White Heat

by Paul D. Marks

  “Pissed yourself, tough guy,” Gus said as he held out the phone to the little blonde kid. “Wanna record it?” The kid shook his head no, and Gus gave him a wink. They watched for a moment, the crying, wet boy alone in the alley, fortunes shifted.

  Gus nodded toward the street beyond the alley. “How about a ride home? Least I can do since one of them got away.”

  “Okay,” the kid said.

  In the car Gus took the confiscated phone from his pocket and began searching through the videos inside. He found a good amount of criminal chicanery: vandalism, underage this and that, one-sided fights, and more tormented kids. Gus deleted the most recent video and then sought out another. He played it, a nearly identical scene to the one he’d just come from: victimized kid, laughter, slurs. It was the video the kid had come to him about a few days earlier. The only thing that had saved the kid was the appearance of a bum who, coincidentally, did look like a parody of Gus, a rattier version in a greasy brown suit and wild hair who’d startled the kids and sent them all scattering. Gus deleted that video as well. He slid the phone into a yellow envelope and sealed it before handing it to the kid. “Glove compartment, huh?” The kid placed the phone into the glovebox and looked at the pistol inside. “Oh, hand that over.” The kid obliged and Gus put the piece in his shoulder holster.

  Near the highway ramp Gus slowed, pointed into the sun at a baseball-capped figure walking on the shoulder. “That your friend? The one who got away?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Open your door.”

  “Why?” the kid said as he opened the door, pavement moving slowly past.

  “When I say ‘now’ you push that thing open. Hard.”

  The kid didn’t say anything else and Gus wondered if the boy would do it, but he came through when Gus gave the order. The kid swung the door hard, knocking Kevin from behind and sending him hard to the gravel shoulder, Dodger cap knocked from his shaved head. The little kid slammed the car door closed as Gus sped up and hit the on highway on-ramp. He looked at Gus and smiled. God those teeth were a mess.

  Gus pulled in front of the kid’s house, a white two story with a bright red front door. The grass was a little long and could use a mow. Same with the hedges.

  Gus grabbed the kid’s shoulder as he began to climb out of the Cutlass. “You did good kid. I wanted you to know that. Now beat it, huh? I have to get back to the office.”

  The blonde kid got out, gave Gus a wave and started toward the house.

  “Hey,” Gus said. The kid turned. “Tell your mom I’ll be by around six. And do the dishes for her. You owe me.” The kid nodded, gave Gus that snaggle-toothed smile that was surely going to call for braces. Jesus Christ, how much was that going to set him back?

  “See you later, Dad,” the kid said as he ran to the door.

  Gus watched his boy go and glanced at the photos on the visor again. He hated the fact that he saw the photos of his kids more often than the kids themselves. But more than that, he hated himself.

  Chapter Two

  Gus spent the drive to the office thinking about braces and how much it was going to cost him. Jessie’s braces had set them back three grand and that was five years ago. Who knew what it would cost for Ernie? Medicine and cable TV seemed the only two technologies that got more expensive over time.

  Gus parked at the curb and checked the time, he wasn’t that late, hopefully. Money wasn’t rolling into the “agency” and the last thing his assistant/girlfriend Nancy had told him before she quit that morning, beside “you owe me for the last two months,” was “You have somebody coming in at four.”

  Gus climbed the dark staircase to his upper rental above a Hostetter’s Vacuum Repair. Fucking Vacuums. Fucking Hostetters. When Gus had signed the lease last year he thought he was getting a steal. That is until he spent his first week in an office directly above the vacuum workshop where whining, broken Hoovers screamed all day.

  Gus stepped into the small reception area and found the couple seated, silent next to Nancy’s empty desktop. She wasn’t kidding this time. She was gone.

  “Hope you weren’t waiting long,” Gus said as he looked over their contract paperwork for their names, “Mr. and Mrs. Hughes. “My receptionist had an emergency.”

  “She was just here,” the man said. “She told us she quit.”

  Gus looked at the woman. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. Gus looked back to the man. “Did she tell you why she quit?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Emergency,” Gus restated. “Personal. But what can I do for you? Come into my office. Please. You want something to drink?” Gus opened the little refrigerator where they kept water and soft drinks for clients. It was empty. “Never mind. Come in. Have a seat.”

  Gus sat behind his desk, and Mrs. Hughes began to cry again. The man was stroked her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her to calm her. He tried to pull her to him but he resisted.

  “Stop it, Gene!” she said to her husband. The man’s hand jerked away from his wife.

  “Grace, please,” he said.

  “Don’t!” she said. “Our son is missing!” She broke down again hard, as if saying the words made it real all over. Gus slid a box of tissue toward her and looked to Gene for the rest of the pitch.

  “You probably heard about it. The wrestler from Horton High that died a few months back? He and Albie, our boy, were friends.”

  Of course Gus had heard. It had been all over the news, Drew Davis, high school wrestler jumped off of a footbridge seventy feet above the rocky creek bed that ran through Horton Nature Preserve. The story had made the national cycle for a couple weeks, leading to a series of “special investigations” on teenage suicide across the web. The event also stood out because Gus’s home, or the home that now housed his wife Lucy and their kids, was in Horton. His daughter was a senior at Horton high this year and he and his wife, ex-wife, were alums of the small-town school themselves. Given all of that, it was a story that was hard to miss. The lesser reported part of the story was that another wrestler, all-state champion Albert “Albie” Hughes couldn’t be found and was wanted for questioning.

