by Z. Rider
Shawn whistled, drawing Dean’s head his way. “Did you hear a word I said?”
“Sorry.”
“He’s turning the gun into the cops if nobody fesses up to it.”
“What gun?”
“The one the driver found in his bunk. Is something up with you?”
“My stomach’s a little messed up.”
“A lot of you’s a little messed up.”
Dean dragged the corner of his mouth up.
“The liquor’s probably not helping,” Shawn said.
“Sure ain’t hurting. What the fuck is this about a gun?”
Shawn sighed. “Phil found a gun when he was cleaning the bus today. It was in his bunk, the one he hasn’t bothered to use all tour?” They were required to have bunk for the driver, but usually he headed off to a motel when they reached a venue and returned after a decent day’s sleep around the time they were getting ready to leave. At their expense, but given it involved the safety of the band, it was a bill they were willing to foot.
“Nobody knows where it came from,” Shawn said. “Do you know anything about it?”
“I don’t know anything about a fucking gun.” Had the biker brought it on? That kid who’d come on board with the stakes? He’d found the rest of the stakes when he was cleaning up, but he hadn’t bothered to check inside the bunks.
Shit.
Though—maybe it had nothing to do with any of that at all. At any rate, it had nothing to do with him. For a fucking change.
3.
* * *
Carl was numb—the kind of numb you got when a Mack truck slammed into you: too much shit for your body to deal with.
Bays walked ahead of him, talking, telling him what was going to happen next.
None of the words got through.
He gawked at the rest of the station—typing and voices and phones ringing.
So much going on. It threatened to swallow him up.
People sat on wooden chairs, waiting their turn, one of them definitely a hooker. A desk cop spoke through vents in bulletproof glass. Someone laughed, loud and cutting. Carl’s scalp tightened, his teeth pressing together. All the activity made him dizzy. He needed another glass of water. He bumped a woman with a large purse who’d just gotten up from a chair at a desk, her attention still on the cop she was griping at. She turned it on Carl—“Well excuse you too!”—and Carl stumbled away, sucking in air.
“Carl!”
Tim’s voice came from far away, barely reaching through.
He wanted to cry. He felt hollow inside, like a tin soldier. Anyone could step on him and crush him.
“Carl!”
Bays turned, his mouth pressing tight.
Carl started to look back.
Bay’s gripped his shoulder, but Carl saw: Tim’s face, on the far end of the room—stricken and hopeful at once. Like hey, Carl had come to get him out! His hands were cuffed behind him, his hair rucked up. What were probably yesterday’s clothes hung from him. Or the day before yesterday’s. How long had he not answered the phone?
“Just keep going,” Bays said.
Of course they weren’t going to let him talk to Tim. Weren’t going to sit him in a room with him.
I spent two fucking years chasing the wrong guy.
And all fucking day in a police station, going over and over what little he knew. Hearing the fucking details of what he hadn’t known.
Tim pulled against the hold a cop had on his arm, saying “Carl!” again.
Rage exploded over numbness.
Bays jerked him to a stop before he could get going, fingers digging into his shoulder.
All this fucking time. All this fucking goddamned fucking time. Acting like his best fucking friend and knowing, all along. All along.
All along.
Bays tugged on him.
His body pulled against it, wanting to charge in the direction they’d taken Tim, down that hall, maybe down to the end of it where he could fucking corner him and yell in his face: TELL ME THE FUCKING TRUTH!
His nostrils flared. The whole room narrowed to the corridor Tim had gone down.
Did you fucking do this?
Bays yanked him off his feet, holding him against his chest. A folder of papers pressed against his shirt, his statement among them, for what that was worth—what little information he’d been able to give about Tim and the night Soph disappeared, and the days afterward. He’d been able to provide even less information about Tim and the more recent killing.
If his fucking best friend had killed anyone, he knew all of fucking nothing about it.
His face screwed up tight, his throat aching. He couldn’t see for the blur, tears welling, hot at the tops of his cheeks.
“We’ve got him, okay?” Bays’ voice was gruff in his ear. “We’ve got him.”
Did you? Did you get him?
What if the information he’d given had just screwed the only friend he had? Just because Tim had dropped off Jonesy for the game that night, just because he’d seen Soph standing on top of the steps.
A lot of people had seen Soph standing on those steps that night.
Did you fucking do it? Did you really fucking do it?
Bays pulled up in front of the apartment building in the same shit-beige unmarked car.
“Do you have somewhere to go tonight? I only ask because…”
Because why would Carl want to sit surrounded by the walls he’d lived in with the guy who might have killed not only his sister but some other seventeen-year-old-girl—slashed her throat, left her in a hole at a construction site. On October eleventh. The day he’d fucking left town.
Tim had gotten pulled over on his way home that night, speeding because he always went a good ten over, and the cop had noticed what looked like a blotch of blood on the collar of the tee shirt underneath his button-up shirt. He hadn’t thought too hard on it at the time—guy could have cut himself shaving, right? Hadn’t thought about it until Tim was pulled in for questioning two days later—not long after the last time Carl had talked to him. Pulled in based on one of the victim’s friends saying the girl had complained about “that bowling alley guy” following her.
