by Frank Zafiro
“Anything new?”
I shook my head and moved a pawn. I was terrible at chess and Adam was good without trying. “You?”
“Nada.” He moved his own pawn.
“How about the job?”
I formed an attack on his rook, hoping to whittle away his support pieces. He moved effortlessly to defend it.
“Just what you see in the news.”
“I try not to watch the news. Or read the fucking paper. Not anymore.”
“Ah, that’s right,” said Adam and took my bishop with his knight. “They did a bit of a number on you back then.”
“Yep.”
I focused on a little revenge and chased his knight around the board for a few moves before he protected it with his queen.
“So?”
“So what?”
“What did I miss by not reading the fair journal of our fine city?”
Adam shrugged, studying the board. “Nothing much. It’s been remarkably scandal free around the P.D.”
“That won’t last.”
“Spoken like a true optimist.”
I smiled slightly. “Hey, if something doesn’t happen naturally, the newspaper will just make something up.”
“Yeah, I suppose.” Adam looked up from the board. “You know, I always wondered about that.”
“About what?”
“You.”
“Me? What about me?” I moved my knight into position to take his queen.
Cassie set a steaming cup of coffee in front of Adam. He nodded his thanks to her. He took a sipped and studied the board. Then he moved a pawn.
“Never mind,” he said.
“No,” I said as I continued to stalk his queen. “What about me?”
Adam didn’t say anything. After a moment, he reached out and moved his queen free of danger.
I suppressed a sigh and stared at the board. My attack was all over the place and I realized that Adam was going to start picking me apart now that my play for his queen had failed.
I shifted a pawn forward.
A slow grin spread across Adam’s face. He slid his bishop nearly the length of the board and took my rook. Worse yet, he had my king in his sights.
“Check,” he said, and sipped his coffee.
I leaned back in my seat and stared at the board, then up at Adam.
He grinned back. “Two moves,” he said.
“Prove it,” I shot back.
Adam pointed to his queen. “Guarding the bishop,” he said. Then he pointed to his rooks. “Two moves and you’re in a crossfire.” He traced the lines of attack, but I studied them for a moment before admitting the truth.
I tipped over my king and offered him my hand.
“Asshole,” I muttered.
“Sore loser,” he said with a hard squeeze.
“You probably play Chessmaster all fucking day long at work. How can I compete with that?”
Adam sipped his drink and shrugged. “You can’t.”
My Americano was cold, but I sipped it anyway. Then I asked him again, “What about me?”
He looked a little uncomfortable. “I just wondered why you stayed, is all.”
“Huh?”
“After everything that happened. A lot of people would’ve left town, you know? Gone somewhere else. Started over. But you stayed in River City.”
I stared at him. In ten years, he’d never asked me this question. He’d asked how I was doing, but never this.
He stared back, then shrugged it off. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s all right.” I thought about it for a moment. A thousand things ran through my head. Maybe I wanted to somehow fix what couldn’t be fixed. Maybe my grandmother didn’t raise a quitter. Finally, I said, “I guess I’m just too fucking stubborn, is all.”
Adam nodded slowly, looking at me. Then he checked his watch and rose from his seat. “I gotta head out.” He dropped a dollar tip on the table for Cassie. “You know, you still talk like a cop, Stef.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know. ‘Fuck this, fuck that, every fucking thing.’ Cop talk.” Adam shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. Just thought you should know.”
“Fuck, Adam. The last fucking thing I want to sound like is a fucking cop.”
Adam gave me a sly grin and left.
7
Cassie re-filled my cup, something she didn’t do for most customers. Adam’s question rang in my ears. I didn’t feel like thinking about it, so I picked up the free weekly newsrag off the rack at the doorway and thumbed through it. I figured I’d give Matt Sinderling another half hour.
The hue and cry of local politics blared from the pages. A budgetary crisis and a dispute over a huge parking garage downtown competed with allegations that a city council member was a lesbian. I snorted at that. Anyone who watched her for five seconds would go from suspicious to certain, but it was being reported as if it were some sort of revelation. The picture of her did little to soften the image. She had a stocky frame and a strident look on her face. I couldn’t decide what I found more disgusting—the fact that one group of people thought her being a lesbian made her unable to mismanage tax dollars any more than the next politician or the fact that another group of people already had her pegged as some sort of victim or a saint merely because of her sexual orientation.
This story will play for months here in River City, I thought with a slight shake of my head.
I turned the page and read absently about what was passing for movies these days. As I read, it occurred to me that if I voiced even half of my thoughts aloud, I would sound like a bitter old man.
“Stef?”
I glanced up to see Matt standing at my table. He wore a tan windbreaker over his green security polo. A battered River City Flyers ball cap sat on his head.
He motioned to the chair Adam had vacated. “You mind if I sit?”
