Mills fidgets. “That’s not how it’s done.”
“I realize that,” Gus says. “I’m not saying you should do it on company time.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying go freelance with this. If you can wrap this thing up, you’re a hero. If not, nobody has to know.”
Mills shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
The waitress returns with the food. “Anything else, guys? Are you fine with the water?”
Both men nod, and she retreats.
“Meet me after work and let’s go to the address,” Gus says, holding up the index card.
“We can’t just show up at the guy’s house,” Mills tells him.
“We can at least drive by.”
“Maybe,” Mills says. “But not today, Gus. Let me think about it. I need a chance to make heads or tails out of this new dump of information.”
Gus doesn’t exactly know what that means, but he doesn’t bother to ask.
Later, after lunch, they’re standing in the parking lot and Alex asks if he can keep the file.
“Oh, yeah. That’s for you. I made copies,” Gus tells him.
Alex reaches out for a handshake and says, “I’ll be in touch.”
31
Mills is maybe twenty feet from his office the following morning when Timothy Chase stops him in the hallway. Twenty feet! Had he not stopped at Starbucks on the way in for the stupid fucking latte, he would have been safely ensconced in his office with the door closed by now, enough to remind the hulking Chase to keep his distance. But, no, here Chase is, his elbow resting on the wall, bracing his neck in his hand, looking down a good three inches at Mills. “Interesting development,” Chase says. “Looks like our killer is smart enough not to carry a cell phone.”
“I’m off the case,” Mills reminds him.
“Yeah, well, just thought you’d want to know that we’ve got all the cell tower data. No matches from crime scene to crime scene.”
Mills starts to walk off. “Then I guess that blows your theory about Bobby Willis.”
“How do you mean?”
“If your killer doesn’t travel with a cell phone, how does that explain Bobby Willis at White Tanks? He had his phone with him.”
“We’re looking at that now. I’m thinking it’s an anomaly.”
Mills is almost at his door. He turns back and laughs. “An anomaly? Seriously? Sounds to me like you’re starting from scratch. Good luck with that. Maybe you ought to call Gus Parker.”
“The psychic?”
“Yeah. Someone’s stalking him. He’s got the license plate.”
“Who’d want to stalk him?”
Mills looks down, then up, his hands juggling theories for show. “Maybe the killer knows Gus is on the case. Maybe the killer’s afraid that Gus will reveal him to us. That’s kind of how it works.”
Chase chews his lip and nods. “Like I’ve said, I got nothing against working with a psychic.”
“Ask him about the fire. It’ll be worth your while.”
Then Mills steps into his sanctuary and closes the door behind him.
Gus is working a half day today and has spent most of the morning hunting for Priscilla Smith’s address in Prescott even despite his own hunch that she has no address in Prescott because those townspeople told the newspaper that she was staying with her sister. He tries to conjure up an image of a house, the sister’s house, but all he can come up with is a generic box with a picture window. He thinks there’s an old Ford sedan sitting in the driveway. Gus knows if he heads to Prescott he’ll find her.
He calls Alex to tell him.
The man’s voice is flat. “I told you, Gus, you’re not going up there. I can’t have you fishing around like that. You’re not a detective.”
Gus stiffens, not knowing why that felt like a blow to the chest. “Look, Alex, I’m only trying to help where you can’t.”
“Fine. You get a vision or something, call me.”
“What about that file I gave you?”
“I’ll give it to Chase,” Mills replies. “He’s going to call you.”
“What for?”
“I told him about the pickup, the license plate.”
“Good.”
“Anything else?” Alex asks.
“Sorry to bother you,” Gus tells him.
“You’re not bothering me. I just don’t know how to convince you I’m off the case.”
Gus shakes his head, completely bewildered, and then from his gut comes a sudden fire of words, like bullets, like warning shots, and he says, “I just don’t know how to convince you to go to Prescott. She’s waiting. She has something to say. She is the key to this. You must go. You must. If you don’t the killing goes on.”