  “You think your son is connected to that?”

  “He’s on the Horton squad, was on it. He and Drew were best friends since they both joined the junior high team. We haven’t heard from him since that night.”

  “I was so relieved when they said it wasn’t him!” the woman said, “but then he called. We told him to come home, but he wouldn’t. He still isn’t home.” She began to sob and Gene pulled her again and this time she acquiesced, burying her face in his shoulder.

  “Why don’t you go to the police?”

  The man shook his head. “We did. Albie turned eighteen last summer. They said he probably ran away. But he left this.” The man pulled out his phone and laid it on the Gus’s messy desk next to the box of tissue as the voicemail he had queued up began to play.

  Mom and Dad. I’m sorry. I wish you were there so I could talk to you. Where are you guys? I’m sorry. I’m sorry for leaving. Sorry for everything. A short laugh. I’ve got to go. Look for me on the news. Bye.

  Gus thought for a moment and remembered the bottle of Maker’s Mark whiskey he’d stashed away. He pulled the bottle from the drawer and poured himself two fingers. “Drink?”

  The man shook his head. “We don’t drink.”

  “Please,” Grace Hughes said.

  Gus poured a shot into a foam cup and gave it to her. “What makes you think he’s anything but run off somewhere?”

  “You sound just like the police,” Grace said. “What makes me think he didn’t run off? A hunch.”

  Gus resented the first statement given his own history with the Horton PD, but the last words made him cringe. Hunches were ghosts and ghosts weren’t real. But then, that didn’t matter to the case, to any case. Whether it was infidelity or insurance fraud or a missing high school wrestler; hunches more often than not, were nothing more than that. However,
hunches paid the same as a solid lead, and a good ghost might just keep the lights on a few more weeks.

  “I can appreciate a hunch,” Gus lied, “but I have to say that without some more information I’m not sure where to start.” Gus down his drink and watched Mrs. Hughes do the same. He poured them both another. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  The man looked at his wife. “A couple weeks?” he said.

  Mrs. Hughes’s head snapped back to life. “Longer. “Months.”

  The couple stared at each other, and though they were in the same room the distance between them was obvious. Mrs. Hughes eyes smoldered while Gene’s pleaded. Gus finally broke the silence.

  “Which is it?” Gus looked at them, taking on the stern eye of a teacher trying to get the straight story from two problem kids. He reminded himself that these people weren’t kids, but worried parents. “I’m not trying to be rude, but you have to be straight with me if I’m supposed to do anything for you. When’s the last time you saw him?”

  The couple locked eyes again and Gene’s pleading eyes surrendered. “It has been a couple months.”

  “A couple,” Grace snorted. “Try four.”

  “That long? Have you talked to him in that time?”

  “Last time he called was the night Drew Davis jumped,” Gene said, “the message.”

  “Why did he say he was sorry,” Gus asked.

  “They’d had a fight,” Grace said. “That’s why he left.”

  “You and your son fought?”

  Gene laughed and squirmed. “His grades were slipping. Is this relevant?”

  “Dunno,” Gus said flatly. “And this was eight months ago?”

  The couple nodded and Grace stared off into memory, her eyes welling with a fresh round of sadness. “We’re not bad parents. It was just easier to let him go. It wasn’t just his grades. He hated us. Barely spoke to us anymore. I think he was taking drugs.”

  “I don’t,” Gene said quickly.

  Gus thought of Jessie, his own daughter. Gus knew all about being a target for adolescent angst. He waited for the couple to add more, they were giving him information but nothing to go on. “Do you have any idea where he’s been between that time and the last time he contacted you?”

  “Coach Hanson, Geoff, took him in,” Grace said. “Told us he could help him get straightened out.”

  “Hanson doesn’t know anything,” Gene said.

  “It was only supposed to be a few weeks, ‘short term’ but,” Grace shook her head.

  “He called every few days,” Gene said. “He was talking to us again. It was better than it was before. For a while. Then the calls stopped. He wasn’t going to school.”

  Gus took a notepad from the desk and wrote the name Geoff Hanson. “Anyone else who might have seen him? Friends? Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “He was friends with the kids on the wrestling team. And Drew.” Gene said. “That’s it. The police interviewed every one of them.”

  Grace downed the drink and let it speak fire. “They didn’t care about him. They wanted to know about Drew Davis. Albie was an afterthought. They told us he was eighteen and without anything to point otherwise they said he must have taken off voluntarily.”

  “He was seeing this girl Francis for a while,” Grace said. “But they broke up after he left our house. He was ‘ridding his life of distraction,’ that’s what he said. He wanted to win the all-state tournament.”

  Gus jotted ‘Francis’ underneath Hanson’s name. “Francis have a last name? And that last phone call? Albie say anything else you can remember, anything at all?”

  “Francis Smalls. And the only other thing he said was ‘goodbye,’” Grace said. She broke down again, and Gene tried to pull her close again, but like the first time she pulled away. “Stop fucking touching me!” She pushed the foam cup forward for a refill. Gus had to sympathize; the domestic strife was all too familiar.

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