I shook my head. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks.” He dropped wearily into the chair and rubbed his eyes for a moment.
I tossed the paper aside and pressed my lips together, saying nothing.
I’m only agreeing to listen, I recited to myself. Nothing more.
“Sorry,” Matt said, his fingers still massaging his eyes. “It was a late night.”
I didn’t reply.
After a few moments, he dropped his hand onto the table and gave me a tired grin. “That coffee?” he asked, pointing at my cup.
I nodded.
Matt swiveled around and caught Cassie’s eye. “Whatever he’s having,” he told her, sounding like we were at a bar and he was ordering cocktails. I clenched my jaw at the thought of how inviting that scenario still was to me. I guess you don’t ever completely beat booze, do you?
Matt didn’t seem to notice, but took a deep breath and then renewed his tired grin. “Thanks for seeing me.”
I shrugged.
“How’s your leg?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“It looked like you hurt it, is all.”
“Nothing big.”
He gave a short nod. We sat silently for a bit, until Cassie finished with his coffee and brought it to the table. He sipped it immediately and burned his lip.
“Ouch,” he muttered. “It’s hot.”
I watched him. I wanted to say Same ol’ Matt to myself, but the truth was, I didn’t know if it was or not. I struggled to remember if I’d been friendly to him in high school, or if we’d even talked.
Matt finished licking his burned lip and met my eye. His own eyes were glassy and tired and a bit sad, though it seemed he was hiding the last part as much as he could.
“I s’pose I should get straight to the point,” he said.
“Okay.”
He blew carefully on his coffee, tried it again, then set it down to cool.
I waited. His stalling was starting to irritate me.
Matt sighed. “There’s just no easy way to start,” he told me.
“Then just start.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I thought I heard a wavering in his voice, but I couldn’t be sure.
“It’s…it’s my daughter,” he said, then broke off, his eyes watering.
I didn’t know where he was going so I didn’t know how to answer.
“Hell,” he muttered. “Hell’s bells.”
I decided to help him along. “Something happened to her?”
“I hope not,” Matt said, looking away. “She’s run off. I can’t find her. I’ve looked everywhere, checked with all her friends, but she’s nowhere. Leastways, nowhere I can find her at.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “I filed a runaway report. But I don’t think they really go looking for those kids, you know?”
“They don’t.”
He looked at me sharply, as if he hadn’t wanted to have his suspicions validated. “No?”
“Nuh-uh. They deal with them if they come across them, but no one goes looking. It’s not even a crime anymore to be a runaway.”
“Not a crime? Oh, great.” Matt wiped a finger across his nostrils, then on his napkin. “So she can run away and there’s nothing I can do?”
“You didn’t have this discussion with the police officer?”
“I only spoke with one on the phone.”
I sipped my coffee, not wanting to tell him that the person he talked to on the phone probably wasn’t a police officer, but a city employee who took minor reports like his over the phone. Unless things had changed since I was on the job, anyway. And given what I just read about the city budget, I doubted things had improved.
“I’ve been spending all my free time looking for her,” he said. “I’ve checked every place I could think of a hundred times. I can’t find her. I don’t know what else to do.”
I sipped again. Matt watched me and I watched him back. Finally he said, “So when I saw you at the game last night, I thought that with you being a cop, maybe you could help me.”
“I’m not a cop anymore.”
“I know. You told me last night. But then I figured that you could help me because you were.”
“Yeah, I was. But not anymore.”
Matt didn’t respond to the challenge. He picked his own coffee up and sipped it. In the relative quiet of the coffee shop, I heard his heavy exhale. “I just don’t know how it got to this point. I don’t understand where I went wrong.”
“Do you think that she’s not a runaway? That she was abducted?”
His eyes snapped to mine. “Oh, no. God, I hope not. Is that what you think?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think anything. All I know is what you’re telling me and all you’ve said is that your daughter ran away.”
“But the ones that run away—not the ones who are kidnapped, but the ones who really run away—they usually turn up, right?”
I drank the last of my coffee, masking my grimace at his naïveté. But his eyes kept boring into me and they held an insane hope, so I lied to him. “Yeah,” I said. “A lot of times they do.”
Other times, they don’t. That’s what I should’ve told him. Other times they turn to drugs and prostitution or if they’re lucky, they end up in some dead-end town working some dead-end job, toiling away in despair and anonymity for the rest of their lives.
I should have told him the truth. So he’d stop hoping.
8
He told me everything, but it wasn’t until he pulled out a picture of his little girl that I understood.
It was a glamour shot. One of those pictures with soft, distilled light designed to make its subject look like a model. Only I realized immediately that this girl didn’t need soft lights or a camera to make her beautiful.