“Parker. . . .”
“That’s my vision. It’s complete, Alex. You and her. That’s the answer.”
“I gotta go, man.”
“And then you come home and you hand-feed the info to Chase and let him wrap the thing up. No one’s the worse for it. That’s it. That’s how it’ll come down.”
The line goes dead.
Mills drives around the city as he has taken to do now, aimlessly searching for answers that he knows don’t exist. He’s accomplishing, in terms of the road, a circle of nothing; he does manage to indulge his boundless appreciation for the topography around him: South Mountain, Estrellas, Camelback. He hasn’t been assigned a new case. He’s been reading a lot in the down time. Thumbing through, actually, because the attention span isn’t there. Enough, though, to feel for the poor, fictional, Irish farmer who’s pissed off at God. He drives by the coach’s house, then the high school. He doesn’t expect to find anything, and he doesn’t find anything. There’s a game tonight; he sees it on the school marquee. A Friday night in early November. No surprise there. He thinks about his son, thinks about how if you remove God’s beauty, the valley is as shitty as anywhere else to raise a kid, maybe shittier. Avenues to the west, streets to the right, a huge fucking grid of hopeless intersections and transplants looking for the sun. Cold weather dropouts and conmen and old people, all of them desperate. His hands are a little shaky. Too much caffeine. Kind of amplifies the frustration. Tweaks the anger.
Suddenly, he grips the wheel and turns it without compromise. He commits himself to the gas pedal and peels out. He needs no map. He looks at the file beside him on the seat. Just inside the cover flap he has written the address: 3589 N. Angel Gem Rd. He’s smiling, possessed by an affirmation or a conviction, or maybe a demon who gushes recklessness. The address is smack dab in the middle of an insignificant neighborhood of ’50s-style ranch homes that fit perfectly into the flatness of the valley, or really any town, anywhere in the US where postwar families settled for a couple of generations until sprouting into the sprawl of suburbia’s crappy subdivisions.
He turns off Thirty-Second and heads west and inches along until he finds North Angel Gem Road. He takes a left. The house is fourth from the corner. He parks across the street and watches. The stillness of the place challenges him to imagine a life inside, but he suspects from the drawn blinds in every window that there is no life inside. A few circulars litter the driveway. The yard is tended but unspectacular. A sliver of a window stands beside the front door; it’s the only one without a blind, but there’s darkness on the other side.
Mills gets out of his car and crosses the street. He traces the yard line back and forth, studying the house, inferring its emptiness, and then he figures what the hell and moves up the driveway to the one-car garage. He peers through the squares of glass and sees a white pickup. He can’t fucking believe it. But he can. He stands there and sustains a kind of g-force between the two convictions. Again, he smiles, the hairs on his arms affirming his discovery in gentle ovation.
The vehicle has been backed in, so Mills can’t read the plate, but he knows. He just does. He backs away and turns to the front door. He knocks and waits. Knocks again. Not a sound from the inside. He peers through th
e window and sees an empty hallway leading to an empty room.
“Can I help you?”
The voice is behind him and gives him a chill. He braces himself and turns around. “I was looking for someone,” he says to the stranger.
It’s a woman, probably in her thirties. She’s wearing a gauzy skirt and a tank top, and she’s lugging a huge Greyhound on a leash. Her hair is frizzy, falling just below her shoulders. “Nobody lives here,” she tells Mills.
“And you are?”
“Just a neighbor. I live over there,” she says, pointing to a house across the street, one door down.
“Oh. Well, maybe I have the wrong address.”
“Nobody’s lived here for a while,” she says. “It’s a rental.”
“Where’s the owner?” Mills asks. “I’m almost sure that’s his truck in the garage.”
She smiles. “You here to repossess it?”
He shakes his head. “Do you know who owns this place?”
“Not really. Some guy. He’s never around.”
“Even at night?”
“I’m not on neighborhood watch,” she says smartly. “And I’m in bed by nine.” The dog growls. She tugs at its leash. “He’s a rescue. Abused at the track,” she tells Mills as if she’s seeking congratulations.