Routine questioning, probably nothing—Timothy Randolph had no record aside from a couple speeding tickets. But while he was in there the cop who’d pulled him over looked back at his own records, checked the names and dates, pulled a detective out of the interview room for a few minutes.
That night, they had a warrant and a collection of Polaroids of the murdered girl from under Tim’s mattress, photos taken from a distance, from someone who was watching her. The next day, they found the shirt in the apartments’ garbage, in a bag with a Columbia Record Club offer addressed to Tim.
While they had Carl in the interview room, the blood had come back from the lab, a match for the victim.
Did your sister ever mention him? Did they have any school activities together? Did she have an after-school job she might have met him through? Did you see him that night at the school? Did he say what he was going to be doing while you were away?
“I’ll be okay,” Carl said, pulling the door handle. He stepped into the evening. Cars passed, tires swishing over asphalt. The low noise of someone’s too-loud television set seeped through the walls of the building. Kids laughed, chasing each other in the vacant lot.
The world felt almost too normal. He was locked out of it, trapped on the wrong side of some fucked-up parallel world. He could yell and bang on its surface, and no one would hear him.
He didn’t even have Tim to hear him anymore.
“If you need anything,” Bays said, leaning across the seat, “or think of anything that might help the case, you’ve got my number.”
Yeah, the card was growing soft in his palm. He nodded without looking back. The car door clunked shut. Bays pulled away, leaving him there. Leaving him looking at the apartment building he’d come home to for the past year plus. All of it reeling out: him and Tim lugging card
board boxes up the steps, all the possibilities, all the freedom. Adults now. On their own. Pizza for dinner that night, sitting on the carpet in the living room, chattering away. Much better than a dorm, right? Way better than a dorm.
Going up the stairs was like dragging bags of sand, his muscles leaden. He clutched the railing, hauling himself up. At the top, a woman collided into him, laughing at something a man in a doorway had said. Carl’s grip on the railing tightened. She apologized, still laughing, heading down the stairs, her steps clicking lightly.
The man in the door watched Carl with half-lidded eyes, a beer can in his hand. He stepped back and shut the door. Carl dragged himself past it, past two more, to the front of his own.
When he let himself in, the emptiness hit him in the middle of his chest. It was an off-kilter feeling, like his roommate would be home later, after work or after studying at the library, and this Tim guy the cops had, that was some other guy altogether.
Tim’s baseball cap from the bowling alley hung on a hook by the door. A pair of his beat-up sneakers sat tumbled against the base of the bookshelf. An X-Men comic lay on a couch cushion beside an empty bag of chips, crumbs dotting the cushion.
He stood in the doorway to Tim’s room, Tim all over it: his jeans, his skateboard, his Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster tacked to the wall. He pulled the door shut and leaned his forehead against it, wondering if it had been like that in Tim’s head, if it had been like that movie. All those movies he loved so much.
He suddenly felt sick over the one he’d gone to, thinking of how while his own guts twisted over what was happening to the girl on screen, Tim might have been cheering the killer on. Relating to him. Going to those movies to commune with what was inside him.
Or not. It all depended on whether they were right about Tim.
He searched every closet and dresser, turning the drawers upside down to check their undersides, shoving Tim’s mattress off the box spring to check that too. The cops had already been through—but what had they missed?
In the kitchen, he checked the freezer, all the way to the back. He rifled through the cabinets, flung open drawers. His fingers traced the knives in there. Secondhand, cheap-ass knives with wooden handles dulled from years of washing. He couldn’t imagine Tim using one of these to cut someone’s throat.
But he was unsettled by how easily he could imagine Tim slicing open someone’s throat with a decent knife—the smile that might slip onto his face as he watched her bleed out. He was thinking of the other girl, not Soph.
No way could he think about that and Soph.
He checked the basin at the back of the toilet, underneath both the bathroom and kitchen sinks. He pulled the grille off the air conditioner and the fabric off the front of their hi-fi speakers.
There was plenty of evidence of his sister in the apartment, but that had all come in with him.
He sat on the couch with a glass of ice and soda, staring at a point in the middle of the carpet. All the pictures of Soph, some of her clothes, a teddy bear she’d had as a baby—all that stuff had come in with him. Tim had encouraged him to put the pictures up: Don’t put her in a box. She was your sister. Soph smiled—squarely—from atop the TV set right now. Was dressed in a tutu for a dance recital on a bookshelf. Had her eighth-grade graduation cap and gown on at the wall by the front door. On the dresser in Carl’s bedroom sat Soph the summer before she was murdered—early summer, before the tractor trailer overturned onto their parents’ Cutlass. She was wearing white shorts and a blousy yellow shirt. She held an ice cream cone toward the camera, like she was offering it to their dad. Carl didn’t have to get up and go look at it to know what flavor ice cream it was. He knew every fucking detail.
She’ll be right there every morning when you wake up.
Was that what Tim got off on? Soph’s face looking out at her killer every fucking day? Watching him watch TV? Watching him study—watching him go on with his life in a way that she would never have the fucking chance to do?