The photo showed her from mid-thigh up. She wore a pair of jeans that hugged her hips but dipped low in front, exposing her flat stomach. The white blouse she wore had small ruffles along the button strip. One hand rested on her hip and the other hung casually at her side. Her breasts jutted out and she was artificially arching her back.
All of that might have been comical or some girl play-acting, if it hadn’t been for her face. She wore a sultry look borrowed from the video cover of a thousand porn movies. Her lips, painted a glossy red, were parted as if she had just been surprised by a moment of sexual pleasure and liked it. Her eyes bore into the camera, daring you to stare at her and not feel a pull from your loins.
“That’s my Kris,” Matt said. “Goddamn heartbreaker.”
Heartbreaker? More like a siren.
Jesus, didn’t he have a school picture he could show me? A girl in braids or wearing braces or maybe even a nice sweatshirt with a cartoon character on the front?
“Why’d she run away?” I asked, but I knew the answer. A girl like that can’t live with limits. She would be the first girl in her class to develop breasts and get her period and those things would be commonplace to her while her peers were still sorting out the mystery of them. She would stop being nervous around boys well before high school because she would discover early on what kind of power she could exert over them.
But I didn’t think Matt knew those things. Or maybe he chose to ignore them. Either way, he answered my question with a shrug and a look of heartfelt confusion.
“I wish I knew,” he said. “I’ve beat myself up over it ever since it happened. But I can’t figure it out. I just don’t know.”
“Any discipline problems?”
He gave another shrug. “A little. Small stuff, really. Curfew issues. What she could and couldn’t wear. Things like that.”
“Boyfriend?”
Matt shook his head. “Nothing steady, as far as I know. She was a pretty girl and a lot of boys called, but I think she got bored with them pretty quickly.”
I sat still and said nothing. Maybe he was right.
Matt didn’t let the silence lie. “You think it was a boyfriend?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know. I’m just asking questions.”
“But you think that might be a lead?”
“It’s something to look at,” I said. “Girls her age who look like she does don’t usually date boys their own age. They tend to gravitate toward the older ones.”
“Like freshmen dating the seniors?”
“Like that. Only…” I hesitated.
“Only what?”
How could I tell him that his sixteen-year-old daughter could probably get into a club without being carded? That she could wear something tight and hand the doorman a book of matches and he wouldn’t look at it, just hand it back to her with a dopey grin while he stared at her chest.
I cleared my throat and decided to test the waters. “She could probably pass for older than high school.”
Surprise widened his eyes. “Really?”
It was crazy that he couldn’t see it, but I’ve come across parents who were even more blind than Matt seemed to be. So I nodded. “Yeah. She could probably tell someone who didn’t know her that she was in college and he’d believe her. And if she were a college age girl, she could date—“
“Are you sure it’s not just the picture?” Matt interrupted. “Because you know they dress these things up. It’s a model photo.”
“I know. But even so—“
“She doesn’t look like this in person.”
Not around you, I thought.
“She looks younger,” he insisted.
“Okay,” I said. “But the fact is that she can look like this with a little work. So it’s possible. A lot of things are possible.”
Matt let out a quavering breath and looked at me. “This is why I need your help,” he told me. “I never would’ve thought of things like this.”
“The police—“
Matt let out a barking laugh, short and explosive, and leaned back in his chair. “She’s been gone almost two weeks and they haven’t done anything. And from what you’re telling me, they won’t do anything unless they stumble
across her.”
“She may just come home on her own,” I suggested.
Matt shook his head. “I can’t wait for that. If something’s happened to her—“
He broke off and looked down at the floor. When he raised his eyes again, they were filled with tears. I clenched my jaw.
“Will you help me, Stef?”
“Matt—“
“Look, I know you’re not a cop anymore, but you were. You know the system. And you’re smart. Hell, I knew that back in high school.”
If I’m so goddamn smart, I thought, why am I sitting here wishing I was drinking beer instead of cold coffee?
“Why don’t you hire a private investigator?”
“I want someone I can trust.”
I started to argue, but I knew what he meant. He meant trust with her. “I don’t have a P.I. license. I can’t just—“
“You don’t need one,” Matt interrupted me again. “I looked it up on the Internet last night. The only time you need a license in Washington State is if you advertise or represent yourself as a private investigator. But you can look into this as a private party.”
I shook my head. “Matt, even that aside, I can’t afford it. I’m on a fixed income.”
He was nodding as I spoke. “Not a problem. I’ve got money. I was saving it for a vacation, but this is more important.”
“Matt—“
“Name your price.”
“I can’t take your vacation money.”
“You can’t do it for free.”
“I can’t do it all,” I told him. “I’m all banged up, Matt.”
“Really?” He leaned back and gave me a look of appraisal. “But you were okay enough to get into that scrap at the rink last night?”
Screw you! was my first thought but I stopped the words, kept them inside and sat still for a long moment. I watched Matt and he watched me.