“Does the name Theodore Smith ring a bell?” Mills asks.
“No,” she replies. “Who are you anyway?”
“I’m a cop.”
She just looks at him. He’s seen those eyes before. Those eyes are expecting to see a badge. Those eyes are waiting for the flash of a shiny something. Those eyes have watched a lot of TV, and Mills is happy to oblige. Yes, and now those eyes are satisfied, and the neighbor says, “Is there a problem here?”
“No. This is just a routine call. You know what the owner looks like?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t really recall. I’ve only seen him once or twice. The house was abandoned for years. And then he showed up and stuck a For Rent sign in the yard.”
“When’s the last time he had tenants living here?”
“They moved out last month.”
“I see,” Mills says. “Now if your little puppy will let me pass, I should really be going.”
The woman laughs and yanks the beast to back up. The dog utters a singular bark and lumbers away. Mills stops again at the garage door. He studies the pickup. The tires are coated in dirt, pebbles in the treads. Not unusual for the dusty valley but, then again, maybe a match for the prints found at Camelback. There’s a doorway that leads from the garage to the house. Below it rests a pair of work boots. For big feet. Huge feet. The garage is otherwise empty save for a calendar on the wall. The guy, if nothing else, is here often enough to care about the passing of time. But there’s something not right about the long-hanging graph of days and weeks and months staring back at Mills. It’s not the current calendar. He does a double take. The year printed across the top is 1973.
Mills is not back in his office for two seconds when Drennon busts through the door.
“Done and done,” the guy from Narcotics says theatrically, his voice booming like a kettledrum.
Mills knows this has to be good news. But he fights back the smile. “Seriously? You found something?”
“We found a lot of somethings,” Drennon says, taking a seat on the edge of the desk. “First we scared the shit out of some football players at Central High. Amazing how quickly these jocks melt down to pussies, you know?”
Mills does not know. So he doesn’t answer.
“It was like Betty Crocker’s finest cake, okay? They gave up the coach, and we didn’t even have to promise leniency. Turns out if you promise them a little buggery in the county jail they say what you need them to say, and they said a lot, so much so that they’ll get leniency after all because they turned state’s evidence to the DA and now we know exactly where Coach Hadley got the shit and how he moved it, and it took like, what, a day for the DA’s office to catch him in the act, and it’s over, Mills. It’s over.”
“Well, not exactly,” Mills says, thinking of his son.
As if reading his mind, the other cop says, “Yes, exactly, Mills. Those jocks told the DA how Hadley had threatened them, including Trevor, with fucking torture if they talked to anyone, how some thugs from Sheriff Tarpo’s office would use whatever show of force to keep them in line. Those assholes almost waterboarded one of the players. Can you fucking believe that? I think they’ll drop the charges against your kid, Alex.”
“Tarpo’s office? What are you talking about?”
The guy belts out a laugh. A kind of hateful laugh. “Sorry,” he says. “I know this isn’t funny, but Hadley was getting the drugs from some rogue deputies, make that moron rogue deputies, who were out there seizing drugs across the valley and feeding it to Hadley for a cut of the proceeds.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I know,” Drennon wails, “classic, right? Like what kind of fucking idiot do you have to be?”
“What about an arrest?”
“Didn’t you hear me when I said done and done?”
His whole body tremors, and he can’t help it. There’s a wave of relief rolling toward his chest, and he puts his hand there for an instant as if to stop the thing from crashing through. “When?”
“I just got confirmation that the DA’s office brought Hadley in quietly,” Drennon replies. “Tarpo’s boys won’t know what hit them.”
“And Tarpo?”
“Uh, no,” Drennon says. “Don’t you wish. But there’s no evidence that Sheriff Lardass had any knowledge. Kind of standard policy for Tarpo.” Drennon leaps off the desk and extends a hand that Mills lamely shakes, still sort of shell-shocked by the news. “Gotta go. I think you owe me a drink.”