His fists clenched. Somebody had taken Soph away. He was one hundred percent with the cops on that.
What if they were wrong about Tim, though? Tim had been there for him. He’d been best friends with him for two fucking years, putting up with all his crazy biker/private investigator shit. His obsession.
Lots of people had the same blood type. There could be another explanation for his shirt. Yeah, they’d ruled out Tim’s own blood, but there could be another explanation.
The fact that Tim was living with the brother of a girl who’d been killed in the same way—throat slashed, no sexual activity—that could be really fucking bad luck for Tim—really fucking shitty luck that made him look even more likely to the cops as their guy.
But either way—either way, if the guy who’d murdered Pauline Garcia, whoever the fuck he was, had also murdered Soph, then Carl had gone after the wrong guy. He’d wasted two years going after the wrong guy. And right now he thought he should be on top of that, on his feet and figuring out how to get the right guy. But he was wiped. Not tired; he’d gotten enough sleep, between the motels and his own bed last night. He was just emotionally, psychologically wiped.
He’d done his job.
He’d made sure someone had paid for his sister’s death.
His spirit felt like it had paid its due, and he had nothing left in him to do all of it all over again.
He had nothing left, period. No mission in life, no family—no best friend and roommate, not unless this got straightened out. Just this shitty apartment, an academic suspension, and a dusty Cougar that probably needed an oil change and a tune-up.
He set his empty glass on the end table.
He did have one goal. One thing he had to do.
He had to convince himself that Tim hadn’t done it. So he could sleep at night. So he could convince the cops. So he could get Tim out and get on with the big plans he’d dreamt up on his drive home: get a job, get back to school, move forward with life.
He added another one to the list: move. Leave this shithole behind. Maybe he could prove Tim didn’t do it, and they could move to another town altogether. Someplace less beige. Tim could transfer his credits. They’d start fresh, where no one knew Tim as the guy the cops had pulled in for Pauline Garcia’s murder, and no one knew Carl as the guy whose sister had been found in a dumpster.
Armed with a knife from the kitchen, he went to Tim’s bedroom and flipped the mattress over. He’d looked into everything he could open or turn upside down, and he hadn’t found anything that said to him that Tim was anything other than who he thought he’d been all along. If he could walk out of this place in the morning satisfied that nothing showed to him that his roommate had done anything worse than speed on the wrong street at the wrong time, he’d be ready to fight for him, the same way he’d fought for Soph these past two years.
He slashed the mattress open to its stuffing.
Shoving it aside, he flipped the box spring. Sliced right through the flimsy fabric tacked to the underside. Nothing but wooden slats and metal coils.
See? he thought. See? A handful of Polaroids of some girl at a bowling alley didn’t prove anything. It didn’t.
Gripping the knife, he headed back to the living room. The cushions on the couch and chair unzipped. Square foam inside. He tipped the chair over. A piece of the upholstery fabric hung loose from the bottom of its seat. He ripped it off completely, exposing the wooden frame underneath. Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing.
Heart thudding, he dragged the couch away from the wall and turned it over. Tim’s parents had donated it to their cause when they’d moved in. It had come from their basement, from the corner down there where Tim had hung out during high school, reading comics, listening to music, trying to draw some comics of his own, pages he’d burned on the charcoal grill behind the apartments, saying they were stupid. Carl hadn’t even gotten a chance to look at most of them. He wished he had now. Maybe they were stupid superhero stuff. More likely they were
slasher comics, like the movies he watched—but what would that prove, unless the victims were young girls, right?
Some of the staples holding the fabric to the frame were of the black upholstery type, some were thin steel, like you’d use for paper. Carl sliced the thin cloth down the middle and began yanking it free.
More wooden frame, and then more, and then, at the far corner, where all the staples were thin and steel colored—a battered and creased envelope slid into his hand.
October 18, 1978
1.
* * *
The bus pulled into a hotel parking lot at five in the morning.
Nick stumbled as he pulled himself up from the couch in the front lounge. Throwing his hand out to catch himself, he caught Janx in the face with his knuckles. Janx said, “Hey!” and Nick fell anyway, sprawling back on the couch, saying, “Fuck,” in a kind of half daze.
They’d brought a lot of booze onto the bus after the last show.
Dean was barely feeling it, sitting there at the table, sliding the bottle cap between his fingers. He waited for the others to get by, get their stuff from the bunkroom. Tromp back up the aisle toward the door.
He was keeping himself in check mostly by imagining himself in a small cage, his restlessness pacing inside of him while his nostrils flared and hearts beat just by his ears.
“Coming?” Shawn said.
That’s what he’d been working on figuring out, pushing the bottle cap back and forth. A bed sounded good. Getting the fuck off the bus sounded really fucking good. But he’d be trapped in the hotel room from sunup to sundown.
Not that he’d be any less trapped on the bus.
Shawn smelled strong—the shower at the venue the other day had worn off, but it was just dried perspiration.
Dean felt like he was drowning in that other rich smell, Shawn leaning with a hand on the table. Waiting for his answer.
