Tim knows your cell number, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, Tim knows my cell number.”

  “Come on in with me, Sonora. The one who eats the last biscuit gets to kiss the cook.”

  Only Sam said things like that. “No thanks.”

  Sam shrugged, got out of the car. Hesitated. He walked around to her window and Sonora rolled it down, cell phone clutched in her left hand.

  “What?”

  “Honey, you called all the hospitals and the jail, right?”

  “At least twice.”

  “Okay, then. I was a teenage boy once. And I’m telling you, Tim is okay. He’s holed up at a friend’s house, in some kind of trouble that seems real big to him, like skipping school or something. Right now he’s sleeping late instead of going to school, and when he wakes up he’ll fool around trying to work up the courage to call you.”

  “Sam, the kid has got to know I’m half out of my mind.”

  “No, Sonora, he’s hoping—stupidly, but kids live in La La Land, as you well know—he’s hoping that you’re so absorbed in this case you haven’t had a chance to miss him.”

  “Sam, I am not the kind of mother that gets so absorbed in her work she doesn’t know when her kids don’t come home! And I can’t think of one good reason for him not to at least call me. Pick up the damn phone!” Her voice broke and she gritted her teeth.

  “I know. He’ll call, in his own good time. You just have to keep your sanity till then.” He leaned into the open window. “Sonora, do you want to go home? You don’t have to do this.”

  “No, Sam.”

  “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “Some,” she lied. She didn’t tell him that she didn’t sleep under the best of circumstances. Teenage sons not coming home were not the best of circumstances.

  “It’s happened before, right?” Sam asked.

  “Right.” In her ears, her voice sounded strangled and tight.

  “And where was he last time?”

  “Out with his buddies.”

  “So—”

  “That was a weekend, Sam. This is a school night.”

  “Sonora, go home.”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Are you going to be able to keep your mind on the job? These guys aren’t exactly a cake walk. You don’t want to be worrying about Tim when we’re bringing down a guy like Aruba.”

  “Sam. Get your sandwich and let me make my call.” She hadn’t meant to sound quite so brusque, but that’s the way it came out.

  “I hope it makes you feel better, taking everything out on me. I like to know when I suffer for a good cause.” But he smiled at her while he said it, and she would have felt better, if it had at all been possible.

  38

  When her cell phone rang, Sonora was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, door propped open, feet on the floorboards, elbows on her knees and chin in hand. Not exactly relaxed.

  The phone was in her lap. She sat up, leaned against the seat cushion.

  “Detective Blair?”

  She was aware of a si
nking disappointment. Her son called her Detective Mom, from time to time, but never Detective Blair.

  “It’s Jack Van Owen. We met—”

  “Of course.” What the hell did he want? How had he gotten her number?

  “Listen, I understand you’ve had one of your chicks go missing. He’s okay, by the way.”

  Sonora got out of the car, catching a glimpse of her face in the side-view mirror. She had gone very white. She walked back and forth along the driver’s side of the Taurus, feet making crunching noises in the gravel.

  “Let’s hear it.” She amazed herself—the calm, worldly mom-voice flowed like melted butter over the thud of her pulse.

  “He got caught up in some minor trouble in Boone County.”

  “Boone County? Good Lord.”

  “I know.” Van Owen’s voice was kind and soothing. “I didn’t get the impression it amounts to very much. But I don’t think the bumper sticker on his car helped.”

  “The one that says i’m driving this way to piss you off?”

  Van Owen laughed. “No. The one that says BRUNO’S PIZZA AND BLUES, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS.”

  “That was on there when we bought the car. He bought the car.” She never liked people to know she helped.

  “Yeah, but you know.”

  She did. Interstate 75 between Cincinnati and Chicago was a major drug route, and the boys from Burlington drew a pretty tight net.

  “Guy that arrested him is pretty decent. I think you’ll be able to get things worked out okay.”

  “God, Van Owen, I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Oh, hell no, I have a son. Been there, done that. When Crick called me—”

  That answered that.

  “—he said you were probably half a jump ahead of a fit, and he knows I know a few people. I think he wants your mind on the job right about now. Listen, I’m going to let you go. I have a feeling your son may be calling sometime in the next little while.”

  “Jack, I mean it. Thank you.”

  “Hey, they’re the children of our heart, aren’t they? Good-bye, Sonora.”