Mills says, “I’m good for it, Drennon. And thanks. I’m, like, too stunned to even thank you enough.” And as soon as the guy is out the door Mills lunges for his phone and calls his wife.
32
Beatrice Vossenheimer lifts the lid from the sterling silver serving dish. Steam rolls and evaporates, revealing a pile of browns and greens and a few stripes of black. Gus has never seen anything like it, and judging by the looks of the others at the table, neither have they. But they’re all smiles. Of fear.
“Dig in,” Beatrice says as she lowers the dish to the center of the table.
She’s invited her new beau from Safeway (Gus approves), Billie Welch (phase II of a master plan), and Billie’s younger sister, Miranda (phase I of making phase II seem impromptu).
“It’s basically tofu soaked in a cilantro lime sauce,” Beatrice explains. “Then sautéed in basil and white wine. And the roots, of course. Roots from all over the desert.”
Gus looks at Billie who offers him a girlish smile, a coy flirtation in her eyes. He volleys back a goofy grin, and then he says, “House of Dreams.”
“What was that?” Beatrice asks.
But Gus is still looking at Billie and only at Billie. “House of Dreams,” he repeats. “It’s the title of your next album.”
“Really?” Billie says.
“Really,” Gus tells her. “It just came to me.”
“It just came to you,” she repeats. “How very intriguing. Would you like to do some of my songwriting for me?”
“No,” he says. “From everything I know, you write your songs yourself. And you need no help.”
“Okay,” the singer says with hesitance. “But I’m not making another album now. I’m just starting to tour with the new one.”
“I know,” he says. “But when you do, you will name it for the song.”
“The Native Americans call it Ahwatukee,” she says.
“Doesn’t have the same ring as House of Dreams,” Miranda tells her sister.
“Isn’t this so lovely?” Beatrice chirps. “Everyone connecting!”
“And the tofu’s a hit,” Gus assures her. “No curb appeal, but I’ve already cleaned my plate.”
“Seconds?” s
he asks, ebullient with the flattery.
“No thanks,” he replies, too abruptly to catch himself.
Later, during dessert (a simple, predictable, cactus mousse), Gus gets a text message. He pretends not to notice but peeks.
“Call me. 602-555-0109. Chase”
He feels a sort of satisfaction by proxy for Alex Mills. In the text he sees a desperation lingering in the characters; it’s a vibe he’s getting that Chase can’t move forward without his help, that Chase knows that Gus is on to something. Oh, the gloating wrongness of it all.
“Is someone trying to reach you?” Billie asks.
He feels his face turn red. “Uh, no. I don’t think so.”
And then he sees her aura. It’s as if there’s a permanent spotlight on her, hovering, anointing her with this rare, timeless stardom.
He can’t take his eyes off her.
Back in Phoenix, Alex Mills is sitting under the clear autumn night, under a canopy of stars, high up in the bleachers beside his son. This is where Trevor wanted to watch the game, away from the crowds, his shame unrecognized. After all, Trevor would be playing tonight if not for his arrest. Minutes away from halftime, the kid leans into his father and says, “I’m really sorry. Okay?”
Mills doesn’t know exactly how to respond. He had been hoping for an apology. Probably best that it came out of the blue. But probably harder because it came out of the blue. He looks at his kid, and then looks away and says, “I know you are. How couldn’t you be?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” the boy asks with a mild smirk in his voice.
“It means I’d be sorry, too,” he replies.
“Jesus, Dad, I’m trying to apologize here.”
Mills nods, thinks for a moment, clears a place in the harbor of his mind for reconciliation, and lets it sink in. Then, holding the boy’s sturdy shoulders, he turns his son to him and says, “I know you are, Trevor. And I know I was really hard on you, but it was really hard on me. And your mother.”
The kid lowers his head.
“Really,” Mills continues, “how would you expect a father to react? You need to put yourself in my place for a second and think about that.”
Desert Remains Page 31
